2. LETTER TO NIAMH

BUKAVU, 26 APRIL

Dear Niamh,

You asked for my opinion and here it is: I don’t think you’d enjoy working in a Rwandan refugee camp. The one I have just visited is, by regional standards, minute – 29,000. Many came from the French Operation Turquoise camp, closed on 21 August ’94. Others came from Cyangugu Prefecture, just across the Kivu Province border near Bukavu. Their arrival wasn’t emergency-creating; as they were expected, the UNHCR’s infrastructure was already in place.

From Bukavu a rough track (one of Zaire’s main motor roads) climbs a series of precipitous hills, densely forested: bamboo, pines, blue gums, indigenous tress aglow at this season with red and yellow blossoms. At first one is looking down banana-blanketed slopes into the narrow valley of the Rusizi river; the forested slopes on the far bank are in Rwanda. Then comes a wide grassy plateau – broken but not rugged country, surrounded on three sides by the Mitumba mountains, rising to 8,000 feet and more.

Twenty miles from Bukavu we turned onto an even rougher track – very narrow, gently undulating – and passed a couple of small villages where our shiny luxury vehicle was observed without friendliness. This fertile region is not over-populated yet the local welcome for the refugees was, shall we say, mixed … There is a large impoverished village close to the camp and ‘incidents’ (sometimes fatal) are not uncommon.

From a high ridge-top, one first sees the edge of the distant camp: huge hospital-tents on an opposite ridge, beyond a wide green valley, and the glinting tin roof of the food-store shed – the only permanent building. The synthetic UN blue of the roof tarpaulins seems a harsh intrusion on an otherwise unspoiled landscape.

Soon we were on the scene of a minor crisis: near the camp entrance the track had collapsed into a deep culvert. Our vehicle could find a way round easily enough but the giant World Food Programme (WFP) trucks, due to arrive next day, could not – and the camp leaders were panicking at the prospect of food rations running out. A UNHCR ex-pat engineer and his local team had been requested to come immediately and stones were being carried to the chasm by corvee labour from the camp. I asked why these young men couldn’t also carry food-sacks from the trucks to the store and was told that that would involve ‘an unacceptable security risk’. There are a lot of very hungry Zaireans out there and to sustain them no one regularly drives 1200 miles from Mombasa, transporting a carefully balanced diet.

The strictly guarded gate of rusty tin was opened by a beaming askari. He welcomed me warmly; elderly ex-pat visitors are treated as possible sources of extra funding. The staff’s neat compound holds a hamlet of tents, each measuring eight feet by eight and minimally furnished, standing a few yards apart on the level ridge-top. Marigolds and miniature cacti grow between the white-painted stones marking the edges of little paths. The loo and showers are in portacabins, far down a steep slope overlooking the main camp on its wide valley floor. The dining-room-cum-kitchen is not a room but a lean-to. Many square yards of canvas awning, attached to the tope of the high compound wall, are supported by blue-gum poles. Beneath, on the earthen floor, benches serve as chairs on either side of a long trestle-table. A generator provides light and keeps the fridge going – most of the time. An excellent Hutu cook, once employed in a Kigali luxury hotel, cunningly transforms basic foods into delicious meals. Now the ex-pat staff is down to three – contented fold who, relishing the simple life, rarely visit Bukavu.

Jeejee appointed himself my guide. A volunteer worker in his forties, idealistic and compassionate, he had spent almost a year teaching in the camp school and is adored by his pupils. Scores converge on him, cheering and laughing, as we walked for miles through various ‘zones’. I won’t even try to describe the surrounding landscape: never have I been anywhere lovelier. In November I hope to return to trek through the Mitumba mountains – and others.

One associates refugee camps with overcrowding and squalor but here the zones are well spread out, some on the valley floor, others on steep hillsides or high ridge-tops approached by lung-testing footpaths. Most mud-brick huts (nine metres by six) stand in small plots where maize and/or vegetables may be grown. A minimum of ten people must occupy each hut, even if a family numbers fewer. A ‘bloc’ is a group of nine huts under a responsable. A zone comprises twenty blocs under a controller. In overall control is the equivalent of the burgomaster of a Rwandan commune, who in this small camp is in fact an ex-burgomaster. We passed clinics, schools, churches, shops, shebeens, a ‘hair-stylist’ – all in mud huts – and dressmakers and tailors working by the wayside. On the highest hill American evangelicals have built a red-brick church: large, circular, brash. This permanent structure infuriates those who argue the whole camp should look ‘temporary’.

