curing the somalia syndrome: analogy, foreign policy decision making, and the rwandan genocide

Curing the Somalia Syndrome: Analogy,Foreign Policy Decision Making, and the

Rwandan Genocide

Darren C. Brunk

Formerly of University of Wales, Aberystwyth

If Rwanda had been better understood at the outset of the 1994 geno-cide, would the world have responded differently? That the interna-tional community was afflicted with a ‘‘Somalia Syndrome,’’ suppressingthe appetite for intervention in Rwanda, is not a new claim. What isnew, however, is the effort this article makes to unravel the reasons forwhich two largely unrelated and distinct conflicts—Somalia and Rwan-da—were perceived within many critical policy-making quarters aroundthe international community as identical ‘‘African’’ conflict-types. Itraises and explores the possibility that had Rwanda been perceived out-side of this contorting ‘‘African’’ schema and its associated Somaliaanalogy, different policy responses could have been legitimized, open-ing the potential for a radically different international response.

In the Rwanda genocide literature, ‘‘Somalia’’ is invoked to explain the U.S. pol-icy behavior during the 1994 Rwanda crisis. Following from this premise, the arti-cle addresses the central question, what explains ‘‘Somalia’’? More specifically,what lessons did Somalia impart to policy makers throughout the internationalcommunity (particularly in the U.S. administration and on the United NationsSecurity Council) in their dealings with Rwanda?

It is the contention of this article that the frequent invocation of the ‘‘SomaliaSyndrome’’ in the Rwanda literature—the reduction of Somalia’s meaning forpolicy makers to a powerful scepticism of ‘‘benevolent intervention[ist]’’ opera-tions in volatile humanitarian crises (Clarke and Herbst 1997:3)—does not ade-quately account for the full breadth of Somalia’s meanings in relation toRwanda, and in a related fashion, to the way Rwanda was understood by U.S.and UN Security Council policy makers at the time of the crisis through theSomalia analogy. In this respect, the Rwanda genocide literature provides nocomprehensive excavation of the Somalia experience itself; the influence ofSomalia in decision making is taken for an explanation, but is itself never fullyexplained.

In response, this article revisits the Somalia Syndrome and excavates both itsmeanings, and the ways in which these meanings influenced policy maker per-ceptions of, and policy toward, the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This re-evaluationwill be conducted in several steps. First, this article will summarize the Somaliaconflict and the ways in which it is treated within the Rwanda literature. Sec-ondly, it will propose a theoretical language—that of analogical and schematicreasoning—in which we might interpret Somalia’s role and influence withinthe policy-making process around Rwanda. Within this theoretical language, the

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pursuant sections offer one schematic set of similarities—the traditional percep-tions of the ‘‘African’’ continent—through which to explain the nature of Soma-lia’s perceived relevance for Rwanda. A final section will briefly contrast thepolicy makers’ initial perceptions and policy reactions to Rwanda with their per-ceptions and responses after the emergence of the language of ‘‘genocide.’’ Itconsiders which policy responses might have been considered by U.S. policymakers and representatives on the UN Security Council, had Rwanda been per-ceived outside the contorting lenses of ‘‘Africa’’ and Somalia at the outset of vio-lence in April 1994.

The 1994 Rwanda Crisis—Somalia’s Place Examined

Somalia is often portrayed as a pivotal experience that influenced U.S. policydecisions during the Rwandan genocide (Destexhe 1995:50–51; Klinghoffer1998:91–98; Des Forges 1999:623; Hintjens 1999:273; Melvern 2000:153; Shaw-cross, 2000:107–113; Kuperman 2001:110; Barnett 2002; Dallaire 2003:147; Power2003:335). Somalia was a humanitarian intervention gone horribly wrong. Itbegan as a militarized relief mission for Somalia’s millions of famine victims—anoperation designed to ‘‘Restore Hope’’ after the fall of Siad Barre’s brutalgovernment in January 1991 (Stevenson 1993:138). It ended as a state-buildingoperation in which UN troops—and the U.S. contingent most actively—becameparty to the conflict through its confrontation with the powerful Mogadishuwarlord, Mohamed Farah Aideed (Delaney 2004). Somalia was a warning shotacross the international community’s bow—it tempered enthusiasm for humani-tarian intervention, demonstrating that state-building in far away corners of theworld was not without its risks, and these risks were not without their domesticpolitical consequences.

In the United States, the effect of the escalating violence in Somalia throughthe summer of 1993 was a public and Congressional backlash against humanitari-anism itself. The United States, many argued, could not continue to put its mili-tary personnel at risk for every ill-conceived UN mission the world over. ‘‘IfSomalia is an indication of how the administration will command our troops inany future operations such as in Bosnia,’’ one U.S. Senator quipped, ‘‘then thisSenator will withhold his approval of any such operation. Our troops comebefore warring factions (D’Amato 1993).’’ According to one similarly dispiritedU.S. citizen, ‘‘If I have to choose between pictures of starving Somalian babies ordead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, well,I don’t want to see any more dead Americans. Sorry’’ (Shalom 2005). Thus, theUN’s humanitarian-turned-nation-building mission in Somalia met an early endin the U.S. public’s mind, and soon after, in United States presence on theground (Wheeler 2000:198–199; Delaney 2004).

Yet, this inglorious finale in Mogadishu was also an important beginning.Somalia left a traumatic memory amongst the U.S. policy-making elite. As onesenior U.S. official remarked later, the loss of U.S. lives in Somalia, ‘‘was thedefining trauma, the consequences of which the U.S. military will live with…long after the Clinton administration is gone. ‘Mogadishu’ and ‘Somalia’ are notplace names now—they are cautionary slogans for disasters to be avoided at allcosts’’ (Shawcross 2000:102).

The memory and lessons derived from the United Nations’ Operation inSomalia (and the U.S. role therein) cast a haunting shadow over future peace-keeping missions, particularly during the emerging crisis in Rwanda. Some ofthe most in-depth investigations of the Rwandan genocide in the secondary liter-ature provide some stronger grounding upon which to build an explanation forthis linkage. According to Alan Kuperman, ‘‘in the wake of the Somalia debaclejust six months earlier… it is possible that U.S. officials, consciously or otherwise,

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dismissed initial reports of large-scale violence in Rwanda because such informa-tion would have raised the prospect of another UN or U.S. humanitarian inter-vention that they plainly did not want to contemplate’’ (Kuperman 2001:35).Kuperman argues that the two cases were seemingly similar enough to result inthe same negative outcome for any peacekeeping mission, as was thought to haveoccurred in Somalia. But what was the content of these similarities between thetwo cases?

