Questioning the Labour Theory of Value
(A critique of Marx's Labour theory of value)
Eugen Bohm Bawerk’s work ‘Karl Marx and the close of his system’ is unashamedly were most of the ideas expressed here come from as well as some other notable critics of Marx. The following makes no claim to be original and is only the reasoning of a student who isn’t an economist by specialisation trying to make sense, after having read Das Kapital, of a principle which is at the foundation of Marx’s economic theory; the labour theory of value.
Even though many critics of Marx are comfortable in ridiculing the LTV (labour theory of value) most avoid any real theoretical engagement or analysis of the theory either on its own or in contrast to its subsequent replacement by the subjectivist theory of Marginal Utility. The LTV can simply be laughed out of court by many, though this doesn’t seem to be a fair or indeed useful way of approaching the subject as the theory itself and theory of economic value in general is 100% more subtle than glibly scoffing at the idea that sweat expended in production is determinant of price tags. The lack of the easy availability, for the non-specialist economic student, to acquire a satisfactory and comprehensive critique of Marxist economics in the more technical sense that just a critique that highlights of a lack of any subsequent revolution and triumph of the world proletariat since Marx’s prediction or the dismal economic performance of the Soviet Union, is a serious concern as little more encouragement is needed for yet more superficial and conceited analysis in the world of ideas. A serious analysis should hopefully admit that like many other theories in the natural as well as social sciences that have subsequently been discredited the LTV does not lack an explanation for economic phenomena. Instead discrediting it relies not on outright rejection but instead on a process of trying to show how when under the pressure of falsification the LTV stretches to a point at which it subsequently breaks.
However this seems to naturally beg the question, what causes one type of labour to be more ‘complex’ than another? How can we verify that this is the case other than by employing the circular logic of simply looking at the prices of commodities in the market and by their price stating that they must be more or less complex than others? Unfortunately this issue of the relation of complex and simple labour is not dwelt on in Capital for more than a couple of pages out of the 1000 or so in the first volume, as it is similarly skimmed over by Adam Smith in the same uneasy fashion in The Wealth of Nations. So although the LTV can provide a theory to answer the question of value there seems to be an issue of falsification present.
A knowledge of Marginalist economics would suggest and point to a solution to this problem lying in an area which Marx again fails to develop or examine in his writing when laying out the ground work for value in vol 1. This spectre that haunts Marxist and all other classical economics is use value.
As stated before if a commodity has no use value then it has no economic value and is not a commodity. However Marx seems content to leave his analysis at that. Use value appears as a binary concept which a product either has or has not and is separate from exchange value. This separation is seen by Marx as being one of the central tragedies of capitalist production and its correction, by the elimination of production for the exchange of commodities for exchange value and instead production in the pursuit of use value, being one of the goals of a future communist society after the revolution.
But surely it is important to realise that items have use values of different magnitudes and that these values can also fluctuate. Recognising this in light of the problem presented earlier of the indeterminacy of complexity of labour, use values present themselves as a basis through which these different values of hours of labour can be explained and determined in a satisfactory fashion. The economic value of one hours labour might be less or greater than that of another man’s preforming a different task because the end product is of greater use value to the prospective consumer.
The modern economist sees no categorical difference between use and exchange values, instead he sees the second is the product of the first. Values are sovereign to the consumer and no the producer.
It is important to realise, before a similar question is asked of the determination of use value, similar to that asked of the relative complexity of labour, that use values are subjective and not objective, unlike those claimed to be identified by the LTV. Unlike Marx, who in the footsteps of Aristotle, who says that exchange takes place between two commodities of equal objective value the subjectivist economist says that exchange occurs when one man values higher or prefers a commodity more than the one he is exchanging it for and the other party in the exchange vice versa. Otherwise if values were equal why would exchange take place in the first place? Wouldn’t both parties be indifferent to exchange?
Therefore by substituting the LTV with the theory of marginal utility we get a deeper and more comprehensive explanation of economic value than we get with the LTV as it finds the answer to the question of the difficulty of determining fixed units of value as being a problem which is really the product of the inability to break down the subjective desires of the human will into objective units.
Gaps of explanation
The above is the central criticism which leads economic theory from the classical school dependent on the labour theory of value into the understanding of economic value through marginal utility theory first put forward by Carl Menger. However it is useful to illustrate this point through several ‘gaps’ of explanation that occur when trying to use the LTV to explain certain economic phenomena. These are the value of natural resources, the value of land and the value of interest.
Natural resources
The foremost example of a commodity which the LTV cannot adequately explain which subjectivist economics can is the value of natural resources. Minerals extracted from beneath the ground seem to provide the favourite example for illustration. Why should if extracted from the same mine shaft using the same or similar process a mineral, coal for example, be more valuable than another type of mineral or a coal of a different quality? If the labour process is the same then there should not be a difference in the price between these minerals according to the LTV, or whatever differences in price there are should be representative of the relative difficulty of extracting the minerals (not that this as well doesn’t itself reduce back to the same problem of valuing the different complexity of the processes) . However this problem of explaining the relative prices of the minerals is explicable if it is not the labour manifest within them but the marginal utility that they serve that determines their price. This importantly explains why scarcity plays such an important role in the value of commodities, which is something that Marx dismisses as being largely irrelevant and only a market influence which over time will diminish as markets settle and goods reach their natural exchange value.
Land
Even though a natural resource, Land is generally considered to be an exceptional member of this category. This is largely because it is a good that although finite does not necessarily require any labour invested in it to present itself as a valuable commodity. Again Marx brings up Land in Capital vol1 but again doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining this peculiar commodity. David Harvey in his lectures on Capital gives the explanation that land acquires its value through the expectation of the amount of labour that will have to be spent on it in order to make it fit for construction of as part of that construction itself. However apart from the same central problem noted above of determining the complexity of that labour there are examples of land that come to mind which gain their exceptionally high value through the accident of their location. An obvious example and it is easy to think of more, would be a piece of land on top of which a house is built which is surrounded by beautiful scenery or countryside. How the value that is clearly added to the house by these surroundings can be accounted for by labour, the stated source of all economic value, presents a problem and a gap in the theory. Again it is not hard to solve this problem through marginal utility theory.