The orderliness of this ‘town’ both impressed and chilled me. I’ve red about these places being modelled on Rwanda’s communes – many refugees living with the same neighbours as before and taking orders from the same (genocidal) local authorities. This camp certainly contradicts the standard image of a great flood of panic-stricken wretches fleeing into a strange land where they suffer as uprooted people. It felt like a disciplined segment of Rwandan society successfully transplanted, at vast cost to the international community. Yet it didn’t seem to me a relaxed or contented segment. The small children clinging to Jeejee, and to me as his friend, were cheerful enough though filthy and malnourished; everyone else looked morose. And on all my walks with Jeejee (he discouraged me from walking alone) I saw numerous frightening faces – with killers’ eyes. I’ve seen similar faces elsewhere: in Croatia, in South Africa, in Northern Ireland. Not surprisingly, that camp contains a horrific number of men with such faces. Yet Jeejee remarked that it is reputed to be the calmest, safest (for ex-pats) and most tension-free of all Zaire’s camps; otherwise I wouldn’t have been invited to visit it.

After the culvert had been repaired, I watched a food-distribution. Again, all very orderly: people queuing with their ID cards, every name being entered in a ledger – so-and-so received such-and-such on 25 April. This immensely long queue was submissive, subdued – too silent. The four men in charge were hard-faced, powerful figures who habitually fiddle the books. It’s unlikely that that camp supports 29,000, and the ex-pats tacitly admit. Most Hutu refugee ‘community leaders’ inflate numbers, then sell the surplus rations and buy guns. Since the collapse of the USSR, cheap guns have been showered on Africa. The significance of that grisly economic fact is not sufficiently recognised.

I toured the rows of enormous hospital tents with Muriel, a nurse attached to this camp since its establishment and proud of its medical facilities – as well she might be. Last week I visited Bukavu’s main hospital and was shattered by its lack of facilitates: at present it is a hospital only in name. Medically, the refugees are privileged people, cared for by their own Hutu refugee doctors, surgeons, radiographers, physiotherapists. Zaireans, hearing about their super-hospital, naturally hope it will treat them too, at least in cases of serious illness. But unless they can pull powerful strings they are denied access, their children allowed to die at the hospital gate. This perhaps is inevitable; the UNHCR and its satellite aid agencies cannot be expected to cater for all local medical emergencies. But equally inevitably, the local people ask, ‘Why does the UN think Rwandan refugees are so much more deserving of help than we are?’

One morning I sat watching the sunrise in a little thatched ‘summer-house’ on the edge of the ex-pats’ compound – their verandah-substitute. Here an askari joined me; Jean is one of the few refugees who speaks fluent English and we had talked before. He comes from Kibuye, a town on the Rwandan shore of Lake Kivu where some of the worst genocidal atrocities took place. In June ’93 he graduated from a Kinshasa college as an hydraulics engineer but now has no hope of getting a suitable job, unless the UN need someone with his qualifications. I asked why he wouldn’t go home to a country desperately short of every sort of graduate. His reply revealed that he believes the camp leaders’ assertions abut returnees being killed by vengeful RPA soldiers. In all camps, this intimidating ‘warning’ campaign is relentlessly maintained.

At 7.00p.m. Jean turned his trannie in to a Kinyarwanda channel purporting to provide a news bulletin. As he translate, I realised this was virulent propaganda, a direct descendant of the infamous Radio Mille Collines (RMC) broadcasts during the pre-genocide period. It shocked me to find RMC brain-washing still in operation and effective – indirectly funded by you and me and the rest of the international community.

The camp’s ‘English Literature’ students expressed a wish to meet me. These seventeen middle-class refugees (eleven men, six women, all professionals over thirty) have evidently accepted that even if the ex-FAR troops one day ‘re-take’ Rwanda the English language – though hated by most Francophones – will be useful in the twenty-first century. On four evenings a week they meet to practise their spoken English in a tent furnished only with twenty camp-chairs – and lit that evening by a kerosene lamp, the generator being off sick. None looked like a refugee; all were well-dressed – the women elegant in a Gallic way – and obviously from affluent backgrounds.

Following Jeejee’s introduction everyone clapped loudly, crowded around to shake my hand and welcomed me with genuine friendliness. However, when I tried to switch the conversation from my travels to Rwanda’s tribulations the atmosphere became somewhat strained, though la politesse prevailed to the end.

My referring to the killer militia as the ‘interahamwe’ (in Kinyarwanda, ‘those who work together’) caused great offence. It is, everyone told me, ‘a derogatory and abusive term’. The protested even more strongly against the word ‘genocide’. What happened in Rwanda in ’94 was a war, they asserted, with killings on both sides. ‘Genocide’ should never be used unless proven to the satisfaction of an international tribunal. If proof exists, why have the leaders not been punished? I could see how, two years after the ‘war’, the UN’s failure to support, fund and supervise the work of the Arusha Tribunal has emboldened the guilty, making them feel the ‘culture of impunity’ will always protect them.

