1/27/97

イギリスのLiving Marxism 96号Onlineからの転載です（http://www.junius.co.uk/）。
現在、国連や援助団体が難民キャンプを閉鎖して、ザイール内のフツ系ルワンダ難民を本国に帰そうとしている政策への批判です。ザイール内のツチ人（バンヤムレンゲ）がいろいろの理由はあったにしろルワンダ軍と連動してキャンプを襲っていたこと、そして国連難民事務所だけでなく、援助団体の一部までもキャンプ内でフツ人過激派がルワンダ本国への反撃を狙っており、そのために一般難民を自分たちの盾に利用しているとし、キャンプ閉鎖の正当性を述べるが、それではなぜキャンプ内のフツ人過激派がそれに対して反撃せず、逆に逃げまどったのかと反論しています。またルワンダの現政権は確かにフツ人のツチ人への大量虐殺（ジェノサイド）のあと成立した政権であり、国際社会からは歓迎されたが、もともとはウガンダ軍の支援を受けウガンダ領からルワンダに侵攻を重ね、それがルワンダをながい内戦状態にさせ、その結果フツ人のツチ人へのジェノサイドに発展したことを考慮すべきだと述べています。またかつてのツチ人のルワンダ侵攻に対しては国際社会が容認的だったのは、アメリカとイギリスがツチ人のウガンダに住むルワンダ難民を支持し、ウガンダを通して軍事、経済的に援助していたからだとも述べています。
Living Marxism誌の視点は例えば国連人権委のreliefwebに載っており、先日一部を訳しAmlに送った論文などよりも論旨が明快で、つまりGreat Lakes地域の紛争の西側諸国の介入は、自分たちで原因を作っておいて、それを解決してやらないといけないという態度でしかなく、それは新植民地主義以外の何物でもないということです。わたしなんかが要約して言っちゃうと、アフリカ人たちを焚付けて武器を買わせて内戦させ、ぼろぼろにした上で、全てを分捕ろうとしているとしか思えないということです。
Living Marxism誌はアフリカにかんする記事が多く、例えば女性のクリトリス切除にたいする西側女性団体の最近の対応に対する論評があったりして興味深いです。アフリカに興味がある人には是非訪れてみてほしいサイトです。

Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 96, December 1996/January 1997（http://www.junius.co.uk/）

No refuge from the West

Far from saving lives, outside interference in Rwanda and Zaire has endangered a million refugees, reports Bernadette Gibson

As we go to press, the major powers who sit on the United Nations Security Council are debating how they should intervene in the refugee crisis in Zaire. But regardless of how many French, British, American or other foreign troops end up going into east Africa, one thing is certain. Western intervention will not resolve the desperate problems facing the people of the region. The crisis is the result of the West's interference in the affairs of Rwanda and Zaire. More of the same can only make matters worse.

The refugee crisis was precipitated by the Tutsi-dominated military government of Rwanda, a regime strongly supported by the West and armed indirectly by US aid (channelled via Uganda). At the end of October soldiers of the Rwandan government invaded neighbouring Zaire, joined forces with local Tutsi militia and took control of Kivu, a large region on the border with Rwanda, including the three towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira. The purpose of this act of aggression was to close down the refugee camps which have been home to more than a million Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled their country after the collapse of the Hutu government in July 1994.

Rwandan troops, fighting alongside local Tutsi militia which they armed and trained, shelled defenceless refugees in their camps and sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing into the volcanic hills of Zaire with no access to food, clean water or medical supplies. The new Rwandan-backed force in the region refused aid workers access to the dying refugees, but supported the proposal for an international armed force to create 'return corridors' that could force the Rwandan refugees back home.

The conflict has destabilised the entire region, creating tens of thousands of new refugees from the local Zairean population, threatening the stability of one of the poorest African countries, and creating the prospect of one of the worst humanitarian tragedies of the decade.

Yet there has not been one word of criticism of the Rwandan government from the West. Instead the 'international community' has blamed the refugees for bringing this disaster on themselves. Western governments and even aid agencies have thinly disguised their relief that Rwanda's armed force has succeeded, where non-violent methods of 'persuasion' have failed, in closing down these refugee camps and forcing the refugees back home. There is a broad consensus in the West that, whatever happens in eastern Zaire, these largely Hutu-populated camps must remain closed.

Why has such an open act of aggression with such devastating consequences been silently supported by the major world powers? And why have these camps become so notorious that humanitarian aid workers agree that they must never be reopened?

To understand the background to this crisis we have to return to the civil war that gripped Rwanda until 1994. After Rwanda gained its independence in 1962, the Tutsi minority was dislodged from many of the privileged positions which it had enjoyed under the Belgian colonial regime, and the majority Hutu population took control. Some Tutsis fled to neighbouring Uganda, where they later formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA).

