Citation
AID officials yesterday urged the United Nations to tie international
aid efforts for Rwandan refugees to investigations of human rights
abuses by the former Rwandan regime.
Yesterday Mike McDonaugh of Concern Worldwide joined a growing chorus
of senior aid officials, led by Care's emergency programmes director,
James Fennel, in demanding that the leaders who organised the genocide
of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutu moderates, and who are now
living off food aid, should be brought to book.
This is a terrible human disaster (in Goma). But one cannot forget
that many of the young men you see in these camps are killers and have
been responsible for far more deaths than cholera could ever claim.
They must be made to pay for their crimes or we send a message to the
outside world, and to African countries especially, which says it's
fine to wipe out your minorities,
said Mr McDonaugh.
Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN's
High Commissioner for Refugees also privately agree with this position.
But yesterday the UNHCR spokesman, Ray Wilkinson, insisted that this
was a political decision outside the agency's mandate. Mr Fennel
likened feeding members of the former administration to sending food
aid to the Auschwitz concentration camp guards. By just treating the
humanitarian symptoms of the crisis and failing to address the root
causes, by addressing this as a human rights issue, we risk becoming an
accomplice in what happened.
As thousands of Hutu refugees continued to die yesterday and the roads
round Goma became clogged with bodies, aid officials also called for a
co-ordinated programme to encourage them to return to Rwanda, where
their safety has been guaranteed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the
new coalition government in Kigali, the capital. We have to get these
people to understand that they can go home safely.
The UN and the US State Department have been vague about the issue of
prosecuting the people who organised the genocide, mainly, one American
diplomat said, because they do not want Hutu refugees to fear a witch
hunt when they return home. But for 6,000 Tutsis living in a camp
behind barbed wire for their own protection, a human rights
investigation of what happened to their families cannot come too soon.
At night, when Goma's air is thick with wood smoke, members of the
defeated Rwandan army and militia shout insults across the wire. Still
alive again, I'm sorry to see. We'll come back to kill you soon,
they
yell. Others lounge outside the camp gates, hoping to catch and beat a
Tutsi when he or she goes out in search of firewood.
Yesterday the American military stepped up its Operation Support Hope
for one million Rwandan refugees while a cholera epidemic raged
unabated and about 10,000 of the migrants started walking back home.
Brigadier-General Jack Nix of the US Army arrived in eastern Zaire to
command the operation ordered by President Clinton. To stop the dying
and relieve the suffering that is my immediate mission,
he said in
Goma.
In an attempt to stem the spread of cholera, a C5A Galaxy transport
plane flew non-stop from California to Goma yesterday, using three
in-flight refuellings. It brought a civilian water-purification company
which can process 24,000 gallons an hour, as well as two California
fire engines to help to pump water from Lake Kivu.
General Nix said the US operation might switch its focus to providing
clean water instead of food. Clean water is essential to combat the
cholera epidemic, which a UN official said had still not peaked.
Aid workers have suspended plans to burn corpses because no one is
willing to do the job, a UN spokesman said. Cremation goes against
African traditions. The US Army will fly in heavy earth-moving
equipment to break the hard volcanic rock around Goma and dig mass
graves.
