The Lion, The Fox and the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia
Written by: Carol Off,
Random House, Toronto, 2000,
ISBN: 9780679311386, 406 pp.
Reviewed by: Alan Ryan, Senior Research Fellow, Land Warfare Studies Centre
This extraordinary book examines the disastrous peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Rwanda, and it does so by analysing the role played in these disasters by three senior Canadians. The Lion of the title is Major General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). The Fox is Major General Lewis Mackenzie, the sector commander in Sarajevo during the early part of the Bosnian War. The Eagle is Justice Louise Arbour, who became chief prosecutor for War Crimes in Rwanda and Yugoslavia at the Hague. The book charts the sorry record of United Nations (UN)-mandated ‘neutral’ peacekeeping in two failed states where robust intervention was required. Both countries experienced tragedies of horrific proportions and the inability of the UN to do anything to prevent or even ameliorate the genocides that occurred demonstrated the international community’s lack of preparedness for the conditions of global insecurity that succeeded the stasis of the Cold War.
Off’s book has prompted uproar in Canada, where peacekeeping has been regarded as a national specialty. The book has received wide attention among students of peacekeeping but has not been widely marketed in Australia. his unavailability is a shame, as the book is well written and addresses issues that Australia also has to face. What level of commitment should affluent and relatively secure states make to global security? When governments commit their troops to peace enforcement missions, what costs and what casualties will they bear?
Off is particularly critical of Lewis MacKenzie’s role in Sarajevo. MacKenzie brought with him all the old assumptions of first-generation peacekeeping. He saw himself as a mediator, whose presence might help restrain the excesses of the ethnic war that was brewing as Yugoslavia tore itself to pieces. He opposed intervention on the grounds that none of the parties to the conflict in Bosnia had clean hands. The UN stayed out of the war—and 200 000 people died. The ethnic cleansing only ended when NATO intervened with air strikes and the United States engineered a fragile peace by effectively imposing the Dayton Peace accords on the warring parties.
Romeo Dallaire’s story is the stuff of Greek tragedy. As the commander on the ground, Dallaire saw the most horrific genocide in recent history occur around him while he urged the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the UN to take action. Something close to a million people died in the holocaust. His own troops were slaughtered along with Red Cross and other humanitarian workers, but with a Chapter Six peacekeeping mandate and limited military resources, he was powerless to intervene. The failure of the UN was total—no-one in the organisation was willing to acknowledge what was really happening. Within the UN bureaucracy, there were determined efforts to play down the extent of the carnage and no member state wanted to take responsibility for revealing the truth of Rwanda’s descent into hell. In the aftermath of the botched mission, Dallaire has been active in trying to inform the world what went wrong and what must be done to prevent such carnage from happening again. Not surprisingly, today he is a broken man, both physically and mentally.
Louise Arbour was brought in as prosecutor to conduct the first international criminal trials since those at Nuremberg. She soon found that no-one was really interested in these trials; they were being conducted to give the appearance of an international response to the two genocides. She found incompetence in the conduct of investigations, disinclination to make arrests, and corruption throughout the bureaucracy. Off paints Arbour’s efforts as something of a victory snatched from the jaws of total failure. The prosecutor pushed for indictments over the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. These indictments included those ultimately issued for Slobodan Milosevic and his colleagues. The tribunal has secured some convictions, though all too often of junior personnel and marginal political figures. Although Milosevic is on trial, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic remain at liberty. In Rwanda, it appears that few of the instigators of violence will ever see justice. As far as Africa is concerned, the international community shies away from involvement in what is generally seen to be an intractable problem.
Off has written a bitter and troubling book, which is essential reading for those who want to know the challenges that will face military forces employed on the more complex operations that will face them in the future. The world is gradually accepting that fundamental human rights take precedence over outmoded concepts of indefeasible state sovereignty. The author concludes, however, that few governments have the political will to invest their troops and their treasure in resolving conflicts in which they have no vital interests involved. As the Security Council deliberations over the fate of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime showed more recently, many governments will delay their commitment and oppose intervention unless their own security or economic wellbeing is affected. As Off concludes: ‘he real lesson to be learned from Rwanda is that no one gives a damn. The missing ingredient isn’t a special force or better communications—it’s political will, courage, morality.’ Soldiers today inhabit a more complex moral universe than that of their predecessors, and their governments have generally yet to come to terms with this fact. This book provides a valuable road map to the ethical conundrums that will face us in a future where military forces will be needed for cosmopolitan as well as national purposes.
