VIEWPOINT: For aid agencies, Rwanda was a watershed
05 Apr 2004
Previous
| Next
Human skulls are seen in this February 2004 file picture on the floor of the Ntarama church in Rwanda where several hundred people were slaughtered during the 1994 genocide.
Stringer photo
Writer and consultant Nick Cater looks back at the Rwandan genocide and its impact on the humanitarian sector.
Ten years on from Rwanda's genocide, in which a carefully planned campaign of slaughter killed more than 900,000 people in just 100 days, ongoing reconstruction and reconciliation efforts are evidence of the scale of the challenges aid agencies faced in that crisis.
There has been plenty of soul-searching since 1994, when the Rwandan president's assassination in the midst of talks on power-haring was seized by extremists in the majority Hutu ethnic group as a pretext to launch their assault on the minority Tutsi community and any Hutus unwilling to be fellow genocidaires.
In the context of the Iraq conflict and much more, Rwanda's bloody anniversary is a timely reminder of aid agencies' limited powers -- or rather, how little they can achieve unless governments and military forces fulfil their responsibilities and avoid muscling in on the humanitarian field.
In 1994, the first challenge was the realisation that "development" proved no barrier to genocide, despite the assistance poured into the small and densely populated country in previous years by international donors to tackle poverty through better agriculture, health care and education.
In his book "Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda", Brown University's Peter Uvin has suggested redesigning development assistance to ensure it does not foster conflict, just as others have said that relief's priority must be to "do no harm".
A second challenge was aid workers' realisation that whatever warnings they issued, governments would not react until at least hundreds of thousands had been killed, in certain cases by individuals from organisations or churches once partners with Western agencies.
U.S. government documents have recently shown that Washington's intelligence reports -- some quoting aid agency information -- clearly said genocide had begun, yet the administration of President Bill Clinton ignored its obligations to intervene under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
And U.S. reluctance, due to its scarring experience in Somalia, influenced other states and the United Nations to do little or nothing, a collective cowardice exposed by the then head of U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda, General Roméo Dallaire, in his just-published book, "Shake Hands With the Devil".
He writes that Kofi Annan, then head of U.N. peacekeeping and now Secretary General, was told of planned massacres yet blocked Dallaire's moves to seize secret weapon stockpiles from the anti-Tutsi interahamwe militias, which might just have halted the genocide before it began.
ETHICAL DILEMMA
As the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front military forces advanced across the country to topple the government, challenge three was that aid agencies faced a massive Hutu exodus into neighbouring states, notably what later became the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
That near-impossible logistical nightmare, complete with a cholera epidemic, was matched by challenge four: the stark ethical dilemma that many "refugees" were killers and their supporters using humanitarian assistance to prepare for further conflict, unchecked by any government.
MSF France was one agency that decided to withdraw from the DRC camps. Its then Rwanda director, Fiona Terry, warns in her book "Condemned to Repeat? The paradox of humanitarian action", that agencies must look beyond institutional self-interest to question the value of their presence.
The DRC camps also saw challenge five: destruction of the cosy consensus of aid agencies and media, as competitive bidding for the fundraising essential of TV news by logo-covered relief workers led journalists to question whether the "do-gooders" really did good.
In time, the new Rwandan regime sent its forces across the border, freeing many families to return home but driving thousands deeper into the bush, where few survived, and exacerbating the DRC's conflict that persists today at the cost of millions of lives.
While Rwanda has made progress in the past decade in terms of its economy and agriculture, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, Amnesty International and others portray the government as an autocratic regime with little respect for human rights or media freedom, whose own local militias have been reported to commit crimes with seeming impunity.
Aid donors that provide a significant proportion of Rwanda’s gross national product have made little use of their leverage to encourage progress towards democracy and integration of ethnic groups, and some Rwandans warn that another genocide is possible if governance and human rights issues are not tackled and festering resentments soothed.
Rwanda's challenges, from the failure of governments to heed agency warnings to the risk of aid fostering violence, still persist. With all their good intentions, are aid agencies any better prepared to deter genocide or deal with its horrific and unpredictable consequences, by themselves or by collectively influencing others?
Unfortunately for many agencies, the fast turnover of leadership and staff amid fresh crises, along with poor institutional memory, divisions between "development" and "relief", limited independent funding and unwillingness to bite any hand that might feed them, mean that the lessons of Rwanda may not be easily recalled.
France's Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo (L), Cameroon's President Paul Biya (2ndL), Central African President Francois Bozize (3rd L), Burundi Vice-President Yves Sahinguvu (4th L), President Nicolas Sarkozy (5th L), Congolese President ...
