Cyangogu, Rwanda
It says something for the change that David Cameron has already wrought in his party that I find myself in Rwanda courtesy of Andrew Mitchell, the Conservatives’ international development spokesman, and Lord Ashcroft (who provided the plane). Aid, trade and conflict resolution provide one of the six policy themes on which the Tories are working, and the hardest of Tory hard men now pursue the subject. Mitchell says that the party’s ‘Victor Meldrew’ dislike of international development is to be banished. Rwanda is a good first stop to study the problems because it was probably the greatest disaster of international intervention ever. In 1994 the ‘international community’ proved its semi-fictional status by willing the end — an agreement for broadbased transitional government leading to multi-party elections — but not the means. The UN force in the capital, Kigali, was constantly denied the men, money and rules of engagement needed to prevent bloodshed. According to the then Force Commander, Gen. Roméo Dallaire, this actually ensured the ensuing genocide. Extremist Hutu leaders persuaded the people to kill everyone they thought was a Tutsi, and they did so at a faster rate than Hitler killed the Jews — more than 800,000 people in three months. A speciality was cutting off each limb of a child in front of the parents before killing it and, afterwards, them. The weakness of the UN force also permitted the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front, under the command of Paul Kagame (‘the Napoleon of Africa’), to take advantage of the genocidaires’ indiscipline and defeat them, causing an exodus of Hutu refugees who died in their hundreds of thousands from disease. Now Kagame is the President of Rwanda, and wants his country to join the Commonwealth. Despite its lack of historic links, Britain is the biggest aid donor in Rwanda, paying £46 million per year. Only 17 per cent of the national budget comes from domestic revenue, so some of our money is used to teach the Rwandan government how to get more tax out of its own people. This is a skill in which Gordon Brown is an acknowledged world expert.
Genocide victims were selected by identity cards. In a rule inherited from Belgium’s unenlightened imperium, Rwanda insisted that everyone’s ID card must state whether he was a Tutsi or a Hutu. The Hutu killers herded people into stadiums, churches etc., separated them according to what their cards said, and then murdered all the Tutsis. I hope the Tory team takes this lesson home as we debate ID cards in Britain. Naturally I am not suggesting that Mr Blair is planning genocide (though it seems to tempt Mr Prescott in relation to toffs), but now that ethnicity is information required by the census, it would be a small step to include it on a card. That way murderous madness eventually lies.
Isay ‘madness’, but if it were merely mad, it would not be nearly so likely to happen. To its perpetrators, genocide presents itself as a ‘solution’ — a ‘final’ one — to a ‘problem’. A decision is made that one part of the human race is not really human. Thus Tutsis were always described in Hutu Power propaganda as ‘cockroaches’. Once the fanatic identifies a race as subhuman, or evil, it seems logical to him to try to exterminate it. As Julian Manyon notes on page 14, the ‘martyr’s oath’ of Hamas, which has just won the elections in Palestine, quotes Muslim scripture: ‘ The day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)... the stones and trees will say, O Muslim, O Abdulla, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’ Near Kigali, we visited a church in which Tutsis had been slaughtered. Round the altar, the scene remains as it was found — bodies, now skeletons, obscenely sprawled, children’s shoes, rosaries, ragged clothes lying where their owners fell. But an eyewitness explained that this killing was no sudden frenzy. It involved the planned death of more than 3,000 victims, and took days of unremitting work to carry out. The most chilling thing about genocide is that it is a policy, not just a spasm.
In the face of such colossal suffering, which continues because Aids picked up where genocide left off, there is comfort in small things. One of the most comforting, in this beautiful place above Lake Kivu on the southwestern border, is the work of Rwanda Aid, a charity linked to the Anglican diocese here. Under David Chaplin, it picks projects where results do not have to await bureaucracy. Its youth groups build a simple house for a poverty-stricken family. The charity’s own sixacre farm trains people in techniques they cannot learn alone on their tiny plots. David provides a model which I’m sure many British people in their fifties would like to follow. He retired early after 25 years as the successful headmaster of our children’s prep school, fathering on the way the lead singer of the rock band Keane, and went out to help children whose parents will not complain about the lack of space to park their 4x4s during the school run. His task here is hard and sometimes, as the only European present for a long stint, lonely, but he is working wonders.
One reason for the spread of Aids is that witch-doctors tell sick men to cut themselves and mingle their blood with that of their children. We naturally regard this as appalling. But it is worth remembering how our own culture can look equally perverse to Africans. In Kigali’s English-language paper, the New Times, the op-ed column, entitled ‘Sodomy, animal sex unAfrican’, argues that aid organisations sometimes have ‘ulterior motives’ when they push gay rights upon the poor. Western ‘dubious and archaic practices’ include ‘women having sexual intercourse with dogs and horses’, says the author.
In Butare, Rwanda’s second city, I notice a barber’s shop which proudly entitles itself ‘Nigger Boys Sunset Saloon’.
The news reached me here that Michael Wharton, ‘Peter Simple’, has died. Being in Africa, I immediately thought of Michael’s creation, Dr Ngrafta, President of Gombola, formerly Gomboland, whose capital is Bungrafta, formerly New Harrogate. As well as having a degree in sociology from the LSE, Dr Ngrafta is a practising witch-doctor. To preserve his power, he organises a coup against himself every year. Then he uses his necromantic arts to change the rebel leader into a creature of his own choice for 24 hours, before proclaiming that the coup has been overthrown. Dr Ngrafta sticks by the belief that ‘old customs are the best and should never be modified or changed in any way’. Michael developed this doctrine into a poetic vision. He was the only journalist whose total oeuvre constituted a work of art.
Previous page
