Ntabwo nitwa Muzungu

The End

2010-11-09T18:48:00.000+02:00

This blog no longer exists. It was fun while it lasted, and I hoped some of you enjoyed it and found it interesting, but this is it.

However, I won't be disappearing entirely. I am now involved in a new project, and anyone who wants to stay informed on events in the region should definitely check out the Oxford Central Africa Forum. I'll be blogging about Rwanda from there, and we're also bringing in experts on just about everywhere else in the region, from any discipline we can find. So stay tuned (but not here).

Toodle-pip, bisous, and murabeho. Xx

Do you want the truth or something beautiful?

2010-09-29T14:16:00.000+02:00

A guest post, this one, because I can't say it better than this article, and you should all read it. Harry Verhoeven is an exceptionally clever and astute reader of the Great Lakes, and also a thoroughly nice person. This op-ed was originally published in The Christian Science Monitor, and makes an excellent point: given that we all know the use of the g-word in the report makes any kind of justice process in this region less likely, can all the 'the truth must out' types get off their high horse please?

Accusing Paul Kagame’s Rwanda of genocide: from one set of dangerous simplifications to another?

“Rigged” presidential elections; “co-responsibility” for the 1994 tragedy, says a former NATO secretary-general; atrocities committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1996- 1997 “that could be classified as genocide”, dixit UN experts: President Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), until recently the international community’s aid darling, now stand accused of a long list of crimes. The regime’s legitimacy and its leaders’ individual criminal responsibility are being contested. But how wise is it to swap one set of dangerous simplifications – Rwanda, the “island of stability” - for another- Kagame’s RPF as the genocidal eye of Central African storms?

Rwanda has long suffered from powerful imagery that has been projected onto it by self-declared friends of the country. The analyses of socio-political trends often reveal more about the ‘expert’ expounding his truths than about what actually happens to Rwanda’s people. Belgian colonialism, confused by the Flemish-Walloon cleavage that undermined nation-statehood back home, portrayed the complex Hutu-Tutsi relationship as fundamentally irreconcilable, mixing racist theories with political expediency. During the Cold War, the Habyarimana regime was the “enfant chéri” of development practitioners, the Catholic Church and François Mitterrand; its efficient state-machinery was “a peaceful outpost” in the dangerous African jungle. When the regime’s core members unleashed the hell of 1994, Kigali’s old allies disbelievingly went into shock (Brussels) and continued support through denial (Paris). When Kagame took over, a new generation fell in love with Rwanda: Anglo-Saxon politicians and aid workers again combined geopolitical opportunism with genuine admiration for the RPF’s sophisticated security and good governance buzz. Ignoring the reprisal atrocities between 1995 and 1998, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have publicly lead the defence of Kigali’s new masters as visionary reconciliators.

The unwillingness of outside actors to critically examine their wishful thinking about Rwanda has historically proved embarrassing; but it’s also led to terrible mistakes, including the inability to prevent the genocide that killed a million people. However, the problem is not just that Rwanda has been imagined as a non-existent African Shangri-La; it’s also that critics –seldom based on any thorough, on-the-ground research- have often gone so over the top in demonising the RPF that the movement handily dismisses essentially legitimate concerns as baseless accusations.

Whilst once it was mandatory to demand ‘empathy’ for the war-ravaged country’s authoritarian government, today it is becoming fashionable to blame the regime –and Kagame himself- for almost all Central Africa’s wrongs. Desiring to denounce the RPF as the brilliantly evil organisation you love to hate, many commentators are now recklessly amalgamating charges of human rights violations, corruption and bad policy and coming dangerously close to embracing revisionism too. It is no longer just Hutu génocidaires and their French silent accomplices who suggest the “double genocide”- hypothesis, conveniently trivialising two decades of anti-Tutsi massacres; a hotchpotch of journalists, scholars and activists are jumping on the UN document’s controversial hypotheses to claim it offers supreme evidence of the culpability of a regime they loath (for doctrinal or fashionable reasons) because if the RPF waged an extermination campaign in DRC, then perhaps it also co-engineered the 1994 events so that it could take over power?

Under the “genocide-in-Congo” banner, the real need to hold people accountable for what happened to 200,000 Hutu refugees is at risk of being merged with the problematic agendas of genocide revisionists and not particularly innocent RPF detractors. “Genocide-in-Congo?” could well become a repeat of the counter-productive “genocide-in-Darfur?” debate, particularly because the report’s author, the UN, has not done a particularly good job of owing up to its own catastrophic failures in Central Africa. This includes its shameful role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but also its shocking inability to neutralise tens of thousands heavily armed génocidaires in the very refugee camps where it alleges the RPF massacred civilians. The UN would have far more moral credibility and political leverage to finally do something about the DRC atrocities if it had done its utmost to solve the deadly embrace between Eastern Congo and Rwanda over the past sixteen years. Unfortunately, the international community is yet to fully accept the devastating responsibility of Security Council members in this ongoing tragedy.

Moreover, the debate is re-ignited at a treacherous time for Rwanda. After ruthlessly crushing an insurgency in 97-98, the RPF’s security-obsessed hardcore has disintegrated rapidly in recent years, falling victim to its own history: the succession of bitter conflicts in Uganda, Rwanda and Congo and the constant confrontation with enemies wielding genocidal rhetoric have turned the RPF leadership into an ultra-professional but deeply paranoid military organisation. It is a commonly trumpeted myth that the main intra-RPF fault-line runs between “moderate reformers” and “security hawks”; in reality, generals and business interests agree on most substantive issues, the “Singapore”-vision of an authoritarian but economically (selectively) liberalising order. The problem is not policy but power: the mediatised fall-out between Kagame and his ex-lieutenants Kayumba and Karegeya is escalating rapidly, but veils a wider struggle that has lead to the marginalisation of once powerful figures. Politics in the (increasingly fragmented) RPF is more than ever based on paranoia as nobody trusts nobody anymore and formal institutions collide with the informal zero sum logic of a leadership that still thinks like a guerrilla movement.

For a regime that both internally and externally sees its legitimacy to rule as inextricably tied to “genocide”, standing accused of the most heinous of crimes is more than a diplomatic insult: it’s questioning its right to rule. The RPF core will react the way it learned to respond to such threats: by going on the offensive (withdrawing troops from Darfur? Stirring up trouble in Eastern Congo to show it’s indispensable?) and at best offering temporary tactical concessions through on-and-off negotiations. The RPF will consider itself vindicated in its initial distrust of the outside world, shutting down avenues of mutual listening and further squashing internal dissent.

The inconvenient truth is that this perhaps well-intended report will probably be counter-productive with the genocide-reference. It was written at a terribly sensitive moment by an organisation that is in no position to lecture Rwanda about accepting responsibility; leaked after elections that were all about improving Kagame’s internal position amidst a power struggle, the chances of it leading to increased accountability for crimes in DRC of RPF officials are nil. Calling the atrocities “genocidal” spices up the debate, but doesn’t further the cause of peaceful politics inside Kigali and doesn’t bring justice any closer for the victims of the Luberizi, Tingi-Tingi and Shabunda massacres.

Tweeting Rape

2010-09-23T23:08:00.000+02:00

Yes. You did read that properly. I'm going to try really hard to be calm about this, but I suspect I won't succeed.

The facts: a reporter called Mac MacLelland, of Mother Jones (which I had hitherto considered to have very good judgment) conducted an interview with a Haitian rape survivor which she simultaneously re-tweeted live. Many of the tweets were then enthusiastically passed on by Clara Jefferey, an editor at MJ, and Stephanie Mencimer, a staff writer. This is the sort of thing we're talking about:

"On my way to the hospital with a girl whose tongue was bitten off when she was raped." (M. MacLelland)

"Awesome @macmcclelland is tweeting a horrific story about rape survivor in Haiti. Follow, but be prepared: serious stomach turning. Follow!" (S. Mencimer)

"Kerby is 24, tall, slim, mother of 3. Husband died in the quake. She was kidnapped at gunpoint by 5 men and taken to a car for the rape." (M. MacLelland)

"Dropped a rocking, crying Kerby back off at a camp flanked by police station, national palace, ministry for women. Rape central." (M. MacLelland)

For a glimpse into the general tone of the profile this rape was recounted on, you might take this as a reasonably typical tweet:

Camp's descended into darkness, and someone has stolen power to blast "We Are the World" over 80,000 tent refugees.#GAAAAYYY! (M. MacLelland, 18th Sept 2010, 3.39)

A lot, since then, has been said. Some of which has got fairly nasty. Jina Moore (who we like) has spoken about journalistic standards and informed consent here, and Akhila Kolisetty (who I've not read before, but seems thoroughly sensible) helps put the boot in here. As I'm not a journalist, and the journalistic angle has been amply covered, I thought I'd skip talking about that, and move straight on to standards of basic human decency. So:

A. Was this specific interview acceptable?

First, perfectly legitimate questions were raised about informed consent. For example, Kolisetty asks "Sure, the woman might have known that McClelland is a reporter, but did she know that the story was being tweeted, and that thousands of people were hearing about the extremely graphic details of her experience? Did she even know what Twitter is? Did she know that her name was being used, and that the reporter was providing identifying information about what she looked like, how old she was, where she lived, and how many children she had?". McLelland's response has been fourfold:

1. MacLelland is adamant that the victim was explained thoroughly the process of the interview, how the information was disseminated, and so forth. Fine, we'll take her at her word. Note, however, that informed consent is not merely about whether the interviewee has been told all the relevant facts, but whether or not they we can be absolutely sure that the interviewee is competent to evaluate that information and choose rationally. Victims of abuse, for obvious reasons, are the prime example of this sort of case (when, for example, information could lead to the victim being identified, sane human beings would not print that even if the victim wanted the reporter to). For example, the victim is repeatedly bullied by a doctor for 'asking for it' whilst MacLelland is there, and is then confronted by one of her rapists. These are not ideal conditions for conducting an interview in which the subject is able to calmly and temperately assess what is going on, you might think. And MacLelland should know that.

