The Rwanda Crisis

The enormous crowd of at least 300,000 was a mixture of all sorts and conditions: dispirited Interahamwe, who no longer even bothered to kill the few Tutsi walking along with them, civil servants and their families, riding in a motley of commandeered vehicles that had belonged to their ministries, ordinary peasants fleeing in blind terror, exhausted FAR troops trying to keep a minimum of discipline, abandoned children with swollen feet, middle class Kigali businessmen in their overloaded cars, whole orphanages, priests, nuns and madmen.”

Gerard Prunier describing the exodus from Ruhengeri. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide 1959-1994 at page 298, published by Hurst and Company Ltd, 1995.

Flight from Rwanda

The genocide in Rwanda claimed the lives of nearly a million people in 100 days in 1994, as extremist members of the Hutu majority turned on the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus, vowing to exterminate the Tutsi and their influence on Rwandan society. The horror was only halted when the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) finally defeated the genocidal government.

In the wake of this violence, over two million refugees streamed into Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). 850,000 people walked across the border to Goma in eastern Zaire over just five days from July 14 to 18, 1994. Most were innocent Hutu fleeing the advancing RPF forces. Some had heard of human rights abuses committed by the RPF. Others fled out of fear inspired by Hutu Power propaganda describing the Tutsi as a “subhuman” race bent on enslaving and massacring the Hutu masses.

However, concealed among those clamoring for support were individuals who had been involved in massacre and killing—even in planning and carrying out the genocide. Groups intent on prolonging the violence saw the camps and the humanitarian aid that came with them as vital for the restocking of and recruitment for their war effort. The genocidaires quickly took control of the camps. Instead of finding safety in flight, the refugees continued to struggle against violence and intimidation while the genocidaires, operating with impunity, used the camps to rearm and launch forays back into Rwanda. Humanitarian organizations were forced to either deliver aid to the hands of the genocidaires or abandon hundreds of thousands of refugees to potential starvation. (For more on the Refugee Program’s efforts to address the dilemmas faced by humanitarian workers, see Refugees, Humanitarianism and Human Rights.

Insecurity in the Camps

The Rwanda crisis forced the international community to acknowledge the extent to which insufficient response to refugee crises could pose a threat to international peace and security. The magnitude of the crisis, combined with the saturation coverage it received on European and North American television, exposed the inadequacy of the international community’s responses in ways that other crises had not. Furthermore, its timing coincided with a renewed commitment by the international community to bring the most serious criminals to justice, starkly highlighting their failure to do so in the immediate aftermath of Rwanda.

It was clear that the international community was unprepared to respond to the crisis—both in dealing with singling out and bringing to justice the genocidaires and in assisting host countries in providing effective security. Many organizations, including Human Rights First, called on international actors to identify and separate those responsible for the genocide and the destruction of the civilian and humanitarian nature of the camps. Unfortunately, there was little political will to undertake such an exercise.

In the face of the international community’s inaction the genocidaires continued to use the camps as bases for incursions into Rwanda and attacks on elements of the local population. Eventually the new Rwandan government and its Zairian allies attacked and destroyed the camps claiming that they could no longer tolerate the threat the camps posed to Rwandan security. Thousands of refugees were killed. 640,000 Rwandans trekked home, while others, including some of the genocidaires, fled deeper into the jungles of Zaire.

The destruction of the camps in Zaire dramatically demonstrated the dire consequences of the failure to maintain security in refugee camps. One of the mechanisms could have been applied it an effort to prevent this disaster was the international refugee law concept of exclusion.

