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| Africa: Central |
| NGO’s and French Criticize Rwanda’s Success |
| 2003-09-22 |
| From al-Guardian, no less! Caught at Winds of Change EFL Western governments gave an extraordinarily grudging response to Kagame’s overwhelming victory. With a few exceptions, the donor community in Kigali and western NGOs criticise the government in notably similar terms as paranoid, controlling, anti-democratic, and even for being responsible for stoking the war in the east of the former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A UN report blamed Rwanda (among others) for looting the DRC’s wealth, but even some of those close to the report say none of the assertions was supported with any evidence. Kagame is cool about the criticisms: "It is because we want to do things our own way - they want to give lessons ... We just have to go on with our own business of changing lives here." The most notable of the enemies are the French, who have never forgiven Kagame for winning the war against the French-backed regime responsible for the genocide, and for thwarting the French military Operation Turquoise which occupied a swathe of western Rwanda trying to preserve its clients. Then in 1996 the Rwandese military attacked the refugee camps in eastern Zaire which were controlled by the genocidaires of 1994, where active military training for another genocide carried on under the noses of international organisations. More than a million peasants walked home and were resettled in an extraordinary feat of organisation for any country, never mind one so very poor. As Joe Katzman at WOC says: "Well. Doesn’t that just sum up the ’Toyota Taliban’ NGOs and the French in 2 neat paragraphs?" But around 370,000 soldiers of the former regime fled west through Zaire and regrouped in the surrounding countries. "We fought them on six fronts until they crossed the borders out of Zaire ... this is how we got sucked into DRC," says General James Kabarebe, who led the campaign that overthrew Mobutu in favour of Laurent Kabila, father of the current president. The Byzantine internal politics of Zaire/DRC soon ousted Kabarebe as chief of staff to Kabila and, in an astonishing twist, the genocidaires were brought from their refugee camps across the region and into Kinshasa’s army. Today, they are still players for the Kinshasa government in the DRC’s intense power struggle. Despite international mediation of a ceasefire, competing groups continue to fight for influence in the transitional government in Kinshasa, while the Congolese people are living a nightmare of economic collapse, massacres and rapes. Rwanda’s security, its ambitious steps towards normality, may be threatened by the instability of its neighbours. In an old political tradition of blaming the victim, many will continue to blame Rwanda for DRC’s violent trajectory. But up on the hills, peace may be being modestly built. A longer version of this article appears in The Nation www.thenation.com |
| Posted by:Frank G |
| #3 Certainly works better than what we did in Haiti. By this model Liberia should round up all the gunmen of the different warlords and expell them. Kind of sucks for the neighbors, though. Maybe the UN and NGO's can provide vocational training for the gunmen. Teach them wordworking or bead craft. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-9-22 4:08:30 PM |
| #2 I'd like to see it copied by the other 43 African nations. That, more than anything, would put the French in their place - i.e., Paris in the summertime... |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2003-9-22 3:13:09 PM |
| #1 "It is because we want to do things our own way - they want to give lessons ... We just have to go on with our own business of changing lives here." Why, that's so ... so .... democratic of them. No wonder the French are so upset! I hope this finds its way into the American press, but I'm not holding my breath. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2003-9-22 11:01:47 AM |