On March 24, 1999, Kosovar Albanians woke to the sound of NATO bombs wrecking havoc on the violent Yugoslav forces. NATO was attempting to end the brutal ethnic violence rapidly escalating against the Kosovars. Yet just five years earlier, on April 7, 1994, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide reported that “not one minute after the UN left, the gendarmes and militia came,” killing over 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days. The only time Western powers landed in Rwanda, they gathered foreign officials and left. Tutsis faced brutal, unrelenting violence in broad daylight. The West did nothing. Rwanda and Kosovo were both humanitarian conflicts; they were both instances when ethnic tensions erupted into full-scale violence. Why, then, did Western powers exercise such selective interventionism, ultimately failing almost a million people? The answer to this question lies in the abrupt changes that Western foreign policy underwent during the 1990s. Historical weaknesses in Africa made the West blind to the reality of Rwanda’s situation. Intervention was deemed impossible. By contrast, the decision in Kosovo was clearer than day: everyone knew what was happening, and everyone felt a responsibility to stop it. Ultimately, Western powers intervened in Kosovo, but not Rwanda, because historical failures in Africa destabilized assumptions about the efficacy of intervention.
The genocide in Kosovo resulted from centuries of ethnic tensions erupting into a conflict that was inadvertently fueled by the threat (and reality) of Western intervention. Kosovo, dominated by Albanians since the 1680s, only became a part of Serbia in 1918. In 1945, Serbian premier Joseph Broz Tito united Kosovo and five other (now recognized) countries under a new state: Yugoslavia. Tito forcibly governed the ethnic groups of Yugoslavia with a rigid one party system that favored the interests of Serbians, causing mass uprisings from Albanians. Tito’s death in 1981, however, ended his Communist hold over the country. The republics slowly began to splinter, but a new Yugoslavian leader was gaining power. Slobodan Milosevic campaigned by proudly proclaiming his dedication for the Serbian people, even at the expense of the other ethnic groups in the region. Once elected in December of 1990, he was quick to execute violent grabs for power in order to ensure the success of Serbs. This violence quickly became deadly: Serbian troops in Bosnia committed mass atrocities against Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian war, which occurred from 1992 to 1995. Milosevic’s desire to ‘cleanse’ Yugoslavia didn’t end there, unfortunately. By 1998, the violence had spilled over into Kosovo, only ending due to NATO’s seventy-eight day bombing crusade. The majority of the killing occured during the bombing, as Serbs were threatened by Western intervention and increased the rate of their killing. The Serbs ultimately killed more than 13,500 people, and displaced 1.5 Million.
Just four years before the Kosovo conflict, similar ethnic tensions in Rwanda failed to capture Western attention and resulted in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history. Though tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis had existed for centuries, relations became particularly strenuous during Belgium’s control of Rwanda in 1916. Tutsis, who were only 17% of Rwanda’s population, were handed royal status while Hutus were constantly oppressed. Hostility between the two groups was constant, but severely heightened by Belgium’s inconsistent alliances. By the mid-1950s, Tutsis were rapidly embracing the decolonization movement spreading across Africa, and Belgium quickly switched alliances to the majority Hutu. Fueled by their desire to maintain influence over the region, Belgium also began to fund the Hutus’ revolutionary movement to take control of Rwanda. Through the support of Belgium’s troops, the Rwandan revolution from 1959 to 1961 transferred power to a Hutu controlled government that lashed out violently at Tutsis nationwide. Tutsi population size in Rwanda decreased to 9%, and over 300,000 fled to Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zaire. A military party of Tutsis in Uganda formed in 1987, calling themselves the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and they made constant attempts to retake the Rwandan government, peaking ethnic tensions and fueling Hutu extremists. On April 6, 1994, Hutu President Habyarimana of Rwanda was shot in a plane attack that was promptly blamed on the Tutsis. Within hours, an interim government was established, and they declared that the only way to quell Tutsi violence was for every Hutu to take up arms and kill their Tutsi neighbors. By April 7, the killing began, overseen by the new extremist Hutu government. 800,000 innocent Tutsi lives were lost over the course of 100 days. The scope of the genocide was only possible due to Western inaction, and it was quickly known as one of the worst humanitarian failures in history. Western powers’ disastrous passivity largely stemmed from their previous failed interventions in Africa.
The failures in Rwanda indicated that the West was quickly developing an African schema: a characterization of African conflicts driven by the United States’ disastrous intervention in Somalia. On October 3, 1993, the world watched twelve dead US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The US had engaged under the pretense of humanitarian intervention, attempting to provide aid to Somalia and to establish a democratic government. Instead, the US met fierce resistance from Somali rebels, and the humanitarian mission ended in a bloody battle, resulting in the death of eighteen US soldiers in a conflict that was widely broadcasted on Western media. The US failure in Somalia was a catalyst for immense backlash against such humanitarian missions, as an unnamed Senior US Official later remarked that “’Mogadishu’ and ‘Somalia’ are not place names now—they are cautionary slogans for disasters to be avoided at all costs.” The Official’s use of the phrase “cautionary slogan” is the clearest demonstration of the impact of the Somalian disaster: it became a warning sign for politicians as they faced backlash over lost American lives, encouraging them to avoid future intervention.