2. "The Haitian group helping [the victim] told me she gave a TV interview before I arrived, and her story is well-known locally" (direct quotation). Hence, presumably, there is no real danger of identification from what MacLelland put in her reporting. This is just appalling logic, suggesting MacLelland is stupid as well as callous. For a start, unless she is sure her report is identical to the TV report and what is 'locally known' at the time of reporting, she can't be sure of that. Given that this is live, the possibility of double-checking something like that is lost. Which is why it is irresponsible. Moreover, this is - at the very least - another way to publicly access this information. To that extent, it is easier to find it, and you have increased the risk to her. Finally, suggesting that the criteria for working out what it would be responsible to spout off about is fixed by the standards of local gossip is beyond cretinous for obvious reasons.

3. "This victims-rights org, run by victims themselves, condoned my ride-along and writing about the case, as did [the victim] and her mother". Another direction quotation, another moronic thing to say. Firstly, anyone who has ever met local victims-rights organisations knows that this could mean anything, from the utterly fantastic and brilliant to the incompetent and irresponsible. Do these people follow best practices on, for example, the anonymity of those they try and protect? Your facile interview is prima facie evidence that they do not. Secondly, they can't have ok-ed the final product, because you did it live.

4. "I do not presume to question a woman's right to tell her own story, nor to tell her she is not sophisticated enough to provide that consent". This is the one which makes me cross. When you are dealing with abused and traumatised people, it is beyond me that anyone could so blatantly disregard their very real vulnerabilities in order to score a political point about the patriarchy. When you are dealing with vulnerable people you absolutely are supposed to presume that there is a power-asymmetry between you and the subject, unless you can be very very certain that is not the case; you are supposed to assume that vulnerable, traumatised, and abused human beings may have a compromised capacity to consent, unless you can be certain as to the contrary. That is not questioning a right; it is being a considerate person. It isn't just journalists we expect this of; this, one would have thought, is a fairly basic standard for being an acceptable human being. I am frankly appalled anyone lets MacLelland near vulnerable people at all. She cannot know whether or not she has endangered this woman's security, nor did she put in place appropriate safeguards to try and find that out. To say nothing of how unbelievably crass MacLelland was about it.

Did MacLelland tell her subject she would break off her account to comment on the 'buff French policemen'? What part, pray tell, of respecting the right of the victim to tell their own story did that come under? The victim could, presumably, tweet the story herself without MacLelland (and without the horrendous command of the English language MacLelland possesses)

So don't dare try and make this about the affirmation of female autonomy.

Should probably calm down a bit, and revert to the third person.

B. Is this ever an acceptable way to mediatise rape?

Three potential problems with this:

1. Doing it live.
2. Doing it on twitter.
3. Doing it if you are a crass and insensitive idiot.

I accept MacLelland may not be able to do much about [3]. If you want more evidence as to the truth of [3], check out this Onion-worthy gem from her latest article at MJ:

"Are you excited?" I ventured to the woman weeping next to me on the plane from Miami to Port-au-Prince yesterday, because I honestly couldn't read her emotion.

I think my considered intellectual response to this can only be AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGARGAREGARG.

There is more to say about [1] and [2]. Here I'm just going to re-quote the inestimable Jina Moore, who has put her finger on the multiple points far better than I would:

1. Basic 101 of interviewing trauma survivors is to make sure they're in control of the experience that is the interview. Why? Common human decency is one reason. Another reason is that the experience they're telling you about is one of utter powerlessness; it's your duty as a journalist to restore as much power to that re-telling as possible.

That includes, I think, letting them tell the whole story before you broadcast it to the world. There may be details that they don't get right the first time and they call you to correct. They may tell you something that later they regret and ask you not to use -- and it's within your rights as a journalist to grant that request, if it doesn't compromise the story. The point is, they need to have the power to ask.

2. Basic Trauma 101 is that the trauma narrative is often confused for survivors -- although "confused" is valued language that comes from the world of the non-trauma survivor. For the trauma survivor -- and especially for survivors with PTSD, who are literally re-living the story, sometimes as they tell it to you -- time is not sequential. The story does not come out in a chronology. (And for a really good book about this, and how important it is to listen as long as you need to, as many times as you need to, to understand, see On Listening to Holocaust Survivors by Henry Greenspan.)

Why's that relevant here? Two reasons. One, Because presumably you're asking the survivor to share her story for some larger purpose -- presumably there's something others need to understand by listening to her. Otherwise it's just voyeurism, and you should go home. (I'm not accusing Mac of voyuerism.) But you need to listen through the whole story to understand what that is, and then you need to frame it for us.

Two, you just un-ordered her story because the medium demands it. The nature of her experience may also have un-ordered it. This is closer and more literal to the risk that is "journalism as trauma" than I am comfortable with.

All of which is obviously true.

I only want to add one more thing: the essence of twitter is that it is glib and throw-away. That it is trivial, un-contextualised, forgettable, and so on. Just look at the twitter-feed (pictured below).

Ask yourself the following: Can you follow what is going on? Do you feel that you can understand and empathise with this woman? Do you feel like her story is being respected?

Twitter functioned beautifully during the Iranian election because it is anonymous, quick, and profoundly disrespectful as a medium (authoritarianism needs long speeches, as Castro could tell you). It is precisely these qualities which make it utterly inappropriate here. So back in your box, MacLelland. And Moore-Kolisetty FTW.

Swimming lessons, and term limits

2010-09-19T17:08:00.000+02:00

I shall return to the report later, but for the moment, wanted to share this beautiful illustration of the utter bloody randomness of human history; the story of how swimming lessons saved Taiwan.

More importantly, Sheik Musa Fazil Harelimana (Minister of Security, pictured) is trying to get article 101 of the constitution amended. For those without an enclyclopaedic knowledge of the Rwandan constitution, this is term limits. This may be the prejudice of academic background speaking here, but I think this is far worse news than the electoral irregularities, the UN report, the flights into exile of Rudasingwa, Gahima, Karegyeya, Nyamwasa, etc.

There is no doubt that the Rwandan state works, and is a stronger, denser, and more effective entity than any other state in Africa I can name (two possible rivals: Revolutionary Ethiopia, and the Eritrean state which broke it, but I don't think either comes close). That does not necessarily mean that any of those three states are nice (after all, you need strong states to carry out welfare or pogroms...), and that does not mean those state apparatuses are going to carry on working (see Ethiopia for details). The core test for all three (which Mengistu's Ethiopia has already failed, obviously) is whether what is now sustained by personal authority and connections can accrete an institutional logic of its own. We are already pushing against the limits of 'the struggle generation', which means 2017 was to have been the crucial year when we all find out whether the new Rwandan state has an existence outside and beyond the elite which created it. If Kagame stays beyond the current constitutional limit, that is less likely to be the case.

I do not say this because I don't like Kagame. That isn't relevant. I loved Mandela and Kufuor, and esepcially loved it that they left when they said they would. Even those who believe Kagame is truly great and exceptional, should nonetheless want him to leave office in 2017. Anyone who wants anything for the future of Rwanda is going to need a strong state with institutions autonomous from society and independent of the individuals which currently hold its offices. In the next seven years, power in Rwanda could become yet more personalised or centralised, or it could be slowly routinised in institutions. The former is understandably tempting for an embattled and (understandably) paranoid regime currently on the defensive. Please don't be tempted.

Complicating factors

2010-09-17T16:51:00.000+02:00

Paul Kagame's visit to London was rather overshadowed by another visit you may have heard something about. In the spirit of things not paid enough attention to, here are two things which should give pause to people making the case for a genocide in the Congo in 1996:

The RPF was never a totally Tutsi movement, not in the camps of Mbarara, and not when they enter Kigali in 1994. By the point of the entry into the DRC, the RPA (as it became) has integrated considerable numbers of FAR combatants. This is a multi-ethnic army. If this report is accurate, a considerably number of the alleged genocidaires are themselves Hutu.
We think about 2.1 million people fled Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. Some 850,000 went to five vast refugee camps near Goma, and a further 650,000 in thirty smaller camps round Bukabu. About 140,000 go back to Rwanda of their own accord in the first three months. Even on the highest claims about numbers killed in the Kivus, the vast majority of the rest are forcibly returned to Rwanda when the RPA enters to clear the camps. That means that there were over a million Hutu at the mercy of the Rwandan army who were simply taken back to Rwanda.

These facts are not decisive, they are not proof in any sense (and I am not a lawyer, and nobody is on trial). Nor - I suspect - will they go uncontested by some of the readers of this blog. I am happy to print any evidence people have about this one way or the other. What these two considerations do is undermine the claims regarding intentionality, which the convention requires. They suggest, to me at least, is that it would be more appropriate to regard the actions of the RPA in 1996 (if everything in the report is true - a very big if) as a campaign of political terror where the collective punishment of civilians was a vital instrument of that terror (something like what Gerard Prunier argues in this book). That, if proven, would still constitute crimes against humanity, I believe, but would not meet the test for genocide.

In general, however, I think the debate (Fight? Row? Screaming match?) about whether or not the RPA's actions constitute genocide is an extremely unhealthy and unproductive one. It seems to rely on two unspoken falsehoods: that if it is not genocide then everything is fine, and if it is genocide, it is exactly as bad as the Tutsi genocide of 1994. This is an utterly debased moral language, and one which makes it less likely that we will see justice in the Great Lakes. But more on that in the next post.

Rwanda responds (and so do I)

2010-09-13T12:27:00.001+02:00

You can download the response of the Rwandan government to the mapping report here, and the Congolese government's response here.

As you can see, they don't like it. Two hundred and twenty Congolese Civil Society Organisations, however, do.