Klinghoffer and Des Forges attempt to answer this question in their own sum-maries of Somalia’s role in U.S. policy making during the crisis. As Klinghofferwrites, ‘‘descent into genocide became blurred with the civil war, and the Soma-lia image of a ‘failed state’ with random violence masked the actual premedita-tion and directing role of the Hutu extremists in the interim government’’(Klinghoffer 1998:46). For Alison des Forges of Human Rights Watch, the com-mon link between the two cases is the same. ‘‘If Washington officials describedthe killings as ‘chaos,’’’ she writes:

[I]t was in part because they saw Rwanda through the prism of Somalia. In thislight, Rwanda was another ‘‘failed state,’’ just one more of a series of politicaldisasters on the continent. In such a case, they reasoned, any intervention wouldhave to be large-scale and costly and would probably produce no measurableimprovement anyway. (Des Forges 1999:623)

Klinghoffer and Des Forges offer some explanation as to the meanings of Soma-lia that were identified in the surface interpretations of Rwanda’s violence—bothwere seen as ‘‘failed states.’’ In the words of Des Forges, Somalia was the‘‘prism’’ through which Rwanda assumed its shape and form. After Somalia, orperhaps because of Somalia, the primary observers and participants tell us,Rwanda could not have been viewed or addressed otherwise.

And yet, Rwanda was a unique event. It was, in many if not most ways,entirely incommensurable with the failed state ⁄ failed intervention scenarioencountered in Somalia. Rwanda’s 1994 crisis was, in an important part, thepenultimate climax of a long-running state-sponsored project of genocide(Ndiaye 1993; Des Forges 1999:93; Melvern 2004:63); Somalia in 1993 was thefailed vestige of a state first confronted by and then divided amongst clan-basedpolitical factions. One was, in part, an expression of state organization, theother, an expression of the state’s absence. How then was Somalia able to holdthe perceptual influence it did over such a structurally distinct conflict asRwanda? The following sections will attempt to provide a coherent assessmentof the binding content between Somalia and Rwanda, where this content comesfrom, and why these common meanings pervaded over others in depictions ofthe Rwandan genocide.

Analogy and Schema—Interpreting U.S. Policy Decisions in Rwanda

In the U.S. decision making around Rwanda, Somalia was often cited as a casethat could provide important policy precedents and lessons through which toguide decisions in the unfolding events and policy options around Rwanda,given that the two events were perceived as ‘‘similar.’’ In this respect, Somaliawas used as an analogical referent for Rwanda.

The function of an historical analogy is to allow decision makers to draw whatthey perceive to be useful lessons and examples from history in order to identifythe character of events in the present. Where two events are compared and equa-ted in this way, analogies are meant to help identify the policy options that wereeither successful or unsuccessful in the similar past to assess their likely outcomeif applied to the present. Understanding the literature behind analogy more

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broadly therefore may provide a theoretical signpost to understanding the influ-ence of Somalia in relation to Rwanda more specifically.

According to David Fischer, analogy ‘‘signifies an inference that if two or morethings agree in one respect, they might also agree in another’’ (Fischer1971:243). But what ‘‘two things’’ do analogies typically compare? For ElliotZashin and Philip Chapman, through the use of an apt analogy we can express acomplex idea about a subject or problem by comparing it with something elsethat is more familiar and clearly understood (Zashin and Chapman 1974:310).Analogy, according to Zashin and Chapman, remains a tool of comparisonbetween events. Yet, these authors add to Fischer’s definition with an importantproviso. Analogies compare what is ‘‘unknown’’ to a similar event that is alreadywell understood, or ‘‘known.’’ In the Zashin and Chapman definition, analogy isexpanded to encompass the added element of ‘‘discovery,’’ in which new orunknown phenomena are interpreted through the lens of the familiar. Theseevents may be equated for their proximity in history, the experience—whetherindividual or prominently by the same generation—of particular policy makersin past events, or their perceived similarities of character (see as well: May 1973;Jervis 1976:217–282; Neustadt and May 1986; Khong 1992; Houghton 2001; Paris2002:423–450).

The first three selection criteria seem to offer a fairly complete explanation ofthe relevance of Somalia to Rwanda. Both of these events were close in his-tory—U.S. troops had been stationed in Somalia as late as March 1994. Somaliahad been influential not only for the U.S. government decision makers involved,as primary corroborating testimonies suggest, but also for the U.S. public whohad experienced the trauma of Somalia live on television and through themedia. In this respect, there is good reason to believe that Somalia was a readilyavailable referent for a generation of government officials and their electorate.Indeed, it is for these criteria that many in the secondary and primary literatureseem to make such a confident connection between the two events; but what ofthe fourth criteria—surface similarities? Certainly, the specific attributes of theRwanda conflict were clearly seen as similar to the defining attributes of the‘‘African’’ failed state example in the shape of Somalia. In this respect, bothRwanda and Somalia were viewed and framed as similar event ‘‘types’’; that is,they were viewed through a common ‘‘schema.’’

A schema, according to David Houghton, is ‘‘a general cognitive structure intowhich data or events can be entered, typically with more attention to broadbrush strokes than to specific details’’ (Houghton 2001:26). Schemas are broadframeworks for ordering and categorizing the world, and events that occurtherein. Its cognitive utility stems from the belief that faced with the responsibil-ity of making important decisions without always enjoying the benefit of com-plete and coherent knowledge of the situation before them, policy makers‘‘must have some means of simplifying and sorting out the vast quantity of infor-mation impinging on them’’ (Welch Larson 1985:50). The means to which indi-viduals will often turn is a cognitive schema—mental concepts applied tointerpret the meaning features observed in the world (Welch Larson 1985:51).Certain features are associated to this schema through past experience, memoryand belief, ‘‘providing a prototype against which specific examples can be com-pared’’ (Welch Larson 1985:51).

If Rwanda and Somalia are the same, then Rwanda by extension must be thesame kind of conflict as Somalia. Of course, the inverse is also true: if Rwanda isconsidered the same kind of conflict as Somalia, then the seemingly similar char-acteristics of one might reasonably be interpreted in the same way as the other.Rwanda and Somalia were perceived to share many common features—mass vio-lence, state failure, and inter-tribal strife, to name but three prominent percep-tions. Through these features, both Somalia and Rwanda were related to a


common ‘‘African’’ schema. In Somalia, images of mass violence were inter-preted as expressions of state failure and inter-clan civil strife. When similarmass-violence was observed in Rwanda, therefore, it was assumed that the natureor meaning of the violence was also the same as Somalia’s. As the following twosections will attempt to demonstrate, understanding the schema through whichevents are perceived therefore is a useful lens through which we might under-stand how and why Somalia was selected as an analogical referent over others.

The ‘‘African’’ Schema at Work—U.S. Decision Making and Rwanda

To the eyes of the U.S. public, troops had arrived in Somalia as heroes—the van-guard of a humanitarian army bringing food and supplies to an afflicted Somalipopulation. In confusing contrast to this early media backdrop of U.S. troopsfeeding hungry Somali children and of Gulf War-style casualty-free warfare, theimages of dead U.S. servicemen gunned down by lightly-armed street gangs inthe autumn of 1993 was a jolt to the U.S. public’s understanding of Somalia,and America’s place in Africa more broadly (Besteman 1996:121–124; Wheeler2000:198). ‘‘As far as the American public could see,’’ according to Delaney,‘‘what had started as a humanitarian mission to feed the hungry and the helplesshad degenerated into a bloody urban guerrilla war’’ (Delaney 2004:37).

