Cheap Talk of Compassion, Justice

Americans zone out when hearing or reading news reports about East-Central Africa: Lac Vert, Kibumba, Mugunga, Goma, Uvira, Banyamulenge, Hutus, Tutsis--all a blur. We are not helped by simplistic media coverage by those who do a quick story and leave it all behind.

What the few Americans who pay attention to this region, which includes Rwanda, Zaire, Uganda and Burundi, know is that tens of millions of people are caught up in far more than just some kind of “traditional tribal conflict” or auto-genocide.

When nearly 1 million Rwandans were slaughtered between April and June of 1994, the world was properly appalled. The gory story was, if anything, overreported in near-tabloid style and had the effect of numbing the world’s compassion rather than generating an outpouring of assistance like the one that came forth during the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine.

The U.S. government response was months late, but it led to the world’s governments getting together in early 1995 to pledge $700 million to reconstitute Rwandan society: to rebuild Rwanda’s system of justice and its health care and educational infrastructure and to jump-start its once self-sufficient food production. More than 18 months later, less than $50 million has arrived. Combined with cutbacks in traditional foreign assistance from the U.S and Europe and a $1-million-a-day burden of supporting its refugees in Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi, small wonder that Rwanda, the original victim of this turmoil, is now in crisis.

Here are several areas in which the world’s missteps have proved inhumane:

* An all-African peacekeeping force of not less than 10,000 must be maintained to stabilize places like the Zaire-Rwanda frontier and interior Burundi. This idea originated in Africa but it was publicized by the State Department and Western media as if it was our idea, thus dooming it from receiving pan-African acceptance.

* The more than 1.5 million Rwandan refugees in neighboring countries must be told to go home, with adequate human rights monitoring to assure them safe passage and resettlement. Using the United Nations and private relief agencies as proxies to care for them in perpetuity is no way to accomplish repatriation. The U.N. overloads the fax machines of media outlets with calls for additional funds for the camps when it should consider folding up its tents and setting them back up safely inside Rwanda for a brief transitional period. Also, it must not allow armed members of the former Rwandan military and militia, which led the genocidal attacks against Rwanda’s population in 1994, to stay in the refugee camps and use them as guerrilla bases.

* The government is holding more than 70,000 prisoners in inadequate jail facilities. The promised financial and technical support to reconstitute its justice system has not materialized in nearly sufficient amounts. Rwanda was in effect ordered to not initiate its own adjudication of war crimes in favor of an international tribunal. The first trial of anyone accused of war crimes has just been postponed for another six months because the defendant, a mayor accused of directly ordering nearly 2,000 murders, demanded a new attorney. Meanwhile the 70,000 prisoners sit idly and hungrily by with no one to process their cases, let alone even acknowledge that they are being held in custody. War crimes tribunals are far more mediagenic than simple justice by local people.

The entire region is in need of smart diplomacy. With President Mobutu Sese Seko thought to be dying of cancer in Europe, Zaire is splitting apart into what could eventually be four separate states. Burundi is being strangled by an international embargo for violating the West’s preference for electoral niceties and is in effect in a state of civil war. Rwanda waits and waits and waits for the pledged funds and technical support to arrive while being accused of fanning the flames of conflict in Burundi and Zaire. And the relief agencies plead for funds from a world exhausted by the lack of progress in the region.

A little clarity of purpose and reporting and fulfillment of prior commitments would help.