The criticisms of the Rwandan government deserve a detailed response. As such, I'm going to go through it line by line. Here it is:

"The timing of the leak of this draft report is quite revealing; it appears that the UN is attempting to divert international attention from its latest failure in the Great Lake Region where recently hundreds of Congolese women were savagely raped under the watch of its peacekeeping force MONUSCO"

This is irrelevant. It should not alter one iota what we think of the content of the report. It is also unlikely to be true. Firstly, this report was not by MONUSCO, but by the UN Commission for Human Rights, who do not answer to MONUSCO. Secondly, this report was leaked. Which undermines the case for conspiracy somewhat. Colum Lynch has a much more plausible account of the internal politics of the UN here, in which he suggests that it was leaked because someone on Ban Ki Moon's team was trying to get the g-word removed. The idea that the UN is in some was 'out to get' Rwanda (or Israel, or North Korea, or Iran) is a familiar trope of conspiracy theorists, and one of those delightfully unfalsifiable arguments which is ready-made for all occasions. Peter Gourevitch does exactly the same thing here, insinuating (amongst other things) that because Kofi Annan was a sponsor of the report, that undermines its credibility (because Annan wanted to spread blame after his disastrous handling of the genocide). For a start, this is pretty shabby tabloid tactics from someone who should know better, i.e. this is a shameless ad hominem attack offered with no evidence whatsoever. So can we please stop attacking the authors?

CORRECTION: well, sort of. Something I should have added, probably. It is pretty clear from the methodology of the report that they would have needed to rely on MONUSCO quite considerably to write this (setting up the interviews, locating survivors, etc). To that extent, it is plausible to contend that the report had biased access to information. Furthermore, it means that the UN Commission would have had extensive links with MONUSCO going back years, would have been in fairly constant contact with them, and to that extent the claim that they would have leaked the report to take the heat off them is slightly more credible.

“It is immoral and unacceptable that the United Nations, an organization that failed outright to prevent genocide in Rwanda and the subsequent refugees crisis the is the direct cause for so much suffering in Congo and Rwanda, now accuses the army that stopped the genocide of committing atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo"

False. That would be collective responsibility gone insane. A similar logic would make it impossible for any German government official ever to criticise Israel. Stop anthropomorphising: the UN is not one monolithic bloc, but a huge, diverse organisation, and whilst several people in the UN should probably be publicly shamed for their conduct in 1994, that does not mean that other people who now work for the UN are under some strange Great-Lakes gag rule.

"The report is a dangerous and irresponsible document that under the guise of human rights can only achieve instability in the Great Lakes Region and undermine ongoing efforts to stabilize the region, particularly at a time when unprecedented progress is being made in establishing peace, security and economic collaboration."

This is the most plausible rebuttal offered. It is credible to suggest that this report is destabilising. There are two potential replies the UN could offer: firstly, their mandate is investigative, and they have a duty to report the truth as they see it, regardless of consequences. Secondly, the long-term consequences of not bringing these abuses to light (i.e. a lack of closure, continuation of a culture of impunity, non-resolution of grievance, etc) are ultimately more cancerous for the region in the long run.

Broadly, however, nobody knows what the consequences of publishing this will be. We all know it is explosive, but nobody has a crystal ball. The Rwandan government could be right that this is destabilising, and the UN could be right that there is no future for the region without reconciliation and openness. Nobody knows, so to that extent, it shouldn't be part of the debate unless someone out there is prepared to offer more than assertions in this regard.

"Given the gravity of its mission, the Mapping Team’s failure to consult with Rwanda even though they found time to meet with over 200 NGO representatives is shocking and shows complete disregard for fundamental fairness"

No: there is no such thing as a right of response to a mapping report in advance of publication. You get your right of response now, in public, like everyone else. In any case, the Rwandan government were apparently shown a copy of the report a couple of days before the leak, and now have until the beginning of October to give 'comments and advice' on the final version.

"While NGOs are entitled to their opinions, their work should not form the basis of genocide or war crimes allegations against Rwanda or any other nation."

Why not? Often these are the only organisations in any position to observe such abuses. After all, the Rwandan government has never, to my knowledge, complained about Alison Des Forges' monumental tome documenting the 1994 genocide for Human Rights Watch (with, of course, the exception of the section on RPF crimes), which would seem to be an exact parallel case.

"The report makes extremely serious allegations – of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – based on questionable methodology, sourcing and shockingly low standard of proof.

By its own admission, the Mapping Team was not concerned with pursuing in-depth investigations or gathering evidence of sufficient admissibility to stand in court, meaning that they employed the lowest evidentiary standard to investigate these allegations”

It is correct to point out that this report is not trying to fulfil the evidential burden of a court. The point of this document, if you recall, is to offer advice as to the direction of the transitional justice process in the DRC. Therefore, its purpose is not to try and convict anyone, but to indicate the appropriate scope of such a justice process, and how it might proceed. As such, this criticism misses the point. All the report was supposed to determine is whether or not there is a case to answer. If the Rwandan government feel that this evidence is insufficient to meet a legal burden of proof, they should be the first in line to support an independent judicial process into human rights abuses in the DRC.

Apart from anything else, as things stand, that would be the only way to clear their name.

“It is a fact that Rwanda’s intervention in the DRC was a matter of survival and the direct consequence of the irresponsible and insensitive management of the refugee camps by the UN and the international community subsequent to the genocide.

It is true that the former government of Rwanda were re-arming in the camps (Read Médicins San Frontières' reports on this from the time for all the evidence you need), the UN was utterly hopeless at doing anything about it, and Mobutu was (probably) helping them for his own reasons. There were also attempts to ignite an insurgency in the areas round Gisenyi and Musanze in the North-West. That, to my mind, establishes a strategic justification for intervention in the DRC to forcibly close down these camps (whether or not it is a matter of survival doesn't matter - this alone is enough for me).

However, it is clear that the RPA was able to establish almost total military dominance very quickly after their entry into what was then Zaïre. From that point, it should have been possible to return the refugees to Rwanda, or to disarm them and leave them in the Congo. Every genocidaire in Rwanda got a trial, or an approximation of that through Gacaca. It would be extremely difficult, as far as I can see, to make the argument that the military situation in the Kivus was so desperate that the normal protections extended to either combatants or non-combatants (I don't want to get into that particular fight) don't apply.

So I'm really hoping the Rwandan government say bring it on. I would really like a world in which these allegations are false.

The leaked report: commentary

2010-09-03T17:11:00.001+02:00

President Paul Kagame will be sworn in as President for a second term on Monday. I don’t talk to him that often, but I suspect he will not be looking forward to it as much as he’d hoped. I’ve blogged before about why the election itself should be viewed as a failure on the RPF’s own terms. This is reflected in the guest list for the inauguration itself: it's a little less stellar than they might have hoped (as this article points out, neither Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni will be attending, and South Africans are conspicuous in their absence from the current list).

However, this is not the story. You all know what it is: the main reason the RPF high command will be enjoying the inauguration less than they otherwise might is because of the leaking of this UN report. Le Monde got the story first, followed by slightly longer accounts in the Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor. The headlines are all more or less the same: this report accuses the Rwandan army of genocide in Eastern Congo in the late ‘90s.

Two caveats. One: I have not read the entire report. It is enormous. People who want to read it should go here. Laura Seay at Texas in Africa and Jason Stearns at Congo Siasa have. Much of what I am about to write is shamelessly stolen from them. The latter, in particular, is blogging extensively about the detail (check out his post on 1993 to 1996 here). Two: I am not a lawyer. Words like genocide should not be used lightly. This is a specific legal term of art which I am not, for the moment, going to write about, or advance an opinion on. I am not qualified to do that. So all I’m going to do here is try and set out the politics of the current situation.

What is this report?

This report is the Rapport du Projet Mapping concernant les violations les plus graves des droits de l’homme et du droit international humanitaire commises entre mars 1993 et juin 2003 sur le territoire de la République démocratique du Congo. It comes from the United Nations Commission from Human Rights. Its scope is the entirety of the DRC, not just the East, and a ten-year period from 1993 to 2003. Within that, it is supposed to investigate ‘serious human rights abuses’, i.e. war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has investigated over 600 separate incidents, interviewed over 1,280 witnesses, and collected and analysed over 1,500 documents.

The point of this report is “to formulate a series of options aimed at assisting the government of the DRC in identifying appropriate transitional justice mechanisms to deal with the legacy of these violations, in terms of truth, justice, reparation and reform” (from OHCHR, the authors of the report).

Three keys points first:

1. It is false to claim (as many have) that the point of this report is to single out the Rwandan government for opprobrium. This report accuses officials from the governments of Angola, Burundi, Uganda, Chad, and the DRC with war crimes. For example:

"All parties to the conflict in the DRC recruited and used CAAFAG. Between 1993 and 2003, these and other children were subjected to indescribable violence, including murder, rape, torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, forced displacements and the destruction of their villages, and were deprived of all their rights. This situation continues to this day." (Paragraph 719)

2. This is not a legally binding document in any straightforward sense. It does not use the burden of proof that would be required in a court of law. However, every incident included in the report was corroborated by at least two independent, reliable sources, and usually by at least one eyewitness. Some of these witnesses are anonymous in the final report, but that is not unusual given that the credible fear of reprisals for some of this testimony, and it is not sufficient – in my view – to damage the overall credibility of the report, as suggested by the New Times here. The report explicitly says it is only attempting to claim "reasonable suspicion that the incident did occur" (Paragraph 7).

3. This is a leaked draft report. It does not, as such, have the official support of the UN. The rumour (which seems plausible) is that senior UN officials were pressing for the language about ‘crimes of genocide’ to be removed. The publication has now been delayed until the 1^st of October to allow ‘comments’ from concerned parties. It seems difficult to see who this would be other than the Rwandan government. At least, the leaking of this report should be regarded as prima facie evidence that someone in OHCHR believed that something was going to be removed before publication. The possibility that this is for political reasons should at the very least not be discounted.

If that last point is true, it would make sense to look at the most controversial content in the report. The most controversial claim, it goes without saying, is that the Rwandan and Rwandan controlled forces were involved in systematic killings of Hutu refugees that fled into Eastern DRC in the wake of the 1994 genocide inside Rwanda. The Rwandan government has never denied entering the DRC shortly thereafter: their claim has always been that their forces entered to hunt down genocidal militias and close down the refugee camps in which the genocidal government was rearming. Note that these claims are not mutually exclusive with the evidence presented in the report. Jason Stearns has covered the relevant sections in detail here. Crucially, the report does not take it upon itself to try and convict the Rwandan government of genocide, as some have contended. The claim is that if these crimes were proven beyond a competent court, they would constitute crimes of genocide.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to read the crucial sections (paragraphs 512 to 518) without believing that, if true, a crime of terrible evil has been perpetrated. These claims are not new (in particular, this report vindicates the work of Howard French, Nicholas Kristof, and Gerard Prunier). However, this report is far more comprehensive and methodologically careful than previous reports, and it is the first time an international body has seemingly thrown its weight behind such accusations. This makes these claims impossible to ignore. Whether or not this constitutes genocide legally speaking, the report argues that officers of the Rwandan state, and rebels working with them, were complicit – if not the direct organisers – of collective violence on a large scale, directed against civilians.