In a final emphatic blow, on October 3, 1993 18 U.S. Army Rangers werekilled in a fire-fight with Aideed’s militia (Wheeler 2000:198). Scarcely a weeklater, the administration of Bill Clinton signaled its intention, before significantpublic and Congressional pressure, to withdraw its troops from Somalia by March1994 (Delaney 2004:37). In the U.S. Congress, many began to wonder at the per-ceived shift in America’s role in Somalia—from agent of humanitarian deliver-ance to party in an intractable clan war over the spoils of a failed African state(Dole, 1993; Dorgan et al. 1993; Gekas, 1993; Gregg, 1993; Lott, 1993; McCain,1993; Thurmond, 1993). Even Senator Thurmond, one of the few Senators stilldetermined to stay the course in Somalia, summoned few hopeful images todescribe the Somali landscape when he said before the Senate ‘‘[i]t was a wilder-ness of savagery and squalor before we arrived, and unfortunately, it may revertto the same state when we leave’’ (Thurmond, 1993). Moreover, the new savageimage painted in Congress was not an exception to the general U.S. public per-ception at the time. According to Catherine Besteman’s review of media imageryduring the Somalia crisis, the U.S. media offered its audience ‘‘[t]he image of acountry unable to rid itself of ancient rivalries’’ (Besteman 1996:121). Stories of‘‘rivalries that were once thrashed out with spears,’’ or ‘‘clan rivalries, a problemcommon in Africa’’ permeated the media story line (Besteman 1996:121–122).As Besteman concludes, this imagery ‘‘became a journalistic mantra, invoked byreports throughout the media,’’ and throughout the U.S. body politik (Besteman1996:121, 123).

Certainly, Africa is not an intrinsically brutal and savage space. Yet, Africa mayhave certain meanings for societies and policy makers socialized in many culturalmilieus across many Western societies (Brooke-Smith 1987:40–45; Mudimbe1994; Berman 1998; Mount 2000; Bessis 2001:29–37, 183–213; Gong 2002:77–81;Biel 2003). Conflicts that occur within the Western schema or lens of what con-stitutes ‘‘Africa’’ may then be categorized through common ‘‘African’’ traits andinterpretations. The media may focus on images of refugee flows, starving chil-dren, and the passive victimhood of natural violent forces believed common toand characteristic of the African world (Latham 2001:11; Vera 2001:115–122;Salter 2002; Taylor and Williams 2004:2–10). They may alternatively focus on‘‘hopeless’’ stories of savage cannibalism, state failure, child soldiers, and violentanarchy that are similarly perceived as the endemic and intrinsic qualities of war-fare as it is uniquely conducted on the African continent (Lindqvist 1996; Kaplan

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1997:22–29). The ‘‘African’’ schema may pre-order our readings of, and themeanings we ascribe to, events under its sway.

Somalia and Rwanda shared a similar descriptive schema that for a U.S. policyaudience typified conflict in Africa. As ‘‘African’’ conflicts, both were groupedaccording to the similar ways in which they were prominently presented in U.S.media, public and policy-making audiences. These images included concepts ofstate failure, anarchy and primordial intertribal civil war. These particular imagesformed the relevant surface similarities through which Somalia and Rwanda wereequated. Consequently and most critically as a result, it is this African schematicrepresentation of Rwanda, rather than the actual state-driven genocide characterof the actual conflict, which United States (and as we shall observe, UN SecurityCouncil) policy makers perceived, and engaged, in their policy discussions.

Perceiving Rwanda—The ‘‘African’’ Schema and the Somalia Analogy

One forum around the conflict in which this imagery was most prevalent, and animportant starting place to view how this African schema entered the U.S. policy-making process—was the Western media. Several comprehensive examinations ofthe Western print and television media coverage of the genocide have alreadybeen conducted. Throughout this body of investigation, ‘‘hopeless’’ Africanimagery figures prominently. As part of their lengthy Joint Evaluation of theinternational community’s response to the Rwandan genocide, Adelman, Suhrke,and Jones compile and examine the results of different media evaluations fromBritain, France, and the United States. Their findings ‘‘show that very littlechange occurred in the media coverage after April 6 compared to the paucitybefore’’ (Adelman, Suhrke, and Jones 1996:46). What there was portrayed theviolence as ‘‘ancient tribal slaughters—but with the withdrawal of foreign person-nel there was a precipitous drop in coverage’’ (ibid).

The joint assessment of Thomas Weiss, Larry Minear, and Colin Scott offerssome further insight into general press trends from across the West, with similaradmonitions of their woefully insufficient, and in what little there was, tribalistcoverage (Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996:62–77). Steven Livingston and ToddEachus focus more restrictively on America’s network television coverage (Living-ston and Eachus 1999:219), though their findings mirror those in the JointEvaluation and Weiss et al.

In a complementary analysis, Alan Kuperman provides his own critical reviewof Western print coverage of Rwanda in major outlets including the Times, TheGuardian, Le Monde, the Washington Post, the New York Times and all reportsin the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service for Africa and Western Eur-ope, which includes radio and newspaper reports from Rwanda, Belgium, Britainand France (Kuperman 2001:24). From these printed sources, Kupermandiscerns five ‘‘strong’’ trends in reporting over the genocide’s first 2 weeks(Kuperman 2001:24). Among them he notes, first, that violence was depicted asa ‘‘two-sided civil war—one that the Tutsi were winning—rather than a one-sidedethnic genocide against the Tutsi’’ (Kuperman 2001:24). His analysis under-scores not only that the genocide was largely missed by the Western press in theearly stages of the genocide, but the killing that was perceived appeared in thepress as mutual, and part of a broader inter-communal Hutu-Tutsi struggle.

Such images combined for great media stories, and a classic portrait of ‘‘hope-less’’ Africa’s irremediable unravelling, but why were they so prevalent? One pos-sible explanation is that journalists will often rely on proven patterns of imagerythat relay an established (and marketable) meaning or explanation. Accordingto Susan Moeller in these terms, the media’s narrative force stems from its ‘‘abil-ity, and even authority, to categorize the world by images…. once the parametersof a news story have been established, the coverage lapses into formula. Mythic


elements—the fearless doctor, the unwitting victim—will be emphasized, but theywill fall into a pattern’’ (Moeller 1999:3, 13).