Interest and the nature of labour
In Captial vol3 Marx concludes that the value of credit, namely interest, has to be a product of supply and demand. In the most basic of terms this is again another troubling admission with regards to the LTV. However it also leads onto a much more important point which is Marx’s evaluation of activities such as book keeping and other administrative processes which unlike processes performed by the man on the shop floor appear less directly physical or in contact with the commodity under production. In vol2 Marx again in a brief analysis deems these activities as not contributing to the surplus value of labour. This should hopefully from a modern perspective from which we can see the majority of employees working in the service sector and performing less classical labour tasks akin to administration, make us question again Marx’s sense of nature of labour and value it imparts, as well as other questions regarding exploitation and other issues which are largely irrelevant with regards to this discussion but important in the larger scope of Marxism.
Can we perhaps see here and throughout Capital the influence of Marx’s background in German idealistic philosophy which puts a great deal of emphasis on action. Is Marx perhaps doubly tied to the LTV not only because in an era before the revolution of marginal theory of value the LTV is the only game in town as to speak but also because this theory ties in with his own extra-economic philosophical influences? Again this is perhaps not a discussion wholly relevant to the one being discussed above but an interesting speculative one that sprouts off.
Rethinking the USA's role in the Rwandan Genocide
To introduce
this examination of one of most horrifying acts of the 20th century
it is perhaps unusually more fitting not to start in Kigali or Washington, as
the tile might suggest, but instead in Westminster. On the 24th of
May, just as the 100 day genocide was reaching its half-way point and some
400,000 Rwandans had already been massacred, at the late hour of 11.42 pm the
British House of Commons held a half hour debate on the on-going crisis, with a
notably sparse attendance. The Member of Parliament for Clydebank and
Milngavie, Mr Tony Worthington, gave an indigent 18 minute speech steeped in
outrage not so much at the atrocities being committed but instead at the
inaction and incompetence of the international community to halt the killings.
Mr Worthington’s speech is important not because he was an actor of any great
significance, but instead because in his brief remarks he summed up just about
all of the pressing questions at the time of the genocide, which subsequently
preoccupy the historiography.
The first
point made is the accusation of racism, which is a theme that still runs
throughout the many pages which have been furiously penned on the subject. As
Mr Worthington states ‘We must also admit with shame the racism that is
involved. It is inconceivable that an atrocity in which half a million white
people had died would not have been extensively debated in the House.’ adding
that ‘Rwanda dwarfs Bosnia in terms of casualties’. Such remarks suggest that
the role that skin colour plaid in this humanitarian catastrophe is deeply
unnerving especially if we are accustomed to idea and the moral rhetoric of
Western and American exceptionalism.
Secondly
the acknowledgement that the killing taking place was in fact genocide is
raised ‘Has there ever been a clearer example of genocide? What is the point of
these conventions if we do not take them seriously? . . . Why do we seem
to be so silent?’. Accompanied by Linda Melvern, as well as other future
historians, Worthington insinuates that Western governments knew fully well
that genocide was taking place and that is was their responsibility, as well as
within their power, to at least attempt to halt it.
Linked closely
to the point of racism Worthington blames the media for misrepresenting the
nature of the genocide. ‘In the press there has been a terrible tendency to
dismiss these tragic events as just tribalism, with "What can you expect
from Africans?" as the subtext. By calling this tribalism, we are, in
effect, blaming all the people of Rwanda, whereas it is clear that it is vicious
political violence led by the Rwandan Government or their agents.’. This claim
that the facts were distorted on purpose or otherwise is again held very
strongly, by the same historians, to be factor knowingly ceased upon by Western
governments, notably the United States, in order to sinisterly justify their
inaction. Ominously put by Worthington ‘We justify our inaction by pretending
that all the people of Rwanda are to blame.’.
Then finally Worthington
also displays utter incomprehension as to why the United Nations, and by
implication its member states, has decided to reduce the size of UNAMIR at the
outbreak of the conflict. ‘Why did we back the decision virtually to pull the United
Nations out on the 21st of April? What an encouragement that must
have been to the butchers . . . why did we authorise the withdrawal of the
United Nations instead of augmenting the forces?’. US ‘Somalia syndrome’ is
also blamed, just as it is held by many to be overwhelmingly the underlying
cause of the withdrawal ‘We are suffering badly because of the American
miscalculation in Somalia—thousands are now dying because of that
procrastination.’. Cynical and selfish protection
of national interests is therefore the charge being levelled by many in chorus
with Tony Worthington.
It is the aim
of this dissertation to critically analyse these four issues. This is to be
done with special focus with regard to the United States’ role in the crisis.
Because as much as we might talk about the inaction of the international
community or the West, the USA was the only power who had the resources and the international
influence to launch an intervention into the heart of central Africa, as it
still remains so to this day. Was racism an active influence on US foreign
policy towards Rwanda? How early on did the US know that genocide was in process,
and how knowledgeable was it even before the first machete fell? Was the
media’s account of the genocide a true reflection of the nature of the killings,
thus giving credence to the excuse US policy makers used that they would be hopelessly
entering into an endless cycle of tribal violence? And finally why did the US
lead the move to withdraw UNAMIR in mid-April? Was the move a cold hearted
piece of self-interest or was there a less contemptuous line of reasoning
behind this, widely considered, catastrophic move?
This dissertation
shall hope to diverge from a large contingent of the historical as well as
popular literature on the international dimension of the genocide. This group,
it would be more than fair to say, in their work largely agree with both the
content and condemnation of Tony Worthington’s comments as well as their wider
implications. Instead the case will be argued, taking each point at a time,
that with reference to and inspiration from the much less popular and widely read,
yet every bit as impressive and critically distinctive work of writers such as
Michael Barnett and Alan Kuperman, that Worthington’s remarks, and those of his
predecessors, are much less than accurate or are at least in need of strong
qualifications for them to be of any constructive use. The claim of racism will
be shown to be one that, although prevalent and particularly seductive, cannot
be substantiated, but instead seems to sprout from over emotive assertions and an
all too common inability by commentators to make subtle causal distinctions.