What about the politics?

It doesn’t matter that this isn’t a legal document, or that it is leaked: this report is political dynamite. The Rwandan government have threatened to withdraw all of their peacekeepers (they are the major contributors in Darfur, and a significant presence in Haiti, Liberia, and South Sudan) if the claims regarding genocide appear in the final version, and this threat should be regarded as credible: this is a political elite which has taken on the government of France before (over their intransigence regarding the cooperation of the French state with the Habyarimana regime) and won.

Internationally, much of the damage to Kagame’s already precarious reputation has been done. It will be almost impossible now to speak about the current Rwandan government without reference to this report, whether the final version removes these charges or not. High profile supporters like Tony Blair, Philip Gourevitch, and so on, may find it increasingly difficult to still be vocal. Given the dependence of the Rwandan state upon international support (both direct budget support and investment capital), this may endanger the ability of the RPF to continue to monopolise patronage within in Rwanda. Whether or not you believe the RPF are bad per se, this is likely to be bad news for ordinary Rwandans.

Internally, I am deeply ambivalent about the political consequences of this report. Firstly, there seems little doubt that the radical critics of the current regime will seize upon this report to revive the ‘double genocide’ hypothesis (i.e. that the current regime engaged in a ‘counter-genocide’ at the time of the genocide against Tutsis). This would be false. The comparison is not in the slightest justifiable: the report suggests that at most tens of thousands of Hutu refugees were killed in the Congo. This is nowhere near as high as the numbers killed within Rwanda by the government of Juvenal Habyarimana. Implying any moral equivalence is nonsense. Nonetheless, I suspect that will not stop many people presenting it this way, and – to that extent – this could destabilise Rwanda internally, and revive a (possibly only suppressed) ethnic politics with potentially disastrous implications. Even if it isn’t, this report explodes the central legitimating discourse of the current Rwandan government: that it ended the genocide, and took Rwanda past ethnic politics.

However, if the oft-made claim that the Rwandan population is substantively ‘developmentalist’ continues to hold (i.e. that what most Rwandans really care about is security and development, and have put up with considerable autocracy and state violence before), then this report – which after all, says very much less than the outrageous claims anyone can read online any time they like, and nothing new for the people that already wanted to accuse the current regime of these crimes – may not substantively alter the political dynamic within Rwanda that much. Ari Cohen may well be right when he points out that it is still true that:

“...the lives of a great many Rwandans have been markedly improved by the development programs undertaken by the Kagame government and funded by a variety of international donors; if he is linked to genocide, especially after having bought so much credibility by effectively controlling the narrative regarding the Rwandan genocide, Western governments and aid organizations might shy away from the entire messy region — effectively punishing ordinary Rwandans for the sins of the RPA.”

The question is how many Rwandans will make that calculation too. So I really, really don’t know what to think about likely effects within Rwanda. Over to you.

Bare facts

2010-09-03T16:14:00.002+02:00

A report has been leaked. A claim has been made. A certain word has been used. You all know what I am talking about.

From me: no commentary, no interpretation, no exegesis.

For now, just the facts.

The full text of the Genocide Convention can be found here (in English). This is how it defines genocide:

"Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article 3

The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide."

It should be noted that this is what you might call a 'maximalist' definition of genocide. It could quite easily include the treatment of the Aboriginals in Australia, the Herero people of Namibia, the Afrikaners during the Boer war, the Ottoman Armenians in 1915, etc, as well as the Holocaust and the 1994 Tutsi genocide. It does not imply moral equivalence between these atrocities.

The leaked draft report can be found here (in French). It is almost six hundred pages long, but the paragraphs everyone is talking about are 512 to 518. This is what they say (translation by Jason Stearns):

"Paragraph 512. The systematic attacks [...] resulted in a very large number of victims, probably tens of thousands of members of the Hutu ethnic group, all nationalities combined. In the vast majority of cases reported, it was not a question of people killed unintentionally in the course of combat, but people targeted primarily by AFDL/APR/FAB forces and executed in their hundreds, often with edged weapons. The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces. Numerous serious attacks on the physical or pyschological integrity of members of the group were also committed, with a very high number of Hutus shot, raped, burnt or beaten. Very large numbers of victims were forced to flee and travel long distances to escape their pursuers, who were trying to kill them. The hunt lasted for months, resulting in the deaths of an unknown number of people subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading living conditions, without access to food or medication. On several occasions, the humanitarian aid intended for them was deliberately blocked, in particular in Orientale Province, depriving them of assistance essential to their survival

"Paragraph 513. At the time of the incidents covered by this report, the Hutu population in Zaire, including refugees from Rwanda, constituted an ethnic group as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Moreover, as shown previously, the intention to destroy a group in part is sufficient to be classified as a crime of genocide. Finally, the courts have also confirmed that the destruction of a group can be limited to a particular geographical area. It is therefore possible to assert that, even if only a part of the Hutu population in Zaire was targeted and destroyed, it could nonetheless constitute a crime of genocide, if this was the intention of the perpetrators. Finally, several incidents listed also seem to confirm that the numerous attacks were targeted at members of the Hutu ethnic group as such. Although, at certain times, the aggressors said they were looking for the criminals responsible for the genocide committed against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, the majority of the incidents reported indicate that the Hutus were targeted as such, with no discrimination between them. The numerous attacks against the Hutus in Zaire, who were not part of the refugees, seem to confirm that it was all Hutus, as such, who were targeted. The crimes committed in particular in Rutshuru (30 October 1996) and Mugogo (18 November 1996), in North Kivu, highlight the specific targeting of the Hutus, since people who were able to persuade the aggressors that they belonged to another ethnic group were released just before the massacres. The systematic use of barriers by theAFDL/APR/FAB, particularly in South Kivu, enabled them to identify people of Hutu origin by their name or village of origin and thus to eliminate them. Hundreds of people of Hutu origin are thus thought to have been arrested at a barrier erected in November 1996 in Ngwenda, in the Rutshuru territory, and subsequently executed by being beaten with sticks in a place called Kabaraza. In South Kivu, AFDL/APR/FAB soldiers erected numerous barriers on the Ruzizi plain to stop Rwandan and Burundian refugees who had been dispersed after their camps had been dismantled.

"514. Several incidents listed in this report point to circumstances and facts from which a court could infer the intention to destroy the Hutu ethnic group in the DRC in part, if these were established beyond all reasonable doubt. Firstly, the scale of the crimes and the large number of victims are illustrated by the numerous incidents described above. The extensive use of edged weapons (primarily hammers) and the systematic massacre of survivors, including women and children, after the camps had been taken show that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage. The systematic nature of the attacks listed against the Hutus also emerges: these attacks took place in each location where refugees had been identified by the AFDL/APR, over a vast area of the country. Particularly in North Kivu and South Kivu but also in other provinces, the massacres often began with a trick by elements of the AFDL/APR, who summoned the victims to meetings on the pretext either of discussing their repatriation to Rwanda in the case of the refugees, or of introducing them to the new authorities in the case of Hutus settled in the region, or of distributing food. Afterwards, those present were systematically killed. Cases of this kind were confirmed in the province of North Kivu in Musekera, Rutshuru and Kiringa (October 1996), Mugogo and Kabaraza (November 1996), Hombo, Katoyi, Kausa, Kifuruka, Kinigi, Musenge, Mutiko and Nyakariba (December 1996), Kibumba andKabizo (April 1997) and Mushangwe (around August 1997); in the province of South Kivu in Rushima and Luberizi(October 1996), Cotonco and Chimanga (November 1996) and Mpwe (February 1997) and on theShabunda-Kigulube road (February-April 1997); in Orientale Province in Kisangani and Bengamisa (May and June 1997); in Maniema in Kalima (March 1997) and in Équateur in Boende (April 1997). Such acts certainly suggest premeditation and a precise methodology. In the region south of the town of Walikale, in North Kivu (January 1997), Rwandan Hutus were subjected to daily killings in areas already under the control of the AFDL/APR as part of a campaign that seemed to target any Hutus living in the area in question.

"515. Several of the massacres listed were committed regardless of the age or gender of the victims. This is particularly true of the crimes committed in Kibumba (October 1996), Mugunga and Osso (November 1996),Hombo and Biriko (December 1996) in the province of North Kivu, Kashusha and Shanje (November 1996) in the province of South Kivu, Tingi-Tingi and Lubutu (March 1997) in Maniema Province, and Boende (April 1997) inÉquateur Province, where the vast majority of victims were women and children. Furthermore, no effort was made to make a distinction between Hutus who were members of the ex-FAR/Interahamwe and Hutu civilians, whether or not they were refugees. This tendency to put all Hutus together and “tar them with the same brush” is also illustrated by the declarations made during the “awareness-raising speeches” made by the AFDL/APR in certain places, according to which any Hutu still present in Zaire must necessarily be a perpetrator of genocide, since the “real” refugees had already returned to Rwanda. These “awareness-raising speeches” made in NorthKivu also incited the population to look for, kill or help to kill Rwandan Hutu refugees, whom they called “pigs”. This type of language would have been in widespread use during the operations in this region.

"516. The massacres in Mbandaka and Wendji, committed on 13 May 1997 in Équateur Province, over 2,000 kilometres west of Rwanda, were the final stage in the hunt for Hutu refugees that had begun in eastern Zaire, in North and South Kivu, in October 1996. Among the refugees were elements of the ex-FAR/Interahamwe, who were disarmed by the local police force as soon as they arrived. In spite of everything, the AFDL/APR opened fire on hundreds of defenceless Hutu refugees, resulting in large numbers of victims.