Zimbabwe's Mugabe says cholera crisis over

Zimbabwe's Mugabe says cholera crisis over
By ANGUS SHAW – 6 days ago
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — President Robert Mugabe declared Thursday that there was "no cholera" in Zimbabwe and the country's health crisis was over, even as the United Nations raised the death toll from the epidemic to 783.
Cholera has spread rapidly in the southern African nation because of the country's crumbling health care system and the lack of clean water. The U.N. said 16,403 cases have been reported.
Last week, Zimbabwe declared a health emergency because of cholera and the collapse of its health services. South African authorities have declared the cholera-hit border region with Zimbabwe a disaster area as the disease spreads to other countries.
At a state funeral Thursday for a ruling party official, Mugabe insisted the outbreak of the waterborne disease had been "arrested" with the help of the World Health Organization and other aid agencies.
Mugabe lashed out at critics who have been calling for his ouster — and even military intervention — as concerns about Zimbabwe's deepening humanitarian crisis mounted.
"So now that there is no cholera, there is no cause for war anymore. We need doctors, not soldiers," he said during an hour-long address broadcast live on state television.
Mugabe has ruled his country since its 1980 independence from Britain and has refused to leave office following disputed elections in March. A power-sharing deal worked out in September with the opposition has been deadlocked over how to divide up Cabinet posts.
President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy all have called recently for the 84-year-old leader to step down.
In Washington, the U.S. ambassador to Harare, James McGee, told reporters at the State Department that the cholera problem is getting worse and that Mugabe's assertion that the health crisis was over showed "how out of touch he is with the reality" in Zimbabwe.
"The situation is truly grim," McGee said, "One man and his cronies — Robert Mugabe — are holding this country hostage."
Britain's Africa minister Mark Malloch-Brown also rejected Mugabe's claim that there was no longer a crisis in Zimbabwe.
"I don't know what world he is living in," Malloch-Brown said during a one-day trip to South Africa, where he visited a Johannesburg church housing 1,600 Zimbabweans who have fled the country.
Malloch-Brown called on South Africa to put more pressure on Mugabe to end the political and humanitarian crisis. South Africa has withheld 300 million rand ($30 million) in aid for Zimbabwe but otherwise has been reluctant to use its huge economic and political muscle against its neighbor.
"South Africa could do a lot more and it needs to do it now," said Malloch-Brown, who also met South African Health Minister Barbara Hogan, who is trying to contain the spread of cholera from across the border. He was also due to meet President Kgalema Motlanthe.
About 664 people have been treated for the waterborne disease and at least eight people have died in South Africa. Hundreds of Zimbabweans cross the border at Beitbridge every day to search for jobs in South Africa, buy supplies and, increasingly, seek medical treatment.
Phandu Skelemani, foreign minister of neighboring Botswana, which has been critical of Mugabe, said his country's border with Zimbabwe should remain open but he supported other measures to isolate Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party.
"If you switch off petrol (gasoline), I think that ZANU-PF will have to go. If that step is agreed and you then simultaneously airlift critical supplies like food and essential supplies to prevent Zimbabweans from starving to death, I think it will have desired effect," Skelemani told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Associated Press writers Sello Motseta in Gaborone, Botswana and Celean Jacobson in Johannesburg, South Africa contributed to this report.

Zuma puts Zimbabwe on 2009 priority list

Zuma puts Zimbabwe on 2009 priority list
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Jacob ZumaI hope it is not too late for this
Johannesburg – Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), who is also largely tipped to become the country’s leader after next year’s general elections, has placed resolving the ongoing Zimbabwean crisis among the top priority list for his party in 2009.
Zuma said this Monday last week, while addressing Namibian leaders during his tour of that country, meant to strengthen bi-lateral relations between South Africa and its former colony. The ANC leader said that his country was “concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian and political situation”, adding that very swift action was needed to end the political and economic crisis, which has created a serious humanitarian crisis in South Africa’s erstwhile prosperous northern neighbour. Zuma added that South Africa was determined to solve the crisis in Zimbabwe , alongside the conflicts that continue in other African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan , Somalia and Burundi .”Some swift action is clearly needed to deal with the situation in Zimbabwe. We are concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian and political situation there,” said Zuma.He said that although his party was fully supportive of former South African President, Thabo Mbeki’s mediation efforts in trying to solve the ongoing crisis, the ANC leadership still felt that a lot more needed to be done. “We however more feel that more pressure needs to be brought to bear on the negotiating parties to ensure a speedy conclusion of an agreement. We cannot keep Zimbabweans on tenterhooks while the situation in the country deteriorates,” added Zuma. Unlike Mbeki, whose preferred approach of “quiet diplomacy” was usually viewed as sterile in solving the Zimbabwean crisis, Zuma is viewed as a no-nonsense leader and has also been a very strong critic of Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe. Since he took over the leadership of the ANC, Zuma has often accused Mugabe’s government of having lost all liberation qualities and respect for the constitution. After Zimbabwe’s ill-fated elections, when Mugabe deployed state security agents on a violence spree in which they tortured both known and suspected opposition officials, murdering more than 100 of them, Zuma was very vocal in criticizing Mugabe, while the ANC also announced that it had cut ties with Mugabe’s ZANU (PF). Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since its independence from Britain in 1980, and has, with his authoritarian rule and skewed governance policies, reduced the country from being the bread basket of Southern Africa into being a basket case of the region, failing to even feed its 11 million people. South Africa, which boasts of Africa's strongest economy, is currently under pressure from the international community to lead calls for Mugabe to, at least, share power equally with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and create a government of national unity, after a power-sharing agreement was signed on September 15. However, Mugabe has refused to hand over some key cabinet posts to the MDC, especially those responsible for the country's security, resulting in a deadlock that has spanned close to three months. The national unity government is viewed by many as the only way that the Zimbabwean crisis can be solved, but doubts have now arisen on whether it will work even if the parties involved fainally bury their hatchet and agree on the cabinet posts. - By Our Correspondent