The American claim to ignorance will be shown to be not entirely true but
importantly accurate up till the point at which effective action was no longer
a possibility. The media’s alleged miss-portrayal of the nature of the genocide
will be partly agreed with, yet the reality of the genocide shown to still
carry many of the implications of the original conception posing massive difficulties
to an intervening force in trying to bring the massacres to an end. And finally
the strategic decision making behind the withdrawal shall be demonstrated, especially
in the context of the previous points, to be a reasonable calculation taken on
behalf of US policy makers with regards to the viability of the mission and
their overall strategy for the continued pursuit of effective peace keeping in
the shadow of their failure in Somalia.
Racism or Realpolitik?
When
considering the accusation of racism being an influential factor in the United
States' decision not to intervene, it should first be appreciated just how wide
spread this view is and the major actors who accept and perpetuate it. The
first and most prominent of these voices is non-other than Romeo Dallaire
himself, the commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR).
In his account of the genocide, Shake hands
with the Devil, Dallaire gets only as far as page five before he asserts
that the inaction of the international community was a result of racism against
Africans and maintains this line throughout the book. In other written work
Dallaire has said that the reason why more attention was paid to the Balkan
crisis taking place as the same time as the Rwandan genocide is because 'Rwanda
was black. Yugoslavia was white European.'. This was then advanced upon in an
interview in which after repeating the Yugoslavia claim he stated 'I do not
believe that the developed world actually considers Africans, particularly
South Saharan Africans, as being total humans.'.
Dallaire's
sentiments far from being marginal, find allies at the heart of the UN. Boutros
Ghali, the then General Secretary, has made clear when interviewed that 'there
is a marginalisation of Africa. . . A genocide in Africa has not received the
same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in
other parts of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination
against the African people and the African problems.'. Also alluding to such
discrimination in his memoir Ghali has agreed with Dallaire that acquiring
funds for the mission in the Balkans was much easier than African operations.
The official UN report and investigation into the genocide that was published
in 1999 also highlighted the existence of a 'double standard' between the way
the international community treated African conflicts compared to conflicts in other
regions.
This
identification of discrimination and double standard towards Africans can also be
found amongst the academic literature on the subject. Arthur Klinghoffer in his
investigations quotes Salim Ahmed Salim, the then General Secretary of the OAU,
criticising the UN security council for its blatant hypocrisy in withdrawing
UNAMIR only 6 days before sending another 6,500 troops to Bosnia. After this
Klinghoffer himself comments that 'Double standards predominated, which in the
Rwandan case meant neglect in deference to the attention lavished on Bosnia'.
Klinghoffer also notes the opinions of former President Carter who has branded
US foreign policy as racist. Linda Melvern, though much more tempered in her
remarks, agrees that there was a disparity in focus on Rwanda compared to
Bosnia suggesting that the spectre of letting another holocaust occurring on
the European continent was a central motivation and Melvern quotes Tony Worthington's
original remarks about white people being a unique priority.
Journalism has
become another medium in which the accusations of racist discrimination are
present. BBC journalist Mark Doyle, who was one of the few journalists on the
ground during the genocide, when interviewed has said that the general mood at the
time was that Rwanda was 'just another African war to most people'. When asked
why he thought no intervention occurred, he responded 'You have to conclude
that it's because they're African. I don't see any other conclusion that is
possible, that if hundreds of thousands of people were being killed in a
genocide in Europe, can you imagine NATO not intervening?'.
However
perhaps one of the most important manifestations of the accusation of racism as
far as shaping popular understanding is concerned, is its notable appearance in
the films that have been produced about the genocide. In the most commercially
successful of these, Hotel Rwanda,
the central character Paul Rusesabagina is bluntly told by a UN commander, when
explaining the reason for Western non-intervention, 'You're Black. You're not
even a nigger. You're an African.' needless to say making a definite point.
Similarly in the harrowing masterpiece Shooting
Dogs the theme of racism is pursued when a white British journalist reveals
that when reporting from Bosnia she would cry over the dead bodies because she
could not stop picturing those bodies as members of her own family, however in
Rwanda she felt no such connection with the dead due to their ethnicity, they were
just Africans. The 2007 film adaptation of Dallaire's memoir also exhibits the
same claims that are to be found in the book and is another example of the
theme of racism being explored in a less than positive light through cinema.
How then can
anyone, when there is such ubiquitous support and numerous examples, which
could undoubtedly be added to, disagree with the idea that racism played some
active role in decision making?
The immediate
suspicion that should be raised by such a hypothesis, which seems quite
seductive in its ability to provide very simple and sinister answers onto which
we can place our anger and frustrations, is whether it is reasonable in the
light of other evidence and possible counter examples which it should be
testable against. More simply, in the spirit of Karl Popper, is it falsifiable?
And the answer soon becomes clear when other events and evidence not covered by
that put forwards by its advocates are considered. If the USA doesn’t like
Africans then why did it send 30,000 marines to Somalia in 1993? If white
people are the superpower’s only concern then why was a no fly zone set up over
Iraq in 1991 to protect Kurdish and Shia Iraqis? Why did the black population
of Haiti become such a priority at the same time as Rwanda? And if resources
were being ‘lavished on Bosnia’ then why did NATO, especially its European
members, allow in complete contradiction to Mark Doyle’s assertions so many
thousands to die before effective force was finally put on the ground by 1995?
One has only to read the work of Samantha Power, no admirer of US foreign
policy, to realise that US policy makers can be just as indifferent in response
to ‘White European’ genocide as it can be to those of African variety. And with
particular respect to Rwanda, analysts such as William Ferroggiaro and actors
on the ground such as the former US ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, have
commented on how the US had, prior to the genocide, invested a sizable amount
of diplomatic resources into securing peace in Rwanda when one considers the
limited interests it has in the region. Let us not also forget that the US was
prepared to fund one third of the costs of the UNAMIR mission the mandate of
which it agreed to renew before the genocide, as well as funding many other UN
mission in Africa, notably also the resources which it put into the Goma
refugee disaster.
So as can be
demonstrated, racism soon becomes an explanation which does not quite stand up.
