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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by braille. I'm Lee Chung-Greffo, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm talking with Dr. Philip Drew and Dr.
Bruce Oswald, their authors of the journal Rwanda Revisited Genocide Civil War and the Transformation of International Law. Dr. Philip Drew is an associate professor at Australia National University and Assistant Dean at Faculty of Law at Queens University. Hello, it's a pleasure to be here.
And Dr. Bruce Oswald, professor at Melbourne Law School. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you Lee and your audience. Thank you both.
First of all, can you tell us about your experience and what made you both qualified to write about the genocide in Rwanda? The project we did on Rwanda is a retrospect for us in that we both served in Unimier 1994. I was the intelligence officer with the Canadian contingent, and Oz was the legal officer for the Australian contingent, both of which were located in Kigali, Rwanda in the summer of 1994. We are both also professors of law and have spent pretty much the last 25 years, often reflecting on what we saw in Rwanda, what we experienced, and what we've learned from that, and have been speaking for years on the idea of getting together to write on the issue and to have a retrospective.
And I think that we have finally managed to do that after 25 years, and it's been a great experience to work with Oz again, and as well with all the fantastic authors that contributed to the journal. So Phil really was the instigator of this cunning plan by suggesting not only the editors, but also who to reach out to, and did most of the work in setting us up for success. And it is true that overall the years that I've known him, he's been very, very passionate and committed to trying to capture not only our experiences in Rwanda, but what were the lessons learned, something I know Lee you're going to come back to in a few minutes. And I think what we've ended up achieving in this volume is really that combination, trying to capture what people went through as best as one can, particularly after 25 years, but also to capture some of the lessons learned from that experience.
And you've read about the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and how it was really doomed from the start. Junemir was meant to bring peace between the Hutu and the Tutsi groups. Why did they fail? When we look at the Unimension in Rwanda, we often think of it as a pure peacekeeping mission, but that wasn't the way it was set up.
It was originally set up more or less as an election monitoring mission. It wasn't designed to be a mission where we usually have the traditional peacekeeping model of one side. It wasn't the type of mission, correction, I'm going to start again. It wasn't the traditional type of peacekeeping mission where we have two sides that are fighting and have a peacekeeping force in between.
Indeed, at the time that Junemir was designed, it was designed principally to monitor the peace agreement and to assist the two sides in achieving an affair and balance selection. When things started to decline, particularly in the autumn of 1993 and into 1994, the mission wasn't set up to achieve the requirements of a standard peacekeeping mission. Indeed, it just didn't have the right goals, it didn't have the right equipment, and it didn't have enough people. Oz, I'll hand over to you, because you probably have, from your experience as the lawyer, a bit more context on that one than I had at the time.
Yeah, that's, I'm not sure that context is the right word, because, you know, how did one living in Australia have context of what was happening in Rwanda at the time? I had to say I was a junior officer, a legal officer serving in the Australian Army. We were posted up in Townsville, which is one of the far north Queensland towns. It's predominantly a military town, or it was then.
It was before mass communication, as one would imagine today, where you'd get Facebook or Twitter feeds or social media feeds, that's what was happening in the world, thousands of kilometers away. So I really didn't understand any of the issues before I went to Rwanda. I got some very, very good briefings, obviously, as we led to the deployment, but before the deployment, I didn't have much understanding. And the consequence of that lack of understanding was that when we got on, when I got on the ground in Rwanda, it was a steep learning curve to try and figure out, you know, what was the real purpose of the mission as well identifies.
He's absolutely right. You know, of course, it was set up for very different reasons. And then it was a term that's been used in the, in the UN lexicon quite frequently, which is mission creep occurred. They just kept on asking the mission to do more and more, and clearly, they didn't have the resources as fields already explained.
But I think that that's a really important point to reflect upon when people talk about the failure of uni Mere, and we're talking about you and Mere to, as opposed to you and me, a one which was the observer mission. That it failed because what was the benchmark of success going to be when it wasn't set up with an idea of being a successful mission in trying to stop genocide because no one knew that that was going to happen. And those criticisms that you have the lack of resources on the mission creep, that seems to be so similar to the criticism that I've heard of what's going on in other parts of the world today. You know, whether it's Sudan or what has happened in Darfur.
Do you see some similarities between your experience in Rwanda and ongoing genocide across the world right now. One of the really interesting articles in this journal is written by David Simon, where he compares what happened in Rwanda and to the rheingiers in Myanmar, and he calls it learning the wrong lessons. It's an interesting piece because there was some good that came out of Rwanda, good in inverted commas obviously, because it led to a much greater focus for generations of my students in class. And I think there's a single student in my classroom, I teach these sorts of topics that doesn't reflect upon what happened in genocide and doesn't raise the responsibility to protect or the R2P doctrine.
