The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 8

A8 SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1994 LOS ANGELES TIMES 7 i 4- A i -uKa 1 Rwandan refugees huddle for shelter from the rain under a sheet of plastic at a camp outside Goma, Zaire. Volcanic rock makes the ground impermeable and easily flooded. RWANDA: While World Hesitated, Nation Bled 40 Injured by Grenade in Latest Outbreak of Burundi Violence BUJUMBURA, Burundi About 40 people were wounded, some gravely, when an attacker hurled a grenade into the main market in the capital, Bujumbura, on Friday, security sources said. The grenade exploded in a part of the market reserved for selling hardware and used-car parts, they said. The wounded were taken to the nearby Prince Louis Rwagasore clinic.

At least nine people were killed and 17 wounded last Sunday in an attack on a Roman Catholic church in Burundi's northeast Muyinga province by a gunman and others wielding machetes. Ethnic violence and strikes in August swept much of the central African nation, which has the same ethnic mix of Hutus and Tutsis as neighboring Rwanda and has been teetering on the brink of anarchy. Seven people were wounded Aug. 11 when an unidentified attacker threw a grenade into the central market. Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, Burundi's interim leader, said last month the country would be plunged back into turmoil unless rival political groups resolved the question of who will be the next president.

Ntibantunganya, a Hutu and former National Assembly chief, has been interim president since President Cyprian Ntaryamira was killed in the same plane crash as Rwandan leader Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, sparking massacres across Rwanda, Reuters 1 civilians and training civilians to carry out atrocities," the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We informed New York and wanted to mount operations, and were told it was not in our mandate. "We had information on the location of weapons, training camps, information on the distribution of arms," the official recalled. Dallaire, a 47-year-old cigar-smoking artilleryman from Quebec City, wanted to take preventive action to seize the weapons as early as December, he said. "He was dissuaded, he was instructed, he was cautioned: It was not in his mandate," the official added.

A few months after Dallaire failed to get the go-ahead, Rwanda would reap the whirlwind of ethnic violence from scrupulous adherence to the language of Resolution 72. From the arms caches that the 2aU.N. peacekeepers had detected came some of the weapons used to perpetrate the most rapid genocid-al slaughter in modern times. The spark for the explosion came when a plane carrying Rwanda's president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart from neighboring Burundi, Cyprian Ntaya-mira, crashed April 6 on approach to Kigali's airport after apparently being hit by a missile. Both leaders were killed.

The Rwandan government accused rebel Tutsis of shooting down the plane. Commanded by the hard-line Hutu leaders who succeeded Habyarimana, Rwandan soldiers, members of the ruling party's youth wing, the Interahamwe, and ordinary Hutus embarked on a massacre of their opponents and members of the Tutsi minority. Day after day, bands armed with machetes roamed the hills of Kigali, butchering people and tossing hand grenades into houses. "There are massacres all over the place," one person trapped here told the Associated Press on April 17. "The army's delight is to murder civilians, while civilians turn on each other in ethnic revenge." Faced with such barbarism on a massive scale and renewed hostilities between Rwanda's civil war foes, the Security Council decided April 21 to slash the number of its peacekeepers here rather than reinforce them.

"Don't forget, at the time, many of our people were unarmed; they were military observers," UNA-MIR spokesman Plante said. UNA-MIR's repeated pleas for reinforcements and essential supplies such as armored vehicles were falling mostly on deaf ears. Finally, "Gen. Dallaire said, 'For security reasons, I can't operate with 2,500 Plante recalled. Uppermost in his mind was the massacre of 10 Belgian soldiers on the first day of terror after they tried in vain to protect the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu, from a murderous band of soldiers.

As in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Lebanon and elsewhere, U.N. peacekeepers, too few to deter-attack, had become targets. When the Belgian government, rocked by public opinion, quickly pulled out its key contingent of 440 troops for their safety, no other Western country volunteered to replace them. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali then warned that V.

3 x- carrying out even the Security Council's limited mandate in Rwanda would become "untenable." Before April 21, some of Dallaire's men had already been pulled back to Kenya. With the massacres in full swing, and Kigali's streets echoing with screams and explosions, the U.N. force was then cut to 450, although Dallaire was authorized to pare it to as few as 250. The butchery had been so carefully prepared and spread so widelythis country is as big as Marylandthat only a huge and rapid invasion of well -equipped troops could have halted it with certainty. But there is little doubt in the minds of many U.N.

peacekeepers that even with several thousand more soldiers, they could have saved countless more lives. Dallaire at one point asked for 8,500 and was told by U.N. officials in New York to be more modest in his requests. "We were confined here. We knew places badly needed our protection, but there was nothing we could do," said Plante, who arrived in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, six days after the massacres began.