However to disagree with it isn’t to suppose the idea that the USA is an unconditionally
or wholly benevolent and altruistic power. Instead the crucial factor at work
behind US inaction, which was actually the much more prominent theme in the
UN’s official investigation, was a lack of national interest and political will.
As Philip Gourevitch puts it, ‘Rwanda is landlocked and dirt poor, a bit larger
than Vermont . . . as far as the political, military and economic interests of
the world’s powers go, it might as well be Mars.’ and he’s certainly not the
only person to make such bluntly accurate observations. Even the former
Nigerian ambassador to the UN and Security Council delegate during the genocide,
Ibrahim Gambari, agrees that the US and even his own country were not concerned
due to a lack of national interest. The implications of Gourevitch’s assessment
were made very clear by many members of the US congress before and after the
genocide had begun. Senator Lieberman on the 10th of May 1994 more
or less summarised the reasoning at work when criticising US involvement in
Bosnia as well as peacekeeping in general ‘No matter how strongly we feel, by
means of compassion to become involved, we have to always come down on what our
national security interest is in these regions of the world. What is our
security interest? We have to use that as a guide post to determine whether or
not we become involved’. The argument repeated over again was with the sheer
number of conflicts happening in the world at the same time, some 30 plus being
the number frequently quoted, the USA needed to be selective in its criteria
for intervention otherwise it would soon find itself committed to and spending
its tax dollars and its military personnel’s lives on an endless number of expensive
and never ending foreign engagements.
The document
most associated with this common concern amongst US policy makers is the
infamous Presidential Directive Decision 25 (PDD-25). This document outlined
the basis for a more realist and limited approach to peacekeeping in
co-operation with the UN. PDD-25 put the primary responsibility of the Clinton
administration before contributing to or funding any UN peacekeeping
operations, on clearly identifying the US national interest that was being
served by the mission, a clear exit strategy and the existence of congressional
and public support for such a mission. Many see PDD-25 as a response to the
Mogadishu ‘black hawk down’ military disaster that occurred on the 3rd to
4th of October 1993 when 18 US troops serving in the UN mission in
Somalia were killed. This dramatic loss of life which was subsequently seized
upon by the US media, with graphic pictures of mutilated US service personnel
being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu sending a clear message to the
Clinton administration that military deployments into conflict zones could
quickly turn nasty. And the political consequences of this, President Clinton’s
foreign policy disapproval rating rising from 32% to 52%, were fully
appreciated by his administration and ‘Somalia syndrome’ took hold. Michael
Barnett explains that it is impossible to overestimate the impact of Somalia on
the future of UN peacekeeping ‘Somalia was no longer a place name but was now a
moment but was now a moment and a warning . . . Somalia could refer to what
happens when good intentions are corrupted by unchecked ambitions, or “mission
creep” ’. Clinton says in his memoir that Somalia became his ‘Bay of Pigs’,
which paralysed future Congressional support for international interventions. The president and more importantly the US
congress had no appetite for any more African adventures, especially if they
believed the very people they were trying to help didn’t appear to want them
there.
Though
importantly the further contextualisation that must be added is that even
though Somalia was of great significance in altering the American zeitgeist
towards peacekeeping, PDD-25 was actually being drafted, as Anthony Lake has
pointed out, before the Mogadishu disaster. President Clinton’s famous speech
to the UN general assembly laying out the new US approach to peacekeeping saying
that ‘the United Nations must know when to say no’ was delivered on the 27th
of September 1993, nearly a week before Mogadishu, not afterwards as is often
assumed. The president presented the new questions that needed to be asked of
UN operations ‘Is there a real threat to international peace? Does the proposed
mission have clear objectives? Can an end point be identified for those who
will be asked to participate? How much will the mission cost?’. This has been
noted by foreign policy analyst Michael Mackinon as being part of the Clinton
administration’s desire, as it had been elected heavily on the basis of its
domestic agenda which many believed had been side-lined in favour of foreign
policy, to reduce the US’s liabilities to fund and contribute to the ever
expanding post-Cold War UN peacekeeping bill. This bill which had sprung out of the end of
the superpower dead lock, which had previously stunted UN peacekeeping, was largely
the result of the escalation of the number of UN peacekeeping missions from 2
to 17 in under 4 years, with the financial costs rising eightfold to over $1
billion each year as the number of UN peacekeeping personnel rose from under
10,000 to 73,000 (with an additional 21,000 to be deployed in Haiti). As US
congressmen had spoken about and made clear before Mogadishu, UN peacekeeping
appeared to them to be being carried out by the hugely inefficient ‘UN empire’
of foreign bureaucrats spending huge sum of US taxpayers money on missions that
did not seem to be necessarily serving American interests.
The result of
PDD-25, compounded by Mogadishu, was that US peacekeeping resources would be
more restrictively deployed and certainly would not, unless there were American
interests at stake, be deployed in between two enemies that were not committed
to an immediate peaceful resolution to be facilitated, but not enforced, by the
UN. The more limited Chapter 6 missions, like UNAMIR were on the agenda, but
not Chapter 7 missions, like Somalia. This was also the approach being taken by
Boutros Ghali in his new ‘Agenda for Peace’ initiative, which stipulated that
the UN would only send help to those peoples who were prepared to help themselves
and in which all sides were committed to a peaceful resolution of their
problems. However as is made clear by Ghali in his memoir this was a necessary
requirement of needing to carefully husband the limited resources that the
heavily indebted UN possessed in relation to the potentially overwhelming
demands being made upon it from conflict spots worldwide. The only subtle yet
crucial anomaly in both PDD-25 and the Agenda for Peace, is that neither
mention the word genocide and how this is to be dealt with if it contravenes
the framework of national interest or the requirement of peaceful resolution
and co-operation. This was in theory and practice, an unknown and unwelcome
variable.
