Exploring the Links in Central Africa’s Conflicts

Reading a couple of recent articles on the latest upsurge of the civil conlict in the Central Africa Republic (I understand if you hadn’t heard anything was happening there), and an interesting New York Times piece on the militarization of poaching in central Africa, led me to reflect once again on the fascinating interconnection that exists between the various armed groups across Sub-Saharan Africa. Here’s a quick, dirty and non-exhaustive glance.

CAR, Chad and the Sudans

We’ll start with the CAR, as it’s topical. The northern rebels (currently going by the trade name ‘Seleka’, which in a local language means ‘The Alliance’) are quite literally that- a hodge-podge of armed gangs, guns-for-hire, militia representing disenfranchised communities (mostly northern), and bolstered by rebels who have come into the north from their neighbour Chad.

Chad has been a breeding ground for militant activity for the better part of 20 years and longer. Current Strongman President Idriss Deby seized power in the early nineties, launching from his home base in the far reaches of eastern Chad (Bahai) on the Sudanese border. His ethnic Zagawa militia swept across the country in a series of bloody battles, the remnants (tanks, shells, landmines, technicals) of which are still scattered across the landscape today.

Deby’s rise to power was supported by armed groups within Sudan. His ethnic group- the Zagawa- are on both sides of the border, in eastern Chad and in Darfur, western Sudan, and his coup d’etat was backed by Khartoum. Various rebel groups sprung up as a result of his seizure of power- which was brutal both from a military perspective, and from the reprisals wrought on the civilian population.

From 2002, two major rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) became prominent in Darfur, fomenting an armed uprising against the Khartoum government. The Zagawa formed one of the prominent ethnic constituents of the rebellion, and Chad was implicated. Tensions with Khartoum quickly soured. Cross-border raids by the Khartoum-backed Janjawid militia took place into Chad. It became clear that rebel groups were using refugee camps in eastern Chad as an opportunity to rest, recuperate, and stage new attacks against government forces.

From 2005, a fresh impetus of rebellion against Deby began, with implications clear that the renewed support was coming from Khartoum, in response to Chadian support for Darfur rebel groups. Twice, once in 2006, and later in 2008, rebels (the same, or allied to those, as those now pushed into CAR) pushed all the way across the desert and showed up on the outskirts of N’djamena- where they were eventually supressed. In both instances, the government of Sudan was blamed. Interestingly, the attack was eerily similar to one carried out, also in 2008, by Darfur rebels, who pushed across the desert all the way to Omdurman, on the edge of Khartoum, before being overcome. Khartoum claimed the forces were essentially Chadian, and blamed N’djamena for arming the group. Tensions between the two countries remain tense.

The uprising in Darfur itself was a complex issue, based on similar complaints to those leveled by the southern Sudanese rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)- a combination of economic marginalization, Islamicization, the centralization of government control, and access to resource rights and profits. Indeed, the rebellion echoed that of the north-south civil war, quite literally: Throughout the history of the Darfur conflict, rebel activity has followed from gains and advances made in the peace deals with the southern rebels (now an independant state). Essentially seeing the SPLA’s rebellion as ‘successful’, they resorted to a similar model for their own resistance against Khartoum, and as gains were made by the SPLA at the negotiation table, so military pushes could be mapped by Darfur rebels, trying to get Khartoum’s attention and force concessions in their own deals.

As well as using conventional forces in both the Darfur and north-south civil war, Khartoum has always espoused using proxy forces- militia groups that it arms and supports, but with whom there is a measure of deniability- particularly when they terrorize the civilian populace with torture, killings and ethnic cleansing. The best-known of these groups is the Janjawid, horse-backed ‘Arab’ militia allegedly stocked by, among others, prisoners released by Khartoum. The Janjawid carried out indiscriminate killing of civilians and the burning of villages, essentially forcing up to 4 million people from their homes in Darfur between 2003 and 2005. However the use by Khartoum of Arab horsemen in subduing and slaughtering agrarian villagers was well documented during the 1983-2005 civil war as well (the Murahaleen). Various different proxy militias- including previously southern-allied armed groups enticed to break away from the SPLA- were employed by Khartoum. Likewise, the SPLA (itself a fragile agglomeration of warlords and their private armies) employed similar tactics on northern soil.

The SPLA itself received backing from external sources. More strongly identified with East Africa than with the north African/Arab culture associated with Khartoum, the south Sudanese at the time found natural allies in Kenya and, notably, Uganda. Both nations hosted large refugee camps of southern Sudanese, who eventually formed an influential diaspora in those nations. This quiet support was further strengthened by Cold War politics. NATO interests in Sudan’s oil reserves (at the heart of the civil war) had it come down on the side of the south, and backing was funneled via the former British colonies of Kenya and Uganda, both of which helpfully became bases for the large western-funded aid operation as well.

Museveni, Bashir, Garang, Kagame and Kony

While Uganda was providing a channel of support to the SPLA, Khartoum’s response was to engage with its well-established tactic of using proxy militias. The technique depends on identifying existing divides within the target community, and exploiting those accordingly. In Uganda, an obvious candidate was a northern-based and highly disgruntled Acholi rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which would come to be led by a sociopath called Joseph Kony and become infamous for its use of child soldiers, and horrendous crimes against civilians. Over the years, Khartoum’s backing of the LRA became common- if scantily-proven- knowledge. In doing so, Khartoum kept Museveni’s forces and military investment wrapped up at home, reducing the extent to which Uganda was free to invest in creating an ally on its northern borders in the SPLA. The LRA remained a major destabilizing force in northern Uganda from the early eighties and into the first half of the first decade of the new millenium- eerily echoing the timescale of the Sudanese civil war. Since 2005, they have been vastly reduced in capacity and influence, carrying out few attacks (despite an over-the-top web campaign suggesting the contrary), and pushed variously into pockets of South Sudan (where they were enemies of the SPLA), DRC and, now, CAR, where they are being hunted by a contingent of Ugandan troops and US Special Forces.

The links between Uganda’s Museveni and the SPLA’s Garang are well established- Garang died flying in one of Museveni’s helicopters after returning from a meeting in Uganda, the purpose of which is still unknown. While Museveni was providing backing to the SPLA, he was also supporting another regional warlord (who would one day also become President of his nation), Paul Kagame. Kagame, inspired by Museveni’s first insurgent campaign against Idi Amin, joined Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) in 1981, and fought alongside him in that second insurgency against Milton Obote. For a time, the Rwandan refugee served in Museveni’s government as head of military intelligence, before taking the leadership of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group that prior to 1994 launched a long, violent and militarily highly successful insurgency campaign against the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government. The RPF had bases in southern Uganda, and received backing from the Ugandan government. Both Kagame and Garang studied at US military institutions during periods of their respective exiles, and Kagame also received intelligence training in Tanzania.

Hutus, Tutsis and Africa’s World War

The RPF’s campaign- which included massacres of Hutu civilians that remain under-acknowledged to this day- kicked into overdrive following the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and the subsequent slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus that followed over the subsequent 100 days. A strong military force, their overthrow of the Hutu military establishment is lauded as a spectacular acheivement- indeed there are allegations that were it not for French intervention on behalf of the former Rwandan government, the RPF would have taken Rwanda in the years preceeding the 1994 genocide. Regardless, Kagame’s RPF did eventually take control of the country, and Kagame remains President to this day.

The fallout of the RPF victory was the flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hutus, among whom were the genocidaires- the architects and footsoldiers of the massacres. These fled into eastern DRC, into camps and into the jungles and villages. While the violence between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda had largely come to a close, it continued in various guises in eastern DRC, and does-so to this day, between various splintered militia groups. These groups generally share alliances that can be broadly categorized as pro-Hutu or pro-Tutsi (although names and divisions shift as you cross the border) in a highly complex and shifting patchwork of old allegiences and new grievances.

The most far-reaching consequence of the Rwandan civil war for the DRC showcased the phrase ‘when Rwanda sneezes, Congo catches a cold’. Laurent Kabila, a pro-Tutsi rebel fighter who cut his teeth following Congolese liberation in the 1960s, re-emerged in 1996 to front the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL), an overtly Uganda-, Rwanda- and Burundi-backed group that would eventually force despot Mobutu into exile and lead to Kabila’s presidency from 1997.

