Interview by Andrew Smith
Disclaimer: All interviews reflect the individual views of our guests
Sir Charles James Petrie, 6th Baronet OBE, is a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations , Former UN Resident Coordinator for Myanmar and Head of UNSG's Internal Review Panel for the UN in Sri Lanka. In August 2021, Petrie published a book with Unbound publishing entitled "The Triumph of Evil: The Rwanda Genocide and the Search for Justice".
In your book The Triumph of Evil, You really focus on your time in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. Could you just tell us a little bit more about your time there, as a broad overview?
SCJP: If I were to look at my 30-year-long career in conflict settings, within and outside the United Nations (UN), I guess there would be three components to it. There would be the traditional, normal, let’s say the classic humanitarian worker providing relief component, that would be the beginning of my career. I was in Timbuktu during the ‘84 to ‘85 famine, I was with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in 1986, and then later as part of the UN in Sudan, Somalia. So that would be the first part of my career.
And then the second would be confronting the notion of evil, which I was faced with in Rwanda; arriving in Rwanda and finding a context that was completely beyond anything I’d seen before. I had seen war, and civil war and had had to deal with warlords, but Rwanda was dimensionally different. As summarised by a priest I got to know, who was subsequently killed, Father Vjeko Ćurić, it was a confrontation where every Hutu killed was killed for a specific individual reason, whether the individual belonged to the opposition, there were some grievances, some jealousy, some debts. But every Hutu killed was killed for a very specific reason, while a Tutsi was killed for the simple reason that the individual was born. So that was a dimension of violence that shocked me.
And I followed up in trying to understand this dimension of violence. So I spent two years in the Middle East in Gaza from ‘96 to ‘98. Being there I got a better sense of how a people can be traumatised, and how a traumatic event defines their society, their politics, and their narratives. Rwanda, coming out of the genocide, is a traumatised society coming to terms with the past. Israel is a society that has to deal with the history and the memory of the Holocaust. So that was very gripping and instructive. But at the same time, I was there when the new wave of suicide bombings started. That introduced a level of violence that fed the existential fear that the Israelis felt, so those tensions were enormous. And then afterwards, for three years I was the senior United Nations (UN) official responsible for initiating and maintaining contact with the Congolese rebels from ‘98 to 2001, and many of the rebel movements were influenced by, and some were even part of, the forces that committed the genocide in Rwanda. So, I continued to try and understand the notion of evil.
And then the third phase of my career, the principal reason why I wrote the book, I attempted to get the UN to investigate one of its own alleged to have participated in genocide. I felt that the UN had an obligation to investigate as the institution is the guarantor of the genocide convention. I couldn’t understand why the UN was unwilling to do so. I argued that individuals within institutions must not hand over their sense of individual responsibility to the institution. As institutions are made up of individuals.
With your book and with your work in Rwanda, you elaborate an account of institutional failure on the part of the UN in multiple conflicts, also in the NOEMA article [on Myanmar]. But you never lose sight of the fact that institutions are made up of individuals. Based on your experience, do you find that international institutions allow enough room for individual agency? Or are they far too rigid, and thus allow ‘evil to triumph’, despite the wishes of, perhaps, even the majority of involved individuals?
SCJP: I think the statement that ‘all you need is for good people to do nothing for evil to triumph,’ is very true. I think institutions have their own logic and individuals develop different relationships with institutions. Different personal dynamics emerge, and they have to do with the comfort that institutions provide, the need to feel that one has a future within an institution, and that does sort of make people think twice before trying to rock the boat if they see something that they believe is wrong.
There is also another narrative that appears when you’re in an institution: it’s the sense that you don’t know everything. So there’s this sort of logic where you say ‘Well, this doesn’t seem right, but I don’t know everything. Maybe those on top have more information than I do so that’s why they’re taking this decision.’ And finally, in institutions like the UN that are facing massive budget cuts, and as a result everybody’s fairly vulnerable, the incentive to rock the boat is significantly diminished.
