Word: rwanda
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Rieff shares that impression. He is an author and journalist who has spent the better part of the past 10 years observing killers and humanitarians on the job in places like Bosnia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Angola. "As I write," Rieff notes, "there are 27 major armed conflicts taking place in the world; 1.2 billion people are living on less than one dollar a day; 2.4 billion people have no access to basic sanitation; and 854 million adults, 543 million of them women, are illiterate." Rieff expresses his admiration for the humanitarians--Doctors Without Borders...
...often--in Bosnia and Rwanda, for example--humanitarian workers have simply served as fig leaves, moral cover for big powers that did not want to get involved. As long as telegenic humanitarians put on a morally satisfying show of Western deus ex machina, caring for refugees on the 6:30 news, then governments can procrastinate. Take, for instance, the legal dithering of the Clinton Administration on Rwanda (where 800,000 dying in eight weeks amounted to an immense crime of omission): It depends on what the meaning of the word genocide...
...Balkans, as saying, "You don't reply to fascism with relief supplies, and you don't counter ethnic cleansing with reception centers for the displaced." Oxfam called for a cease-fire during the Rwandan genocide, but as an observer pointed out, that would have left half of Rwanda in the hands of those Hutu perpetrating the genocide and thus would have allowed them to finish what they had started in the zone they controlled. Grotesquely, the presence of humanitarians, in one aid expert's words, "far from representing a bulwark against evil, [may become] in fact one of its appendages...
Kanuma, a journalist from Rwanda, said he was shot at for writing articles critical of the Democratic Republic of Congo...
...troops' arrival marks a shift in France's policy toward her former African colonies. In the past, France regularly sent soldiers to prop up governments and dictators close to Paris. But following criticism of France's role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide - France allegedly continued to arm and support Rwanda's Hutu-led government even after the murder of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu began - President Chirac declared that the age of unilateral action was over. The Foreign Ministry in Paris still insists that French troops will not "play an active role in any military conflict." But the French...