"With 450 men, we had our hands full. If we had had the 5,500 the number of troops finally authorized by the United Nations, instead of protecting 18,000 to 20,000 refugees in the city, we could have protected maybe 100,000 to 200,000 could have gone out to the churches where we knew were trapped," Plante said. "We would have been able to protect them and deliver them food. There was hundreds of thousands of tons of food in the city, but we didn't have access. Because when we went to the warehouses, people would fire on us." Its ranks slashed, UNAMIR's remnants hunkered down at the airport, a hotel-turned-command-post and Kigali stadium, which was filled with thousands of refugees.

U.N. troops rode in trucks and other vulnerable "soft-skin" vehicles because Dallaire hadn't received enough of the armored vehicles that he had pleaded for. The blue-helmeted soldiers were further handcuffed by their mandate, which the Security Council whittled down even more in its April 21 resolution. U.N. troops in Rwanda were ordered to do no more than try to mediate a ceasefire between the government and the rebels, to act as observers and to supervise humanitarian relief, if possible.

"When people say, 'Why didn't you go into the massacres and separate the Tutsis and the that wasn't our mandate," Plante said. Even when a Kigali radio station, Mille Collines, was on the air urging Hutus to exterminate the "cockroaches," UNAMIR took no action to knock it off the air. "It wasn't in our mandate," Plante said. In the jargon of U.N. peacekeeping, Dallaire, unlike his peers in Somalia, had not been given "Chapter 7" authority by the Security Council to intervene militarily to try and force an end to the fighting and killing.

"UNAMIR could have stopped this if we had granted them Chapter 7 authority," one State Department official maintained. But the U.S.' official acknowl i scrutiny, including an assessment of their chances for success. PPD25's first application came in Rwanda. In mid-May, after the massacres had flickered out in Kigali but were continuing in other parts of the country, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, invoked the new policy before the Security Council.

"Sending a U.N. force into the maelstrom of Rwanda without a sound plan of operations would be folly," she said. Some other Security Council members echoed the Americans' caution and approved it as a fresh breeze of pragmatism. But Boutros-Ghali, though he refrained from mentioning the United States by name, flatly rejected the Clinton Administration's preoccupation with preventing another Somalia. "We must accept that in certain operations we will not be successful," he argued.

"And the fact that you are not successful in a certain operation must not be an obstacle to additional operations all over the world." As the. dead piled up in Rwanda, Boutros-Ghali called on the 15-member Security Council to change course and send an enlarged force of at least 5,500 peacekeepers. After numerous delays and considerable pressure from the United States, the council authorized the force but delayed sending more than a few hundred soldiers. Member nations wanted from Boutros-Ghali a military strategy, a commitment from countries to provide the troops and a timetable for their use. They also wanted assurances that both sides in the civil war would cooperate.

In Albright's words, anything else would have been "pie in the sky." U.N. officials believe the Clinton Administration's lack of enthusiasm for intervention crippled Boutros-Ghali's attempts to recruit soldiers for the mission. But there hardly was an international outpouring of commitment, even from other African countries. Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Malawi, Mali and Nigeria were willing to send troops, but only if Associated Press somebody else paid to equip them. At the time, U.N.

forces were already involved in 17 other peacekeeping operations, from Bosnia to Cambodia. Rwanda this small, landlocked country plagued by its own murderous politics and ethnic hatreds, lacking strategic importance and anything to offer the world but coffee fell victim to "donor fatigue." It was late June before the outside world intervened in force. Help came in the form of French marines and Foreign Legionnaires, who set up a "safe zone" for fleeing Hutu refugees in the country's heavily forested southwest. But for the now-almost-victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front, France was the most suspect actor of all. A former colonial master of much of Africa, it had supplied arms to the former government.

With the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government forces almost defeated, an estimated 2 million refugees had surged toward Rwanda's frontiers with Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi. It was only then, one senior U.N. official says, that the outside world became shocked by televised images of this wretched exodus. was only then that it was moved to commit enormous resources to soothe Rwanda's suffering. "So many people coming into Goma made it a pure refugee operation," the U.N.

official said. For U.N. agencies, you were responding to a classic situation." Clinton promised "immediate and massive" aid as part of an operation dubbed Support Hope, and the U.S. military began a round-the-clock airlift of food, water and medicine to the refugee camps. By July 2, the Administration had committed itself to delivering $250 million in aid.

Still, as Gen. John M. Shalikash-vili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed last month while inspecting the U.S. military assistance effort, the United States remains committed to avoiding any peacekeeping role here. "The U.S.

is not going to get involved," he said. Now, some U.N. officials involved in coordinating the mammoth response to the refugee crisis fear that it will obscure the failure of the international community to deal with the somber events behind it: the butchery that erupted in April. "We've used the word genocide to describe what went on here, and the international community hasn't done anything about it," the U.N. official said.

