what if us troops were sent to rwanda

Question is how do they get in I suppose. In the 1990's the US is distinctly lacking in its capabilities or desire to project force in Africa outside of coastal areas.

A full force is unlikely, and it's unilateralism that was unbecoming of the Clinton administration, a basic rundown of the problems going into Rwanda:

1. Nobody wanted it.

2. France and China who sold arms and provided other means of support to Bagosara's government actively objected to it.

3. The United States needs someone who will let them in. The way the chips fell that was probably going to be Uganda.

The best chance would likely have been a dramatic expansion of UNAMIR and basically the adaptation of a "Listen to everything Dallaire says" policy for the matter.

Really the maximum that could probably actually happen is more funding for UNAMIR with an expanded mandate and the United States running air support to jam RTLM's transmissions out of Uganda (the president, Yoweri Museveni, had been installed over Obote with RPF support and thus has a favor to repay Mr. Kagame).
 

Flubber

Banned
The best chance would likely have been a dramatic expansion of UNAMIR and basically the adaptation of a "Listen to everything Dallaire says" policy for the matter.


As discussed in the older thread, Dallaire got the additional troops he wanted months before the genocide began and had already expanded his mission brief.

The older thread also raises three questions people never seem to want to answer:

  • Why must it be the US sending troops when other nations were closer or already engaged?
  • What rules of engagement would the intervention force plausibly be given as opposed to what rules of engagement would actually work?
  • What would happen when the intervention force withdrew?

Samantha Powers titled her book "A Problem from Hell" for very good reasons.
 
Any successful intervention would have mandated the RPF running the show afterward, it really would have, Arusha was just not going to happen.

Also Dallaire never got things like an intelligence capacity, even in the best of times he was hamstrung by his mission parameters.

Also if you read my post you notice that the only actual US presence I called for was an intervention by air.
 

Flubber

Banned
Also if you read my post you notice that the only actual US presence I called for was an intervention by air.


If you'd read the older thread, you'd notice that the intervention by air is not as simple as many would like to think. Even the usual "jam the radio station" mission would require more aircraft, support, and overflight permissions than many assume.

And, of course, you've ignored the $64 question: What happens when the radio station is no longer jammed and the intervention troops go home?
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
As was noted in the thread given above, the intervention would not have been as simple as it may appear.

Any intervention would have been at the end of a rather tenuous supply line (there was exactly one good runway in Rwanda that could handle even C-130s). Flights would have required oveflight of at least two countries (Best bet Kenya and Tanzinia) and forces would be 800 miles from the nearest coast line. That means at least two weeks to get motorized troops to Kenya, 3 days to cross Kenya and Tanzinia before you can start to seriously pacify the region.

The U.S. could have put in airborne/air mobile forces in fairly quickly, say a week, but all they would have been able to hold was a perimeter around the airport and whatever they could expand to using UN forces transport.

You then run into the classic peacekeeper issue of "who do we shoot at?". The sides were far from definitive. In addition to the well known Hutu on Tutsi violence there was also Hutu on Hutu (in one province 5% of the population was wiped out, and the area was virtually Tutsi free before the Genocide started).

Overall, the lack of response is a terrible moment, but it is likely that even with a robust U.S. response the death toll would have only been reduced by a third. That is a huge number of people who could have been saved, but it is less than many assume.
 
And, of course, you've ignored the $64 question: What happens when the radio station is no longer jammed and the intervention troops go home?

I'm just taking a stab at the question of "what if the troops go home?". Most likely outcome is a limited genocide as the Tutsi rebels set up a new regime and launch a wave of counter violence against the Hutu's. This would probably force another intervention.
 

Flubber

Banned
I'm just taking a stab at the question of "what if the troops go home?". Most likely outcome is a limited genocide as the Tutsi rebels set up a new regime and launch a wave of counter violence against the Hutu's. This would probably force another intervention.


That possibility is mentioned in the other thread too.

If you somehow stop the OTL genocide from happening, you've done nothing to effect the dysfunctional ethnic-political structures on the ground. This means that, once the Western babysitters leave, the shit is still going to hit the fan.

Instead of having a 800K-deaths-in-100-days horror which can be easily labeled as "genocide" and which can fit neatly in the West's ADD/ADHD news cycle, you'll still have a slower process of "ethnic cleansing" which will kill more people over a longer period of time. In fact, that slower process is called the Second Congo War, has been going since the mid-1990s, and has killed 6 million people, although no one seems to care about it.

Nothing short of a re-imposition of the colonial imperial system in going to stop these killings in sub-Saharan Africa until the borders fit the peoples or the peoples fit the borders.
 
This would mean that President Clinton(perhaps other NATO members?) have decided on an actual break with France over the matter, sending forces in without UN approval and quite probably excluding French troops entirely from the effort.

Could have very interesting consequences in the next few years to come...
 
If you'd read the older thread, you'd notice that the intervention by air is not as simple as many would like to think. Even the usual "jam the radio station" mission would require more aircraft, support, and overflight permissions than many assume.

And, of course, you've ignored the $64 question: What happens when the radio station is no longer jammed and the intervention troops go home?

Yeah, problem is the United States has decent relations with a lot of the people who can give them these permissions and in particular the president of Uganda would have every reason to let the US run a mission against Bagosara and the Interahamwe that would involve the blocking of RTLM.

The difficult part comes in assuring something after the last troops leave, the RPF would probably have to be a part of this. At the start of the genocide there was a coordinated effort made on the part of the Hutu extremists to kill moderate Hutu politicians who would have either supported the Arusha Accords (which involved a power-sharing deal between Habyarimana's party and the RPF), disagreed with the notion of extermination of the Tutsis or both. CalBear's point regarding the Hutus is important here, it does bear mentioning that Tutsis were not the only victims of the Rwandan Genocide, only the most well known, moderate Hutus who didn't play along with the Interahamwe or the government were killed, and a whole lot of people used the chaos of the genocide to settle old scores not of an ethnic character or just to take advantage (as in I kill my neighbor, say he was a moderate, and take all his nice stuff). In the end, the last two groups standing that were organized were Bagosara and the extremists and the RPF, any hope for ending the genocide is not going to come from supporting the ones who are doing it so that task falls to the RPF.

People are assuming that the RPF would really go any further than it did in the immediate aftermath of a genocide that was 75% successful that is to say tragic incidences of Tutsi-on-Hutu violence inflicted by RPF soldiers with links back to high command... questionable in most cases. A lot of Hutus left Rwanda fearing exactly this, and it lead to the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis we have today.

Diplomatically China will be as annoyed as it was when NATO bombed the Chinese embassy (the one that was letting the Serb paramilitaries use their communications for their own purposes... oops) but it will drop the issue given that relations with the US are more important than arms trade with Bagosara. Any sort of US intervention will probably uncover some degree of evidence that France was helping the genocidaires to the point where French soldiers were actually teaching Hutu militias in the pre-genocide days how to cut open the stomach of a dead Tutsi and throw them in the water so that they would sink to the bottom.
 
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