The 20th century was an epoch of genocide that began in Namibia and Armenia and ended in Bosnia and Rwanda. Joyce E. Leader was deputy to the U.S. ambassador in Rwanda during the lead up and at the outbreak of the 1994 upheaval in which one million Tutsis were murdered by Hutus, often hacked to death with machetes. The painful irony, addressed in Leader’s account, is that the U.S. had mediated a power-sharing agreement meant to end the country’s sputtering ethnic rivalries.
“Unintended consequences” is a phrase Leaders repeats as she rues the results of what seemed like honest brokering in the name of peace and democracy. Instead, the U.S.-negotiated accord triggered the genocide because the Hutu majority felt threatened by the status accorded to the Tutsi minority—perhaps a problem familiar to students of race-baiting American history. Inspired by hateful fake news reports, they struck down their neighbors. From Hope to Horror gives an insider’s perspective on a catastrophe that demonstrates the danger of populist demagoguery and ethnic supremacism. In Rwanda, U.S. policymakers made their usual mistake of listening to people like themselves with slight awareness of the grassroots below.
Leader doesn’t quite say so, but unintended consequences can also follow from the State Department’s policy of repositioning Foreign Service officers every few years. In some cases, American diplomats are barely up to speed on the nations they service—and then they’re gone.