"517. The systematic and widespread attacks described in this report, which targeted very large numbers of Rwandan Hutu refugees and members of the Hutu civilian population, resulting in their death, reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide. The behaviour of certain elements of the AFDL/APR in respect of the Hutu refugees and Hutu populations settled in Zaire at this time seems to equate to “a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against that group”, from which a court could even deduce the existence of a genocidal plan. “Whilst the existence of such a plan may contribute to establishing the required genocidal intention, it is nonetheless only an element of proof used to deduce such an intention and not a legal element of genocide.” It should be noted that certain elements could cause a court to hesitate to decide on the existence of a genocidal plan, such as the fact that as of 15 November 1996, several tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees, many of whom had survived previous attacks, were repatriated to Rwanda with the help of the AFDL/APR authorities and that hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees were able to return to Rwanda with the consent of the Rwandan authorities prior to the start of the first war. Whilst, in general, the killings did not spare women and children, it should be noted that in some places, at the beginning of the first war, Hutu women and children were in fact separated from the men, and only the men were subsequently killed.

"518. Nonetheless, neither the fact that only men were targeted during the massacres, nor the fact that part of the group were allowed to leave the country or that there movement was facilitated for various reasons, are sufficient in themselves to entirely remove the intention of certain people to partially destroy an ethnic group as such. In this respect it seems possible to infer a specific intention on the part of certain AFDL/APR commanders to partially destroy the Hutus in the DRC, and therefore to commit a crime of genocide, based on their conduct, words and the damning circumstances of the acts of violence committed by the men under their command. It will be for a court with proper jurisdiction to rule on this question."

Kissing, Saffer politics, and the African party

2010-08-23T13:29:00.000+02:00

Now, I know you don't all enjoy annoying conservatives as much as I do, but we might just manage to agree on this one. Stellenbosch may be one of the last places in South Africa, if not the world, where young men still openly say they are glad apartheid happened. To that extent I am generally in favour of antagonising them, and you should be too. So hurrah for these two gentlemen (pictured).

As South Africa watchers will already know (clunky punning link coming up...), the other controversial union of the moment is that of two opposition parties, Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance (the socially acceptable party for white people), and Patricia De Lille’s Independent Democrats (a minnow of a party with its roots in the now moribund Pan-African Congress, a sometime rival to the ANC). Anyone wanting to know more should check out this splendid piece by the ever wonderful Eusebius McKaiser

The two big questions are [1] Will this merger last? [2] If it does, does it change anything really? I’m with UB on the answer to [2]; it’s not obvious that this new party can challenge the ANC in any distinctively new way. However, I’m less convinced than he is that the extremely difference ideological pedigrees of the two movements make the marriage unlikely to last. A friend of mine (who I won’t name, because he doesn’t know I’m quoting him) has made the point much more succinctly than I ever was going to do:

Don't look at Western Europe for your examples of the likely success of these types of coalitions and mergers, look at the rest of the continent, Eastern Europe, South America. The African political party is not an ideological party. It is a party united by a desire to stay in power or remove the incumbent. Is the contrast between the right of the ANC and the edges of the communist party more or less severe than that of De Lille and Zille? What is the ideological unity inherent in the MDC? The Rainbow coalition?

He’s right, and central Africa watchers may find this depressingly similar too. Numerous times during the election back in Rwanda politicians, usually RPF, complained about the ideological vacuity of politics in the Great Lakes (usually comments like ‘Why don’t the parties oppose us on issues of policy, rather than ceaselessly playing the ethnic card/talking about history?’). They have a point. What, really, is Rwandan political competition about? If you remove the naked competition for power, and disagreements over what you might charitably call ‘the interpretation of recent historical events’, what is left? Can anyone articulate genuine ideological identities for the political parties in Rwanda?

Given that I suspect we can't, has anyone got any suggestions as to why much politics on the continent seems to happen in an ideological vacuum?

"New trends"

2010-08-19T19:26:00.000+02:00

Very nice piece by Lars Waldorf and Scott Straus over here. Lars Waldorf is one of the many HRW staff that don't go back to Rwanda, if you get my drift (and he never replies to my emails. But other than that, we like him), and Scott Straus wrote this excellent tome, which you should all read too. The really interesting bit, for me at least (also picked up on by Chris Blattman), is this:

First, Kagame turned on four of his top generals. Two fled the country and another two were arrested. After denouncing Kagame, General Kayumba Nyamwasa barely survived an assassination attempt in South Africa. His exiled colleague, General Patrick Karegeya, is openly calling for Kagame's violent overthrow. Second, the government did not just target challengers from the Hutu majority that it feared might play the ethnic card; it also prevented Tutsi politicians and Tutsi-led newspapers from opposing Kagame.

Or, more simply: [1] some sort of political competition (we don't know what) within the top brass of the military, and [2] the RPF are not just 'targeting' Hutu opposition figures, but also Tutsis.

So, maybe I'm being stupid, but what's new about this, exactly?

P.S. Daniel Berman has an excellent comment on my post below. It merits a response, and will get one. Just as soon as I have one...

Who won the Rwandan elections?

2010-08-16T12:34:00.001+02:00

Thanks to Graham Holliday of Kigaliwire for this picture of the voting in Kigali. Which I didn't credit the first time I put
up. Sorry about that.

Before everyone gets too excited, I’m not alleging any electoral fraud beyond that reported by Reuters. Which, as Reuters themselves, does not give us grounds to infer vote-rigging was taking place at any level beyond that of enthusiastic RPF Abakada at only a couple of polling-stations. That is why the poll has been accepted by the Dutch, the NDI, and now the Commonwealth. Final results for people that want them here. To summarise:

Paul Kagame (RPF)

- 4,638,560 (93.08%)

Jean-Damascene Ntawukuriryayo (PSD)

- 256,488 (5.15%)

Prosper Higiro (PL)

- 68,235 (1.37%)

Dr. Alivera Mukabaramba (PPC)

- 20,107 (0.40%)

A wipeout then. And one which isn’t particularly surprising or interesting. So I’m not going to write about it. Instead, I’d like to speculate wildly on the slightly bigger picture as regards what we can learn from this election. Winners and losers more broadly conceived, if you will. Somewhat controversially, I’m going to suggest that if any one constituency definitely lost these elections, it was the RPF. So:

Firstly, consider what the point of elections is for an impressively dominant and secure political elite which faces no immediate credible challenges to their authority. More simply: why bother running the election at all? The answer is that elections here are staged exercises in popular legitimation, just as they were in South Africa in 1994, Japan for much of the later twentieth century, and everywhere else we knew the winner in advance. Staged, of course, is not the same as rigged (it was staged, it wasn’t rigged). The success of this archetypally modern bit of political theatre requires that the election everyone sees is believably pluralistic, competitive, and at ease with democratic disagreement. This is important for a couple of reasons: firstly, it serves to draw the teeth of those critics internally who wish to characterise Rwanda as a brutal dictatorship. Secondly, given Rwanda’s dependence on international investment, it reassures external observers that Rwanda is ruled by the kind of people ‘we can do business with’. Thirdly, most obviously, an election is a way of getting a mandate, which shuts up the opposition in general.

Given that you know you’re going to win the election anyway, just allow an opening up of political space – it silences the more sensible of your critics, makes those that remain look like hysterical spoilers, and reassures those individuals and organisations that are more or less on your side anyway.

You may be thinking this was never the strategy of the Rwandan elite, but it really did look for a while as if that was what was going on. If we’d been talking about this election in the beginning of this year, the following things would have been true:

An extremely critical press was still regularly publishing coverage slating the government for everything under the sun.
Victoire Ingabiré was allowed back into the country.
Bernard Ntaganda was allowed to register his political party, and register as a candidate for the Presidency.
Frank Habineza had just had a series of extremely positive meetings with the electoral commission, and most commentators thought they would be allowed to register.

It was going to be a win-win situation: Kagame would win anyway, albeit with a reduced margin, but would be more than compensated for that by the immense international plaudits he would have won. The opposition would have got to transform themselves into national figures, and respectable, registered voices of opposition to boot. Everyone would have calmed down a bit, and the people crying dictatorship would have to calm down or be exposed as hopeless ideologues.

But that didn’t happen. The government ended up cracking down on all of this. Umuseso and Umuvugizi were suspended for the duration of the electoral cycle. Not one of the three ‘new’ opposition figures (i.e. Ingabiré, Ntaganda, Habineza) was allowed to run. Rallies were broken up, prominent critics went into exile, and others are now dead. The repertoire employed to secure political dominance was more violent than it has been in Rwanda for a while. I am absolutely not accusing the government of complicity in political assassination, but even the most trenchant RPF fan surely has to concede that this election was not the beautiful PR exercise for modern Rwanda they wanted it to be. The election was free, fair, and peaceful because the whole deal had been locked up months in advanced.

Because that didn’t happen, it didn’t work as an exercise in legitimation: if you compare the coverage of this election to the rather breathless hagiography we got for the 2003 or 2005 elections, it is clear that the worm has turned (my second-to-last post has a set of these links if you want to check them out). The international press coverage is not totally critical (Kagame has not attained Mugabe or Bashir levels of hate figure yet), but it is clear that what international praise there has been has been muted, and this failed as an exercise in promoting Rwanda internationally.

(Side note: ‘Nkunda’ has suggested on this blog that the reason for the chilling in Rwandan relations with the ‘Anglosphere’ can be attributed to the increasing closeness between Rwanda and China. I have two problems with this view: firstly, surely Rwanda is just not important enough for anyone less mad than the French to conceive of it as a prize in some new Great Game? Secondly, how exactly would Anglo-American foreign policy decisions come to be reflected in the editorials of newspapers like the Guardian or the New York Times?)

Moreover, I don’t think this election has served much of a purpose internally either. Firstly, I continue to believe that the vast majority of Rwandans did not attach huge importance to these elections. In part because they knew the outcome in advance, but also, and I don’t want to sound orientalist here (I probably will), my impression is that a significant proportion of Rwandans do not conceive of their relationship to the state as legitimated in democratic terms, at least not straightforwardly. Instead, it feels to me much more similar to something like the Latin America of the ‘70s, where the ‘imagined social contract’ was explicitly developmentalist: more simply, the Rwandan state is legitimated internally by its ability to provide two basic goods, security and ‘development’. Not through elections. For those people, re-electing Paul Kagame does not alter his authority to lead one way or the other. For anyone that doesn’t accept this set up (and there are also plenty of Rwandans who don’t feel this way), this election will not have satisfied them, because those people are precisely those that were reading Umuseso already.