As a result of the disaster, Western politicians began to look at the disaster in Somalia and create a premise upon which to judge all future African conflicts. Directly following the battle at Mogadishu, Western media displayed imagery that highlighted the “savage” and “hopeless” nature of the Somalian conflicts. This characterization became a lens by which politicians considered ethnic conflicts in Africa; the more “savage” imagery broadcasted, the more people became convinced the ethnic violence in Africa was inevitable, and thus out of their control. It is also for this reason that the Somalian experience made it easy for the West to deny the danger of future ethnic conflicts altogether in order to avoid confronting a similar situation again.
Accordingly, the Somalian disaster didn’t just change Western outlook on Africa– it transformed the mechanisms they used to evaluate the importance of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Prior to Rwanda, the West assumed military intervention was the obvious and immediate solution to all humanitarian conflicts, both in Africa and otherwise. This was especially true after the US exited the Cold War on December 26, 1991 as the definitive victor. The Soviet Union had suddenly lost its grip on many African countries, resulting in widespread civil conflict and destabilizing democracies. In order to increase hegemony and further their own democratic agenda, the US sought to become involved in several humanitarian conflicts. This interventionist tendency is why they were so quick to get involved in Somalia in the early 90s. The Somalian intervention’s aftermath, however, fundamentally changed the West’s assumptions by putting their own troops in danger. In a statement responding to the Somalian disaster, one Senator declared that “[US troops] come before any warring factions.” It’s clear that the Somalian experience forced the West to ask a difficult question: Would they prioritize humanitarian conflicts over their own troops? For many politicians, the answer was clear: Risking Western lives was both politically unpopular and unnecessarily risky. By adopting this mindset, the West was afraid to intervene in all future instances of humanitarian conflict, as they became more concerned about public opinion than the well-being of those threatened by violence.
Thus, this new foreign policy perspective created insecurities about Western personnel in Africa, and made politicians more skeptical about the information on escalating deaths in Rwanda. The failed intervention in Somalia created public outrage at the image of endangered Western personnel. For this reason, the first thing the UN did when the violence was about to begin in Rwanda on April 7, 1994 was evacuate all foreign officials in the region. Since foreign presence became non-existent, the only available mechanisms to provide the West with information about the Rwandan genocide were scarce, and often delayed in relaying accurate information. As a result, it was easy for the West to paint the evidence of mass genocide as simply unreliable information. Additionally, politicians’ desire to avoid intervention after the Somalian debacle created more confusion about the type of conflict ongoing in Rwanda. Since the Tutsis were labeled a political party, Western decision makers capitalized on the scarce information to argue that rising violence was simply a civil war in which their intervention would do more harm than good, pointing to the Somalian debacle as evidence of failure.
The historically weak Western presence in the Rwandan region also magnified the impact of the lack of information. The United States maintained only a single human intelligence asset in the entirety of Central Africa, since the area was considered a low-interest region for the US. The only other channels of reporting relied heavily on Hutu and Tutsi intelligence, which were biased and often unholistic in their reporting of the violence. The West’s structural weakness in the region coupled with their desire to reject reports of violence is why the violence was perceived as only a civil war until April 20, 1994, which was when the genocide had already been underway for a few weeks. Genocide was only officially declared by the UN on May 4, 1994, and the killing had become so violent by this point that intervention would not have any great effect on the number of lives lost. In addition, intervention was further stalled due to reports that Tutsis were initially winning the war, which contradicted later reports of mass genocide against the Tutsis. The contradictory pieces of information made it impossible for the West to gather support for an intervention until it was too late.
On the other hand, Kosovo’s proximity to NATO members gave them a unique advantage since information, some of which was inaccurate, about the escalation of ethnic tensions was widely broadcasted and easily understood. The war between the Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs, ending only in 1995, had already attracted NATO attention to the Yugoslavian region, and many forces were already stationed nearby Kosovo. News channels were firmly established and unwilling to fall short on responding to violence as they had in Rwanda. The media’s determination to report on the violence faster than they had in Rwanda actually resulted in publishings of many false reports from Kosovar Albanians, who were looking to attract Western attention. For this reason, early reports of the violence claimed the genocide had been raging since 1999, while further investigation discovered only about 3,000 corpses during this time, many of which were armed rebels. Many reports also classified petty crimes such as thievery as human rights abuses or even mass ethnic violence. The exaggeration of the violence coupled with the scope of the reporting made politicians much more attentive to the conflict than they were in Rwanda.
