Strange Choice for U.S. Holocaust Council

A former U.S. official who opposed intervening against the Rwanda genocide has been named to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which governs the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The appointment was one of President Biden’s final acts in office, and one of his strangest.

In the spring of 1994, Rice was director of Africa Affairs for the National Security Council, under President Bill Clinton. Reports began pouring in about machete-wielding militias of the Hutu tribe in Rwanda carrying out nationwide massacres of the country’s ethnic minority, the Tutsis.

What were Susan Rice and other U.S. officials saying about all this behind the scenes? Samantha Power gave us the answer. Power—who later became US Ambassador to the UN and then director of US AID—authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning book in 2002 about America’s responses to genocide. She revealed that senior State Department officials said they were “worried” that acknowledging genocide was underway in Rwanda “could commit [the U.S.] to actually ‘do something’.”

One of those officials was Rice. During one key discussion among about whether the U.S. should intervene, Rice remarked: “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [midterm] elections?” One other colleagues, Tony Marley, later recalled how shocked he was by Rice’s argument. “We could believe that people would wonder that, but not that they would actually voice it.”

When Power interviewed Rice about her statement, Rice replied that she “did not recall the incident.” She added: “If I said it, it was completely inappropriate as well as irrelevant.”

Electoral considerations should have been irrelevant. But they weren’t. They were part of the Clinton administration’s calculus in choosing to stand idly by as more than 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda.

That troubling episode came up for discussion when Rice was nominated in 2012 to become President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser. During her confirmation hearings, Rice was asked about the Rwanda-midterms remark. She replied that she did not recall having made that statement.

Concern about genocide having unpleasant political consequences is not a new phenomenon among U.S. government officials. Recall how the State Department responded in 1942, after receiving overwhelming evidence that the Germans were annihilating millions of Jews in Europe.

As information about the killings mounted, the British suggested to the United States that the two governments issue a joint statement acknowledging and condemning the mass murder. A Roosevelt administration official objected, on the grounds that if they issued such a statement, the Allies “would expose themselves to increased pressure from all sides to do something more specific in order to aid these people.”

Dr. Rice has suffered more than one memory lapse when asked about genocide. A wikileak cable in 2010 quoted a disturbing exchange between Dr. Rice and the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court concerning Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, architect of the Darfur genocide. The ICC prosecutor informed Rice that Bashir had stashed away $9-billion in secret bank accounts. The prosecutor wanted to publicize that information in the hope of turning the Sudanese public against Bashir. But the U.S. never publicized it. After the cable was leaked to the press, a reporter asked Dr. Rice about it. She replied that she “didn’t recall” being told about the $9-billion.

After visiting Rwanda in 2013, Rice recalled how in 1994, six months after the genocide there ended, she walked through “a church and an adjacent schoolyard where one of the massacres had occurred [and] the decomposing bodies of those who had been so cruelly murdered still lay strewn around what should have been a place of peace….[W]e saw first-hand the spectacular consequences of the poor decisions taken by those countries, including my own…“ Left unspoken was Rice’s own role in shaping that U.S. policy.

Now, ironically, Rice will be joining the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which is the governing board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Part of the museum’s declared mission is to “influence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to prevent and work to halt acts of genocide”—which makes it a strange place for someone with such a troubling track record on the Rwanda genocide.