Confusingly
PDD-25 does say the USA should act to stop a ‘sudden and unexpected interruption of established democracy
or gross violation of human rights,’ though this is only stated after
the primacy of US interests is firmly asserted in the document, as it had been
many times in the US congress, before and after Rwanda. The decision for action
in the face of a potential future ‘sudden
and unexpected interruption of established democracy or gross violation of
human rights,’, such as a genocide, which did not contravene US national
interests, as Mackinon notes along with many former members of the
administration , would lie with the president. If Clinton wanted to personally
back and risk political capital in interpreting PDD-25 in a way that would
service international human rights concerns or the genocide convention, then he
would have to be prepared to defend such an initiative against the increasingly
isolationist and reluctant US congress and be prepared to bear the worst
consequences if Mogadishu should be repeated. The Somali mission had been
dropped for exactly this reason; Clinton had decided that the juice was no
longer worth the squeeze. In the shadow of this how would Rwanda fair? Would
Clinton’s domestic agenda be once again put at risk to help foreigners?
Tragically for
the people of Rwanda the answer was no. Not a decision dictated by racial
discrimination, as discussed above, but instead out of a commitment to national
interest. However as shall now be discussed there are and were two very
important factors at play, highlighted by Mr Worthington, which must be considered
if we are to make a fair evaluation of Clinton’s decision not to intervene. The
first, understanding the nature of the genocide. Was it spontaneous tribal violence,
which would be hard or impossible to stop, only for it to reignite at a later date?
Or was it a politically motivated and centrally planned affair directed by a
minority elite which could have been easily disrupted? And secondly exactly
when did Clinton and his administration know there was genocide occurring? And
how did this affect their potential ability to intervene and their decision to
withdraw UNAMIR?
The Nature of the Genocide
Identifying
the nature of the genocide and how it unfolded, in particular how fast it
unfolded is important due to its implications on how successful a foreign
intervention might have been in halting the killing. The most blaring
criticisms made by historians such as Linda Melvern and Alison Des Forbes is
that the western media as well as the UN itself mistook the genocide for
mindless tribal violence instead of the centralised politically driven ethnic
massacre which it was. Media analyst Piers Robinson claims that the press
helped manufacture non-intervention through what he calls ‘distance framing’
the violence as tribal warfare. Boutros
Ghali in his report on situation in Rwanda on the 20th of April and
in the resolution to withdraw the next day spoke of ‘mindless violence’
perpetrated by ‘unruly’ members of the Rwandan military. Des Forbes claims that
during the genocide she spoke with a US official who described the genocide as
an ‘age-old tribal hatred, as something that was perhaps almost inevitable, the
kind of thing that happens in Africa and it's regrettable, but after all, we
can't really do anything about it.’. The view was that an unstoppable tragedy
was taking place.
The vast
majority of the enormous amount of ink subsequently spilt on this subject has
come down firmly in rejection of this interpretation. As Christopher Taylor in
his work argues this view is ignorant and racist in implication as it suggests
Africans don’t or can’t experience political and economic problems similar to
Europeans and the rest of the world. Instead
the expert consensus is split into two camps, much reminiscent of the
Goldhagen-Browning debate regarding the Nazi holocaust. Historians Scot Strauss
and Lee Ann Fujii along with journalist Phillip Gourevitch are good examples of
those who see the motivation behind the killing being strongly the result of
state coercion, internal Rwandan power politics and personal incentives such as
material greed. These being largely divorced of tribal hatreds and ingrained
indoctrination of Hutu power ideology. Fujii says personal power rather than
tribal identity was key and Straus like many others stresses the depth and
control of the totalitarian state apparatus in Rwanda, unique amongst African
states, aided by Rwanda’s mountainous geography and high population density.
Whereas Gourevitch, once again using his magnificent ability to distil the
essence of a complex situation into a concise quote summarises as follows with
the words of a Lawyer from Kigali ‘“Conformity is very deep, very developed
here,” he told me. “In Rwandan history everyone obeys authority. People revere
power, and there isn’t enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population,
and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey. The peasants who
were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic
standing to see how to behave.’. Somebody such as Johan Pottier even goes as
far as to present a Marxist inspired understanding of events putting the
killing down to class warfare and the competition over limited economic
resources.
The other side
of the split, voices such as Rwandan historian Mahmood Mamdani, Reva Adler,
Jonathan Glover and the African Rights report, largely except the central role
played by state coercion and the manipulation of political elites however they
don’t think that the weight put on racial and tribal ideological influences
should be so minimised. Mamdani says we must see the killing as neither the
just the product of political coercion or just chaos but a mixture of both and
notes how machete wielding mobs, cheered on by women, made the genocide not
just state coercion. Glover similarly states ‘The human responses were
overwhelmed on the killers by tribal hatred, but this emotion was itself a
product of conscious political manipulation’ referring to ‘tribal psychology’
which was stirred up by government propaganda. Reva Adler who conducted a field
study interviewing those who took part in the killing identified multiple
factors motivating the killing. Intimidation and fear produced by autocratic
governance being one but also exclusionary ideology and inter-ethnic tensions
playing a role. His interviews produced quotes to this affect, one killer
stated ‘People used to say that Tutsis were evil people, cruel and hypocritical
and I believed it. I really hated them and believed that they deserved to be
killed’ and another ‘Deep inside I wanted to fight up to my last drop of blood
because our leaders were telling us that if the ‘cockroaches’ took power, they
would put us into slavery and we would be killed’. African Rights in their
magisterial record of the genocide Death,
Despair and Defiance emphasise how wide spread the violence was in Rwandan
society involving mass participation from members of all backgrounds and
occupation, not just political extremists and members of the army. Doctors,
businessmen, lawyers, students and school teachers participated in the most
graphic acts of rape and murder, after being mobilised by government media and
propaganda as well as state officials. Research done into the role of the
churches by Timothy Longman reveals that ‘the complicity of Rwanda’s Christian
churches in the 1994 genocide was profound’ and that it worked as a tool of
overbearing Rwandan state to legitimise and support the authority of the
Habyarimana regime and also legitimising and encouraging the politicisation of
ethnicity. And Longman is certainly not the only one to bring attention to this
disturbing reality.