In contrast to Kosovo’s established information channels, the limited understanding of the Rwandan conflict coupled with the underdeveloped landscape in the region made any intervention from the West strategically impossible. The delayed nature of the reports on Hutu violence had already made an intervention far too difficult to plan. But the significant military limitations of the Rwandan region also acted as another strong deterrent against an intervention. Rwanda’s lack of nearby aviation fuel coupled with long distances from Western air bases made troop transportation inefficient and expensive. France’s intervention in Chad in 1983, for example, faced almost identical geographic struggles and managed to deploy only 1,750 troops in the first week due to the large distance between the countries. For reference, it is estimated that at least 80,000-120,000 troops would have been necessary in Rwanda in order to make a small dent in the genocide’s rapid progression. The French intervention in Chad also demonstrates the limitations on an air intervention, as the lack of nearby fuel forced France to re-route eight combat air vehicles from Chad to nearby countries. Thus, an air intervention in Rwanda would have been impossible. Since risking Western troops to carry out an invasion was wildly unpopular, especially following the disaster in Somalia, it was difficult for Western policymakers to draw out a realistic plan for invasion. Western powers were also afraid that their intervention may speed up the rate of the killing or incite new conflict, like it did in Somalia. For instance, Hutu fear during a Western intervention may have encouraged them to finish the killing as quickly as possible, making the genocide more brutal.
By contrast, Kosovo’s location made it easy for NATO to plan an invasion without risking any lives, making the operation more politically popular. Yugoslavia had a close proximity with NATO members like Italy, Belgium, France, and Luxemburg. Troops had also already been stationed in the region due to the Bosnian war. This made it easy to efficiently mobilize military personnel and equipment into Yugoslavia. The close proximity also meant that there were sufficient air bases to facilitate an entire air invasion without having to deploy any troops on the ground. Additionally, the West calculated that the bombing would only last fourty-eight hours, as they predicted that Slobodan Milosevic would stop the genocide as soon as they started bombing. These factors made it seem as though intervening in Kosovo was a quick solution to preventing any spillover of the violence that was blooming in the region. Western powers used this same mentality as they attempted to redeem themselves from their failures in Rwanda.
As the violence in Kosovo began to emerge in 1999, the West was also facing immense backlash in response to their inaction in Rwanda. The backlash acted as additional pressure that fundamentally shifted the new foreign policy assumptions the West had adopted. By 1999, the West had made a full pivot regarding their assumptions about the efficacy of an intervention. They switched from considering interventionism as the first option (demonstrated by Somalia) to prioritizing political opinion over the humanitarian impact of the conflict itself (demonstrated by Rwanda). Kosovo, however, acted as the exception to this new assumption. The reason for the sudden shift in Kosovo lies in the guilt that accumulated after Rwanda. Once the conflict in Rwanda had ceased, the Genocide Convention conducted an extensive search into the genocide, revealing that the convention had been massively violated between April 6 and July 14 of 1994. The Convention was the first unilateral treaty entrusting the UN with calling upon all competent actors in the case of a genocide. Unlike the Humans Rights Declaration which preceeded it, this treaty made international response to genocide an obligation, not an option. The West was uniquely guilty due to their plethora of resources and troops, which is why they encountered severe backlash and were forced to reconsider the steps they took when faced with a humanitarian crisis. Thus, Rwanda became the second African disaster to shift the assumptions the West adopted about humanitarian intervention. It is for this reason that President Bill Clinton, when adressing Kosovo’s parliament in 2009, stated that he “missed [the Rwandan genocide]. It was gone in 90 days.” According to Clinton, the US’s inaction in Rwanda “explains why we were so quick to come [to Kosovo].” His own guilt is a reflection politicians’ fearful reaction to the aftermath of the genocide, ultimately resulting in their endorsement of a pre-emptive intervention in Kosovo in order to prevent Rwanda from repeating itself.
The selective interventionism in Rwanda and Kosovo teaches us key lessons not only about Western tendencies to intervene, but also about the effectiveness of that intervention as a whole. Firstly, it’s important to recognize that while Western powers did intervene in Kosovo, it was not a success. What was supposed to be a fourty-eight hour bombing intervention lasted for seventy-eight days, fueling ethnic violence and escalating the conflict. The false reporting and hasty decision making ensured both Rwanda and Kosovo were humanitarian disasters. In both of these cases, Western response failed. Intervention was entirely rooted in national interest, and their “strategic” military calculus actually ensured the destruction of the Tutsis and the Kosovar Albanians. The conclusion this paper arrives at, then, is not only about the specific case of Rwanda versus Kosovo but also about the ways in which Western foreign policy consistently fails to uphold peace and effectively support victims during conflicts. Rwanda and Kosovo are only two examples, but they demonstrate just how much the West needs to change their foreign policy doctrine along with the domestic political systems that enabled these failures.