It was disconcerting, almost unreal, to be associating with people whom one knew to have been responsible, as commune leaders, for helping to implement the genocide. People at first apparently normal, affable, intelligently interested in me as I had been presented to them: an Irish travel writer. That is the most sinister aspect of the sort of people I met that evening. Doctors, school principals, lawyers, university lecturers – the authority figures who gave their imprimatur to the attempted extermination of all Tutsi. Tutsi who were often their patients, their pupils, their clients, their academic colleagues, sometimes even their relatives by marriage.

An emotive word, genocide – too often wrongly used, nowadays. Its dictionary meaning is unambiguous: ‘Deliberate extermination of a race, nation.’ Yet in ’94 confusion persisted for some time, while the massacres were taking place, about whether or not they fitted into this category. Naturally Rwanda’s ‘interim’ government put a lot of thought into fudging the issue but by new few deny that genocide happened. Plus the slaughtering of some 30,000 ‘moderate Hutu’ – certain politicians, and their supporters, who wished to see the Arusha Accords being made the basis for ‘a new Rwanda’ which would have disempowered the génocidaires.

I left the camp asking myself, ‘Why does UNHCR, in collaboration with various NGOs, continue to collude with the génocidaires, docilely playing their game?’ At a cost of US$2 million per diem … This is a political rather than a humanitarian crisis. Two million refugees became victims of the génocidaires, having been intimidated into leaving their homes by leaders who were looking ahead. As one (Jean Bosco Barayagwiza) boasted publicly, ‘Even if the RPF has won a military victory, it will not have the power. It has only the bullets, we have the population.’ Barayagwiza now lives in luxury in Goma, running one of the camps.

As early as August ’94 the UNHCR knew they were nurturing evil people. An official spokesman, Ray Willianson, admitted this (in November ’94 a UN report stated, ‘Former soldiers and militiamen have total control of the camps’) and General Dallaire of UNAMIR II was willing to try to separate the militias from their victims; he had no doubt these would then return home. However, he was opposed by the UNHCR commissioners, and by several major NGOs, and denied the necessary mandate. His proposed operation might have involved the deaths of some UN troops and that institution fears the effects of body-bags being seen coming home (to wherever) on CNN. William Shawcross, writing about the genocide, has angrily observed, ‘So often today, humanitarianism is a figleaf for political inaction.’ The UN is efficient only at disguising its own moral flaccidity by ‘doing good’ in a way that soothes uninformed, TV-prodded Western consciences. If it continues to dress in fig leaves, for how much longer can it claim to have even a shred of authority?

It’s unlikely you’d feel happy and fulfilled working amongst these refugees. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not, post-genocide, anti-Hutu, pro-Tutsi. That would be ridiculous, banal. Past Tutsi behaviour was outrageous, brutal, consistently demeaning of the Hutu. Although nothing justifies genocide, that past (both distant and recent) does explain why the organisers succeeded so dreadfully. Also, Rwanda’s peasants were/are peculiarly vulnerable to having their inherited, logical antagonisms manipulated. The structure of their society – in pre-colonial times, during the colonial, since independence – has been tightly authoritarian in a way atypical of Africa. That counted for much, after 6 April 1994. When told to kill, the peasants killed. When Authority sanctioned the slaughter of their neighbours, tens of thousands of them slaughtered their neighbours, accepting that their own survival demanded the extermination of Tutsi – not sparing the children, this time, as they did in 1959. Repeatedly they were reminded that thousands of those children had recently returned to Rwanda wearing RPA uniforms.

Everywhere aid workers are supposed to be politically neutral, helping all those in need and no questions asked. But maybe it’s time to revise that code? Have we not seen enough of where its abuse leads? In this respect, too, my camp visit was disquieting. The three ex-pats are admirable: innovative, resilient, dedicated – not escapists, like some of the younger generation of aid workers, or cynical passengers on the NGO gravy-train. Yet they are actively supporting a morally indefensible operation. Perhaps in such situations most ex-pats become ghettoized, their lives for the moment centred on the physical welfare of their charges, their horizons restricted to ‘humanitarian’ considerations. Obviously those three have a good relationship with the camp leaders; they seem to have no difficulty accepting the ‘war’ explanation – maybe they need to believe in it, for their own peace of mind? Or maybe they are genuinely ignorant of the background to this ‘humanitarian’ crisis. It is extremely complicated. I certainly wouldn’t understand any of it had Rachel and Andrew not been living and working in Rwanda in 1995. If solely dependent on media interpretations, I’d probably have pushed the tragedy aside as one more distant horror beyond my comprehension for lack of any reliable insights.

On 9 May I go home to Ireland, sustained by the prospect of returning to Kivu Province in November. My friends will certainly assume that this wish to revisit Bukaru is entirely Rose-inspired, another symptom of my personality change. A reasonable assumption, but false. Kivu Province pulls me as a traveller – forget grandmaternal urges. Rwanda, too, sounds like good trekking country; I may also spend some time there. But I hope to see you before then.

Your old friend,

Dervla.