Even though it
is the preference of the author of this piece of work to favour the second consensus,
of the presence of at least some active role of ethnic hatred in the killing,
neither side of interpretation offers drastically different implications for
the likely success of an outside intervention. It seems to be inferred from those original
critics of the false betrayal of the genocide, that when the more accurate descriptions
are recognised that it necessarily follows that an intervention force would
have been able without too much difficulty to halt the killing. This wasn’t
just tribal chaos so couldn’t it have been interrupted? Des Forbes asserts that
the genocide was centralised in organisation and execution and therefore open
to effective interdiction. However one can find even within her own work
evidence that this wasn’t the case and that the militias and the masses that
they mobilised were led by ‘grass-roots political leaders determined to carry
forward the genocide’. Mamdani talks about how the genocide was led by small
decentralised units of death squads or ‘Interahamwe’, which travelled around the
country in groups of around 10 mobilising local populations into action. The
ability to shut down these numerous cells which were set up all over the
country during the civil war, numbering upwards of 50,000 men would have been
much more difficult than might otherwise be appreciated. Alan Kuperman agreeing with this diagnosis also
worries that any intervention might have sped up the genocide and the impetus
to kill whereas Glover suggests that we should not underestimate how hard it
would have been for an outside force to win the trust of the people of Rwanda
over their government, which as has been highlighted was a strong bond, even if
primarily built on fear. There is also an overwhelming consensus from those who
believe that centralisation did in fact play a part at the beginning of the
genocide, when the activity was focused mainly in Kigali, that after 2 or 3
weeks once the killing had spread to the countryside, where 95% of the Rwandan
population live, this decentralisation was lost and that stopping the genocide
in any effective manner would have depended on halting it in that early 2 or 3
week window. This view is stressed by Scot Straus, Jared Cohen, Alan Kuperman,
US military Africa analyst Thomas Odom and the
African Union’s official report on the genocide, amongst others.
There is another,
much under recognised, yet crucial factor at play which links strongly with the
warning of the existence of the 2-3 week window for a successful intervention,
and this is the tremendous speed at which the genocide took place, specifically
during this initial period of time, which consequently has drastic implications
for any potential intervention. The vast majority, as high as 80% according to
French historian Gerard Prunier, of the victims of the genocide were dead by
the end of April. Kuperman explains that the mechanics of this horrific feet of
extermination relied on surrounding and massacring the large concentrations of
Tutsi who fled to what they believed to be places of safety such as churches,
schools and sports stadiums once the killing began. The African Rights
exceptionally detailed history of the genocide concurs with Kuperman that the
majority of those killed died in such large massacres and the vast majority of
the massacres detailed in their work are recorded as having taken place within
the window of time mentioned. The obvious implication, not drawn out by most
studies of the genocide, even those that recognise this very detail, is that
not only would an intervention have had to have arrived within or preferably
before this 2-3 week window to dissemble the mechanism of genocide before it
became decentralised, is that not being able to do so would mean that the lion
share of those scheduled to be killed would already be so. Needless to say time
was of the essence. Bearing this reality in mind we now turn to the question of
when and at what precise date the US knew that genocide was taking place in
Rwanda. The answer to this question dictates the feasibility of an intervention
and the likely success that such an intervention might have had.
US intelligence and early warning
The first
accusation that needs to be addressed on the issue of early warning and what
point the US knew genocide was occurring in Rwanda is the question, frequently raised
by the historiography, of how much did the US know before the genocide took
place and were there clear signs ignored of impending genocide which US
officials should have acted upon? Various claims have been put forward by
historians such as Linda Melvern, Samantha Power and Alison Des Forbes as well
as input by Romeo Dallaire, which point to documents produced before the
genocide which have been subsequently presented as clear early warning signals
which ‘warned explicitly of a possible genocide’. The first of these is the now
infamous ‘genocide cable’ sent by Dallaire on the 11th of January
1994 to the UN in New York warning of the formation of death squads and stock
piles of arms as well as plans to eliminate the Tutsi in Rwanda and to launch
an attack on the Belgian UN soldiers in UNAMIR to force their withdrawal. The
second important document is the UN Ndiaye report about human rights abuses in
Rwanda published in August 1993 in which the Rwanda government is accused of
already having committed genocide in a series of ethnically motivated massacres
from 1990-1994. And the third is a CIA report, from January 1994, on Rwanda
that predicts that if the fighting between the RPF and the Rwandan government
were to resume, then half a million deaths could result. Surely these documents
should have set warning bells ringing?
However when
these primary documents are analysed and are placed within their pre-genocide
context and our natural temptation to read history backwards is tempered, the
case for early warning is not as obvious as it might at first seem and we can
begin to understand how these warning signs could have been missed. Starting
with the ‘genocide cable’, as has been pointed out by Michael Barnett, the
cable does not actually contain the word genocide. The 13 paragraph document
sent by Dallaire to New York on the 11th of January talks briefly in
paragraphs 6 and 7 about suspected plans to kill Tutsis in Kigali, brought to
his attention by an unidentified government official. The control that
Habyarimana has over his government and the unity within it is also questioned.
Confusion and the prospect of violence is that which is most clearly conveyed,
not the impending genocide of half a million Rwandans. Once this is recognised
we can begin to understand why the cable wasn’t taken as seriously as one might
at first think. As Boutros Ghali has said when interviewed, closely seconded by
Kofi Annan, ‘in retrospect, this telegram had an importance, but we received
hundreds of telegrams giving information, that there will be an assassination
of MR. So-and-so, that there are arms which have been discovered. We had this
in Salvador . . . in Guatemala, or in
Nicaragua, etcetera. Retroactively everybody paid attention to this telegram,
but we practically receive tens of telegrams of this kind every day.’. More
interestingly, and to this authors knowledge not commented upon in any of the
historiography, is a statement to be found made by Ghali in his memoir, in
which he tells us that he personally did not see the ‘genocide cable’ until
several years after the genocide. If Ghali is to be believed then this gives us
an important insight into either the low priority that the cable was given or
alternatively the incompetency and inefficiency within the UN bureaucracy, though
in reality it most likely represents a measure of both.