In all of this, it’s quite interesting to note that Kabila, Kagame and Garang all had close relationships with Museveni, who faciliated relationships between the men. Also interestingly, during his own rebellion to seize control of Uganda in the mid-80s, Museveni had actually approached Mobutu for military assistance, but Mobutu had been training troops loyal to the then-government of Uganda, which would go some way to explaining Museveni’s eagerness to support anti-Mobutu forces in DRC.

Nowhere was this interplay between various central African forces demonstrated- and with remarkably low profile- than during the Second Congo War. Dubbed ‘Africa’s World War’, it involved the overt engagement of no less than seven African nations. Following the initial installation of Kabila on the back of a Tutsi-allied army, backed by Rwandan, Burundian and Ugandan forces during 1996-7, their heavy presence in DRC subsequently forced Kabila to request their withdrawl or look like a Kagame puppet (not an unreasonable concern). Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian forces piggybacked a Tutsi revolt in north-eastern DRC (Goma) in 1998, aiming to unseat Kabila (and no doubt install a more acquiescent puppet), and would likely have been successful were it not for the direct involvement of Chadian, Angolan, Zimbabwean and Namibian troops. Libya and Sudan were both indirectly supportive of the Kabila government as well- Sudan did not engage directly, but did continue to fund its proxy militias to worry Uganda, including the LRA. (Interestingly, the support of the Angolan government came as a result of Mobutu’s backing of the UNITA rebels during that country’s nasty civil war; the government victors were keen to repay the debt by ensuring that Mobutu stayed out).

The fallout of this interplay of regional actors continues to this day, with north-eastern Congo becoming something of a lush, mineral-rich carcass over which a patchwork of militias fought- and continue to fight. During the Congo conflict, Ituri and Kivus North and South played host to an orchestra of militia on both sides of the conflict, including the anti-Rwandan militias the FDLR, the Mai Mai, the RDR and the ALiR, as well as the remnants of the genocidal Interahamwe and other Hutu groups. Allied to them were anti-Burundian groups CNDD and FROLINA. On the other side of the coin were the pro-Rwandan groups the RCD and RCD-GOMA, the ethnically Tutsi Banyamulenge, and the pro-Ugandan militias MLC, UPC and other pro-Tutsi groups. Since that time, this murderous alphabet soup has aligned, split, rebelled, splintered and reformed into a variety of coagulating movements, all squabbling for a piece of the eDRC pie. Most recently, the takeover of Goma by the M23 rebel group (with ostensible backing from both Rwanda and Uganda) signifies that this regionally-interwoven conflict is by no means over. The tension for Joseph Kabila, who replaced his father after Laurent’s assassination, is that the regime he inherited was essentially installed by a pro-Tutsi coalition which expected to dominate the subsequent political landscape. By rejecting this, both Kabilas find themselves fighting against the very group that put them in power. Meanwhile, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict that reached such a bloody crescendo in 1994 in Rwanda has merely been exported a few dozen miles over the border into what is in effect a disputed territory, irrespective of lines on the map (and with horrendous consequences for the population; the 800,000 who lost their lives in the 1994 genocide have had as many as two and a half million added to their number from the forests of DRC since then).

I’m not even going to try to list the latest iteration of rebel groups and their alliances in east DRC currently.

The oft-forgotten child of the Great Lakes region, Burundi, is no less intertwined with regional conflicts. Stepping back a decade or two, it is riven by the same Tutsi-Hutu divide that Rwanda and east DRC are, and was a little-mentioned but insperable part of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Indeed, new Burundian President and ethnic Hutu Cyprien Ntaryamira was in Habyarimana’s plane the night it was shot down, and died alongside his Rwandan counterpart. Tit-for-tat ethnic killings between Tutsis and Hutus, which had been ongoing for decades, reaching a crescendo in 1993 when Ntaryamira’s predecessor Ndadaye (a Hutu) was assassinated by disgruntled Tutsi soldiers- preceeding both the Ntaryamira/Habyarimana assassination and the Rwandan genocide. Indeed the Tutsi-Hutu killings in Burundi in the lead up to May 1994 provided fuel to the genocidal fire, and the presence of Burundian Tutsi refugees in large numbers in southern Rwanda proved to be a destabilizing (and fear-evoking) influence that leant credence to the genocidaire case, as well as proving a ripe recruiting ground for Kagame’s RPF.

Conflict in the Horn

A pivotal nation less directly implicated in its neighbour’s conflicts, but none the less indirectly involved, is Kenya. At the time of its engagement in southern Somalia in 2011, its claim was that it had never before fielded its army (a claim to which some truth was subsequently demonstrated in its fairly inept tactical handling of the fight with al Shabaab). Be that as it may, Kenya has repeatedly played host to war-embroiled diaspora. Sudanese refugees in camps in northern Kenya became a recruiting ground for the SPLA to which Kenyan authorities turned a blind eye, and Kenya became a safe-haven for SPLA leadership at points along the way. Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the mammoth relief operation funded by the UN and largely western nations (many of whom interestingly enough also had economic stakes in South Sudan) was also run out of Kenya, from the pokey northern airhead of Lokichoggio, and it, as much as any foreign arms transfers, holds much of the credit for prolonging the war and forcing Khartoum to the negotiating table which saw South Sudan win its independence.

Kenya also provided the home for the Somali Government in Exile, which has been based in Nairobi for most of the period since the fall of Siad Biarre in 1991. This, combined with a growing and restive Somali diaspora in Kenya, fears of a porous border, and alleged support, by Somali militants, for Islamic militants within Kenya, resulted in Kenya’s ill-advised military intervention in southern Somalia (‘Jubaland’) against al Shabaab- the fundamentalist group in tacit control of most of southern Somalia at the time.

Over the years, a number of different forces have been involved in the war against the various iterations of Somali Islamic militant groups, with Kenya the most recent addition. Uganda and Burundi have both provided substantial troop numbers (and suffered casualties), but the key player in the conflict has been Ethiopia, whose government essentially used the chaos in Somalia to justify a military invasion to bolster their own porous border, establish a buffer-zone, and weaken home-grown Islamic militant groups in Ogaden and Somali Region (Ethiopia and Somalia- both highly distinct nations with strong historical identity- have a long history of border conflict, and Somalia launched an invasion of Ethiopia as recently as the late 1970s).

A nation that allegedly provides support for al Shabaab is Eritrea, which recently faced sanctions for its involvement in moving Shabaab finances. Eritrea is possibly operating on the principle of ‘The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend’. Eritrea fought a bloody war with Ethiopia in which it gained its independence from that nation- after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) initially supported the overthrow of the communist Mengistu regime in 1991 alongside Meles Zenawi’s Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) as part of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Indeed Isaias Aferwerki, subsequently President of Eritrea and leader of the civil war, was one of the EPRDF’s co-leaders alongside Zenawi.

As well as Eritrea and Somalia, the other regional actors the EPRDF has relationships with are Sudan and South Sudan. Initially, the EPRDF was supported by Khartoum as it overthrew the Derg regime- perhaps because Mengistu was allowing the SPLA to use the refugee camps along Ethiopia’s western border as bases for R&R and recruitment for its troops. Upon seizing the area, the EPRDF emptied the camps and forced tens of thousands of southern refugees back into Sudan. This changed, however, upon consolidation of power, and by 1995, Ethiopia and Eritrea both had troops in South Sudan in support of the SPLA. To this day, Ethiopia continues to provide support to rebels fighting the Khartoum government, allowing an SPLA presence around refugee camps in the west, where recruitment of militia fighters operating in Blue Nile state continues. One of Ethiopia’s primary interests- and the source of conflict with Khartoum- is over control of the Blue Nile’s water resources. The Blue Nile provides roughly 90% of the Nile’s overall flow, rising in Ethiopian territory, and Ethiopia is in the process of constructing a massive hydroelectric power station (the Renaissance Dam) close to the Sudanese border- a move that has heightened tensions between Ethiopia, and Sudan and Egypt downstream.