For the audience, such patterned symbols have the benefit of being immedi-ately intelligible. Without lapsing into complicated contextual analysis on anightly basis of global political troubles, patterns provide a standard frameworkfor representing, and from the audience’s position, interpreting complicatedevents. For the media, such patterns allow the reporter to navigate and reporton events as an observer otherwise unfamiliar with the terrain. This ‘‘naviga-tional’’ tool is particularly relevant to African coverage, where journalists offer lit-tle more than passing witness to the continent’s many disparate and diverseconflicts. Under these conditions, ‘‘African’’ imagery in reference to Rwandaserved two functions: first, it explained what the information available could noton its own. Secondly, it provided the explanatory pattern or framework projectedand digested by the Western media and their audiences.

Policies From Perceptions—U.S. Policy Toward Rwanda

‘‘African’’ imagery in the West is not restricted to the confines of media repre-sentations. At important policy-making focal points in the West as well (and par-tially as a result), ‘‘Africa’’ played a prominent representational role.

Of course, it is worth noting that it is not the contention here that ‘‘African’’imagery was a ubiquitous feature of U.S. government perceptions of Rwanda in1994 across all of their many institutions, agencies and individuals. Rather, thearticle examines how and where some ‘‘African’’ representations and percep-tions influenced some individuals and some decisions at some important junc-tures in the policy-making process, and proposes the conditions under whichthese cases of prevalence and persuasiveness occurred. In this latter regard, thissection will consider the media as a source of ‘‘African’’ representations for pop-ular and elite audiences, the underlying conditions in the information andknowledge environment within government concerning Rwanda, as well as thepossible rhetorical uses served by ‘‘African’’ imagery by government officials.

False ‘‘African’’ framings and references permeate policy maker and policy-advisor experiences during the Rwanda genocide. Consider for example, AlisonDes Forges’ experience lobbying for action on Rwanda. Looking back on herexperience in meetings with National Security Council and White House staffDes Forges contends that ‘‘these officials thought in terms of the categories leftover from years before’’ (Des Forges 1999:623). ‘‘In this perspective, the hatredand violence was ‘age-old’ and by implication could have no end’’ (Des Forges1999:623). In Des Forges’ experience, prevalent ‘‘hopeless’’ imagery provided alegitimizing representational framework for a policy of inaction, and this wouldform the U.S. government’s policy approach for April and May. As SamanthaPower remarks in a similar respect, ‘‘[r]emembering Somalia and hearing noUnited States demands for intervention, President Clinton and his advisors knewthat the military and political risks of involving the United States in a bloodyconflict in central Africa were great, yet there were no costs to avoiding Rwandaaltogether’ (Power 2003:335). For Power, Rwanda was interpreted within thehalls of U.S. government primarily as an ‘‘African’’ conflict. It is this ‘‘African’’content of the Rwandan conflict that made it similar to Somalia. Additionally,Power’s analysis offers some further depth to the question raised from Kuper-man insofar as it explains to some degree why, in their common ‘‘Africaness,’’policy makers may have feared that the outcomes of a peacekeeping responsewould be the same. ‘‘Africa’’ may well have accounted for their common equa-tion.

How did these ‘‘hopeless African’’ images enter the policy-making process?The influence of the global media, particularly within the specific permissive

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environment around Rwanda in the spring of 1994, provides one compellingexplanation. Put simply, policy makers, like the community of which they are apart, are consumers of media representations. At different times and under dif-ferent conditions, these media representations may influence the policy-makingmembers of their audience in their professional roles. The daily reading routineof State Department officials is one basic example. In the routine reported inLionel Rosenblatt’s analysis of media’s influence in policy decisions:

Every morning at seven, [the State Department’s] Operations Center produces adaily news summary for policy makers that consists of relevant press clips fromthe New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the BaltimoreSun, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor. (Rosenblatt1996:139)

Of these sources, we are already familiar with some of their coverage duringRwanda’s genocide. ‘‘Of course,’’ the authors go on, ‘‘the press clips are not…the policy maker’s only or most important source of information. Intelligencesummaries, reports from foreign posts, and information from a wide variety ofother sources will also be used…’’ (Rosenblatt 1996:139). Thus, government offi-cials may be direct recipients of media imagery in their roles as policy makers,though given the U.S. government’s diversity of intelligence and informationsources, one might easily downplay the exclusive influence of media representa-tions in the formation of policy-maker perceptions and actions in global events.

What happens, however, when these ‘‘other sources’’ are either not available,or not being used? Under such conditions, might reliance on and the influenceof the media increase as a source for information upon which to build policy dis-cussions and options? In this respect, media representations and reports oftencomplement, but will sometimes even supplement, other forms of governmentalinformation and intelligence.

To explain, the information environment in Washington in early April 1994shares some similar elements to that experienced by the Western media—bothwere operating under restrictive conditions of information scarcity and paucity.As the violence in Rwanda escalated after April 6, the U.S. government had agreat deal of incoming information regarding Rwanda’s violence. America’s lim-ited intelligence network in central Africa was certainly active generating someinformation on the conflict. Their meagre intelligence resources in the regionhowever—one intelligence officer stationed at the time in Cameroon—were notsufficient to gather a great deal of in-depth information from the conflict zone(Kuperman 2001:32). The embassy in Rwanda was no better prepared to providea clear account of the sudden escalation in violence, as the then-Deputy AssistantSecretary for African Affairs, Prudence Bushnell recalls, ‘‘the imprecision of theinformation grew, because it was too violent for people to get out on thestreets… So the information we were getting was from second-hand reports fromthe embassy’’ (Bushnell 2003). Embassy personnel were subsequently evacuatedwithin the first week of the crisis, closing down another vital intelligenceresource (Melvern 2000:139). However, the intelligence community’s primaryfunction was to amass and analyse the primary ‘‘open’’ sources of informationemerging from the conflict. These sources included the global media, NGOreports, the remnants of what was seen at the time to be Rwanda’s legitimategovernment, and the United Nations. Thousands of accounts of the violencearrived daily from these ‘‘open’’ sources.

A major challenge for the analysis of this information, however, was that differ-ent NGO, intelligence and media reports often presented radically differentreadings of what was occurring on the ground. As such, not all this informationsurvived the narrative cull by analysts within the government’s intelligence


network. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) submitted a thorough reportwithin the first couple of days, though its findings of targeted massacres werereportedly dismissed for what analysts perceived to be extreme claims. NGOreports were similarly dismissed as politically-motivated accounts designed tonecessitate a robust U.S. response. As Tony Marley argues, looking back at hisreading of early information coming out of Rwanda:

I tended to discredit the accuracy of the information itself, as I believe othersdid, because we had heard allegations of genocide, or warnings of genocide…before… We had heard them cry wolf so many times that we failed to react tothis claim of genocidal planning. (Marley 2003)

Thus, much of the early accurate, though alarming, reports of massacres andorganized slaughter were deemed unreliable and unusable insofar as policy ana-lysts were prejudiced from the outset against the most extreme representations,those beyond their imagination to understand.