So, you know, there was something that came out of Rwanda that we should not forget as a legacy of that those terrible events. But to me, it's the political will and this is I think what David brings up in his article, that the international community as a whole is still very hesitant for a variety of reasons to intervene in these, in these sort of events are occurring, you know, mass atrocities leave alone when a genocide is occurring. And my sense has always been it has less to do with law and more to do with politics and diplomacy. The law sometimes is used as an excuse to allow or escape code to allow politicians and diplomats to get off the hook, I think.
But, you know, I don't see many issues that are not that you can't answer by using a legal framework when having to deal with these atrocities. So that leads me to one of my other questions, what are some of the legal lessons that you took away from your time in Rwanda. Yeah, a lot. I mean, it was a life changing moment for me as a very young very junior sorry lawyer at the time so I, you know, obviously I've never been a legal advisor overseas.
I've never been a legal advisor in a situation where you had mass atrocities and genocide. So it was a turning point in my life to really come to grips with what does the law do in these circumstances. And for those people listening to this podcast, I very strongly advise them to read Dame Rosalind Higgins dissenting or separate opinion. I can't remember now whether it's dissenting or separate, I have to apologize.
But it's a fantastic opinion in the nuclear weapons case where she uses a harsh law to pack a great international lawyer. And I'm saying that the law may not answer every question, but it's capable of answering every question. And that quote has meant a lot to me over the years because I learned, I was forced to look to see how the law could address some of the issues that I was seeing in Rwanda And very, you know, I'm trying to summarize this into three levels of legal lessons. At the strategic level, the legal lesson I learned was that the UN had the legal framework to intervene.
I can talk more about that, but clearly there was no legal prohibition against the UN intervening in Rwanda under Chapter seven. It had, you know, every power it needed to intervene at the operational level. One of the really, really difficult issues that we dealt with was where you had a Rwandan coming to you or coming to the UN and saying, I want protection as a Rwandan because these people who are accusing me of committing genocide, usually a Rwandan authority are falsely accusing me of committing this crime. I never committed it.
They just want my house. And the Rwandan authorities would turn around and go, well, he did commit genocide. Of course he says he wouldn't who wouldn't. And so we want to, you know, arresting.
Now, what are you doing that circumstance as a UN when someone is seeking sanctuary with you says that they didn't commit a crime and then you've got the Rwandan authorities quite rightly, you know, in many cases, having to deal with people within the community, who they know committed genocide and are hiding inside the community. So that whole concept of detention and what you do in those circumstances has led me to, you know, thinking about the question of detention and in much greater depth. And then I'm happy to talk about that as well. But then the last level is at the tactical level, which is the question of self-defense.
And it came about that I was in a circumstance where there was a potential for life threatening situation to arise. The Australian soldiers who were there with me, you know, loaded their weapons and put around in the chamber and were ready to shoot their weapons. And my commanding officer told them to unload and they did not unload. And one of the issues that arose then was whether they were exercising their right of self-defense by not following what my commanding officer or the orders of my commanding officer, which was to unload.
And the interesting point about that is that, and your listeners, this will resonate with the listeners, is that most people say that you have an inherent right of self-defense. And I've pondered for 25 years, whether that is true or not. And, you know, obviously it doesn't take me 25 years to decide that it's definitely not true, but it was a really important turning point for me as a lawyer, because there are two components to that statement inherent to right of self-defense. And what is inherent?
What do people mean by inherent? And I think what people mean is that once you claim it, you have an immunity from prosecution. Clearly that's not true. You claim it as a defense.
So you can't be immune from prosecution. It's a defense to a charge. And right, that doesn't make sense to me either as a lawyer, because what I think people mean by right is that once you've claimed it before the court, that the court then can't do anything to you, because you've claimed it, you're off the hook, so to speak. That's not true, because, you know, I use this example sometimes when I teach.
It would be like someone saying that they have a right to self-defense as a defense when they've sexually assaulted another person. I mean, the court would never allow, unless there's some really weird set of circumstances. It would never allow that claim of defense to go to the jury, because it clearly makes, you know, doesn't arise in that context. So self-defense is a very contextual defense.
It's a justification, as we say, in the criminal law. And one has to be careful about creating expectations for soldiers that it's a cop launch that they can rely upon whenever they want to. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple podcast, Spotify, and Google podcast.