Libya, the Sahel, and Transnational Islamicism

The other lynchpin tying many of sub-Saharan Africa’s conflicts together is- or was- Moammar Ghaddafi. With his view of a Pan-Saharan Islamic Caliphate, Ghaddafi poured billions of dollars in aid money into propping up friendly regimes- including (but not limited to) Sudan’s Bashir, Chad’s Deby, Niger’s Tanja and Mali’s Toure. Indeed, at the time of the Libyan civil war and Ghaddafi’s death, mercenaries from Mali, Chad and Niger were all present fighting on behalf of the soon-to-be-late dictator, and upon the failure of the regime, flooded back home to their respective countries. This influx of arms created rapid destabilization, increasing security concerns in Niger and Mali particularly, although both Chad and Mauritania have also had coup scares since Ghaddafi’s death. The fall of the Libyan regime is argued as one of the factors in the insurgency that has split Mali in half, which the French have just launched military action in response to, pre-empting a planned ECOWAS intervention.

The loose coalition of Tuareg and Islamist militias that annexed northern Mali to form their state of Awazad is itself a regional conglomeration. Tuaregs exist across the Sahara region, with the bulk of their territory in northern Mali, Niger and Mauritania, and southern Algeria, but with significant populations and ties in Morocco, Chad, Libya and links throughout West Africa and even to the Bedouin of the Middle East. The strong cross-border ties ensure that the Mali conflict has direct repurcussions for stability in both Mauritania and Niger. Meanwhile, Islamist groups, particularly AQIM and its offshoots, also operate across the Sahara region. Originally born out of the Algeria conflict of the 1990s and the insurgent groups that rose to oppose the government, they now have operational reach in Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Algeria and Libya and beyond, in a complex presence that is part insurgency, part fundamentalist terrorism, and part criminality.

While long rumoured, the conflict in Mali also led to renewed claims of a partnership between AQIM and its partners, and the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, fighting a domestic insurgency in Nigeria to create a Sharia-based state in the north of that nation. Reports that Boko Haram fighters were supporting operations in Gao provided some confirmation that Boko Haram and AQIM share resources and information in their mutual jihads. Boko Haram has also publically announced its ties to Somalia’s al Shabaab, which in turn is networked to militant Islamic groups in Kenya and Uganda, as well as to global fundamentalist groups outside the African continent.

The below map is a rough and only partial representation of some of the relationships described above- more to visually demonstrate linkages across geography than to provide accurate detail. You’ll need to click on it to view large enough to read properly.

Note that you could carry out a similar analysis on a much smaller scale in any one of the individual conflict-zones, such as Darfur, east DRC or Sudan/South Sudan- which details I have not gone into here.

Strongman Politics, Statehood and Postcolonial Identity

The incredible array of cross-border interactions and networks that embody conflict in sub-Saharan Africa is hardly surprising. A relatively small number of individuals have a very extensive impact on conflict. Museveni supported Garang in his fight against Bashir, who in return funded the LRA in Uganda against Museveni. Museveni equally fought alongside Kagame in Uganda’s domestic conflicts, and so supported his former compatriot in Kagame’s own struggles, first in Rwanda, and subsequently in DRC. Kagame and Museveni together installed Kabila, who then rejected their influence, creating a new conflict. Meanwhile Bashir, as well as fighting Garang in the south, initially supported both Deby and Zenawi in their respective rebellions, but finding himself at odds with both, after Deby invested in the Darfur conflict to shore up his borders, and Zenawi took sides with Garang. Zenawi found himself at odds with Afewerki, and also took the opportunity to secure his borders with Somalia, taking on al Shabaab in the process. Meanwhile, Ghaddafi’s influence provided some facade of stability to several sub-Saharan nations, supporting Bashir, Deby, Tandja and Toure, and with his death, all four nations have experienced an increase in instability.

The concept of the Strongman has a dominant presence in the politics of most sub-Saharan African states. The cultural context is often described as embodying a ‘power/fear’ paradigm (contrasted with the notion of ‘guilt/innocence’ that is commonplace in most European cultures, or ‘honour/shame’ that is found across the Middle East and much of Asia). The development of society for many centuries has in many parts of the region revolved around a single strong leader who takes responsibility variously for family, clan and tribal groups, and this has translated into state-level politics.

The colonial division and subsequent post-colonial devolvement of sub-Saharan African politics and identity is both a part of the problem, and goes a long way to explaining this highly integrated conflict dynamic. State borders are lines drawn on a map by colonial surveyors and clashing European powers. They cut across traditional boundaries, creating situations (as in Rwanda/DRC, for just one of many examples) where ethnic groups are subsequently split by an arbitrary international boundary. Thus war on one side of the boundary naturally spills across the other. Alliances between self-identifying ethnic groups are far stronger than those to nation-state governments in many cases, resulting in the mutli-national involvement so often seen.

Indeed the very nature of ethnic identity in sub-Saharan Africa is problematic. In part it is a construct of the colonial period, where the notion of ‘divide and conquer’ was used to administer restive provinces. People-groups were identified and given artificial containment (see tribal groups in Kenya under the British, and Hutu/Tutsi identity as reinforced by the Belgians). Divisions that were malleable and interchangeable at best prior to colonial rule became reinforced in order to create some kind of order. Where once, ethnic identity could be redefined according to marriage or economic status, it had now become something linked to birthright, some genetic trait unchangeable and therefore open to exploitation. Thus have been born many of Africa’s post-colonial conflicts.

This post is by no means an exhaustive list of alliances. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the dizzying acronym maelstrom that identifies the various players in today’s war-zones, never mind those of the last thirty years. In 2007 there were nearly 30 armed groups operating in Darfur alone- many with ties to other groups in other parts of Sudan, South Sudan, Chad and CAR. A similar number of militia groups existed in South Sudan at the birth of its statehood- most of which were subsumed into the new South Sudanese armed forces, but which retain discrete identities within that force, ready to break out should their agendas be compromised. Then there are the proxy militias on both sides of the north-south Border, the various disgruntled insurgency groups within Ethiopia who claim ties to various other disgruntlecies across the region, and the veritable sea of militias, proto-militias, startup-militias and mom-and-pop militias in the jungles of DRC.

To name a few.

Without wishing to turn something with terrible and far-reaching consequences into an academic whimsy, I have long found the interaction between the various conflicts (and their masterminds) in sub-Saharan Africa fascinating, and it’s been interesting mapping them out for this little exercise. What I hope it demonstrates is the extreme complexity in understanding conflict in Africa; the need for careful analysis, both in terms of motivation and in terms of stakeholders involved; a greater appreciation for the diversity that this continent (or rather, the particular chunk of it reflected in this post) exhibits; and hopefully, a nuanced understanding that conflict in ‘Africa’ doesn’t just happen because it’s the ‘dark continent’- or any one of the newer myriad of tropes the media unconciously trots out when it covers ‘yet another’ African war. Rather, as with any conflict, there is a highly intricate set of circumstances, histories, identities, motivations and participants that coalesce to give a particular event at a particular point in time.

A disclaimer: This post doesn’t address any of the complex linkages to forces outside the African continent, such as politics of the Cold War during the 80s, or subsequently, the newer dynamics of neocolonialist power-games and players, such as China’s economic imperialism, or the US and its allies in their ongoing investment as part of the ‘Global War on Terror’- all highly complex networks that fuel conflict. Likewise I haven’t touched on the dynamics of post-independence conflict in southern Africa, which reverberate up into DRC, ROC and elsewhere, or the conflicts in West Africa, such as the nexus between Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Conakry (with destabilizing influences into Burkina, Ghana, Niger, Mali and elsewhere). And I’ve barely referenced the Arab Spring that ties all North African nations together, including tying in to Bashir’s Khartoum, and weakening that regime’s position vis-a-vis its ability even to manage its southern ‘problem’. Here, I’ve just focused on the central/east regions of the continent, but maybe sometime I’ll expand broader.

Also, apologies again for the lack of URLs in this post. There are HEAPS of sources I pulled drawing this together, gradually over several weeks of reading and pondering, but my internet connectivity out here is poor and going back to catalogue them all has been impossible. If I get a chance to update this again in the future, I’ll see what I can do to fix that.

Finally- I’m pretty sure that Kenya was substantially implicated in supporting Kagame and the RPF on some level during the early 90s, but I couldn’t dig up any sources that explicitly outlined this relationship. If you come across anything, please could you post a link/source/theory in the comments below- thanks!

-MA

9 Events that have Shaped the Humanitarian Industry

The humanitarian industry is a relatively new one in its current form. This makes it an interesting, frequently exciting one to be involved with, as it’s constantly changing. This can be a challenge, too.

I like to joke that the earliest disaster preparedness and response on record is Noah’s Ark. Then of course there’s the story of Joseph (he of Technicolour Dreamcoat ™ fame), who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams of skinny cattle devouring fat cattle as an impending famine and subsequently requisitioned harvest surplus which he then redistributed to the hungry when said famine eventuated.