Information readily available through the media, however, offered a largelyuniform tribalist representation of the violence, in contrast to the occasionallyalarmist and variegated readings on offer from the government’s own classifiedintelligence and in-country NGOs. This is the narrative that remained for manyuninformed policy makers in the U.S. government being introduced to Rwandafor the first time. Thus, if senior level policy makers in the U.S. government wereunaware of Rwanda’s emerging genocide, the blame might be placed more onthe ‘‘African’’ narrative selected from overwhelming if incomplete and contrast-ing fragments of information, rather than its total absence.

Alan Kuperman, who devotes significant attention to what the U.S. govern-ment knew about Rwanda in the early weeks of the genocide as part of his assess-ment of America’s policy response, seems to agree with this conclusion(Kuperman 2001:23). According to Kuperman:

U.S. officials who had responsibility for Rwanda… assert that classified reportsfrom the first few weeks of violence largely mirrored open reporting at the timeby international news media, human rights organizations, and the UnitedNations. Indeed, these officials say they relied heavily on such open reportingrather than on proprietary U.S. government sources of information. In part, thiswas because the normal sources of proprietary intelligence were not available inRwanda. (Kuperman 2001:23)

Consider this last observation, and how it relates to policy makers as direct par-ticipants in the media audience. If Kuperman is to be believed, many within theU.S. government, particularly those uninitiated in Rwanda’s complex history,had to rely on whatever information sources were available and considered reli-able. They also had to rely on the readings presented to them of this informa-tion. The mass media were one such ‘‘open’’ source of information, and‘‘African’’ imagery was one prevalent narrative in the media.

The experience of Anthony Lake illustrates the influence of these media nar-ratives in some critical U.S. policy-makers’ perceptions. According to Lake, theadministration’s National Security Advisor, only confused reports and contrastingstreams information were initially available through the government’s preferredintelligence channels. Early on, the government’s intelligence community wasunable, or unprepared, to make any definitive claims regarding the cause andconditions behind Rwanda’s obvious violence. According to Lake:

I asked some of the people from the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], ‘‘Sowhat’s going on? Who’s killing who? I haven’t seen much about this…’’ And they

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couldn’t tell me… there was very little attention to what the problem was andhow to fix it politically through the UN, etc., at least at my level. (Lake 2003)

Where then did the National Security Advisor’s information come from? Lakeclaims that ‘‘my consciousness of it certainly grew, I’d say primarily from pressreports, by May, although I knew bad things were happening there. There werenews stories about bodies washing down rivers, etc., that were gaining our atten-tion’’ (Lake 2003).

Lake’s admission would seem partially at odds, however, with broader findingsfrom Kuperman’s work, particularly over the failure of the DIA—a critical intelli-gence provider—to disseminate an adequate picture of Rwanda’s historical andpolitical context. According to Kuperman, the DIA received sound intelligenceon the Rwanda situation as early as 24 h after the downing of Habyarimana’splane, indicating the extent of the massacres and the Rwandan government’sambitions. It is uncertain, however, whether this information would have beenavailable prior to when Lake had approached them for his first appraisals ofthe violence (Kuperman 2001:32). Moreover, once this information was pro-cured, the DIA failed to disseminate and convince others of its dire findingsthrough the rest of the national security establishment—including the StateDepartment, the Central Intelligence Agency, offices in the Pentagon, andLake’s own National Security Council (Kuperman 2001:24).1

The view that was widely accepted in the absence of another coherent narra-tive was the ‘‘African’’ schema. A review produced by Lake’s own NationalSecurity Council (NSC) following the Rwanda genocide found that ‘‘most classi-fied cables and reports from the period instead referred to ‘communalviolence,’ a term that suggested decentralized and mutual violence rather thangenocide’’ (ibid:36). The review had no record of the DIA’s initial reports.Where the accurate information available was not being used, ‘‘African’’ imag-ery, and its media purveyor, assumed a greater explanatory prominence. Accord-ing to one State Department member sitting on a special interagency task forceon Rwanda, ‘‘We had CNN on… I don’t recall us knowing anything that wasnot already being reported by the press’’ (ibid:34).

As such, though there are some discrepancies, the failure to disseminate essen-tial available information at the time could well explain why Lake, for one seniorpolicy-making example, did not receive useful internal intelligence early oneither from the DIA directly, or later on from within his own NSC. According toKuperman therefore, in this sense corroborating Lake’s experience, ‘‘the bestindication of what senior U.S. officials believed at the time and reported to thepresident in classified intelligence reports is the concurrent open reporting bythe media, UN, and human rights organizations’’ (ibid:24).

Under conditions of poor intelligence and information, the influence ofmedia representations, and the consistent and coherent ‘‘African’’ narrativethey expressed, may have been relied on to a greater extent, as the conditionswere present to enable its greater influence upon audience perception. Beforethe media could assume importance therefore, another, perhaps more funda-mental environmental condition was necessary—a lack of usable information.More critical than the media representations that may have filled the informa-tion void was the information void itself. Here again, a reason that mightexplain how ‘‘African’’ imagery was enabled to dominate media representationsof Rwanda—lack or the failed dissemination of available information—seems tosatisfy comments at some important policy-making junctures within the UnitedStates.

1 Kuperman cites a general dismissal of extreme interpretations amongst intelligence services as one importantreason why the DIA’s findings may have been disregarded.


Perception and Analogy—Africa and Somalia in U.S. Foreign-PolicyDecision Making

Within the U.S. government, ‘‘African’’ imagery appears most frequently in con-junction with the memory of Somalia. In many of these instances Rwanda andSomalia were equated for their common ‘‘African’’ schematic features. Somaliawas a dominant framing analogy for many policy makers trying to form animpression of the violence in Rwanda, particularly in the early stages of the vio-lence. Consider, for example, the reflection of the Deputy Assistant Secretary forAfrican Affairs at the U.S. Department of Defense, James Woods. For Woods,‘‘Rwanda had come in the wake of what everybody considers to be the fiasco inSomalia.’’ He goes on, ‘‘the death of the 18 American Rangers in Mogadishuhad occurred only six or seven months earlier and had totally traumatized theClinton administration on these types of foreign interventions’’ (Woods 2003).For Woods, the cautionary tale of Somalia weighed heavily upon his own, andothers’ within the U.S. government’s, appraisal of Rwanda. But what does Woodsmean when he speaks of ‘‘these types’’ of foreign interventions? On whatgrounds was Somalia a legitimate reference against which to paint Rwanda assuch an inhospitable context for action while other cases were clearly not?Woods’ explanation provides little guidance on these questions.

In other instances, however, the missing links between the two cases are moreclearly drawn. For example, Tony Marley, the political military advisor for theU.S. State Department, similarly echoes Wood’s concern. According to Marley’saccount, ‘‘the United States was very concerned, especially Defense Departmentofficials, that no U.S. personnel or U.S. resources be siphoned off into anotherpeacekeeping operation in Africa. This was, remember, following the Somaliadebacle’’ (Marley 2003). The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs,George Moose, seemed equally impressed by Somalia when he reflected ‘‘if youthink back a few months about what happened to our troops in Mogadishu, Icertainly was not one to argue that the Belgians should be pressed or obliged tostay in Kigali and Rwanda…’’ (Moose 2003). In another official’s summary, afterSomalia, the United States had no appetite to go ‘‘into the middle of CentralAfrica, into a country no one had ever heard of, to insert itself between twotribes no one could even pronounce, the Hutus and the Tutsis, and to get itselfinvolved in another civil war’’ (Sheehan 2003).