My point is this: the Rwandan election should not be seen as the culmination of a sinister Machiavellian grand plan where the RPF always wanted to crush the democratic life out of the system. The truth is much sadder. This looks to me like there really was a genuine political will to run a genuinely pluralist and competitive election in Rwanda. And then there was a failure of nerve. Why? A couple of potential candidates:

The grenade attacks: not significant in terms of body count or even visibility outside of the capital, but enough to make an already jittery elite batten down the hatches?
Instability within the military elite: not just the exiled critics Nyamwasa and Karegyeya, but also the arrests and the reshuffles (Musoni, Karenzi, etc). Something was going on, and we don’t know what it is, but it might have been enough to persuade the inner circles of power that opening up political space right now was a bad idea?
Ingabiré was so much more of a nutter than anyone anticipated. I genuinely don’t believe that if the government had seen her coming, she would have been allowed back at all. But she was, and then started making all these dark allusions, and inflammatory speeches. Buttons were pushed. Alarm bells rang. The shutters came down.

More generally, Ingabiré, Ntaganda, and Habineza fucked this up. Why refuse to participate in the Forum of Political Parties, when it costs you nothing? Why go around calling yourself an RPF splinter cell, when you know how people feel about that? Why make unexplained trips to have shady meetings with dubious people in Uganda? Why not ask really basic questions about where your funding is coming from?

I’m not saying this sort of behaviour justifies what was then done to neutralise them as political competition, but everybody knows this government is (understandably) a little paranoid. It could have been anticipated, and if a couple of things had happened differently, this whole story might have been very different.

But that didn’t happen. As it is, everybody lost.

RPF 'banter'

2010-08-12T13:03:00.000+02:00

“Kayumba is my friend... Besides, he also knows that if I was involved in his shooting, he would not have survived” (Patrick Karegyeya, exile and former RPF insider)

What else? We have a final tally for the vote: 92.9%. Turnout was extremely high (as it might be elsewhere if the polling booths were this fabulous).

On a more serious note, I spoke too soon when I described the poll itself as peaceful. The twittersphere has rumblings about grenades (singular or plural) or gunfire, in Nyamirambo or Rubangura, or a car accident involving Ingabire. Jina Moore has put up all of the links you might need here. For people who can't be bothered reading it all, her conclusion, broadly, is that this sounds a lot worse than it is:

"Here's what I can tell you: It's not just that everything is quiet, like I said before. It's totally normal. When I went out, there were as many cars grinding up the hill as there usually are. There were as many people on the streets as I'd expect for 9 p.m. on a Wednesday. Restaurants and bars weren't suffering. Tonight feels like any other night in Kigali... which might sound weird to outside readers, judging from the phone calls and emails I'm getting from folks who don't live in Rwanda. But here, eh, things are okay."

Oh, and Fox News manage to confuse the Rwandan Presidential elections with the ICTR. Seriously.

BACK IN BUSINESS

2010-08-10T14:43:00.000+02:00

Yes! After an insanely hectic two months in which I did my bit for the world's carbon footprint and then some, Ntabwo etc has returned, and is once again looking forward to treating serious issues with insufficient levity or knowledge. Todays big story:

Rwanda Votes

As if you didn't know already.

Polling started today at 7am, and many stations had closed reporting 100% turnout by 10am. This may sound unlikely if you've never been to Rwanda, but - believe me - this is par for the course. In so many ways.
Voting appears to have been entirely peaceful, and largely free and fair (apart from this report from Reuters. See the fourth and fifth paragraph from the bottom). So much so that the Dutch and Gaston Ain Bilbao of the National Democracy Institute have already declared the poll legitimate.
Shock news: Paul Kagame wins by a landslide. So much so that the possibility of a little bit of reverse-rigging to make the poll look more appropriately Western has already been suggested.
The (legal) opposition has already accepted the results. The Commonwealth observer mission is almost certain too as well (after all, they have only been on the ground for a week, and the game was locked up long before that).

So the election itself is peaceful, and largely free and fair. Excellent, right? Not quite. This does take place against the backdrop of some rather unsettling events:

Much of the opposition crumbled: Victoire Ingabire (remember her?) was arrested, and the Canadian avowed revisionist Peter Erlinder was sent in to be her lawyer, and was promptly arrested too. For a very interesting take on what the hell it is with Canadians and genocide denial, see here. Here she is adding her ever-mature voice to the debate (brink of collapse? Give me a break). Another party collapsed into internal infighting (allegedly the result of RPF interference). The registered opposition gamely ran a couple of rallies, but when Kigaliwire went along to this Liberal Party rally, everyone there said they were voting for Kagame anyway.
People are dead: Andre Kagwa Rwisekera, deputy of the Democratic Green Party, was found by a river with his head nearly hacked off. Jean Leonard Rugambage, acting editor of the suspended newspaper Umuvuguzi, was shot dead in front of his home in Kigali. Paul Kagame blames foreign dissidents, as usual.
At least one other is lucky not to be dead: Former General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa was shot near his Johannesburg home. I've blogged a bit about Kayumba before, but I'd rather leave comment on this and the other killings to another full post.
Former RPF insider and now exiled dissident Patrick Karegyeya is now openly calling for violence. Kagame's response was less than confidence-inspiring: 'those that want war, we will give war'

None of this is totally disanalogous from what has happened in previous elections in Rwanda (a bigger comparative piece on that coming up some time next week). However, and interestingly, the international coverage is completely different. For a start, the guardian's coverage has been uniformly brilliant (kudos to Gavin Illsley for spotting this excellent piece on Rwanda's Western PR firm) and detailed, which is itself new. In general, though, there is a critical tone to the journalism coming out of the international press which is completely new (see the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Observer, and the Mail and Guardian for details). More on why the wheels might be coming off the international charm offensive in a later post, but for a start, we might look to the brave new breed of critical blogs out there, such as Democracy Watch, Coloured Opinions, and Texas in Africa (this one is particular is great).

Final important thought: the ever-brilliant Jason Stearns points out that in Rwanda, as in many places, elections are a distraction from politics, not the thing itself.

And for those of you that only tune in for the silly links:

How Nigerian Parliamentarians think. Truly the funniest thing I have read in years.
Cogratulations, murdered and mutilated Liberians! You finally have a celebrity angle. Yes, it's the truly epic Naomi Campbell fail you've all seen before (and if not, what planet do you live on?). And something you may not have seen: a party which makes Harry Windsor's 'Natives and Colonials' shindig look tasteful
A brilliant collection of Congolese taxi slogans.
An unbelievably paranoid press advice guide (don't go out after 6pm in Kigali? Seriously!?)
The horror, the horror
Fiddling while Rome burns #4571: Yoweri Museveni and Ban Ki Moon got together in Kampala, and played football
In other football news, Africa had its first world cup (and Ghana should have been in the semis, but for that scummy cheating Uruguayan). Most important consequence: we all now have a new piece of faux-traditional African garbage to hate, the Vuvuzela (pilloried beautifully here)
Headlines you could not make up for fear of being called racist: Witches are overwhelming the courts in the Central African Republic (kudos to Daniel Swain for the spot)
Not funny, but interesting: how to tell when a Middle East Expert is lying
Upper middle class moment of the decade: testing how clean Congolese water is with Rose Hip Tea

Finally, the most important news of all: Rwanda has it's first ice-cream parlour. Never mind that Bourbon in UTC has been making brilliant ice-cream for ages, to say nothing of dozens of other places, or that the Rwandan dairy industry is not 'nascent', it is older than your country, you patronising Banyamerika twats. Yeah, lets defeat genocide ideology with frozen milk.

Temporary Suspension of Service

2010-07-02T11:46:00.000+02:00

The more quick-witted amongst you may have noticed that things have gone a little quiet here of late. Sorry about that (rumours of my arrest by the NSS and personal interrogation by Dr Ndahiro are greatly exagerrated, etc). This is just a brief placeholder to apologise (particularly as this is a rather interesting time in Rwanda), I have a ridiculous schedule for the next month, but hope to be able to start this up again then.

Totziens.

Eritrean Humour

2010-06-07T15:02:00.000+02:00

Apologies for the long pause – last two weeks have been hectic, with the consequence that I’ve said nothing at all about the arrest of Prof. Erlinder. I will try and put some thoughts together. As a placeholder though, herewith a joke all the way from Asmara:

All the heads of state in the world die. And, obviously, go straight to hell, where being used to getting their way, all try and bargain with Satan to make their situation a little less horrific.

Barack Obama goes first:

“Please, Lucifer. I’ll give you everything I have, all my worldly wealth, if I can just call home one last time to tell Michelle, Sasha, and Malia that I love them”

The devil replies:

“Fine. One hundred million dollars and you can make the call”

Barack hands over the money. Makes the call.

Nicolas Sarkozy is next:

“Satan I also beg of you to let me make one last call so I can have ‘phone sex with Carla one last time”

The devil replies:

“Fine. One hundred million euros and you can make the call”

Over goes the money. The call gets made.

And then President Issayas Afwerki of Eritrea rocks up and asks if he can make a quick ring back home to the guys at the EPLF. The devil shrugs and says:

“Sure. You need ten cents?”

And, naturally, all the other heads of state are instantly in uproar about how unfair it is that Afwerki’s call is so much cheaper than all the others.

The devil smiles:

“You really don’t understand, do you? This man is from Eritrea. It’s a local call”

Good news

2010-05-30T18:58:00.002+02:00

Hurrah. Well done whoever put the thumbscrews on this time.