Humanitarianism as we know it today has, for better or for worse, become an industry, and has developed quickly from a relatively fringe activity best left to hippies and missionaries, to a multi-billion-dollar a year sector attracting a wide range of skilled and experienced professionals. It’s unique, dynamic and, certainly from an insider’s perspective, fascinating. But the way things look today haven’t popped out of nowhere. Over the last century and a half, the humanitarian industry has been shaped by a number of key events and moments that have given rise to its current dynamics.

1. The Battle of Solferino (June 24th 1859)

At the height of the Austro-Sardinian war, a Swiss businessman by the name of Jean-Henri Dunant travelled to the small Italian town of Solferino, where he witnessed the aftermath of a battle that left forty thousands dead and wounded. So struck was he by the plight of the casualties, many of whom were abandoned and left to die, or executed by the enemy, that he forewent his business plans and spent the ensuing days helping to organize medical care for the survivors.

The experience so moved him that upon returning to Geneva, he wrote up his memories, recommending the establishment of a movement of trained and neutral volunteers who could administer medical aid to the casualties of battle, and treaties offering such people protection. His recommendations became the foundation for what was to become the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as the first Geneva Conventions.

The Committee’s proposals, initially signed and endorsed by 12 nations in 1864, recognized the need for national committees of volunteers to provide medical assistance on the battlefield, but also enshrined the neutrality of wounded soldiers. The agreed international symbol, as laid out by the signed agreements, was a red cross on a white field- the inversion of the Swiss flag, itself a symbol of neutrality.

This notion of neutrality, and of non-combattants offering non-partisan support to the injured victims of warfare, became the founding tenet of modern humanitarian organizations, and the ICRC continues to this day to occupy a unique status under International Humanitarian Law and within the rules of warfighting. The Red Cross Code of Conduct forms the guiding set of 10 principles that most major NGOs voluntarily adopt as their core values, particularly enshrining the primacy of the humanitarian imperative, neutrality and impartiality.

2. The Aftermath of World War II and the Marshall Plan (1945, 1948-51)

Following the victory of the allied forces first in the European theatre, and subsequently in Asia, most of Europe in 1945 had been devastated. The extent of destruction caused by warfare and bombardment, the loss of millions of men at the peak of their economic productivity, and the diversion of years’ worth of resources into the machinery of war, meant that both society and economy across the continent was decimated.

Conversely, because it had stimulated its economy through the production of wartime assets without suffering any destruction of its mainland infrastructure, the USA had become the first country in history to economically thrive under conditions of warfare (a dynamic that has echoes today in how the economy operates while America is at war). In order to shore up its wartime allies, to assist with the vast humanitarian needs of post-war Europe, and no doubt to maintain the health of its key trading partners, Harry Truman’s government put together an economic recovery package of unprecedented proportions. It would see some USD 13 billion invested across western Europe.

Whether due to the plan itself, or due to the simple mechanics of post-war recovery, industrial output did increase substantially during the plan’s lifetime, and was deemed in many corners to have been a great success. The Marshall Plan laid out a framework for international foreign assistance that became increasingly the norm, with large bilateral or multilateral grants or loans provided to countries with struggling economies in order to lift their productivity and stability.

As well as normalizing the concept of foreign assistance on such a large scale, another interesting side-effect of such a large humanitarian crisis was the need to have capacity to deliver support, and so the US government agreed to allow private charitable organizations provide emergency relief to war survivors. Although the charity was not a new concept, this gave new impetus to non-governmental relief agencies, and many of today’s largest NGOs appeared around this time. CARE, which is an acronym for “Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere”, in fact originally stood for “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe”.

A third impact of the end of the Second World War was of course the founding of the United Nations (UN), to replace the defunct League of Nations that had failed so miserably to prevent World War II in the first place. This occured in 1945. As well as spawning a host of international agreements on everything from trade to human rights, the UN also gave birth to a spread of sub-organizations with specific mandates. Among the most pressing in the post-war years was the plight of the tens of millions of refugees forced from their home in the fighting- and thus was born the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1947, which three years later became the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the most dynamic and critical international organizations in the humanitarian field today.

3. The Biafran Airlift (1967-70)

In 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria following a series of coups, counter-coups and ethnic killings, and the ethnic Igbo in the south of the country declared their own homeland, the state of Biafra. The Nigerian government responded by blockading Biafra, and a humanitarian crisis resulted, with millions of civilians caught up without food and medical supplies.

In response, a huge humanitarian operation was launched, and a mix of well-meaning volunteers and mercenaries, funded by charity organizations, began flying food and medical supplies into Biafra. The mission was fraught with danger- the Nigerian airforce would shoot down any relief flights claiming (most likely accurately) that weapons were being smuggled to the resistance. Flights were flown in at night, without lights, and landings orchestrated on roads in the bush where supplies could then be delivered to starving civilians.

By war’s end as many as three million people may have died, mostly due to a mixture of starvation and disease. The involvement of humanitarian actors, however, has subsequently been condemned. Not only did the relief flights facilitate the smuggling of weapons to the Biafran rebels, but some critics claimed that the relief assistance merely gave the Biafrans the resolve to hold out longer, exacerbating the humanitarian situation rather than surrendering and allowing the seige to end. One report put the toll due to humanitarian action at 180,000 dead. This was the largest and most high-profile instance to that point of humanitarian intervention being arguably partisan, and also contributing significant harm, not just good.

Another important cameo played out in the Biafran civil war. Red Cross workers were allowed to work in the war-affected areas to provide medical assistance, but under the guise of neutrality were not allowed to speak about what they were seeing. Witnessing atrocities against civilians committed by government forces, as well as attacks against humanitarian staff, this enraged some of the volunteers. Most prominent among these was Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, who felt strongly that the Red Cross’s stance on neutrality was an ethical compromise. He determined to establish an organization that was free of any government influence and could speak out on behalf of those affected by crisis, and the NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was born. MSF remains one of the foremost NGOs to this day, and is fiercely independant and proud (to a fault…?) of its independence from government, military and even international organizational influence. The actions of Kouchner and his peers also set a precedent for relief agencies advocating on behalf of the rights of the victims of conflict and injustice, not simply being silent responders.

Biafra introduced a whole new complexity to the idea of ‘neutral’ aid agencies on several fronts.

4. The Ethiopia Famine (1983-5) and Live Aid (1985)

From 1983, a combination of failed rains, civil warfare and the purges and collectivist policies of a communist dictatorship had pushed Ethiopia into one of the worst famines of the 20th century. By its end, 8 million people would be affected by famine, with between 500,000 and one million deaths. Images of its victims, made famous by BBC reporter Michael Buerke’s dispatches from the field, were broadcast onto TV screens across the western world, making the Ethiopian famine the first to really be witnessed by a western audience.

Galvanized by public sympathy, a group of some of the most popular musicians of the day joined together, led by the enthusiastic Bob Geldof, to form Band Aid. They recording a song to raise funds for Ethiopian famine victims, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ which became a Christmas Number One in the UK charts in late 1984. In 1985, Geldof again coordinated efforts for a fundraising concert, held simultaneously in the UK and the US, which ultimately garnered an audience of a little under 2 billion people worldwide and raised an estimated $150 million.

The Ethiopian famine and the subsequent fundraising efforts marked a watershed moment in the history of aid fundraising. Large amounts of fundraising money were no longer just the domain of governments, nor were charities restricted to small pockets of whatever they could raise through collection baskets and faithful donors. Furthermore, the idea of a world out there- the third world- experiencing hardship was suddenly projected into peoples’ homes and made a part of their day-to-day consciousness. Since that time, people- particularly in the west- have remained aware of third world disasters. It is part of the collective experience and expectation that there is a poor world out there that suffers things that people in the west do not tend to.

On the up side, this has made the job of convincing people of the need to give easier. There is also a downside. Since Live Aid and many of the confronting images that were broadcast to shock people into giving, people have slowly become increasingly desensitized to images of suffering. The awareness-raising and media campaigns for the Ethiopia famine also represented the major incursion of shocking images into the public space, to the detriment of the dignity of survivors which has taken years to break down (and is still a challenge in some sectors).