Moving onto
the Ndiaye report which has often been presented as a second clear and major
warning of impending ethnic violence in Rwanda, reading the report in a
critical manner with appreciation of its pre-genocide context similarly reveals
the claims based on it to be quite tenuous. The report recognises the existence
of death squads and the use of violence by extremists groups to spread fear throughout
the country in order to dismantle the country’s democratic transition. However
crucially it never provides us with a picture of the situation in Rwanda as
being more than that of ethnic violence and terror being used for political
aims, not the unambiguous advent of mass killing on an unprecedented scale. As
Mahmood Mamdani comments the presence of death squads, much like across Latin
America, is not an unequivocal precursor to genocide but instead the
willingness and intent to use violence for political purposes which might
manifest itself along ethnic lines, though moderate Hutus were also notably
victims of the Interahamwe. The report speculates that the few thousand killed
in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994 could carry the charge of genocide but this is certainly
not an ‘explicit’ prediction for a massive escalation in such activity.
The CIA report
of January 1994 which is referenced in Samantha Power’s book, along with the
genocide cable and Ndiaye’s report as the main primary sources to back up her
work, is referenced to the African Unions report on the genocide which in turn
says that Human Rights Watch was told by an unidentified CIA analyst around
late January, that if the conflict renewed, then half a million people could possibly
become casualties. One would certainly be forgiven for thinking this is less
than robust evidence but if we are to trust this reference then it must be
noted once again that the word genocide or a prediction of it, separate from
suspected casualties caused by fighting, refugee flows and other disruptions
caused by the renewal of a civil war in one of Africa’s most densely populated
countries is not present. Neither is it present in a similar prediction made from
a US governmental source, which as a piece of evidence is much more easily
verifiable, on the 11th of April, once the genocide had begun. In
this report it is speculated that the renewed conflict could cause a ‘massive
(hundreds of thousands of deaths) bloodbath’ caused by ‘inter-tribal killings’
and civilians being increasingly drawn into the conflict between the RPF and
the Rwandan government. One can see from this evidence that there were those
who believed that the violence would grow and that many would be killed in the
conflict but also one can also see how non-intervention could easily have been
read into these descriptions as this was seen as a civil war in a country and
region outside the USA’s national interest, not a genocide or a crime against
humanity any different from the multitude of others that US politicians could
see themselves getting involved in if they became responsible for policing the
world in such a comprehensive manner.
So if these
pre-genocide speculations can be dismissed then the question that needs
answering is at what point after the downing of President Habyarimana’s aeroplane
and the setting up of the first road blocks in the early hours of the 6th
of April did the US government know that the violence and killing taking place
in Rwanda was not a resumption of the country’s civil war but instead a
fully-fledged and systematic genocide of the Tutsi population of the country?
Alan Kuperman claims that this knowledge could not have been in front of
President Clinton before the 20th of April. If we are to go by the
primary documents that we have available to us then the first date that the US
government reveals knowledge of genocide is on the 26th of April.
Equally Amnesty International also took till the 26th of April to
publish its first reports that claimed genocide was taking place. Kuperman
describes well in his book the reality of the confusion and the ‘fog of war’
that surrounded events and intelligence gathering once the civil war resumed
claiming that US government intelligence, which had sparse resources invested
in the region, was receiving over 1000 reports per day with conflicting
information. Very little was also know about events outside Kigali and the
satellite photos that were used by the Defence Intelligence Agency to confirm
the genocide were under scrutiny and criticism as to their reliability. And to
add to this we should also not allow ourselves to down play the role of the
agents of genocide who were purposefully trying their utmost to spread
misinformation.
To compound
the deep sense of confusion on the ground and the difficulty of obtaining
accurate information about the volume, as well as the nature, of the killing
taking place, the journalistic work of Mark Doyle, the only journalist present
in Rwanda throughout the whole course of the genocide, gives us a good idea of
how great these difficulties were. Doyle took until the 29th of
April to finally recognise the Genocide as just that, and explains that it was
exceptionally dangerous to travel around the country, especially the
countryside, adding to the difficulty of those on the ground witnessing the atrocities
to figure out the extent of what was occurring and then engaging in the
difficult task of trying to explain this to others thousands of miles away. As
Doyle confirms when interviewed ‘it was very dangerous to go anywhere without
friendly soldiers with you . . . In retrospect, I guess they were probably
Tutsi who were being killed, but we didn’t stop to ask, because it was
horrifically dangerous’. Journalist Fergal Keane also in his account Season of Blood mirrors Doyle’s
experience of confusion and misinformation even as he arrives in Rwanda in
early June at the end of the genocide. The importance of realising these
journalistic failings, as Kuperman concisely comments, are as follows ‘In obscure
parts of the world, where Western governments do not invest significant
intelligence assets, the news business is relied upon to serve as a surrogate
early-warning system. In Rwanda, it did not fulfil this role.’.
So to
consolidate the issue of US intelligence it is clear that early warning claims
don’t stand up once the documents that support them are put into their proper
context, US intelligence like Amnesty International only identified genocide 3
weeks after it began and actors such as Journalists on the ground did not
identify it either until the window of action had more or less shut.
Accusations have been made from many corners that US intelligence knew more
than it did but the evidence to back this up is not so readily available.
Perhaps in the future when more primary documents are released these
accusations will become more than just accusations, but until then the evidence
tells us that tragically the horse had bolted before anyone knew and before anything
could be done about it.
Conclusion
Now that these
two important dynamics of the genocide, its nature and speed as well as the
state of US intelligence, have been analysed in close detail, it is possible to
pose by way of conclusion a more complete analysis and evaluation of the US
government’s inaction during the genocide, by drawing together all of the
strands previously discussed. The popular explanation of racism being a central
motivation of US inaction has been presented and then rejected on the basis that
such an explanation, although emotionally seductive, is not able to stand up to
any vigorous falsification. Instead the central impetus behind US foreign
policy was highlighted as the pursuit of national interest, which is blind to
skin colour, just like that of any other nation state. And the particular application
of this reasoning to Rwanda, as Rwandan human rights activist Monique
Mujawamariya says she was told during the crisis, was ‘The United States has no
friends, the United States has interests and in the United States there is no
interests in Rwanda’. However to judge US decision making, especially that of
President Bill Clinton who was the only actor who could have possibly created
support for Rwanda by a wider interpretation of PDD-25 than was evidentially
decided upon, without consideration of the other two vital dynamics at play during
the genocide, would be to do so with an incomplete and fractured narrative.
