Mention of "Genocide”" makes US Ambassador to UN Susan Rice to get emotional

Daya Gamage – U.S. National Correspondent Asian Tribune

Washington, D.C. 08 May (Asiantribune.com): Early April CNNU.N. Ambassador Susan Rice reported 'The 15th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda brought American U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to tears as she reflected on her personal memories surrounding the slaughter."

Rice visited Rwanda as a staff member in former President Bill Clinton's National Security Council six months after the ethnic cleansing. She explained how even months after the violence she encountered decomposing bodies at one of the massacre sites.

"For me, the memory of stepping around and over those corpses will remain the most searing reminder imaginable of what our work here must aim to prevent," she said last April 7 at a special commemorative event at United Nations headquarters in New York.

She emotionally concluded her remarks, expressing how "We bow our heads to mark the memory of those who were slain. And we bow our heads to mark the sorrow of all who stood by."

The mass killings began on April 6, 1994, when tribal Hutu militia members attacked their tribal Tutsi countrymen after the plane of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. Within 100 days, some 800,000 people were murdered.

Not even twenty four hours later of that April 7 commemorative event at New York with a refreshed memory of the Rwandan genocide U.S. Ambassador to U.N. Dr.Susan Rice was with State Department’s South and Central Asian Affairs Bureau chief assistant secretary Boucher when the latter and U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka Robert Blake met with several U.S.-based organizations representing members of the Tamil Diaspora to discuss the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka.

Although neither the State Department nor those who represented the ‘so called’ Tamil Diaspora in the U.S. disclosed who and what organization represented the Diaspora a serious allegation that Sri Lanka Government is exercising genocide against the ethnic Tamil minority was brought forward and highlighted. Dr. Rice was at hand to listen to the allegation.

Sri Lanka’s LTTE which is facing an imminent defeat is holding onto about 50,000 or so innocent ethnic Tamils in a six square kilometer ‘No Fire Zone’ in the eastern sea front Mullaitivu District as a human shield to safeguard the outfit’s remaining leaders and cadre accuse the GSL of massacring them and engaged in an attempt to move the civilians out against their will.

To divert the attention and seek a ceasefire the pro-LTTE elements in Western nations have been influencing the international community to believe that genocide is taking place in Sri Lanka.

The pro-LTTE web sites, one based here in the United States engaged in malicious propaganda for the consumption of the International Community, couple of days ago commenced a campaign to force the U.S. to militarily involve and air drop food and medicines to the No Free Zone for the ‘starving Tamil civilians’.

When the word “genocide” is mentioned anywhere and anytime Dr. Susan Rice gets emotional, and astute political strategists in the Western Tamil Diaspora who represent the agenda of the Tamil Tigers appropriately strike that ‘red hot iron’ identifying President Obama’s closest foreign policy advisor and his ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice as the target to ‘stump’ Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry and its overseas diplomats stationed in Western capitals have a long way to understand this scenario and background and the sensitivity of some of the Obama administration foreign policy officials such as Susan Rice who was tapped by LTTE professionals at a time the Outfit wanted a breathing space to regroup as done several times in the past.

Rice is so close to President Obama, and if she is convinced of a genocidal situation in any corner of the globe military intervention is one option she may have as a recommendation to the administration. She has cited Responsibility To Protect (R2P) as a weapon in an OPED piece for Washington Post.

How much she was convinced by the so called “representatives of the Tamil Diaspora” can be discerned from subsequent statement she has made and will make in the future about the situation in Sri Lanka. The sentiments and pronouncements in her statements will help to understand the mind-set Dr. Rice has developed about the Sri Lanka situation. And ‘discovering’ this mid-set will be important for political analysts and Sri Lankan authorities to develop countermoves to negate Global LTTE Propaganda, its unscrupulous public diplomacy and ‘strange’ strategic communication that has cost Sri Lanka some goodwill which is tied to foreign economic assistance.

One report says that in April 2007, as the United States was enmeshed in two wars, a Brookings Institution scholar and Clinton-era State Dept. official Dr. Rice testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of taking military action as a last resort to stop the genocide in Darfur.

“A collective shame” was what Susan Rice called the international community’s failure to act. Rice was hardly sanguine about what it would take to stem the genocide, nor did she exhibit a preference for taking military action.

In passionate but clear language, she instead proposed a multistep policy of robust financial sanctions against Sudan and the imposition of a no-fly zone around the afflicted western Sudanese province. But if that failed, Rice continued, a starker measure should follow.