5. The Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2004) and Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS)

The civil war between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) ultimately resulted in two million deaths and four million refugees. Africa’s longest-running civil war, and possibly the most destructive, it too resulted in devastating images of famine as population groups were forced from their homes to settle in large, unsanitary camps where food supplies were precarious and disease rampant.

The international community established Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a consortium of UN agencies and three dozen NGOs, in 1989, with the aim of delivering assistance to the mainly southern displaced people in camps both within and outside Sudan itself. A logistics airhead was set up in the small Turkana town of Lokichoggio, in Kenya, from which a vast operation of airdrops and relief deliveries was flown into Sudan. At the height of operations, Loki was the second busiest airport in Africa. OLS remains functional today, although not to the extent it was through the 1990s.

The civil war in Sudan was in part a proxy of the Cold War, and as such western allegiences found themselves favouring the southern rebels, both in terms of ideology and in terms of potential access to oil and mineral revenues in the long run. This was reflected in the huge amounts of funding that were invested in OLS, enabling such a massive aerial logistics operation. The offshoot of this was the explosion in budget of many of the NGOs party to OLS, catapulting some of them into the massive organizations they are today.

OLS also became an unwitting party to the conflict. Food aid became a weapon in the war on the ground, and was used to tactical advantage by both sides. By feeding humanitarian information to OLS, belligerents could influence where food drops were headed, and because populations would move to where the food was, they could thus influence the movement of people to their advantage in the field. It was an ugly ploy that cost the lives of thousands.

OLS’ involvement in the Sudanese civil war was a turning point in the humanitarian industry. As it became clear that the impact of food aid was having a detrimental effect on the people it was supposed to be helping, it began to become clear to the aid industry as a whole that they could no longer act out of the right motivations and still be operating with a clear conscience. The aid industry could no longer feign innocence- it was clearly becoming complicit in the conflict- and nowhere has this been more obviously demonstrated than in the Sudan civil war, and the ultimate secession of South Sudan as a state. With the humanitarian sector essentially propping up the southern government- even to this day- there is little doubt that South Sudan is a state that was created by the intervention of humanitarian actors. I have not seen any studies that suggest what the humanitarian impact might have been without OLS intervention, but I wonder whether the war would have lasted as long or cost as many lives, and I am utterly convinced that, for better or for worse, South Sudan would not be a state today.

The high profile of OLS, particularly the drama of large-scale airdrops, also had the unfortunate side-effect of cementing in the donor public’s mind that this was what aid was about- truck-and-chuck. It’s an assumption that twenty years on, the aid industry still struggles to re-educate the public about, making it hard to raise funds for other less appealing but often far more relevant issues such as human rights, advocacy and institutional capacity-building.

6. The Rwandan Genocide (April-July 1994)

During a hundred day period in mid-1994, Hutu extremists slaughtered over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a calculated, cruel campaign of extermination. Based on old ethnic tensions, a history of tit-for-tat killing sprees, a hate-fueled propaganda message, and the meddling and inaction of international powers, the Rwandan genocide remains one of the darkest stains on the concience of modern history.

The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, at the time a rebel army, swept across Rwanda and eventually brought the killing of Tutsis to something of a denouement. The Hutu extremists, together with nearly two million ethnic Hutus, fled ahead of the advancing front and found themselves in dire camps on the rocky lava flows of eastern Zaire. Unable to dig pit latrines, and living in deplorable conditions, cholera broke out and killed tens of thousands of the refugees in a matter of weeks.

While the international community had stalled and stalled again during the genocide, images of Africans dying by the thousands on TV screens now galvanized them to action, and millions of dollars worth of aid was flown into the Hutu camps around Goma- while survivors of the genocide were still receiving scant attention. As dollars flowed into the camps, the orchestrators of the genocide and their militias consolidated control over the population (and the aid resources), preventing the return of Hutus into Rwanda to begin a reconciliation process, and even launching attacks back into Rwanda (which the newly-installed Rwandan government returned with gusto). Eighteen years on, fighting continues to plague the forests of eastern DRC (as Zaire has since been renamed), with vicious slaughter of civilians and proliferation of horrific rape a daily occurence, while old scores are settled by both sides. The invasion of Goma by the Tutsi-backed M23 rebel group this week is the latest chapter in this story.

The failure of the international community to act to stop the genocide (something that could have been done with the right political will), and then the subsequent outpouring of international sympathy and support to the very purpotrators of that genocide- all in the name of impartiality and the primacy of the humanitarian imperative- remains the blackest spot on the history of the aid community. The concepts of neutrality, impartiality and humanitarian imperative all took a beating, and where at one time they might have been considered black-and-white standards, since Rwanda there has been a new appreciation for the shades of grey they embody.

The Rwandan genocide was one of three humanitarian interventions that went horribly wrong in the early 90s- the others being Somalia (1993) and the former Yugoslavia (1992-95). In the former, aid was appropriated by warlords and used as a weapon against a suffering populace, ultimately leading to a catastrophic peace-enforcing intervention. In the latter, UN forces with a sketchy mandate struggled to make sense of the deep-seated hatred of the belligerents, their biggest failure being the murder of 8,000 men and boys by Serb extremists in the beseiged muslim enclave of Srebrenica- even while a battalion of dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing.

The aftermath of these failed interventions gave rise to a whole new understanding of the complexity of aid and the potential for humanitarian assistance to be outright unethical. Approaches such as Do No Harm, which are mainstream today, were birthed from the Goma debacle, while standards such as the Sphere Project arose, in part to try and ensure that humanitarian actors were singing from the same songsheet and not tripping over each others’ toes.

In addition, the highly complex nature of operations following Rwanda began to make it clear that aid work was no longer just about well-meaning do-gooders with a social conscience. Humanitarian actors needed to be able to work within the highly complex contexts which aid found itself being delivered in- to be able to work both with the technical aspects, and also the political ones. Where up to and throughout the 1980s it was generally enough to have a heartbeat and a willingness to work in the field, the fallout from Rwanda, Somalia and Yugoslavia saw a push towards the ever-increasing professionalisation of the aid sector.

Ultimately, Rwanda served as a deeply humbling experience for the humanitarian industry. If nothing else, it robbed the industry of the moral high ground, and forced it to accept its place as a player within a political landscape, often to the detriment of the people it purports to support. No event before or since has communicated this message so clearly.

7. The Bombing of the Canal Hotel (August 19th 2003)

Following the September 11 attacks on US soil, the United States led a ‘coalition of the willing’ against alleged terrorist targets, first in Afghanistan from late 2001, and subsequently in Iraq from early 2003. While the aerial assaults and troop incursions quickly broke the conventional forces of both nations (where they existed), the result was a bitter and drawn-out insurgency overlaid on a highly complex set of tribal and sectarian divisions that has turned both nations into two of the most unstable places on earth today.

As coalition forces swept through different parts of each country, the UN and NGOs flooded in behind them to pick up the pieces- providing humanitarian assistance to areas that had been difficult for them to reach in prior times due to political and security restrictions. With pro-coalition governments in each nation ostensibly supporting the foreign presence, humanitarian space opened up rapidly, and was quickly filled by humanitarian actors.

The net effect of this to the anti-western belligerents- who saw the coalition invasion of their homelands as an occupation and who framed it as an attack on Islam- was to view (not entirely without cause) the presence of western aid workers as simply a second wave of the occupation. While the first was a military presence, the second was a cultural colonization that sought to unravel conservative social norms with western notions of human rights, gender equality, tolerance and so-forth. The humanitarians became the enemy.

On August 19th 2003, a truck bomber drove into the compound at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, based out of the Canal Hotel. 22 people were killed, mostly UN staff, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative to Iraq, whose office was allegedly specifically targeted. One hundred were wounded. The attack was claimed by al Qaeda in Iraq. It was followed a month later by another bombing at the same site, and then a month after that, by a coordinated series of bombings that also targeted the Red Cross compound, killing 12. When it became clear that the humanitarian industry was no longer considered neutral by the belligerents but was being specifically targeted, NGOs and the UN withdrew rapidly from Iraq and began remote operations, based mostly from Jordan.

While aid workers had suffered incidental attacks, particularly while carrying out operations in active conflict zones, and had even suffered occasional deliberate attacks (for example the killing of six Red Cross workers in Chechnya in 1996), this was the first time that the industry had been targeted by a high-level campaign sending such a clear message. It did not mark the end of such attacks, either. Among other subsequent high-profile deliberate targeting of aid workers include the murder of 5 MSF staff in Afghanistan in mid-2004, the abduction and execution of CARE’s Iraq program director Margaret Hassan in November 2004, and the murder by militias of 17 ACF workers in Sri Lanka in August 2006. Roughly two hundred aid workers a year are victims of violence while on operations.