In 1990, the RPA invaded Rwanda to fulfil their dream of regaining power. The invasion was backed by Uganda and Uganda's main Western allies - Britain and America. The Hutu government held off the onslaught for four years but, isolated and under intense international pressure to share power with the invading army, the government began to lose control.

As the RPA looked increasingly assured of victory, Rwanda descended into a nightmare of violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, along with Hutu supporters of the RPA, were slaughtered by government soldiers and the notorious Interahamwe - Hutu militia - in a four month frenzy of violence. The killings ended when the RPA seized control in July 1994, sending nearly two million Hutus, a quarter of the Rwandan population, fleeing into neighbouring Zaire and Tanzania where they settled as refugees.

While the ferocity of the violence and the large numbers of people slaughtered within a short timescale drew international media atten-tion to this war, in other aspects it was horribly similar to a string of wars in sub-Saharan Africa from Sudan to Liberia to Sierra Leone. Fuelled by grinding poverty and desperation for power, in countries where political power means access to scant resources, the war in Rwanda was all too characteristically brutal. Yet the treatment of this war by aid agencies and the international media set it apart from other African conflicts.

Soon after the Rwandan Patriotic Front had formed a government, Western commentators, human rights groups and aid agencies started talking about the 'genocide' in Rwanda. Before long the real roots of the massacres, which lay in a four year civil war between an African government and an invading army backed by the West, had been buried beneath an avalanche of propaganda. The moral clamour to describe events in Rwanda as the third genocide this century - a pre-planned, well executed attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group, Rwandan Tutsis - shaped international opinion on the issue. (For a full account of the issue and the row which followed, see Helen Searls and Barry Crawford, 'Rwanda: the great genocide debate', Living Marxism, March 1996.)

In the highly charged moralistic atmosphere which surrounded the discussion of the Rwandan genocide, anybody who challenged the dominant version of events (such as Living Marxism) was accused of being pro-Hutu and compared with those who have sought to deny the Holocaust. People calling for reconciliation between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda were condemned for promoting a climate of impunity for murderers. In this black and white version of history, the word Hutu soon became automatically linked with adjectives like 'killer', 'genocidal' and 'extremist', while Tutsis became portrayed as the world's ultimate victims.

The moral certainties offered by the 'genocide' version of events successfully justified and sanitised the activities of the new Rwandan government. As the force that stopped the genocide they assumed an almost angelic image. None of the atrocities committed by the RPA during the civil war or since they took power have been condemned by the West. No Tutsi soldiers are facing murder charges at either the International Tribunal on genocide set up in Tanzania, or within Rwanda. Indeed, as we have seen in recent months, the most brutal activities of Rwandan backed forces in Zaire can be justified by Western governments, and by the radical aid agencies and liberal journalists who have appointed themselves as the most dedicated proponents of the 'genocide' thesis on Rwanda's tragedy.

The Rwandan government has good reason to be confident that it has Western backing for its attacks on Hutus in Zaire. In 1995 it decided to close down Kibeho, the last remaining camp for Hutu refugees inside Rwanda, by surrounding the camp and firing into the crowd. Thousands of refugees were killed, many of them shot in the back as they ran for their lives. But already the notion that Hutus were genocidal criminals had stuck and few condemned the massacres. Instead the Western media rallied to emphasise the need to suppress the threat from the 'Hutu extremists'.

Against this background it becomes possible to make sense of the extraordinary events that have taken place in Zaire since late October, where more than one million people have been driven towards possible death in order to achieve the widely held aim of closing down Hutu refugee camps.

Rwandan refugee camps are much like the camps produced by conflicts throughout the Third World. While the vast majority of refugees are civilians, predominantly women and children, most camps contain members of a defeated army who have brought their arms with them. Even where there are no former soldiers, it is not long before structures are created whereby one political group or another exerts some form of leadership within the camps. Refugee camps like these have remained open for years around the globe and have never become the focus of international criticism.

Yet within three months of Rwandan refugees settling into their camps, human rights groups and commentators were condemning aid agencies for supporting killers and calling for the camps to be closed. The French aid agency M仕`ecins Sans Fronti`eres pulled out of the camps, publicly stating that it could no longer justify feeding murderers. Those who stayed spent the next two years devising more and more aggressive ways of forcing the refugees to leave the camps and go home. Reducing food rations, refusing to treat new Aids and TB sufferers, and closing down all educational programmes within the camps were among the methods employed to 'persuade' the refugees that life would be better back home in Rwanda.

Even faced with the deterioration of the already horrendous conditions in the camps, however, Rwandan refugees defied all initial attempts to force them home. The common explanation is that the innocent refugees are being held hostage by the guilty - those members of the old army and the Interahamwe Hutu militia who fear punishment if they return, and would prefer to reorganise and fight their way back into Rwanda. While there are undoubtedly members of the defeated militias in the camps, this explanation by Western commentators suggests that the majority of refugees are being brainwashed by the 'extremists' in the camps, who are exaggerating claims of revenge killings inside Rwanda. Nobody has asked why, if the Hutu militias in the camps were so well armed and organised, did they put up no resistance to the Tutsi attack, but fled into the hills of Zaire?