Just following up on that, do you find that this logic of ‘maybe I don’t know everything,’ is the largest problem?
SCJP: No, I think it comes in more as a justification for inaction. For some, it’s that, but I think generally it’s a justification for inaction. You see something going on that you believe is not right, you see the institution taking positions that are not correct and you fear that there is a cost to taking a stance. So one way to be able to bear the consequences of inaction is to say that others know more than you do, so you need to know more than you do to take action.
I understand per your recent visit to anti-junta resistance-controlled territory in Myanmar, as detailed in the NOĒMA article, you came to understand what governance looks like in regions when the state rapidly becomes absent.
You noted in detail the resilience of the Karenni people and their ability to create institutions coupled with a discussion of the ‘UN’s failure in Myanmar.’ You mingled these two ideas, saying the UN could again become relevant by way of engaging these ‘new’ civil leaders on the ground. Could you elaborate on this a bit more, perhaps painting a brief picture of what this may look like?
SCJP: An important point to understand is that I didn’t discover new forms of governance in Myanmar. It’s something I’ve observed elsewhere; in Syria, working with the Syrian opposition, even in Somalia. I went to Karenni to get a better sense of how this governance structure functioned. It was fascinating.
But what I did discover in Karenni that I hadn’t expected was this new generation of activists, what they call ‘Generation Z.’ What was very interesting was the fact that you have this generation of young, who actually have more in common with their peers, whether it be their peers in the country or outside the country in other parts of the world than they do with their parents. They have their own language, their own logic and their own music. They are a significant force in Myanmar. Of course, in terms of resistance to the military you have the ethnic armed groups, and the civil disobedience movement, but you also have this generation.
What I think this generation brings to the situation in Myanmar is they’ve broken the divide that existed before in the opposition. Before you had the predominant Barmar democratic opposition under Aung San Suu Kyi, and then you had in parallel the historic insurgencies that have been fighting since the end of the Second World War. Until recently neither really connected, they didn’t work together. However Generation Z has broken this divide, the young Barmar, the young ethnic groups and others have come together to resist the regime.
In terms of the UN, to be honest, it has to get its act together, and there are some structural issues. There hasn’t been a leader, a coordinator, for the UN in-country since the coup. The person who was the coordinator when the coup happened was sick, he was in treatment outside the country, and he wasn’t replaced. He just remained as the absent coordinator until he didn’t. From then on there have only been acting UN coordinators, individuals from individual UN agencies filling the position. They find themselves in the position of having to take a very strong stance on behalf of the system but with the risk that it’s going to undermine their agency’s ability to do its work. This means they aren’t free of their operational responsibilities. Given that their incentive structures and promotions are linked to the agency they work for, they tend not to take strong positions.
So, in that sense, the UN structure in Myanmar is an orphaned structure. They have no leadership. So they have to get their act together on that front. And the rest is straightforward, if you're being paid to work in a conflict situation, you see new opportunities and you're able to assess the complexities, then I think the action is straightforward.
After four years in the country, you were asked to leave Myanmar in 2007 due to your open support for the Saffron Revolution. After your time with the UN, you subsequently have spoken admirably about ethnic Karenni rebel groups, this is again in the NOĒMA Article, and other organisations in Myanmar that are participating in what, in their view, amounts to a ‘revolution,’ not a civil war.
As a diplomat well accustomed to conflict zones, how do you decide when to take a stand and ‘pick a side,’ even despite the risks (such as your expulsion from a country), versus deciding when to just ‘do your job’ and fulfil the mission objectives, as apolitical as they may be?
SCJP: I think one needs to understand that everything is politics, that one can’t escape politics. It’s about how you navigate through or around the politics. Getting kicked out of a country and becoming persona non grata (PNG) is an extreme outcome, almost a failure. When you’re in a country, especially if you're the UN, your responsibility is to work with nation-states, with governments. It’s almost like sailing. When you sail, you try to get as close to that point with the wind where if you go too far you tip over, so you don’t want to go too far and tip over. So while you don’t want to get PNG, you do want to speak the truth without getting kicked out.