The Canal Hotel Bombing essentially set a precedent that said the humanitarian industry was no longer a neutral, impartial body but a party to the conflict, and as such a legitimate target. The industry has not been the same since. Aid workers now go through intensive security training before deploying to insecure areas. Aid agencies are jumpy about pulling their staff from hostile situations. Where once an aid agency’s logo might have protected them from violence, there are many places in the world where it is now seen to be something that puts them at risk. Significant portions of NGO and UN aid budgets are now spent on security, and in some parts of the world, NGOs struggle to differentiate themselves from military actors and government contractors who are agents of foreign policy and do not hold to humanitarian principles. No single event in the last ten years has had a bigger impact on the landscape of humanitarian action in insecure environments than the August 2003 bombing.

8. The South Asian Tsunami (December 26th 2004)

Early in the morning on December 26th, an enourmous tectonic rupture beneath the Indian Ocean triggered an earthquake of magnitude 9.2, generating a gigantic tsunami. The wave struck the Indonesian region of Aceh first, where the wave height was estimated at as high as twenty metres coming ashore, before other devastating waves washed up against southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and eventually even the east coast of Africa. More than 230,000 people died and five million were impacted.

The event made the term ‘tsunami’ a household word as shocking images of destruction emerged on television sets and the toll grew almost hourly, almost defying belief. Western audiences, particularly struck by the devastation on the tourist beaches of southern Thailand, where thousands of European holiday-makers were among the casualties, poured sympathy and money into the subsequent relief response. Ultimately, $14 billion would be provided in international humanitarian assistance.

The public response to the disaster was unprecedented and overwhelming. NGOs quite literally received more money than they knew what to do with- and while one (MSF) publically closed its appeal once it had reached an amount it felt it could work with, most others continued to allow the funds to flow in, creating a massive surplus. The result was an organizational disaster as agencies tripped over themselves to try and spend their funds in a timely manner, squabbling over response sectors and geographical areas in order to stake out their territory and not dissapoint their donors. Many smaller NGOs popped up specifically in response to the tsunami with no knowledge of the humanitarian sector or its standards, and coordination across the board became at points nearly disfunctional.

The massive response to the tsunami- an admittedly enourmous natural disaster- occured against the backdrop of a number of other major world crises, particularly the war in Darfur, but also a devastating conflict in DRC, both of which were suffering from a paucity of international attention and funding. This frustration was exacerbated by the fact that the actual humanitarian needs following the tsunami were not as great as the scale of the event itself might suggest. While the death toll was high, the damage was limited to relatively narrow coastal areas, and the countries most affected (Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand), while overwhelmed, all had some national capacity to cope. Nor were the majority of survivors at the same level of risk as those in IDP camps in Dafur or eastern DRC.

This reality led NGOs into a period of considerable soul-searching, and the revamping of fundraising processes, particularly around the concept of raising too much money for a crisis that did not need the funding, and how that funding might be redirected. The issue of transparency around NGO spending became a prominent theme.
The single biggest criticism, however, remained that of coordination. Although the UN’s cluster system had begun to be piloted, the failures within the humanitarian community in this regard created a renewed impetus for focusing on collaboration. In the years following the tsunami, the UN’s Humanitarian Reform program has become mainstreamed, and coordination between major humanitarian actors is now the norm- if at times still flawed- in any significant humanitarian response, and the central role of UN OCHA is largely undisputed.

The vast amounts of money raised and the numbers of humanitarian actors involved did however create a prime testing ground for a number of cross-agency initiatives. Humanitarian accountability, for example, was piloted across a range of response programs, while the notion of interagency evaluations also gained traction. Existing humanitarian standards such as Sphere were given a rigorous outing, and found to be largely robust.

Other knock-on effects of the tsunami response relate particularly to donors. The disaster set a new precedent for a shocking event against which all other disasters would be measured. It demonstrated just how fickle western donors could be (not a new truth)- the outpouring of assistance was demonstrably linked to people’s identification with Thailand as a holiday spot. It also raised the issue of donor fatigue. So many people had given significant amounts to the tsunami response that it became difficult to fundraise for any other disasters, including areas of arguably greater need, such as Darfur.

9. The Haiti Earthquake (January 12th, 2010)

When a large (7.0) and shallow earthquake struck near Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, it was that city’s vulnerability rather than the enormity of the quake itself that resulted in the scale of catastrophe that ensued. Between two and three hundred thousand people died, as many more were injured, and a third of Haiti’s population affected. Against the backdrop of a fragile political and economic state with entrenched poverty, and the intensity of destruction within the city itself, the impact was devastating.

Because almost all major infrastructure in Port-au-Prince was damaged or destroyed, aid floundered reaching the survivors. Reporting on the disaster was fast. Within a couple of hours of the quake, it was headline news, and details were pouring out aided by social media. Within twenty-four hours, most major networks had journalists and film crews on the ground filing reports, and the world’s giving public, again shocked by the scale of the tragedy, began to give.

They also began to ask questions. Within seventy-two hours, criticism was being ladled out that the emergency response was too slow, that international responders were not doing enough to get aid to the victims. The ever-accelerating news cycle, aided and abetted by Web 2.0, was looking for ways to build on the story. People, not understanding the complexity of aid as anything more than truck-and-chuck logistics, grew rapidly frustrated with what they saw as unacceptable delays.

The Haitians too played to the media. Savvy and well-connected themselves, they understood the potential of broadcast images to rally support for their crisis, and there were numerous reports of crowds playing up and becoming aggressive only once the news cameras were on the scene.

Crowdsourcing of disaster response information came in to play. Use of text messaging, combined with web-based crowd-sourcing platforms, triangulated the location of trapped victims and directed search-and-rescue teams to dig them out. The question of whether this was a good thing or not remains unanswered.

Haiti became the world’s first participatory disaster in many ways. Not only were people following along with information in near-real time- and contributing to it- but so too people felt that they had a right to get directly invovled. While the South Asian Tsunami had generated a lot of startup NGOs, the scale paled compared to what happened in Haiti. Due to its proximity to the US, as well as strong ties through the Haitian diaspora there, thousands- literally- of well-meaning but thoroughly unqualified citizens filled suitcases with money and flew on over to Haiti to contribute to the relief efforts. At one point, there were reported to be over ten thousand NGOs operating in Port-au-Prince.

While the UN coordination mechanisms had become well established by the time of the Haiti earthquake, they were insufficient to deal with the sheer number of ‘humanitarian’ actors, leading to accusations of poor coordination. In fact, most major humanitarian actors were coordinating reasonably well under the circumstances. The problem was, the influx of do-it-yourself do-gooders had no knowledge of the standards of behaviour developed to manage exactly this sort of issue, and simply did their own thing. Ironically, despite nearly thirty years of increasing standardization and professionalisation of the aid sector, Haiti marked a return to the days where anybody with a heartbeat, a will, and a wad of notes could carry out aid work.

*

From its humble beginnings as a simple set of agreements around the treatment by volunteers of wounded soldiers a hundred and fifty years ago, the humanitarian sector has ballooned into a high profile, multi-billion-dollar and increasingly professional industry. The clear-cut principle of neutrality has been built upon, and then increasingly nuanced as the implications of high-value aid resources flowing into conflict and post-disaster settings has become increasingly understood. Aid workers have gone from being unsung heroes protected by their badges, to targets in an increasingly violent playing field.

Increased critical awareness of the impact of aid has led to the development of more and more standards and tools to unpack that complexity, while tragic mistakes have lent a sombre, self-critical and often cynical edge to the notion of international do-gooders.

The expectations of a giving public have shifted too, from a time when charity was the domain of churches and old ladies, to today where major emergencies become causes celebres among teenagers or corporate businessfolk, and revenues are measured in the billions. So too as the world has shrunk, ease of travel has increased, and communications media has accelerated, the giving public is increasingly interacting with disasters in near-real-time as they unfold, creating expectations often unrealistic at best, very often ignorant.

