Loud Voice From U.N.’s Bully Pulpit : Boutros-Ghali campaigns for Rwanda mission

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali refuses to let the genocide in Rwanda go unchallenged. He scolds the West for not responding to the crisis. He chides Africa for not sending more troops to stop the killing. It’s a good use of his international bully pulpit.

Though he met Friday with President Clinton, Boutros-Ghali can’t drum up the political support he did when he finally persuaded George Bush and other nations’ leaders to send troops to Somalia. That thankless operation soured much of the West on the idea of dispatching troops to another bloody foreign power struggle.

The American casualties in Somalia prompted the Clinton Administration to develop a new and stringent policy on peacekeeping, Presidential Policy Directive 25, which Clinton signed May 5. Even when no U.S. troops are promised, the new policy calls on the secretary general to answer a series of tough questions posed by the United States, such as which countries will send troops, what role the troops will play on the ground and when they will leave. Washington demands satisfactory responses because Americans pay one-third of the U.N. peacekeeping budget; although U.S. lives might not be on the line, U.S. tax dollars would be.

In order to comply with the new U.S. directive, the U.N. Security Council delayed sending 5,500 troops to Rwanda to allow time for a study of what can be accomplished in the Central African nation while the fighting rages. The troops would go only if the secretary general determined that the combatants would cooperate with the United Nations by agreeing to a cease-fire, that foreign troops were indeed available and that any mission in Rwanda would be short-lived.

Additional delays have been caused by the refusal of most African nations to commit troops to a U.N. peacekeeping force. So far, only Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal and Zimbabwe have committed. Boutros-Ghali has tried to put together an all-African contingent to secure Rwanda’s Kigali airport, ensure the flow of relief supplies and create safe havens for fleeing Rwandans. The reluctance of neighbors to get involved is not unusual in Africa, where isolationism is encouraged by the charter of the Organization of African Unity.

Since the deaths of Burundi’s President Cyprian Ntayamira and Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana in a suspicious plane crash April 6, more than 200,000 people have been killed in fighting between members of the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. U.N. officials will try again on Monday to negotiate a cease-fire. That’s a start, but only a start.

What would it take to get more help for Rwanda? Neo-colonial meddling is inappropriate, but for so many African nations to sit by while hundreds of thousands of neighbors die is unconscionable.