For Sheehan, the Clinton administration’s inaction on Rwanda was inevitable,given the results of ‘‘Somalia.’’ Rwanda is presented as the next manifestation ofSomalia—a context in which failure is inevitable—even before the situation inthe emerging present unfolds. This association is taken for granted, but why?Sheehan’s quotation hints at one possible answer when he writes of Rwanda as‘‘a new African adventure of raging civil war.’’ In this vein, both conflicts areseen as similar African conflicts, and more importantly, ‘‘hopeless’’ ‘‘African’’conflicts. For Sheehan as for others, Somalia certainly inspired the memory andfear of U.S. casualties in ill-fated humanitarian operations, beyond the clearboundaries of direct national economic and political interest. Somalia andRwanda shared some kind of common genetic resemblance through which theywere often implicitly equated and understood as similarly ill-fated. Both explicitand implicit meanings are played out in policy-maker justifications for actionwith regards to Rwanda. For Sheehan and Marley, both Somalia and Rwandawere ‘‘African’’ peacekeeping operations, while for Moose, it was the deadly com-monality between the U.S. and Belgian experiences in Somalia and Rwanda—theshared suffering of traumatic casualties for purportedly benign humanitarianmissions—that bound them together. In these official retrospectives, Somalia isseen as a pivotal event with far reaching effects beyond its own boundaries (and

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in relation to Rwanda in particular) for the explicit memory of U.S. casualties,but also for the implicit memory of the ‘‘African’’ conflict environment in whichthese casualties occurred.

Changing Perceptions, Changing Policy—Rwanda as Genocide

Representations on the United Nations Security Council through the month ofApril largely mirror the representational narrative already visited in the case ofthe U.S. government. From Member State comments, Secretariat reports tocouncil and UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations briefings on theUNAMIR mission, Rwanda was consistently and restrictively depicted in imagesof civil war violence, tribal conflict and state failure. The situation briefings tocouncil by Iqbal Riza (Department of Peacekeeping Operations) are representa-tive of the tenor of council debate and information inputs produced withinthe UN system. In his briefing of April 9 for example, Riza spoke exclusively ofthe RPF and government movements and actions in the field, without a wordon civilian deaths (Melvern 1994: April 9, 1994). On April 11, his briefingturned to the violence within Rwanda’s borders, though presenting it in termsof ‘clashes’ and ‘disorder’ in the streets, leading to ‘‘random’’ ethnic killings(ibid, April 11, 1994). This narrative thread is as true of council’s in camerainformal debates as well as in the record of Member State public statements.As late as April 21, the council’s public statements reflected the twin imageryof state failure and tribal war. The council delegate from Oman, responding tothe Secretary-General’s report of the same day, argued against the reinforce-ment of UNAMIR, ‘‘owing to the lack of agreement by the two conflicting par-ties on a cease-fire and to the absence of central authority in that country’’(UN Document, S ⁄ PV.3368, April 21, 1994). Djibouti’s delegate attributed theviolence to ‘‘a tide of emotional power capable of exploding with a surfacetrigger… the necessary pretext to commence the disruption that led to theensuing chaos’’ (ibid).

Assuming these delegates’ sole source of information was the briefings pro-vided by the UN system itself, one should not be surprised at their framingof the conflict. The Secretariat’s report of April 20 was intended to provide asummary of the best information available, upon which council membersmight conduct an informed policy debate. Instead, the report explained thatRwanda’s ‘‘authority collapsed… an interim government was proclaimed onApril 8 1994, but could not establish authority’’ (UN Document, S ⁄ 1994 ⁄ 470,April 20, 1994). The report called for a cease-fire between the warring ethnicparties, with no reference to the plight of and need to protect at-risk civil-ians.

Not surprisingly, the council’s Resolution 912 of April 21 (committing to awithdrawal of UNAMIR troops) summed up the prevalent perception on thecouncil when it stated its ‘‘deep concern’’ for the ‘‘breakdown of law and order,particularly in Kigali’’ (UN Document, S ⁄ RES ⁄ 912 (1994), April 21, 1994). Thecouncil’s public face reflected the internal framework through which it reasonedabout the conflict. The representation of Rwanda bound within this frameworkwas a ‘‘hopeless’’ conflict of state collapse, contested between two belligerent tri-bal parties.

On April 28, however, an important narrative shift occurred. It began at theinsistence of the Council’s non-permanent delegates, particularly with the leader-ship of Czechoslovakia’s Karel Kovanda and the council’s New Zealand President,Colin Keating. Together, the two delegates solicited guidance from HumanRights Watch’s Rwanda expert Alison Des Forges. In private tutorial sessions, DesForges painted an image of Rwanda at significant odds from the prevailing civilwar ⁄ state failure norm (Des Forges 1999:638). As a result of these contrasting


impressions, Keating introduced a draft statement calling on council to label theRwandan conflict by the name of ‘‘genocide.’’ Though resistance on the council,particularly from the U.S. delegation, discouraged the statement being passed, acompromise statement was adopted on April 30, invoking the language of theGenocide convention, if not the term itself (UN Document, S ⁄ PV.3371, April 30,1994). Notably, whereas the memory and threat of ‘‘another Somalia’’ is repeat-edly invoked by council Members in informal in camera debates prior to andduring the debate around Resolution 912, the term does not appear again afterthe 21st, even as council debates shifted ever more toward increased engage-ment, rather than withdrawal (see Melvern archive transcripts for April 12, 13,14, 15, 21).

Through the month of May, council debate turned increasingly toward the‘‘genocide’’ reading of the conflict and away from civil war and state failure rep-resentations. With the new discursive environment, Rwanda as genocide assumeda new urgency and importance within which council members could no longerlegitimately defend their policy of disengagement. On May 17 within weeks ofresolution 912 in which council voted to withdraw its troops, council voted toreinforce UNAMIR to the tune of 5,500 troops (UN Document, S ⁄ RES ⁄ 918(1994), May 17, 1994). Through the month of May, the Secretary-General touredWestern capitals in search of the necessary troops to man the renewed mission,but with admittedly negligible results. By June 10, the shift in the representa-tional environment was sufficiently established to force the U.S. State Depart-ment to abandon its recalcitrant policy to avoid the ‘‘genocide’’ label.Subsequently on June 22, council resolved to accept the next best alternativeresponse—a French-led intervention force, Operation Turquoise, mandated todeploy and end the ongoing genocide violence in Rwanda’s south-west (UN Doc-ument, S ⁄ RES ⁄ 929 (1994), June 22, 1994).