At the April 8 (2009) meeting the ‘representatives’ of the U.S. Tamil Diaspora had with Boucher, Blake and Rice at Washington’s State Department an analyses on the following lines were the ones the top Obama administration officials heard from the Tamil Tiger US lobby:

(1) The biggest lie in recent times has been the story of the “liberation of the Tamils” which is a camouflage for their programme of genocide, decimation, incarceration and destruction in progress make those remaining Tamils completely subservient to the State with no voice, destroying the very concept of a traditional Tamil homeland which underpins the clamor for self-determination.

(2) The Sri Lankan government for the past few years has been justifying their genocidal agenda and its attendant programme founded on a series of lies and denials of their crimes against the Tamil people.

(3) If the well meaning sections of the International Community are to permit a state of affairs where the international media and independent observers are not permitted into sites of genocide and depend only on the lies of the perpetrators of such genocide and violations of the international humanitarian law, they are creating a dangerous precedent for the massacre of voiceless people in their thousands to be massacred with impunity in the future too.

And this is the line of overseas propaganda the pro-LTTE elements in the United States and other Western capitals are engaged in to disturb the minds of Obama policymakers such as Dr. Susan Rice and systematically and strategically employing the Goebbels theory.

“The U.S. should press for a Chapter 7 U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum,” Rice told in 2007 testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), now Obama’s vice president. “Accept the unconditional deployment of the U.N. force or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states collectively or individually.”

About Rwanda this is what Dr. Susan Rice has said: “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”

One analysis said that Rice’s testimony could offer a window into the next four years of U.S. foreign policy. According to interviews with longtime associates she is a rigorous thinker and thorough pragmatist, impatient with ideology and incompetence. With Rice at the helm, former colleagues said, an Obama foreign policy would likely be bold but not dogmatic.

Background

Susan Rice is an American foreign policy expert, served on the National Security Council and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the second Bill Clinton administration (1997-2001). She took leave from the Brookings Institution to serve as a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama entered the White House Rice was named the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations with cabinet rank.

Rice, an African American, grew up in Washington, D.C., in the Shepherd Park neighborhood. Her father is Emmett J. Rice a Cornell University economics professor and former governor of the Federal Reserve System. Her mother is education policy scholar Lois Dickson Fitt.

Growing up, her father told her to "never use race as an excuse or advantage", and as a young girl she "dreamed of becoming the first U.S. Senator from the District of Columbia." She also held "lingering fears" that her accomplishments would be diminished by people who attributed them to affirmative action. (Affirmative action was a rule brought by the U.S. Federal Government and states to afford preferential entry to tertiary education for the Blacks over the whites who were considered way behind in educational facilities)

Rice attended Stanford University, where she received a Truman Scholarship, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1986, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, she attended New College, Oxford, where she earned an M.Phil. in 1988 and D.Phil. in 1990. The Chatham House-British International Studies Association honored her dissertation as the UK's most distinguished in international relations.

Career

Rice was a foreign policy aide to Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential election. She was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm, in the early 1990s.

Rice served in the Clinton administration in various capacities: At the National Security Council from 1993 to 1997, as Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping from 1993 to 1995 and as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs from 1995 to 1997. In 1997, she became Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, serving in that capacity until Clinton left office on January 20, 2001.

As Assistant Secretary of State Rice was considered "young, brilliant, and ambitious," and she worked to "integrate Africa in the global economy while at the same time aiming to increase U.S. national security." At the same time, she was criticized by detractors who considered her "authoritarian, brash, and unwilling to consider opinions that differ from her own," and reportedly having disputes from some career diplomats in the African bureau.

Rice was managing director and principal at Intellibridge from 2001 to 2002. In 2002, she joined the Brookings Institution as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development program. At Brookings she focuses on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Rice served as a foreign policy adviser to John Kerry.

This connection serves well as Senator Kerry is the current Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee which almost impeached Sri Lanka having received propaganda material from LTTE US lobby at the March 2009 special hearing on the “Situation in Sri Lanka.” And, Foreign Affairs Committee depend heavily on Dr. Rice’ US office in UN and Boucher’s South Asia Bureau (which will soon be headed by U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka Robert Blake)

In a Washington Post OPED piece in its October 2, 2006 edition Dr. Susan Rice, then a senior fellow at The Brookings Institute writing about military intervention in countries where genocide is taking place said: “Others will insist that, without the consent of the United Nations or a relevant regional body, we would be breaking international law. Perhaps, but the Security Council recently codified a new international norm prescribing "the responsibility to protect." It commits U.N. members to decisive action, including enforcement, when peaceful measures fail to halt genocide or crimes against humanity."

- Asian Tribune -