Aid now operates in a highly politicized environment with rapid changes, almost incomprehensible flows of information, and a vast and shifting range of constituents, all of whom require satisfaction on one level or another. With every major disaster or event, the aid world changes, and the goal-posts shifts.

For all its failings over the decades, one thing that stands out is that the aid industry- like many of the people who have to respond on the ground- is by very nature flexible and adaptable, changing as its circumstances change. It’s made its mistakes, and it remains a deeply flawed sector. But for all that, I couldn’t see myself in any other.

What do you think? Are there any other key events in the history of humanitarianism that you feel have had a major impact on the development of the sector?

Shake Hands with the Devil- a Debrief

Ten years into my career as an aid worker, I have finally brought myself around to reading Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. For those not familiar with the book, General Dallaire was the Force Commander of the United Nations Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) between 1993 and 1994, during the time of the Rwandan genocide. Shake Hands is his memoir of the events that took place during his twelve months or so in that office.

I’ve had the book on my iPad Kindle app for over 2 years, and had it on my reading list for many more. I think I delayed reading it because I knew what the content matter was going to be and, quite frankly, you kind of have to steel yourself for that sort of thing. You know before you open the first page it’s going to be a harrowing read, especially because it covers true events.

I’m not overly sensitive to these things as a rule. Over the years I’ve had to deal with horrendous subject matter coming across my desk. Pretty much the first task I was given when I started out in this line of work, back in 2003, was to synthesise what was going on at the time in the Liberian civil war, and the stuff I waded through did a good job of setting me up to deal with almost any horror stories the aid world has pitched my way since. That said, it still takes a certain energy to sink yourself into an account that deals with such tragic material.

The events in Rwanda, as well as being one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century- a period that was not short on tragedies- also act as a milestone in the development of the humanitarian industry, and I think anybody in this line of work has a responsibility to understand intimately the dynamics and processes at work during that time, how the history unfolded, and the complicity of the international community in what happened. A few years ago I read Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families, a book that is in some ways even more harrowing than Shake Hands, although in other ways, less-so. At any rate, in my opinion both Gourevitch and Dallaire should be required reading for anybody working in the humanitarian sector. Or, for that matter, in international relations and foreign policy.

I recap the events of 1994 briefly because they are so devastating in their impact that it is inexcusable that there be any chance they might be relegated to some dusty shelf of historical anecdotes and forgotten. They must be retold so that our children, and theirs, know what transpired. I was a teenager at the time of the genocide, nearly twenty years ago now, and living in Geneva, and I suspect had more exposure to the events at the time than many people my age. Those very much younger than myself may not remember them at all. Regardless, I believe it is our responsibility to remember the victims and what happened to them, just as it is our responsibility to carry the memory of those who have died fighting just wars.

The backdrop to the genocide is complex and deep-seated. Rwanda- a tiny country in the heart of the African continent- has a population divided between two key ethnic groups- a minority Tutsi and a majority Hutu. The Tutsi did at various points over the last couple of hundred years hold a disrepresentational amount of wealth and political influence, in part exacerbated by the Belgian colonial system. A sequence of ethnic slaughters had occured over many decades, with atrocities committed by both groups. By 1993, a large contingent of Tutsis were living as refugees in Tanzania and a rebel Tutsi army was carrying out offensive operations in the north of the country against the mainly Hutu government forces (and populace). Rwanda had a government dominated by increasingly extremist Hutu elements, and the international community was attempting to broker a naive peace agreement between the belligerents.

On the night of April 6 1994, the plane transporting Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, killing all on board. Those responsible for the shooting down of the airplane have never been identified, however it is generally (though not universally) accepted that the assassination was carried out by Hutu extremists, who immediately blamed the Tutsis and used the killing as an excuse to launch what was to become the Rwandan genocide.

The genocide itself had been planned for months, if not years, with weapons stockpiled, militias organized, victims identified and a campaign of hate propaganda disseminated. It was no spontaneous chaos.

Over the next three months, while the international community failed to intervene, far-right Hutu death squads carried out a systematic and well-rehearsed annihilation of Tutsis and moderate Hutus across the country. An estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered, roughly 8-10,000 per day, most killed with machetes and farm implements. Rape and torture were systemic. The killing was only really brought to an end as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi rebel group led by Paul Kagame (now Rwanda’s President), took control of the country and drove the genocidaires, together with nearly two million Hutu refugees, into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, the violence continues nearly 20 years later.

As part of the Arusha peace negotiations, UNAMIR was given a Chapter VI (peace-keeping) mandate to monitor a cease-fire between the RPF and the Rwandan Government Forces (RGF) from late 1993 onwards. Dallaire, a Canadian, had command of this mission, and was present during the six month lead-up to the genocide, and was also on the ground throughout the height of the genocide itself and the accompanying civil war.

The United Nations has been widely condemned for its inaction in stopping the genocide from occuring, given that it had both intelligence that plans were underway, and peacekeeping troops on the ground who, at times, stood by and watched while civilians were hacked to death in front of them. Gen. Dallaire, as UNAMIR’s Force Commander, is unavoidably tainted by this failure, and although the book only touches intermittently on the subject, consequently suffered years of psychological illness as a result of the situation he found himself in- as did many of the troops under his command.

Shake Hands is an interesting, at times awkward book structurally, because it is several things at one time. It is, at its most superficial level, a memoir of the twelve months or so that Dallaire spent in Rwanda. At another level, it is Dallaire’s own attempts to purge his demons- to put down in writing and convince himself, if nobody else, that he did all he could. And on another, it is a methodical, almost clinical account of every step, every decision, every administrative process that prevented the international community from stopping a genocide that people clearly knew was in the works before it even began.

The book is written entirely from Dallaire’s perspective and as such focuses almost exclusively on his own experiences and reactions. It hangs in an odd space of being both banal and horrifying. In the space of a single paragraph, the prose jumps from describing some bureaucratic tedium of logistics or process, to a vivid description of bloated bodies jamming a stream, or the hacking to death of a group of children.

The narrative is subjective but reads fairly. There are those he singles out for damnation- particularly the leaders of specific world powers who failed to intervene, some of the poorly-equipped and -disciplined UNAMIR military forces, and the apparently inept UN Special Representative in Rwanda. Others he praises, particularly those he served with, but others too. Whether critical or applauding, his judgement is consistently based on the merits of their actions and contributions.

There are moments when the book reads like a list of defences, as though Dallaire is trying to demonstrate at every point that his hands were tied. His approach is methodical and reflective of his military background. As far as his position is concerned, he has crossed every t, dotted every i. He does not shirk blame either but acknowledges that he has failed- one could even say that he is unduly harsh on himself- and reading between the lines, it is easy to see that behind his careful description is a soul that is tortured by a guilt it will never, ever escape.

In many ways this is the second tragedy of the book- not to compare in any way to the horror of the genocide itself. Dallaire was put in an inexcusably impossible position, and essentially hung out to dry. Dallaire’s account- and history more generally- makes it clear that the powers that could have intervened quickly to stop the killing- the US, France, Britain, and to a lesser extent Belgium and other nations- allowed the bureaucracy of the international system to tie itself in knots and found excuses not to engage. Dallaire and UNAMIR were left with negligible resources, a nearly powerless mandate, and virtually no ability to seriously defend themselves- let alone intervene against multiple hostile militant forces to protect civilians. The argument is quite clear: had Dallaire gone on the offensive with the scant troops available to him, it would have been literal suicide. Tens of thousands of people were undoubtedly saved from death by the actions that UNAMIR, under Dallaire’s initiative, did take, but the overall inaction and the weakness of the force meant that hundreds of thousands that might have been saved perished. Dallaire, caught in the middle of both the war and the criminal negligence of the international community, has to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.

It’s often said that the biggest threat to the emotional and mental wellbeing of aid workers is not the difficult scenes they witness on the ground, but the ineptitude of colleagues and the breakdown of organizational systems and political will to actually create a solution. Reading Shake Hands, the overwhelming sense is remarkably similar. The accounts of the violence visited on innocent Rwandans makes for horrible reading (though to be honest I found Gourevitch to be far more confronting from that perspective, as his journalistic style and his choice of stories made the accounts far more personal, less clinical). However what makes you come away from the book feeling sullied, angry, and deeply affected is just how simple it might have been to save 800,000 Rwandan lives, and how a broken and self-serving international system completely failed to kick into action.

