Peter F. Whaley, an American diplomat who served during the 1990s in central Africa and who won awards for his provocative political dispatches from hot spots around the globe, has died of pancreatic cancer in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 54.
Mr. Whaley, who died Jan. 29, was deputy chief of mission in Kigali, Rwanda, in the mid-1990s. He was asked to befriend rebels in eastern Zaire, as Congo was known at the time, to carry U.S. government messages to them about respect for human rights.
“I think of Congo as a whirlpool at the heart of Africa, where there are no rules and no expectations,” Mr. Whaley told the Associated Press in 2001. “There is no reason to think the fighting is going to end.”
In 1993, Hutus opposed to the Tutsi government of Rwanda fled to Congo and were given shelter and food by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Some Hutus soon launched an insurgency and in 1994 orchestrated the genocide of Tutsis and Hutu moderates–800,000 by some estimates. After a Tutsi rebel force took power, 2 million Hutus took shelter in Congo.
“If the United Nations had never opened those camps, none of this would have happened,” Mr. Whaley said.
That plainspoken assessment earned him the American Foreign Service Association’s 1997 William R. Rivkin Award for “intellectual courage and constructive dissent.” The award came after he defied most of the international diplomatic community in 1996 by accurately predicting that some 500,000 Hutus would abandon a string of refugee camps in eastern Zaire and would return peacefully to their homes in Rwanda.
Mr. Whaley joined the Foreign Service in 1982 as a political officer, with assignments at Embassies and Consulates in Haiti, Rwanda, Zaire and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His work sometimes irked local officials.
He was evacuated from Haiti in 1990 after regime officials declared him persona non grata because of his wide contacts with opposition figures and his relationship with radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who later became Haiti’s president.
In Rwanda, Mr. Whaley was charge d’affaires at the Embassy in Kigali and helped supervise reconstruction after the genocide. He returned to Washington in the late 1990s and retired in 1999.
Survivors include a daughter and his mother.