The first of these
dynamics, the nature of the genocide, which even if one is to quite rightly
dismiss the false interpretation of the killing as a product of mindless tribal
violence, the actuality of the killing would still have posed major problems
for any potential intervening force. These were primarily the issue of the
speed of the genocide which had claimed more than three quarters of its victims
by the end of April, but also the decentralisation of the genocide upon
entering into the countryside after the second and third weeks, meaning that a potential
window for action existed within, though preferably before or at the very
beginning of, this initial 2-3 week period. This existence of an early window
for action consequently makes identifying the exact date of US knowledge that
the genocide was taking place, of utmost importance for the feasibility of launching
any possible military action. The conclusion of the examination of this
question found firstly that accusations that the US did know, or at least should
have known, about an impending genocide in Rwanda don’t hold firm once the
supporting evidence of these accusations is placed into its proper context. And
secondly knowledge once the genocide had begun on the 6th of April
was not achieved, due to much confusion and conflicting information, until at
least the end of the second week according to Kuperman and by the 26th of
April going by the primary documents which are so far accessible.
So taking
these findings into account and following them to their ultimate conclusion,
even though it might be an unsatisfactory one for some, it is clear that the
genocide could not have been stopped by US military intervention. The
intervention force that it would have taken to stop the 30,000 plus Rwandan
Government forces, bearing heavy equipment, as well as possible resistance from
the RPF which had stated its stance to be less than amiable to new
international interventions, would by the time it had arrived, after being
laboriously transported with its large logistical requirements into one of the
more isolated parts of the African continent, have been too late to stem the
slaughter.
It is by taking
all of the above factual details and reasoning into account that we can also
begin to understand the UN decision led by the US, though certainly not in
isolation, to call for the withdraw of UNAMIR from the country on the 21st
of April, which Tony Worthington found so utterly incomprehensible. Clearly the
decision was made to withdraw a force, which with the resumption of the civil
war, had outlived its mandate. Even Romeo Dallaire admits this in his memoir, saying
that he was aware of this within the first 48 hours of the violence that began
with the wiping out the political opposition of the Hutu power extremists. As
Dallaire says ‘The potential for a future moderate government [was] completely
lost’ leading him to conclude ‘I had no more mandate’. Along the lines of
PDD-25, as well as Ghali’s agenda for peace, UNAMIR’s resources had to be
withdrawn and reallocated to conflicts zones and peoples which were committed
to settling their differences through peaceful agreement. They were not to be
expended on the costly and potentially endless task of fire fighting the many civil
wars around the globe.
As to what the
US knew of the existence of genocide by the 21st of April when
making the decision to withdraw, which if known would have given them a legal
obligation under the genocide convention to keep UNAMIR in place and change its
mandate to a chapter 7 mission, we cannot yet be certain. As has been stated
above the first concrete evidence that we have dates from the 26th
of April, though this does not completely rule out knowledge of the genocide
which as has already been noted Kuperman says could have possibly been known by
the 20th of April. Therefore US decision makers might or might not
have known that genocide was taking place when the decision to withdraw was
made on the 21st. Either way a policy of, what Jared Cohen calls, ‘calculated
non-intervention’ was adopted and the genocide convention side-lined. The US had
decided in an environment of confusion and uncertainty, that its interests were
not at stake in Rwanda, that intervention was politically unrealistic, as well
as militarily unfeasible and that it would not support a UN mission into the
country which it feared US troops would be either needed to support or perhaps
once deployed, like in Somalia, to rescue or to salvage. Even if, along the
lines of Clinton’s 1998 apology to Rwanda, US decision makers were ignorant of
the reality and gravity of the events unfolding, or as Samantha Power charges they
chose to ignore them, any decision to take assertive action would have come up
against these barriers. Therefore any criticism of US inaction must bear these
realities in mind, as too few so far have yet done so.
The blame that
could be laid at Clinton’s door is that as President he should have been
informed about the genocide at least by sometime soon after the 26th
of April when his own people first knew and certainly not by the 17th
of May, when the decision was made to launch UNAMIR 2. If one believes that the
President’s purported lack of knowledge was not a matter of incompetence but
instead one of commission, then one could also blame the President and his
administration’s inaction, including its woeful and begrudging support of
UNAMIR 2 once created, on two accounts. Either with the charge of breaking its
legal obligations to the genocide convention as well as the moral principles
underpinning the document, by not at least going to the aid of the few Tutsi
that could have been saved. Or alternatively or in combination, from a more
realist perspective, the President could be criticised with poor judgement and
service of US national interests. This is because, by not trying to stop or
limit the genocide and more importantly failing to contain the massive
subsequent refugee flows heading into neighbouring states, a higher price was
ultimately paid by US tax payers. The US ended up spending $300 million dollars,
far in excess of the $30 million spent on UNAMIR, on aiding these refugees in
an effort to not allow them to destabilize these surrounding nations. Importantly
this aid failed to stop Zaire consequently imploding into civil war with
catastrophic consequences for the region as well as wider US commercial and
strategic interests. And vehemently restricting willing African nations from
serving these interests, by withholding transportation, was clearly misguided.
In conclusion
perhaps one important lesson that was glimpsed from this failure by the
President, described in his memoir as ‘one of the greatest regrets’ of his
presidency, as well as by members of his administration, that the deep regret
for the failure in Rwanda spurred quicker and more decisive action over Haiti,
Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. However the larger tragedy and reality that
Rwanda reminds us of is that no US President has ever been held politically accountable
for the failure to stop a genocide, which provides little incentive for any
future change in this trend. As Boutros Ghali repeatedly points out in his
memoir, the money spent on US nuclear arms alone far overshadows the
insignificant fraction spent on peacekeeping. As long as no future President is
capable or willing to challenge this great inequity, and the dogma of ‘national
interest’, then only more apologies are set to be written and the ever hollow
phrase re-produced; ‘Never again’. But as sad as this is hopefully this
dissertation has helped to lay out and rearrange the parameters within which
this inaction should be judged.
(Published without the origninal footnotes)
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