food crisis

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Ching Li Chan
Topics: Food, Economic Development, AgricultureCountries: Ethiopia
If you think that the global food crisis is taking a toll on countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Mexico, imagine what its like for those living in Ethiopia. Alex Perry’s report from Kersa, Ethiopia for Time Magazine paints a grim picture:
The day photographer Thomas Dworzak and I arrived at Kuyera, four children died. There were four more the next day…. On that first day, I glimpsed Ayano in the intensive care room, wrapped in a red and blue blanker, struggling to breathe, his eyes tipped back into his skull. When I next saw him, he was trussed up the blanket that had become his death shroud, lying on a slab next to two other small bundles in the morgue…. For five days, we turned our hired SUV into an ambulance, ferrying bodies of dead children back to their villages, picking up the starving and taking them to Kuyera.
Ethiopia faces a major crisis — chronic drought coupled with food prices that have risen 330 percent in the past year and a population that has doubled in size since the mid-1980s.
Yet nature alone is not to blame for Ethiopia's food crisis. Some argue that the government's tight control of the agricultural sector that puts all land under state ownership exacerbates Ethiopia's food insecurity. The distribution of fertilizer and seeds are government-controlled, and while farmers can choose what they want to grow, the Los Angeles Times reports that some 20,000 agricultural advisors, also functioning as tax collectors, keep close tabs of what is being grown.
This week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that "despite the best efforts of the government and humanitarian community to respond to the crisis the needs of people continue to far outstrip the resources available to hand."
Yet surrounding the famine are lush fields of green — feeding goats and cattle — while children continue to die of hunger. It is the harsh reality of what is being called "green hunger" or "green drought" — starvation amidst plenty. A recent BBC article describes it as "the time when the land is full of new shoots but there is no food. It happens because the last rains failed and few crops were planted."
Images posted by Reuters photographer Radu Sigheti puts a face to the crisis in an intimate visit with the Mohamed family during the loss of their young daughter, Michu, who died of malnutrition.
Other children will likely suffer the same fate. Recent government figures estimate some 75,000 children under the age of five in the country are severely malnourished. Among all Ethiopians, more than 4.5 million are in need of emergency food aid.
Now is the time for us to help fill Ethiopia's need. As Mark Lang from the Christian relief agency Tearfund writes in the Times Online, "This is no time to give Ethiopians a compassion fatigued brush-off."

Food crisis 'worsens' in Kenya

Food crisis 'worsens' in Kenya

The situation on the ground is deteriorating rapidlyAid agencies have stepped up appeals for food in northern Kenya where some 2.5m people face severe shortages.
Eight under-nourished children have died in the last 10 days in the hospital in Garissa.
The situation is deteriorating rapidly with families losing cattle, goats and even hardier camels, aid workers say.
Thousands of herdsmen seeking new pastures are moving to Uganda, where Lake Victoria's waters have dropped significantly due to the drought.
Exodus
World Vision, Action Against Hunger and the International Federation of Red Cross Societies have added their voice to the appeal of the Kenyan government, which has declared the food crisis a "national disaster".

