The language of diplomacy

By Barnaby Mason BBC diplomatic correspondent

800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994

In May 1994 I found myself in New York covering the United Nations Security Council for a few weeks.

It was the height of the genocide in Rwanda; unspeakable massacres were taking place every day.

"It's so awful, we must do something," an aide to the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, said to me.

Instead, the members of the security council argued about something called the concept of operations for an expanded UN mission.

A senior American official said it had to be a do-able operation; expectations of what the UN could achieve should not be exaggerated.

Using the word itself would have mattered because, if it was genocide, how could you not act?

Scarred by the painful experience of Somalia the previous year, the Clinton administration delayed a vote on a resolution to send 5,500 troops, even though there was no question of American soldiers taking part.

"Everyone is very conscious of the urgency of the matter," said a British representative, but the dry as dust haggling went on.

Strikingly, the big powers, especially the United States, resisted the use of the word "genocide" to describe what was going on in Rwanda.

So the resolution eventually passed talked instead of mindless violence and carnage, the death of many thousands of innocent civilians.

Plain language

There was only one oblique reference recalling that the killing of members of an ethnic group with the intention of destroying it was a crime under international law.

Using the word itself - calling a spade a spade - would have mattered because, if it was genocide, how could you not act, however difficult it was?

In a similar way, British officials in the early 1990s tended to describe the fighting in Bosnia as civil war rather than Serb aggression - the phrase implied that all the parties were as bad as each other and weakened the demand for intervention.

In the end, the pretence over Rwanda at the UN was swept aside. Mr Boutros Ghali appeared before the media to declare: "Genocide has been committed - and we're still discussing what is to be done. I've begged them to send troops; I failed. It's a scandal."

It was a rare instance of emotion bursting its diplomatic bonds - the kind of moment that diplomatic correspondents relish, as compensation for the amount of time they spend studying ambiguous phrases to find out what lurks beneath them.

Boris Yeltsin defied the 1991 Soviet coup attempt

I can remember others - Boris Yeltsin, for example, ailing but still larger than life, at a summit of more than 50 leaders in Istanbul in 1999, angrily rejecting western criticism of the behaviour of Russian forces in Chechnya as interference in an internal matter.

Bill Clinton publicly turned the tables on him by recalling Mr Yeltsin's stand for freedom on a tank in Moscow.

"If they'd put you in jail," he said, "I hope every leader round this table would have stood up for you and not dismissed it as an internal Russian affair."

Then there was British Foreign Secretary (as he then was), Robin Cook, the previous year visiting a Jewish settlement site at Har Homa in torrential rain.

The Israeli Government accused him of breaking an agreement not to meet Palestinians there. Demonstrators called him an anti-Semite and the then Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, cancelled a dinner with him.

Mr Cook proclaimed: "I did not submit to Israeli pressure."

Instruments of policy

His officials, for once, were just as undiplomatic, accusing the Israelis of a fantastic over-reaction, of being in an ugly and defensive mood.

Those were moments of plain speaking. Usually, words are carefully chosen as instruments of policy. The leaders of the big powers try by constant repetition to get their terms adopted by everyone, because they carry with them value judgements and a particular view of the world.

The most obvious example is the word "terrorist". When President George W Bush calls someone a terrorist, he thinks that is all that needs to be said. The word is intended to close off argument, ignoring the disagreement across the world about who is a terrorist and who is not. It has become just a term of abuse.

There are similar objections to the label "war on terrorism" but it still flourishes.

Can you have a war on a technique, since that is what terrorism is? Can the war ever end?

Words do matter

The attraction for Mr Bush is that Iraq can be verbally neutralised as the central front in the war on terror. Diplomatic correspondents worry about this sort of thing.

Who has "sovereignty" over Iraq?

American and British politicians - and the media - now talk of transferring sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government at the end of June. Pedants object that they cannot do that because they do not possess the sovereignty in the first place.

All right, then, they are going to hand over power.

Are they? Really? Perhaps a transfer of "limited administrative authority" would be more accurate.

But that does not have the right ring to it. It certainly does not sound like a clear end to the occupation.

So you see, words do matter, even if facts on the ground matter more.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 29 May, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.