Seen but not Hurd
Aidan Hartley
London Douglas Hurd is stalking me. Some time ago I wrote a story in a book about the British army contingent that deployed in Rwanda after the genocide ten years ago. Post-maelstrom Kigali was an awfully sad, angry place to be. The guys did an admirable job running field hospitals. They also wanted to brighten things up and thought it'd be a nice idea to teach the locals useful phrases in English like `f—k off,"w--ker', and so on. I could tell where the Paras had been in Rwanda by the way villagers hailed us either by flashing a V-sign or giving the thumb and forefinger 'dickhead' salute. I recall a British officer telling me that this culturalexchange programme also included coaching the Rwandan road-sweepers to prepare a welcome for the Hurds when they visited Kigali, first by chanting a little song and then, just as they moved off, by pointing at Lady Hurd and exclaiming, 'Cor, just look at the arse on that!'
Some months ago Lord Hurd visited the Kenyan highlands where I live. During his safari he regrettably fell off a horse. Now, I have no idea if his tumble has anything to do with this, but he's been at me ever since. First I got a message from him through some friends in Africa to say that he and Lady Hurd had never been in Kigali. As a result, nobody could have chanted 'Cor, just look at the arse on that' at them. Then last week Mark Sanderson in the Telegraph repeated what I now call the 'arse' story and reported that `Lord
and Lady Hurd assure me that they have never been to Kigali. . . an apology is surely in order' (I marvel at the way these newspaper diarists are on such intimate terms with top people).
I do indeed apologise if the Hurds didn't visit Kigali. The British army officer must have been talking about somebody else's arse. And then after seeing Lord Hurd writing in this magazine last week extolling the supposedly Tory virtue of not intervening in foreign conflicts, I thought how silly I was. Of course he wouldn't have visited Rwanda. This is the man who, from Africa's perspective at least, will go down in history as the British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs who stood by as countless innocents were butchered in Rwanda, while he supported the United States in delaying international efforts to intervene. If he didn't visit Rwanda, by God he should have done — and earlier than he didn't.
For months through the summer of 1994 the civilians of Rwanda waited for promised United Nations reinforcements. The Security Council had ordered in thousands of fresh troops, but apart from anything else the Third World contingents could not deploy without being equipped by the wealthy West. General Romeo Dallaire, commander of UN forces in Kigali in 1994, records in his recent memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil, how very late in the day Britain called up to offer him 50 Bedford trucks — of a model 'fit only to be a museum relic' — for a sizeable amount of cash to be paid up front. Dallaire, under daily mortar attacks in his Kigali base with just 450 men, sarcastically asked, 'They do work, don't they?' The official he was speaking to went silent and then replied, 'I'll check and get back to you.' The trucks were later delivered and every single one had to be junked.
This was a matter of British funding, not even of British troops, who were deployed only after the shooting was over in Rwanda. There is a litany of reasons why Britain should have intervened in Rwanda — not least that it had fuelled the entire civil war by backing the Ugandan dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni, who in turn was for years the puppet master of Rwanda's Paul Kagame's Tutsi guerrillas. And why the opposition to intervention in places like Africa, when stability in distant countries is so closely linked with Tory concerns and matters of national self-interest such as refugees, terrorism and health? I'd hate to have to say that Labour has done a better job on Africa. And it hasn't. Clare Short snuggled up in bed with Tutsi President Kagame and gave him lashings of aid while he went off and massacred several hundred thousand Hutus and Congolese. Hain muffed Zimbabwe. And now we've got Blair's Commission for Africa. You just have to look at the Commission's members to see its prospects for success. There's Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's Lenin-lookalike president, who used to adore Albanian-style Marxism, but swapped that for trench warfare against the Eritreans and is now presiding over the mass relocation of peasants (which killed almost as many people as famine did under Mengistu in 1984). Then we've got Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa. He may be fat and in a suit, but he's still head of the Revolutionary party and he gives Mugabe standing ovations. Oh yeah, then there's Sir Bob Geldof.
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