ONCE again the sight of Hutu refugees forlornly tramping from conflict in central Africa is tugging at the world’s heartstrings. It is a spectacle which has popped up on television screens periodically since the great exodus from Rwanda two-and-a- half years ago. And the United Nations is once again there to ensure that it can generate publicity – and therefore money – from a seemingly endless tragedy.
But to focus on the plight of the refugees is to hijack the world’s attention from the real tragedy now taking place in central Africa. Refugees from Burundi deserve more sympathy given the continuing conflict there. But Rwanda’s exiled Hutus are not perpetual victims of war. They are the ones perpetuating the conflict. And much of the world – through the United Nations – has helped them do it.
The fighting now spreading across eastern Zaire is a direct result of the international community’s strange perception that the desire of Rwandan Hutu refugees to remain refugees is of overriding importance. It began with the 1994 exodus from Rwanda, as Hutus bolted from the consequences of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.
Two million people fleeing their country could not be ignored, and the generous international response was right – if made for the wrong reasons.
Governments poured in aid to assuage consciences for turning their backs on the genocide of Tutsis. Ordinary people in the West gave because of the tragic television pictures, amid some confusion about whom they were looking at. After visiting the refugees, Tipper Gore, the wife of the United States vice president, described her grief at meeting the survivors of the genocide. Others were similarly confused, and the idea of the Hutu refugees as the principal victims stuck.
Britain and its allies throw 1-million a day into the black hole of the camps so that they can claim to help central Africa, while turning their backs on the difficult choices required to find a solution.
The camps are by no means full of guilty people, and conditions in Rwanda are not ideal for returning Hutus. There are reprisal killings, sometimes by the mainly Tutsi army.
But that is, in part, a result of the continued cross-border raids into Rwanda from the camps, in order to kill, maim and keep the divisions wide.
As others have pointed out, the West kept the Khmer Rouge alive in the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. Now we are sustaining the genocidal dogma in the Rwandan camps in Zaire and Tanzania.
While the United Nations appeals to “all sides to avoid a humanitarian disaster” – referring to Hutu refugees – the real victims of the killing in eastern Zaire are the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis who have lived there for generations but now find themselves facing murder or expulsion. The United Nations says that it cannot help them, because the victims are being killed inside their own country – even if that country has disowned them.
The spread of fighting into Zaire has been on the cards for months. The Hutu militias, when not raiding Rwanda, consorted with Zairean soldiers and civilians to destroy the country’s Tutsis – the Banyamulenge and the Banyarwanda.
Rwanda denies any hand in helping them fight back, but support for Zairean Tutsis is an effective way to carry the war into the extremists’ camp. Under the circumstances, it will be hard for anyone in the West to say that Rwanda is wrong.
Washington certainly would not permit similar armed camps of fanatics, intent on overthrowing the government, to sit across its border with Mexico. And the United States invaded Panama and Grenada on far more spurious threats to its security.
The West keeps talking about closing the camps. Washington – describing them as centres of terrorism – says they should be shut. Two weeks ago, a United Nations conference said the same thing, for the sixth time in two years. Even Zaire’s prime minister says the camps must close. And yet, even allowing for the trickle of refugees going home, the numbers in the camps expand with every birth.
What little attention has been paid to finding a lasting solution in central Africa is suspect or shunned. The United States Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, popped up in the region a fortnight ago pushing a plan for a Western-funded, African- manned peacekeeping force. European support is crucial. It got buried in a spat between the French and Christopher over who has the right to exercise what influence in Africa.
But if anyone doubts the West’s seriousness, it can always point to the great help given to the Hutu refugees.