The United Nations relief agency UNHCR, the largest aid agency working in the camps, has repeatedly reassured the refugees that they will be safe back in Rwanda, even running a radio station and showing videos in the camps to counter 'extremist propaganda'. One refugee, who returned to the camps after he was beaten and threatened in Rwanda while searching for his family, found his name on a UNHCR leaflet distributed in the camps listing the names of people safely settled back home.

It is little surprise that refugees should fear for their safety inside Rwanda - not least thanks to the way aid agencies have helped to criminalise Hutus in the camps over the past two years. According to Amnesty International, the army of the Tutsi dominated Rwandan government has carried out several hundred 'extra-judicial executions' on unarmed civilians this year. Rwanda's jails are overflowing with 80 000 Hutus, held without trial after being accused of involvement in 'the genocide'. Many have been rotting there for nearly three years.

Despite damning evidence of conditions within Rwanda, aid agencies have wholeheartedly endorsed the idea that the solution to the current crisis is the creation of 'return corridors', through which aid can be delivered to the hungry refugees on condition that they return home to Rwanda.

To date, however, it seems that many of these refugees would rather risk disease and starvation by fleeing further into Zaire than be taken back to Rwanda. While some of the million refugees have found their way to Uganda and Tanzania, those returning to Rwanda can be counted in hundreds - and many of those may be Zairians newly displaced by the spreading conflict. Yet the wishes of the African refugees themselves appear irrelevant to those international bodies which now sit in American and European cities deciding their fate.

At the moment when Rwandan-backed Tutsi militias were pounding the refugee camps with shells and rocket fire, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, urged the camp occupants to go back to Rwanda: 'Because of your current ordeal, I am sure you will consider where you will be safer - in Zaire or in Rwanda.' While Ogata assured the refugees that 'that is a decision for you to make', it appears that the international powers that be are making all the real decisions.

As this article goes to press, aid agencies and Western governments are debating the kind of military force they would like to see sent into Zaire to create the 'corridors' for the delivery of aid and the return of refugees. All are agreed that a key role of the intervention will be to disarm the armed killers in the camps.

Many commentators have blamed the current crisis on those governments and aid agencies who have fed the refugees and allowed the camps to remain open for so long. A recent editorial in the Independent echoed a common theme: 'The failure of the international community to deal with the evil presence in the camps must also carry the blame for the present crisis.' (30 October 1996) Many who share this view harbour hopes that the current crisis will finally produce the results which they wanted two years ago. In their ideal scenario, the innocent refugees will be starved into going back home; while those who do not return will obviously be the guilty ones, and will either be dealt with by the international armed force or left to starve to death. Either way, in this Western view, the ongoing problem of the Hutu refugees and the 'extremists' in their midst will have been resolved. The fact that the Hutus are being forced back to face the wrath of an unelected, minority military government is apparently neither here nor there.

While aid agencies and commentators clamour for Western intervention and condemn the big powers for their apparent reluctance to act, the truth is that this tragedy is another story of too much Western interference in Africa. Western support of the RPA, and Western complicity in the criminalisation of Rwandan refugees has produced the current crisis, and further intervention can only make things worse.

Western intervention caused the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda to explode in the first place. Western support has given the Rwandan regime carte blanche to invade Zaire and close the camps without a word of condemnation from the world. Indeed Western sanctions against Zaire have paved the way for the invasion by bringing that state to its knees; its sovereignty is now routinely bypassed as aid agencies and journalists go to the government of Rwanda seeking permission to enter Zaire.

In military terms, the Western powers are probably as relieved as their allies in the Rwandan government to see the closure of camps which pose a threat from over the border. In political terms, the colonial powers of yesteryear will be even more delighted to see themselves cast in the role of reluctant invaders, called upon to save Africans from themselves. Whatever its final outcome, the Rwandan-Zairean crisis represents another step forward in rebuilding the moral authority of imperialism. A century on from the first 'Scramble for Africa', the great powers can effectively ride back in to reconquer the continent under the banners of humanitarian relief, with cheers ringing in their ears.

In the past, an act of aggression by one African country supported by powerful Western allies would have been condemned by aid workers and human rights groups. Today, it is the aid workers and human rights groups who have legitimised Western intervention by promoting the idea that a criminal Hutu community has exported the seeds of genocide into a neighbouring country.

One thing is for sure - the one group of people who will not have a say in how this crisis is resolved are the million or so Rwandan refugees in Zaire. The criminalisation of these people as supporters of genocide has robbed them of a voice, and may well rob many of them of their lives. No doubt the aid workers will bemoan their fate - but the truth is that the role of these agencies has done much to seal it.
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