Another week in Africa 28/5/2010

2010-05-28T18:35:00.000+02:00

I have returned to Mud Island:

(Warning to all: this is what happens when you elect right-wingers)

However, events back on the continent continue apace:

A serious one first: Prof. Peter Erlinder, the American lawyer who came over to defend Victoire Ingabiré, has been arrested for negationism. See here and here to get an idea of the sort of man he is, and make up your own mind. Interestingly, this comes days after this particularly bellicose interview with the big man himself.
The election season gets under way, with (contested) victories for incumbents in Ethiopia and Burundi. Rwanda's election gets its first registered opposition Presidential plant. Sort of. Colette Braeckman has excellent things to say.
Scratch and win your way to authentic malaria drugs
Robert Mugabe sick of being mean to humans, takes up cruelty to animals.
So farewell then, MONUC, and welcome MONUSCO (note the contemptible behaviour of the Ugandans. As usual)
Want to help Africans but scared Bill Easterley will shout at you? Here at last: the Stuff We Don't Want Flowchart

Good night, and good luck.

Congolese Humour

2010-05-25T12:18:00.001+02:00

The following joke has gone viral on the Congolese blogosphere. It dates from 2003 - 2006 (the time of the transitional joke), and requires more than a little knowledge of the personality politics of the time to make any sense at all. However, I still don't really understand why it is funny. Any help would be most appreciated. Also, attached at the bottom are some Congolese caricatures for your viewing pleasure.

MOBUTU AND LAURENT KABILA MEET IN HELLSVILLE

At the bend of the road in Hellsville, Mobutu bumps into Kabila.

MOBUTU: You? Here? Since when, bro?

KABILA: Since January 16, 2001…

MOBUTU: How did it happen?

KABILA: I was assassinated by one of my bodyguards while I was at a meeting…

MOBUTU: How could this happen? And your security services, where were they?

KABILA: Ah, brother! That’s what I still can’t explain… And yet, I thought I had my security well organized. But what could you do? The kid who shot me down was known as one of my closest associates, almost a son to me…

MOBUTU: Oh, boy! With me, that kinda bullshit would never have happened. No one came anywhere near me helter-skelter, even family and friends… By the way, any news from the country? I cut all contacts ever since I’ve been here.

KABILA: No news… I’m so broke I can’t make a long-distance phone call… I didn’t have time to prepare myself, the assassination was a surprise…. By the way, can I bum some money from you? I could attempt to call Mwenze Kongolo to get some news.

MOBUTU: Hey, pal, you dare bum money from me? You of all people? You and your bunch accused me of stealing money, remember? … Here, take the fucking money… just enough for your long-distance phone call…

[Mobutu fishes out from his pocket a 100-dollar bill and walks with Kabila into the central post office of Hellsville]

KABILA [on the phone]: Hello, Kinshasa? Can I speak with MWENZE KONGOLO please?

Operator at Kinshasa Post Office: Oh my God!, Mzee Kabila?

KABILA: In person…

Operator : Hold on, while I transfer your call to the new telephone number of Mr. Mwenze Kongolo… Here he is…

KABILA: Hello, Mwenze, you changed your number?

MWENZE KONGOLO: Yeah…

KABILA: What’s up? As you well know I couldn’t take anything. I can’t even make a phone call… I’m broke, kiddo… Fortunately I just bumped into Mobutu…

MWENZE: What ? You with Mobutu there?

KABILA: Yeah, right by my side. We're all brothers and sisters in Hellsville... So, how was my departure arranged? Who took my place?

MWENZE: Joseph…

KABILA: Joseph who?

MWENZE: Joseph, your son, we brought him back from Lubumbashi where you had him confined…

KABILA [after a long pause]: But, you nitwits know very well my family situation and Joseph’s history… How could you dare? ... Where was the whole bunch of you: the Katumbas, the Yerodias, the Kakudjis, the Kapends and yourself?

MWENZE: There were pressures from all sides, you know… Pressures from the Zimbabweans, from the Angolans and even from the Rwandans… Joseph was the only viable solution. Fortunately, everything went smoothly and…

KABILA [baffled]: I don’t understand… This is madness! To give power to Joseph? And KAPEND, why couldn’t he act? He had the authority to call in the army?

MWENZE: Oh yeah? Kapend is in prison as we speak for attempting to do just that! He got the death penalty for participating in the conspiracy to assassinate you…

KABILA: Bullshit!... And you, what do you do now?

MWENZE: I’m unemployed… I’m no longer in the government… Joseph kicked us out: me, KATUMBA, KAZADI and OKOTO, for being mentioned in a UN report that wrongly accuses us for stealing 5 billion dollars...

KABILA: You stole 5 billion dollars in 4 years?

MOBUTU: They stole 5 billion dollars in 4 years? … And you guys were heaping insults at me for allegedly stealing less than that amount in 32 years? This is an outrage!

KABILA: If I only knew! ... I’d have treated Mobutu with more respect! And what about my share of the loot? Did you go see MUGABE about that?

MWENZE: Go see Mugabe? Are you kidding me? He’s sitting on your share!

KABILA: But Mugabe couldn’t possibly do it: he needed my fingerprints! To open the vaults where I stashed my dough, you had to have my fingerprints!

MWENZE: Here’s the headline, Mzee. Mugabe kidnapped your corpse and had it flown to Harare. Then he sent it back to the Congo for the funerals…

KABILA: Wow! To be betrayed to this extent? And I thought he was a brother! I now understand why he liked Joseph… By the way, what about the rebellions?

MWENZE: The rebellions are over…

KABILA: Oh yeah? You were able to recover the whole territory quickly according to plan then?

MWENZE: What plan?… The rebellions are over…The inter-Congolese dialogue achieved peace! And everybody is now in Kinshasa to manage the Transition till next year’s elections.

KABILA: You mean, BEMBA, BIZIMA KARAHA, ONDEKANE, and the rest of their gang are in Kinshasa, and you let them roam around?

MWENZE: Listen, Mzee, we couldn’t do anything… The external pressure was such that…

KABILA: You, sissies! It would never have happened on my watch. I’d have wasted them on sight! Ah! If I only listened to Mandela and continued to negotiate with Mobutu aboard the Outeniqua, things would’ve been different, and I wouldn’t be in Hellsville today. I can't believe you thieves made all these monies on my back…

MOBUTU: Don’t worry, my dear, c’est la vie!...

KABILA: What do you mean by "C’est la vie" ? Don't you realize we’re no longer alive?

When did homosexuality become white?

2010-05-24T15:51:00.001+02:00

Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga are going to prison for fourteen years. Their crime, if you want to call it that, was get married Blantyre last December. Since their arrest, these two men have been repeatedly beaten, and subjected to forced anal examinations, in an attempt to work out whether or not the relationship was 'consummated'. In one court appearance, Chimbalanga, "who was sick with malaria, was forced to return to the court room to mop up his vomit." Such treatment breaches innumerable international prohibitions upon torture, and cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment which Malawi is signatory to, to say nothing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, both of which unequivocally ban the criminalisation of individuals on the basis of sexual orientation. I am furious, and I want you to be too.

Let us also not pretend that this is an isolated case. There is a wave of homophobia sweeping the continent, and it is new. Robert Mugabe has made homosexuals his latest folk demons, the 'corrective rape' and murder of Eudy Simelane was just the most prominent of many in South Africa, and - most recently – Uganda's parliament tried to create the offence of 'aggravated homosexuality' (penalty: death). François Bikoro, the editor of the popular (and populist) Cameroonian weekly L'Anecdote – which, like a number of publications across the continent, has published lists of people it accuses of being gay, accompanied by headlines like "The Queers Are Among Us" – reckons circulation has increased from 5,000 to "more than 20,000" since "we began dealing with homosexuality". There are dozens of other examples, all from the last five years or so.

The sentence I hear most often round here when I say I think this is barbaric? 'You just don't understand African values'

My Rwandan informants share this discursive move with much of Africa. All the big names (Museveni, Mugabe, Muthariku – maybe I should have a new blog section on bigots beginning with 'M'?) and everyone else besides defend their bigotry in a particular way: homosexuality is foreign to the African way of life. Interestingly, this seems to separate it from the long, surreal and intermittently hilarious list of homophobias from elsewhere (India: it blocks your chakras. Bolivia: you've been eating the wrong chickens. Australia: it's just threatening in some unspecifiable way). Defence by authenticity is a peculiarly African trope, it would appear. And a particularly resistant one: homophobia appears to be on the wane elsewhere, but not here. Across the world there are 76 countries in which people can be prosecuted because of their sexual orientation. Half of those countries – 38 out of the continent's 53 states – are in Africa. In five of them, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen, as well as in parts of Nigeria and Somalia, gays and lesbians can be put to death. Unsurprisingly, when the UN general assembly issued a declaration on decriminalising homosexuality in 2008, only six African countries could be persuaded to sign. This is indeed one area where 'African values' are beginning to look rather distinctive.

So this one is for my African readers: I mean this with all the respect I can muster, but fuck African values.

Or, if you prefer: having the discussion of what policies states should adopt in terms of the values of the continent is [a] infantile and bogus all the way down, [b] unwittingly accepting of huge planks of colonialist ideology, and [c] a distraction from the a real conversation. Let's go.

For a start, is it true that Africa magically escapes what happens in every other continent, in every other epoch of human history? Bollocks it is. The Shona ancestors Mugabe believes to be spinning in their graves were enthusiastic proponents of one of the most extensive systems of lesbian kinship and marriage anywhere on earth. The Sudanese homosexuals Omar Al-Bashir is so busily oppressing are, in some cases, descendants of the Zande, who found gay relationships perfectly normal, traditional, and authentically African (if they even thought about it in those terms, which I doubt) at least until Evans-Pritchard rocked up to do his fieldwork (and, please, let's not forget how massively gay the Revolutionary Government of Sudan was back in the day, when practically every single dour Islamist general had a rent boy hidden away in a Khartoum apartment). There are countless examples of fawning over male beauty in the Sufi poetry of West Africa (and women weren't doing the writing). There are literally dozens of other examples. I don't know of a Rwandan example, but anyone who has seen the dancing at Cadillac will be compelled to admit there must be a friend of Dorothy or two here as well. What should be obvious, however, is that the homophobia of recent times is not a product of 'traditional' values, but a creature of African modernity (apart from anything, this wave of homophobia is new. Has the entire continent only just noticed that it is African?)