There was nothing ‘new’ per se in Shake Hands that I didn’t already know. I’ve read enough accounts, visited enough analysis on Rwanda, and spent enough time in the humanitarian and international systems to understand how Rwanda was utterly failed. None the less, being taken through these failures step by step, and watching them add up- not just one error, not just ten, but a conspiracy of failures that sprawl from one end of the narrative to the other- is heartbreaking.

I came away from Shake Hands with a melancholic but intense respect for Romeo Dallaire. Like the tragic hero of an ancient epic, his story is deeply flawed. None the less, his humanity, the impossibility of his situation, and his heroic efforts to resolve it within the limits of his capacity come through.

The read is a heavy one, both in terms of the subject matter and in terms of the methodical way that Dallaire lays out the bureaucratic impediments put before him and how he worked to move the system forward. It leaves you with an anger at the decision-makers who stood by and allowed the genocide to occur. Not just the genocidaires themselves, but powerful people- Francois Mitterand, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, even the likes of Kofi Annan (then in charge of the Department of Peace Keeping Operations and who has recently released a book on the subject of the challenges of humanitarian interventions) and Boutros-Boutros Ghali (then UN Secretary General)- leaving you wondering why some of these men and women aren’t also standing before a tribunal to give account of their actions and their complicity in genocide.

Shake Hands isn’t fun, but it is an important narrative and I would seriously endorse it to anybody involved in this line of work. We all have a responsibility to understand tragedies like this. It is where history finds its highest value as a discipline- trying to ensure that we (as individuals, even if larger institutions around us fail) do not become guilty of repeating past mistakes, but work to avoid and solve them. And to take the time to unpack the sorts of complexities that a case like Rwanda presents means we’re more likely to take that time to understand the current events of our time that equally can’t be summarized by a tweet or a headline- Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, Darfur, DRC, the LRA and Myanmar to name just a few.

Sorry for the heavy post. As you can see, the book left me needing to do a little written debrief. And in its defence, going through some tough things in my own life just at the moment, it really helped me get some perspective on what really matters.

Read Shake Hands with the Devil. But maybe keep a glass of your favourite scotch handy to wind down afterwards.

NB: A note on the photo used with this review. I have never traveled to Rwanda myself- much as I would like to- but friend and fellow photographer Nick Ralph was there not long ago and snapped this gorgeous shot of a young boy with a scythe, with building rain clouds behind. I love the shot- it’s the sort of image I really like in photography, and the child, the red soil, the dark skies and the lush green backdrop are very evocative of the Rwanda that Dallaire describes in his narrative. Additionally, I like the image because, despite the sombre tones of both shot and article, it shows that 18 years on, Rwanda has taken a road towards recovery- albeit one that is incomplete and still fraught. I want to thank Nick for giving me permission to use this shot. Do check out his 500px site, where hopefully he’ll start putting more fab shots like this one up. Incidentally, Nick tells me this shot is in fact a stitch of four vertical frames. Nicely worked sir.

When the Colour is Taken Away

Playing with light, texture and patterns in the absence of colour.

The Wall: A detention block at the notorious S-21 detention centre, where over a four-year period towards the end of the 1970s more than 17,000 men, women and children were detained, interrogated and tortured before being taken to the Killing Fields and executed.

Caught in the Light: Sun throws the shadows of bars onto the floor of what was once a classroom before it became an interrogation cell for political prisoners under Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

Images of Freedom: View through prison bars to nearby apartment blocks.

Neutrality, Impartiality, Complicity

I grew up in Geneva, so perhaps it’s fitting that when I think of the term ‘neutral’ the first thought that comes to mind is that of Switzerland. Indeed when the nascent International Committee of the Red Cross (and now, Red Crescent, with a Red Star of David and a Red Lion thrown in for good measure) chose its emblem, it took the colours of that country- a white cross on a red field- and simply inverted it. Today it is among the very best-known symbols of the world. It represents impartial assistance to any injured party, regardless of creed, colour or context. Its standing under International Humanitarian Law grants its bearers access to the most intense battlefields around the world to rescue people in need, and still today the ICRC retains an ethical stand at the very top of the humanitarian industry worldwide.

It is fitting then that humanitarian agencies since then have taken their lead from the ICRC in establishing their own charter of ethics. In the early 1990s, a consortium of international actors drew up what is broadly known as the Red Cross Code of Conduct (its full title reflects the role of non-governmental organizations in disaster relief as well). This is a voluntary code to which almost all of the major international non-governmental humanitarian agencies are signatories to and which are seen as guiding principles in the application of their assistance around the world.

Click here to read more…

Legacy of a Genocide

Of the 17,000 men and women (and several thousand more children) who passed through the Tuol Sleng detention centre (or S-21), just twelve lived to tell the tale. The notorious prison, converted from a Phnom Penh school, became the hub of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly political purification, where people accused of sedition and crimes against the state were interred, interrogated, tortured, and eventually either killed, or transported to one of the nearby Killing Fields and executed alongside hundreds of thousands more. This number would eventually include many high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials and their families, themselves, caught in Pol Pot’s paranoid purges.

Phnom Penh was liberated by the Vietnamese army in January 1979. Thirty years on, and yesterday the very first trial of a Khmer Rouge leader opened in a special UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia. Kaing Guak Eav, known to most as ‘Duch’, headed Tuol Sleng prison, also called S-21. A third of the Cambodian population are said to have perished during the brief but genocidal reign of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, in the four years from 1975 to 1979. It’s hard to believe that the country has held itself together for so long, while these crimes go unpunished and families are left without reconciliation or answers. Pol Pot himself died in 1998, under uncertain circumstances while under house arrest by a Khmer Rouge faction.

Tuol Sleng is now a museum honoring the victims of the prison camp, a memorial in much the same vein that the death camps of Nazi Germany remember those who perished in the holocaust. The place itself is a quiet and reflective location, with the stark pre-communist school-blocks surrrounding an open courtyard filled with benches and frangipani trees, and the bustle of Phnom Penh feels strangely distant. The cells have been left largely as they were found. When the Vietnamese liberators were drawn to the prison by the stench of rotting flesh, they found a dozen corpses still shackled to their beds, executed as their captors fled. The photographs they took as evidence are graphic displays of the coarse brutality, still mounted in the cells they were taken in.

Like many places where evil has blossomed, there remains a lingering disquiet over the compound. The mementos and photographs hail back a chilling time in history. Subdued voices of visitors passing through echo in hallways where screams and cries must once have thrived. Barred windows and barbed wire lend only the briefest taste of what the inmates must have seen, day after day, as they awaited their turn with the interrogators.

Like the death camps of Germany and eastern France, Tuol Sleng is an important place. Not only does it honor those who died innocently and needlessly before a vicious gang of thugs, but it allows us the space to remember, and on a very shallow level, to connect to the events that took place, in the Orwellian hope that we won’t come back to this place again. Although it’s not my first time visiting a place of atrocities, I found it left a mark on my soul, and stands out as one of the most significant memories of my month travelling in south-east Asia. I would strongly recommend that anybody who passes through Phnom Penh makes a visit to Tuol Sleng a priority. Too much of what we do when we travel is frivolous and petty, but the gravity of remembering the experiences and circumstances our fellow humans have been through is both important, and our responsibility.

 

Photographs:

1. Cell.  Detention cell in Tuol Sleng.

2. A Quiet Place.  View of one of the detention blocks, formerly a school building, and the courtyard at Tuol Sleng.

3. Resting Place.  An interrogation chamber upstairs in Tuol Sleng.

4. Razor.  Coiled wire and, beyond, flowers outside the prison.

Barbs of History

After Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975, a Phnom Penh high school called Tuol Svay Prey was taken and turned into an interrogation, detention and torture centre, among the very cruelest of places the 20th Century- a century of atrocities- saw.  An estimated 17,000 men and women, and several thousand children, passed into the centre and were tortured until they confessed to crimes against the regime- often for many weeks.  Once convicted, they were executed at a killing field outside the city.  Only twelve people who were interred at the prison during its four-year reign of terror are known to have survived.

Tuol Sleng, as the prison came to be known, was liberated by the Vietnamese who marched on Phnom Penh and drove out the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.  They found a dozen or so corpses, still on the beds they had been chained to and executed by their fleeing captors.  Today the place has been preserved as a museum, a place of memorial to those who died, and a place of remembering and learning lest those who come after are ever tempted to repeat such a dark history.

Photo: Barbed wire still strung across a window at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.