The reason I was kicked out was a personal political calculation, it was inevitable. It was linked to the Saffron Revolution. The protests of the monks were triggered by the military’s dramatic increase in fuel prices in August 2007, one of the prices that hurt the people the most was that compressed natural gas increased by 500%. Most of the public transport in the urban centres of Myanmar worked with compressed natural gas, so of course the prices increased overnight, and the people didn’t have the reserves to absorb the new prices so they started walking. Monks possess significant influence in Myanmar. A little confrontation between the monks and the military in the North triggered the revolt. The monks went into the streets and basically told the military to stop insulting the people, the people couldn’t take it anymore. For a while, the military didn’t know what to do, because Buddhism was one of the pillars of their legitimacy, but then when they found an opportunity or justification to attack the monks, they did so with extraordinary violence. That happened in September, and it just went on and on.
When you're the UN representative, you have to make a speech on the 24th of October - which is UN Day. You are instructed to read the Secretary General’s speech on UN Day. And I knew that it was going to be on Global Warming so I went to the Secretary General’s Office and said, would you be willing to put a little sentence in the speech about Myanmar? They came back to me and said no, because if we do it for Myanmar, we will be asked to do it for North Korea and the rest, so we can’t. I decided I needed to do something, principally because I thought it was the right thing but also because I sensed that there was a generational shift within the military, I sensed that a new generation of officers were going to take over very soon. I also sensed, because I’d been talking to them, that they were very, very uncomfortable with what was happening with the attack on the monks.
I feared that if the UN remained silent on that day, we would be undercutting the confidence of this new generation of leaders. So I ended up writing another speech which I read immediately after delivering the Secretary General’s speech. The speech spelt out the concerns of the monks and the general public, urging the military to listen. The result was that I got kicked out. But then on leaving, I got a message from one of these younger officers stating “We understand why you said what you said, you need to understand why we’ve done what we’ve done”, and then I got kicked out.
These officers did take over and became part of the civilian government in 2011, and when they heard I was no longer with the UN they invited me back and asked me to help facilitate their discussion with the armed groups, to help build confidence in the ceasefires between the armed groups and the military.
If the UN had remained silent on that day, we would have been doing more harm than good, we had to take a position. In terms of the answer to your question “When do you take a position, when do you remain neutral,’ that’s a really difficult call. It’s something that you need to think about, you need to think through the consequences of the actions you take or don’t take. I’m not comfortable with the notion of ‘leaving in protest, pulling out’ because ultimately you will need to come back, and look at the situation in Syria.
You seem to contest the notion that there is such a thing as an apolitical position in situations like Myanmar. Speaking broadly, often humanitarian missions (including military ones), diplomatic missions, and humanitarian aid are construed or framed by various actors as apolitical or transcendent of the political. An example of this could include US aid to Gaza in 2024, or in an extreme case even NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Based on your experience, do you accept this view?
SCJP: Of course, they’re very political, and the consequences are huge in terms of the interpretations that they trigger and the narratives they allow. It’s very, very difficult to ensure that such actions are not seen as political by others, it’s the way others see it or want to see it and it has real consequences. Kosovo, the Serbs saw it as an aggression, the Chinese saw it also as a Western aggression. Gaza, in the simplest of interpretations, there’s the juxtaposition of the West’s response to Gaza versus Ukraine. In a way, I think, to believe that it’s apolitical, especially if you’re the one taking the action, is incredibly naive. It means you’re not able to understand the perceptions, and the consequences of those perceptions, that are triggered by your actions.
Could you talk a little bit about what signs you see or what precursors exist immediately prior to what we will call the ‘institutional failure’ of nominally neutral organisations such as the UN, in the context of brewing conflicts and humanitarian disasters such as Sudan, Myanmar, or Rwanda?