Critically, the shift in representations of Rwanda did not change the interna-tional community’s very real experience of failure and defeat suffered in Soma-lia. And yet, the shift away from ‘‘African’’ images of the conflict significantlychanged the impetus for action in Rwanda in such a way as to increase pressurefor and the legitimacy of military engagement in spite of the Somalia experience.What accounts for the difference in policy-maker responses? Here, the relevanceof the African schema seems to provide a convincing answer. The shared repre-sentational schema of ‘‘African’’ meanings in which both Somalia and Rwandawere understood, and through which Rwanda was significantly undervalued andunderestimated as an event with important humanitarian interests at stake, criti-cally reinforced the power of Somalia in relation to Rwanda as opposed to con-flicts safely ensconced within (predominantly) U.S. and European spheres ofinterest in Bosnia and Haiti.

Somalia’s relevance for Rwanda was not just the memory of casualties, but itssimilar ‘‘African’’ character. It was the fear of ‘‘African’’ conflict, however, poorlyand inappropriately conceived a concept to the actual character of the conflictunfolding in Rwanda, that enabled the dissuasive force of the Somalia syndrome.It is critically these ‘‘African’’ meanings that were left to frame policy-maker per-ceptions during the international community’s formative first encounter with theRwandan crisis, and contributed to the U.S. and UN Security Council’s resistanceto engagement with the resultant genocide. As the later change in perceptionaround Rwanda attests, had Rwanda been framed as a government-directed pro-gramme of ethnic cleansing and genocide earlier within U.S. government andUN Security Council debate (see the determination of genocide offered byNdiaye 1993). This contrasting representational environment might have con-strained the legitimacy of policy disengagement, and enabled justificationsfor, and the legitimacy of, greater U.S. and international community policyengagement.

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United States as Representational Agent

United States resistance to the genocide term raises a last important caveat—U.S.policy makers in particular were not merely passive consumers, captive to mediaand other external representations of the Rwandan conflict. At many juncturesboth prior to and during the spring Rwanda crisis, U.S. policy makers were con-scious agents in shaping and advocating for particular representations of Soma-lia, and Rwanda. This agency must also be examined and understood if one is tofully appreciate the extent to which both African representations and the Soma-lia analogy influenced policy-maker perceptions and decisions, both in the Uni-ted States, and on the UN Security Council.

Prior to April 1994, given its particular Mogadishu experience, the U.S. admin-istration was an active agent in promoting the ‘‘hopeless’’ narrative aroundSomalia, and around the prospects for success of any successive UN peacekeep-ing operation. The U.S. administration presented Somalia as a UN failure, and atragic result of that organization’s incapacity to manage complex peacekeepingmissions. According to Walter Clarke, the former deputy chief of mission at theSomalia Embassy during Operation Restore Hope, ‘‘the Ranger’s disastrous fire-fight in October prompted many—both within the Clinton administration andthose outside who had applauded Bush’s decision to intervene—to distancethemselves from the tragedy by blaming the United Nations. President Clinton,when meeting with families of the dead Rangers, said, somewhat implausibly,’’given that U.S. Rangers under independent U.S. military command carried outthe raid, ‘‘that he was surprised the United Nations was still pursuing General Ai-deed’’ (Clarke and Herbst 1996:72).

This marked scepticism around peacekeeping and the UN influenced U.S. pol-icy-maker antipathy toward Rwanda, long before the spring of 1994. Speaking onthe floor of Congress days after the deaths of 18 U.S. Rangers, one Congressmanremarked:

[E]ven as the President this minute is trying to justify to American parents whytheir sons and daughters are sacrificing their lives in Somalia, I have learned thatthe night before last his United Nations Ambassador voted in the UnitedNations, and they approved, another peacekeeping operation. This one is inRwanda…. Where does it end? Can anyone in this room tell me where Rwandais, or why we are going there, or what vital American interest is at state inRwanda?... We are told we are going to be patrolling between the majority Hutusand the minority Tutsis in Rwanda. Why, Mr. Speaker? (Rogers 1993)

Even before the UNAMIR mission hit the ground in Kigali, some U.S. policymakers were predisposed to resist the intervention, regardless of the type of con-flict it was perceived to be.

The meanings associated with Somalia by many U.S. policy makers were notuniformly shared around the world, however. According to Chester Crocker writ-ing soon after the conflict in 1995, ‘‘appraisals of the Somalia operation varywidely’’; its lessons are variable, depending on which UN mission one chooses toexamine, which objectives and results are deemed important, and which experi-ence one examines (Crocker 1995:2). For example, the Australian mission to Bai-doa as part of the UNITAF deployment was in many respects a success story,providing humanitarian relief while successfully disarming many of the localcombatants (Patman 2001). While many policy makers and political observersshared the concern that the precipitous withdrawal of Western states from Soma-lia had weakened the credibility of multilateral interventions, the Clinton admin-istration was particularly active in casting blame for this perceived failure ofmultilateralism in Somalia on the United Nations itself. As a result, the Clintonadministration imposed strict limits on when and under what conditions the


U.S. government would support and participate in peacekeeping operations inthe future. Speaking before the UN General Assembly in September 1993 forexample, President Clinton cautioned:

[I]n recent weeks in the Security Council, our nation has begun asking harderquestions about proposals for new peacekeeping missions. Is there a real threatto international peace? Does the proposed mission have clear objectives? Can anexit point be identified of those who will be asked to participate? How much willthe mission cost? From now on, the United Nations should address these andother hard questions for every proposed mission before we vote and before themission begins. (Friedman 1993)

In May 1994, this scepticism assumed a concrete form when President Clintonissued Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25, outlining the severely restrictivecriteria against which the United States would sanction any future multilateralintervention. Under this directive, the United States would not intervene unlessit was committed to total victory with full support from the public and Congressin situations of clear national interest, where adequate personnel could ensureattainable objectives, minimal U.S. casualties, and a clear exit timetable—that isto say, the very conditions lacking during the UNOSOM II mission (Clarke andJeffry 1997: 208).

The resultant chill effect on intervention was not limited to U.S. participation.Rather, PDD 25 radically curtailed the UN’s own capacity to spearhead futureinterventions, even where the United States was not a troop contributor. Accord-ing to then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, explaining this effect, ‘thechange was more important than the PDD, because the United States would say,‘‘we don’t allow you to do a peacekeeping operation… Why? Because, one, wehave to contribute 30% of the budget… and two… in the case that you will haveproblems… you will ask our assistance, and we will be compelled to give you thisassistance’ (Boutros-Ghali 2003). In this respect, the retrenchment from ‘‘asser-tive multilateralism’’ amongst U.S. policy makers born out of the United States’particular experience in and interpretation of Somalia imposed constraints onthe UN Security Council in terms of what courses of action other council mem-bers might realistically propose and present for debate.