President Mwai Kibaki has pledged government aid for famine victims
Over the last few months the pastoral people of northern Kenya, Somalia and southern Ethiopia have begun to lose their livestock to the drought.
"Communities may soon be wiped out since they depend entirely on livestock," said the Red Cross.
Children, weakened by months of hunger, are starting to die of diarrhoea, malaria and other diseases, and the existing centres for feeding malnourished children are overflowing, aid workers say.
BBC Africa analyst Elizabeth Blunt says people in these parts of Africa have traditional ways of coping with drought, eating famine foods such as wild berries and migrating en masse to areas where there may still be water and grazing.
The water levels at Mtera and Kidatu dams are too low to generate power
Patrick RutabanzibwaTanzania's energy and minerals ministry
A senior Kenyan churchman said more than 3,000 people from Western Pokot district were on the move, heading towards the Ugandan border with around 20,000 head of cattle.
"The exodus is still going on, but we hope that Ugandan authorities will understand the situation and continue allowing the Pokot to graze their animals in the country," Rev Joseph Murupus told Kenya's East African Standard newspaper.
Power cuts
This drought follows previous seasons of poor rains across the region.
Uganda's Water, Land and Environment Minister Kahinda Otafire warned on Wednesday that the water levels in Lake Victoria - which borders Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania - had dropped due to the drought and some hydroelectric plants may be closed.
He said more than 20 Uganda districts were facing food shortages, but said the problem was not as serious as in Kenya.
Tanzania is also expected to start power rationing as water levels in dams have dropped.
"The water levels at Mtera and Kidatu dams are too low to enable Tanesco [Tanzania Electric Supply Company] to generate power as required," Energy and Minerals Permanent Secretary Patrick Rutabanzibwa told Tanzania's Guardian newspaper this week.
"The plan is to start with a two-hour rationing schedule," he said.

Zim food crisis deepens

Zim food crisis deepens30/09/2007 20:49 - (SA)

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Harare - Zimbabwe harvested only one-third of the wheat it needs this year - a drastic shortfall the government blamed on constant power outages, official media reported on Sunday.
Stores throughout the impoverished country were telling customers that bread would not be available until further notice.
Most bakeries closed last week as flour deliveries ceased, worsening the situation for a nation already struggling with severe shortages of fuel and food supplies, including its staple diet item of corn.
The government said on Tuesday it would import 100 000 tons of wheat to supplement this year's yield of 145 000 tons - well short of the government's 375 000-ton target.
The first 35 000 tons of the imported wheat were delayed, however, at the Mozambique port of Beira as authorities sought hard currency to pay for it.
Land grabs 'to blame'
Many have blamed Zimbabwe's agricultural decline on the government's seizures of white-owned commercial farms, begun in 2000, for redistribution to black owners.
A report by the Ministry of Agriculture's research department said, however, that chronic power outages had cut off irrigation and forced wheat farmers to abandon crops during germination - leading to yields of about 2-3 tons per hectare (0.8-1.2 tons per acre), far lower than the target of 5 tons a hectare (about 2.25 tons an acre), the official Sunday Mail newspaper reported.
The low harvest compounds Zimbabwe's troubles, as it faces its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with acute shortages of hard currency, food, most basic goods and fuel.
The UN World Food Program estimates at least 3 million people - a quarter of the population - will need emergency food aid before the April corn harvests.
Zimbabwe is facing daily power outages caused by shortages of coal and equipment. Breakdowns have plagued the western Hwange coal mine, which sits atop one of southern Africa's biggest coal deposits, and the country is importing nearly 40% of its power.
Outages rise 50%
The state power utility said on Friday that daily outages had increased by 50% since Mozambique reduced supplies over an outstanding debt of US$35m.
The outages have also affected the tobacco industry, which began planting seedlings this month, according to the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, a black farmers group. Many farmers had said that, with irrigation shut off, their seedlings had wilted and died, the union said.
Zimbabwe was once the second-largest tobacco exporter in the world after Brazil. Cigarettes have disappeared from shops, and on the thriving black market fetch at least 10 times the government's fixed price.
Meanwhile, cotton farmers anxious about seed shortages were resisting government advice to destroy their crops to prevent the spread of cotton blight, a bacterial disease that affects the plant, the agriculture ministry's research department said.
Newspapers were also in short supply on Sunday. The state newspaper company and the sole independent Sunday paper have cut print operations because of shortages of paper and materials and falling advertising on consumer goods no longer available in stores.
The independent Standard sold out on the streets before 07:00 GMT, vendors said.
- AP