"If you have 500,000, 1 million people exterminated in this country, and don't do anything about it, are we even going to blink an eye if 200,000, say, are exterminated somewhere else?" Paul Kagame, the 36-year-old Tutsi who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front to victory and is n6w Rwanda's vice president and defense minister, questions the United Nations' ability to learn from Us failure to prevent mass slaughter in his country. "What happens in New York! is beyond my control, and my experience is that it's either negative comes too late," Kagame said. "Maybe someday, somebody will do the right thing. But I am hot optimistic about the way they handle things." Times staff writer Stanley Melslef In Washington contributed to this report. Continued from Al their own national tragedy, the joutside world will intervene too iate, with too little, elsewhere.

I Now, in the aftermath of the Violence, the world's reaction has Remained piecemeal, although the top U.N. official in Rwanda, Shah-jryar Khan of Pakistan, warned his superiors this week that "guerrilla might be set to break out, reviving the deadly cycle of civil and massacre, On May 17, the U.N. Security Council authorized a peacekeeping -force of 5,500 soldiers, but as of Friday, exactly 4,150 were on the jground. 'Y CWW 76 naye countries i offering to send an -nfantry Dat- talion. Then we kay, 'Anybody want to equip are waiting for the phone to jring," said Canadian Maj.

Jean-Guy iPlante, spokesman for the U.N. jAssistance Mission in Rwanda (UN-iAMIR). "Of course, it is now too late Jto stop the massacres anyway." A U.N. commission created in 'July to determine formally whether acts of genocide and large-scale (violations of human rights occurred in Rwanda, as a first step Jtoward identifying and punishing jthe mass murderers, has called on the world community to supply 200 jorensic medical experts and investigators. At last count, four were in jthe country.

The members of the commission itself, distinguished jurists from Togo, Guinea and Mali, spent only a jweek here and then left, saying they right be back later this month. "You listened to the questions jthat they asked, and it was clear they weren't really briefed at all," one high-ranking U.N. official involved in relief efforts here said, What is particularly tragic Borne would say criminal, in light of jthe high-sounding ideals proclaimed in the U.N. Charter is that as long ago as last Oct. 5, the United States and other members of the iU.N.

Security Council, in its Resolution 872, ordered the creation of a "peacekeeping mission" in Rwanda J'in the shortest possible time." The mission's goal was to aid in the establishment of the coalition government and pluralistic, non-ethnic constitution mandated by jthe Arusha Accord of Aug. 4, 1993, jthat had, it seemed, put an end to a withering 3-year-old civil war between the Rwandan government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front led by returnees from exile. I But as early as last December and January of this year, U.N. military observers who arrived here got wind of activities that presaged a possible blood bath in this verdant, beautiful country in the highlands of central Africa. Rwanda's strife-plagued history made the most nightmarish scenarios possible, even highly likely: In five years of slaughter beginning in 1959, an estimated 100,000 members of the Tutsi minority were slain by the majority Hutus.

i According to one senior U.N. official in Kigali, Dallaire and his subordinates, then in command of a force from Belgium, Ghana and Bangladesh, asked superiors at U.N. headquarters for permission to act to prevent what appeared to be preparations for a hew round of bloodletting. The request was turned down, he said. "We had reports that certain lements were distributing arms to edged that only "overwhelming authority, tens of thousands of troops" could have stanched the Rwandan blood bath or forced an end to the civil war.

Such a commitment never came. In the words of a blistering report in May from the London-based watchdog group Africa Rights, in Rwanda "the coup was mounted and the genocide perpetrated without international denunciation of those responsible." That same month, more than four weeks after the slaughter began, diplomats at U.N. headquarters in New York were still heatedly debating what to do. The most insistent voice urging caution came from the United States, which was worried that intervention might degenerate into the sort of debacle that the earlier U.N. relief operation in Somalia had become: There, after unselfishly sending 20,000 Marines and soldiers to help a famine- and strife-stricken country on the Horn of Africa, Americans had grown uneasy as their young men and women became the targets of the people they had come to help showered with rocks by children and shot at by snipers from warring clans.

Their disillusionment climaxed last October with the horrifying televised spectacle of an American corpse dragged through the streets of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, by jeering, exultant Africans. In the end, 42 Americans were killed and 175 wounded in a faraway country they had been sent to help. It was a sobering and formative experience for U.S. policy, one that sent shock waves through the Pentagon and White House. "What happened in Somalia has frankly made the American military gun-shy," the State Department official said.

"I don't know how many times I've heard American officers say, 'These people are not worth one American The direct outgrowth of the costly niisad venture was Presidential Policy Directive 25, whose avowed touchstone is "realism." Under PPD25, which President Clinton signed May 5, the Administration said it will refuse to approve peacekeeping operations until they are subjected to close.