In terms of Rwanda, the particular peacekeeping experience of the UnitedStates in Mogadishu dampened the Clinton administration’s appetite for UNinterventions in general, and this had an effect on its disposition towardaction in Rwanda. This is not to suggest that representations of Rwanda didnot matter in U.S. decision-making processes, or in the development of scepti-cism toward the emerging Rwanda crisis. Certainly, the evidence previouslyexamined points to the influence of ‘hopeless’ African imagery and theSomalia analogy in the initial formation of many U.S. policy makers’ firstimpressions of the Rwandan conflict. Rather, these two experiences appear tobe complementary and mutually-reinforcing: U.S. policy-maker scepticism ofthe UN in general, combined with the traumatic memory of how the UN’sperceived organizational failures played out in the particular instance ofSomalia, may have predisposed U.S. policy makers to identify and similarlyinterpret observed surface similarities between Rwanda and Somalia. Perceivedsimilarities between Rwanda and Somalia were in turn given greater weight inU.S. policy-making decisions, reinforcing U.S. policy-maker resistance to inter-vene in the crisis. This interplay of representation and distaste for interventioncannot be discounted when one considers why, in the particular case of theUnited States, policy makers eventually played such an obstructionist role inthe few efforts made through the UN Security Council to become moredeeply engaged in resolving the Rwandan violence.

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The dissuasive effect of U.S. scepticism toward intervention after Somaliabecomes readily apparent in Rwanda when one considers the desperate attemptsby U.S. policy makers to resist applying the ‘‘genocide’’ label to Rwanda, monthsafter the ‘‘hopeless’’ representation of Rwanda had been discarded in councildiscussions, and the genocide label had been adopted by the rest of the interna-tional community. As we have observed, though Secretary of State Warren Chris-topher and his staff clearly recognized the nature of the Rwandan violence, StateDepartment officials were forbidden from employing the term ‘‘genocide’’ untilJune. According to then-assistant Secretary of State, George Moose, when pressedin an interview to explain this resistance, ‘‘I think one of the most shameful fail-ures that certainly rises right to the top—the fact that it took us so long to cometo what should have been a fairly obvious conclusion’’ (Moose 2003). Mooseclaims the State department was conflicted ‘‘over what obligations might flow…It is ludicrous, in retrospect, that the discussion was about how might we beviewed if we declared that there is genocide and then… do nothing about it’’(Moose 2003).

As we have observed, by May 1994, U.S. policy makers were aware of the nat-ure and scope of the violence occurring in Rwanda. Their resistance to thegenocide term at this point was not due to a misperception of the conflict, butrather a conscious decision to avoid representations that might conceivablynecessitate greater interventionist action. This conscious resistance is furtherevidence of the ways in which U.S. policy-maker action was not solely driven byrepresentations of the conflict. At important junctures, both in drawing lessonsand meanings from the Somalia experience as an example of the UN’s failed‘‘assertive multilateralism,’’ and as an active antagonist to the new ‘‘genocide’’framing of the conflict, U.S. policy makers also played an active role in shapingthe terms of UN Security Council debate around Rwanda, and limiting thescope for action therein. And yet, in the face of U.S. reluctance to sanction anintervention, the importance of the genocide label becomes all the moreimportant in terms of its representational force. The ‘‘genocide’’ term becamea powerful tool for policy makers and activists on the Security Council andwithin the international community in their attempts to break through U.S.reluctance to sanction an intervention. By resisting the term, U.S. policy mak-ers were forced to confront a powerful moral claim that undermined the pre-existing ‘‘hopeless’’ representational framework that legitimized non-interven-tion as the preferred policy response, and challenged the restrictive terms theUnited States had imposed on intervention. PDD 25 was designed to protectthe United States from interventions in ‘‘hopeless’’ conflicts, but made no pro-visions to justify U.S. resistance to the moral and legal imperative to act incases of the most grievous crimes against humanity. Tellingly in this respect,U.S. policy makers actively resisted the genocide term, but once accepted evenby the United States, they did not resist the UN-sanctioned intervention thatsoon followed.

Conclusion

This article set out to explain why similar interpretations of the conflicts inSomalia and Rwanda were selected as the basis for ‘‘relevant’’ surface similaritiesand historical analogical comparison. It has argued that Western perceptions of‘‘Africa’’ provided the schematic typology through which these two events weremutually categorized and ultimately compared. The binding common features ofthis African schema were the tropes of mutual tribal violence, anarchy and statefailure. Viewed through these interpretive lenses, policy makers did not take ade-quate notice of the contrasting forms of state-driven, hierarchical, and complexpolitical genocide occurring alongside Rwanda’s civil war violence.


This ‘‘African’’ schematic lens was an additional influence within U.S. policy-maker perception of Rwanda, and reinforced the relevance of the Somalia crisisfor Rwanda. Far from its source, this ‘‘Syndrome’’ debilitated many of the criticalfeatures by which the Rwanda genocide might have been called by its propername, especially during the early weeks of policy makers’ ‘‘first encounters.’’Certainly, following the accepted mantra of the Rwanda genocide literature, theshadow of Somalia did bear important influence on U.S. policy perceptions anddecisions regarding the Rwandan genocide. The standard account in this litera-ture does not fully explain why and how Somalia acted the way it did uponRwanda. Moreover, it does not suffice to say that Somalia was related to Rwandafor its prominence in history and personal connotations for the policy makersinvolved. Ultimately, policy makers selected similarly-defined features and narra-tives for each of the conflicts and generalized them as their singular shared iden-tity. The ‘‘African’’ schema provided the ready pool of features and meaningsthrough which both conflicts were defined. Somalia, a previously-defined ‘‘Afri-can’’ event, was consequently the appropriate analogical referent for applicationto the ‘‘African’’ Rwandan present.

Why should this re-telling of a decade-old story be of interest to us now? Thesimple answer is that analogies continue to appear in foreign-policy debate inmany forms and forums. When Mukesh Kapila cautions us that ‘‘the only differ-ence between Rwanda and Darfur now is the numbers involved,’’ what memoryof Rwanda does he intend to use to explain contemporary events in Darfur(Reeves 2004:161)? What meanings are potentially hidden in these terms, andultimately, how much stock should his audience place on these inferred similari-ties? When John McCain asked Americans in the lead-up to the 2003 war againstIraq, ‘‘who would not have heeded Churchill’s call to stand up to Adolf Hitler inthe 1930s…’’ (McCain 2002), how do we know to trust the invocation of this pastto explain the ambitions and capabilities of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003? Cer-tainly, these analogical incantations may not have held the influence that Soma-lia did over Rwanda. Yet, we have seen in Rwanda the influence history’smeanings and lessons can and may hold over policy-maker perceptions. Thelesson of Somalia warns us to be wary of analogy’s power. Somalia’s examplewarns us to history’s sometimes dubious claims to explanatory authority. This isone lesson we can trust to guide us well in the future.

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