SCJP: Making a distinction between governments, the international community, and humanitarian organisations, whether they be the UN or international NGOs, is critical, but increasingly difficult to sustain. We know that the international community has agendas and that fact has become very clear. They’ve always existed, but they’re increasingly clear. I think the agendas are defined, of course, by political interests, but they’re also defined by such things as dwindling resources. The reality is that governments have increasingly used humanitarian operations as default responses to conflict and as a result, humanitarian organisations are placed right in the centre of politics. This is the reality that has to be confronted now.
But how do you deal with regimes that are massacring their people, where do you stand, do you remain neutral in such a situation? Impartial, I think yes, if you define impartiality as a sort of a needs-based approach. But do you remain neutral in the face of horrific actions? There, again, I don’t think it’s very clear cut, and I think one of the big mistakes is for individual organisations to believe that they take the full burden of such a decision on their shoulders, do stay and risk being complicit or do you go and abandon those you serve.. I think there needs to be much more of a collective response, and if you have a collective approach to such a dilemma, responsibilities and roles can be allocated. Some will take a very strong position, advocate in a very visible manner and get kicked out, while others remain inside and will try to leverage the visibility and actions that their peers have taken.
To ask NGOs to have that collective response is a lot, as there’s nothing that binds them together. The UN should be able to do it, it has so many parts to it. The UN should have a strategy that has different components to it, with somebody at the top responsible for calibrating the different interventions. But the UN has yet to figure this out. For me that’s the systemic and systematic failure of the UN: It hasn't been able to come together to develop a strategy to address a specific political crisis.
Based on your experience, if you could implement one institutional or structural change to the United Nations today, given the context of the world and the potential emergence of multipolarity today, what would it be and why?
SCJP: I would cut all of their budgets by 40%. Money is dwindling, and confidence in the UN is also diminishing, so slowly you have atrophication of the organisation, it's reverting back to the League of Nations. I think donors should cut the budget by 40%, or even more, and that will provoke an electroshock to the organisation. I think it will force the organisation to think through what are their essential contributions, and hopefully, they’ll realise it’s the normative side, that the UN doesn’t necessarily have to be a service provider. Others can do it, but the UN is a guarantor of standards and the ability to live up to standards. And if after a 40% cut, the agencies aren’t able to do that and they sort of implode, they’re dying anyway so you sort of accelerate their death. But I think there needs to be a dramatic cut in the budget of the UN to get the system to think through exactly what is the essential contribution that they bring.
Your book opens with the famous quote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” How has that ethos translated into your personal actions in diplomatic engagements, having worked in conflict zones such as Sudan, Gaza, Somalia, and Afghanistan?
SCJP: When I had the position of responsibility in the UN or elsewhere, the two things that obsessed me and kept me up at night. One, of course, that one of my colleagues was killed and the fear that not everything had been done to manage their security. But then the other was the fear that something was going on in a geographic area that I was responsible for that I wasn’t seeing. That some horrors were being committed that I was not aware of and that the organisation that I represented was not responding. So that kept me up, this fear of horrors being committed that I was not aware of. So that’s one way how good people doing nothing allows evil to triumph. In this case, it’s doing nothing because you don’t see it happening, yet it’s happening in an area that you are responsible for.
In the end of course it comes back to what we were saying in the beginning, a sense of individual responsibility. You need to understand that you are part of the institution and the institution is made up of people like you, so it’s your responsibility to push for what you think is right. I think it’s especially true for the UN. If you look at the UN, I mean coming to the question before: What is the purpose of the UN? The UN is an institutional fairytale. It’s the fairytale that the world can be better. And if the institution fails and collapses, that fairytale will go, it will no longer be there. That’s the UN charter, the UN charter is a fairytale, especially in the world today. But it’s an essential fairytale: this belief that the world can be a better place, and one can work together to make it a better place. So I would say the UN is an institutional fairytale that must survive for the good of humanity.
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