Thought two: we should be deeply suspicious in any case when our leaders justify their decisions in terms of the 'traditional' or the 'authentic'. How many African dictators can you name that used to say back in the '60s and '70s that democracy was deeply foreign to 'African values'? How many can you name that didn't. Or religious leaders that say giving women choices as to who they marry, or own land, or not have their clitoris mutilated is somehow 'Western'? Did anyone think to ask these women how 'African' they felt these values to be? Did all the Bikos, Lumumbas and Nkrumahs really fight colonialism for this?

The evidence for this is compounded by the utterly randomly this kind of talk gets applied. The whole discourse of whether or not something is 'authentically African' get applied as and when the leaders of this continent find it convenient: walk into any Catholic church in this country and you'll see the Virgin Mary cradling a baby which is alabaster white (a depiction neither African nor true, given that we all know Jesus was a Red Sea Pedestrian). I don't see anyone calling for a rejection of the Christian faith on the grounds that it is foreign to Africa. The homosexuality laws used to oppress today are (most often) statutes given to these states by their departing colonial powers. The family values so zealously defended by the Kings of Uganda and other such bigots are similarly identical to the puritanical morality of Les Péres Blancs. They are no more authentically African than I am. But they are not the subject of this criticism, because they serve the interests of those in power.

And with regards to homosexuality itself, the point could hardly be clearer: look behind the speeches and rallies in Uganda, and Malawi and elsewhere, and you will find American money. Perhaps because of their disappointing performance back home, American evangelicals and their money are exporting the culture wars to Africa. This also explains the novelty of the thing: the vast majority of Africans have had rather more important things to worry about for the last fifty years than what two men or two women (or fourteen men and a dog, for all that I care) do in the privacy of their own home. If you really care about whether or not something is 'foreign' to Africa, you could not ask for a better example than the current wave of homophobia.

So please please please can we drop all this crap? Discussions in Africa now about homosexuality have nothing whatsoever to do with what is and is not African, and what is and is not traditional, and even if they did, it would remain a stupid argument. Even if it was somehow true that African values are inimical to sexual freedom, that has no connection whatsoever to what African values should be. Whatever else you think of Rwanda, and practices like Ingando, there is something truly inspiring about the widespread Rwandan belief that people's values can and should be changed to create a better, fairer, more inclusive society. Of course, if you are cynical, Ingando is just manipulative indoctrination at the hands of an autocratic élite. I don't think so, but maybe. Even then, however, it is refreshing to see a departure from the widespread illusion that values systems cannot be altered. The opposition contention – that values are fixed – is inextricable from the vision of African societies as 'static' and 'traditional' as opposed to the 'dynamism' and 'modernity' of European culture. That picture of the world takes us right back to Hegel, and was one of the central legitimating planks of colonialism. Lords Lugard and Macauley would be delighted at how the most vocal proponents of their worldview are now African statesmen.

So if this isn't about 'Africa', or what is 'traditional', what is it about, really? The American fundamentalist invasion gives us part, but not all of the explanation. After all, they found fertile ground here for their vindictive and unchristian twaddle. As usual, Pambazuka get it exactly right: family values campaigns here, much like everywhere else, are a cynical attempt to divert public attention from the real issues. The discursive move to describe something as 'un-African' is just another way of closing off political debate (again, see the history of African nationalisms for details): after all, which African citizen will stand up and say they are anti-Africa? It's like being anti-development, or anti-family. Simply, it's the new anti-politics (as if we didn't have enough round here already):

"...the uninformed in this world may be excused if they conclude that the primary problem of Africans is the existence of gays or that African tyrants and legislators have nothing else to do other than turn homophobe and bash the victims. Actually, the loud homophobia comes right out of the very coveted secret manual of African dictators under the chapter 'Diverting Public Opinion'. Diverting public opinion is an art and though few can do it as well as the late Idi Amin and Bokassa (what a show the duo staged over time!) they are trying hard. Massacres and jailing of dissidents have become too ordinary to attract that much attention or to generate much uproar. The world is now used to African genocides and carnages and is only surprised by reports of development, for which it has no ears anyway. Hence the resort to gay bashing. It is not that the tyrants have nothing else to worry about. Uganda has its murderous LRA and serious dissatisfaction by the majority of the populace that considers Museveni's rule dictatorial to boot. Sudan is a mess and al-Bashir detested; let us not talk of Darfur and possible secession and war in the South in the near future. Mugabe's problem is well known, and Malawi of Kamuzu Banda fame has more serious problems than two gays getting married and trying to confront their miserable lives as the majority of Malawians. Africa surely has more serious concerns and problems, including the very fact that the stigmatisation of the gays has a negative impact on the control of the AIDS ravaging many of these countries..that aside, the gay issue is useful for diversion in that there is a loud and organised gay community in the donor countries and it will raise hell against African leaders persecuting gays instead of attacking them on the absence of good governance or democracy."

And that's about all I have. This is bogus, but I'm fair too disenchanted to think that means it won't work.

Don't fall for it, Africa.

Is this country collapsing?

2010-05-22T14:26:00.002+02:00

Not Rwanda, but here. People who do think Rwanda is 'unravelling' should really look south of the border sometime, to see pandemonium done properly.

Now, I know that there are many people who read this from time to time who know far more about Burundi than I do, so I'm just going to put up what I know. I don't know what the hell is going on, or how serious this is, but if anyone does, that would be awesome.

There were supposed to be local elections on Friday. They have just been postponed for the second time (apparently having a poll on the Sabbath is inappropriate in a country this deeply religious. Funny how nobody spotted that the first time they moved it)
The day before, in what is becoming a bit of a central African meme, Human Rights Watch got thrown out (more evidence that 'Rwandan best practices' are going international. The APRM will be pleased...)
Unlike Rwanda, Burundi has an extremely vibrant/aggressive plural/fragmented civil society. And now they are all getting death threats.
How is incumbent Pierre Nkurunziza going to win the election? God, apparently (but don't worry, he's said he'll stand down 'like a good sport' if divine intervention proves insufficient. That's alright then)

A couple of British journalists in 19945 called this place 'the country that lost its head' (for example, this remains a country where hand grenades are a popular means of score-settling, due to their staggering ubiquity). It seemed to have got it back after Buyoya and Nkurunziza got the peace deal between the FAB and CNDD-FDD going, and the transitional government actually worked, and then ended on schedule. So is it all going to crap now?

Answers on a postcard please.

Another week (and a half) in Africa, 18/5/2010

2010-05-18T09:32:00.000+02:00

Apologies for the delay. Rwandatel are crap, and the internet has been out at work for over a week. Normal service will now resume, insha'allah.

Item One of business, helpfully-minded types working here in Rwanda on Human Rights stuff should give this a look, and see if they can help out.

More importantly, herewith your week-and-a-half-ly round up (with a distinctly Kenyan flavour this week. Maybe next time I'll do the Nigerian edition – that is sure to be enjoyably bonkers):

Nairobi's Kung-Fu Grannies
owThis may be the I wish Kigali's matatus were this cool
Another 'typo', this time 'hilariously' gutting some of the crucial rights in the Kenyan Constitution. In a triumph for the rule of law, those arrested must be "put in prison and the key thrown into Lake Victoria."
ESL moment of the week has got to be Lesotho's decision to 'legalise' free education.
Africa is basically one country, right? Therefore, they need only one football strip.
If you thought that was patronising, check out how Indians use blackface actors pretending to be starving bushmen to sell lemonade
More evidence of the incredible stupidity of PEPFAR

From elsewhere:

Just when you thought nothing could get worse for Haiti, Sean Penn decides to 'save' you
Also from the consistently brilliant Tales from the Hood, these horrors, which may be even better than the parody
In Soviet Union, holidays take you.
The Danish create attempt to foster romance. Badly.

Sadly, no bigoted fashion icons this week, unless you believe this.

Totziens.

Unfortunate

2010-05-12T22:18:00.000+02:00

Granted, it is just a typo, but how marvellously Freudian for the Electoral Commission to decide to announce the results of our Presidential election two days before the result.

Hon. mensh. to Susan Thomson of Democracy Watch (via Third World Goes Forth) for the spot (credit for the picture goes to Mark Thakkar).

Great article on Rwanda

2010-05-12T10:58:00.001+02:00

...published here. Required reading for anyone taken in by the more alarmist stuff coming out of the international press these days (particularly America, for some reason). Andrew Mwenda is excellent, which is not to say I agree with absolutely everything he says here (nonetheless, I love any journalist who finds tenuous ways to bring in Marx. Although I'll admit I don't get the Tilly reference).

UPDATE: for some reason the above link is dead for the moment, but AllAfrica (bless 'em) have cached it here.

Fair Trade Hurts Poor People?

2010-05-11T13:39:00.004+02:00

The holy wars are raging again. A plebiscite today at the University of Sydney hopes to make selling Fair Trade goods mandatory. Many of the arguments made there have been echoing across cyberspace for some time now. For the overwhelming majority, FT is an unqualified moral good, and opposing it is a sin to be equated with eating sautéed kittens. For the people that oppose it, FT is a lazy, thoughtless attempt to shrug off a broader moral responsibility which is at best naïve, and at worst harmful.

I should state now that I am not an economist (I do, bizarrely, have a degree in economics from Oxford, but believe me when I tell you that means nothing). Most of my friends who are economists look on FT will genteel contempt. Most of my friends who work in development out here, by contrast, support it. I respect the intelligence of too many people on both sides of this chasm to believe that the answer is unequivocally in one direction (although, in both cases, I think there is a sociology to their training which prejudices in favour of certain conclusions).

My basic point is this: the debate about FT is currently treating a complex and heterogenous phenomena as a single monolithic entity. There is no one FT system. There are different organisations, which operate differently, and – surprise, surprise – these policies play out differently with different crops, and in different socio-economic contexts. I realise this is a bit of a lame argument, but it strikes that the people in FT would probably be quite receptive to efforts to make them improve their practices. I'm going to suggest what a couple of ways forward might be.

I also want to separate out the criticisms, because I think we need to distinguish between [a] the unmerited, [b] the merited but soluble, and [c] the insoluble. If I've left any out, please do throw them up here

1. Fair Trade disproportionately affects 'relatively wealthy' countries

The argument: because of the difficulties of operating in truly poor places, inevitably FT ends up operating in areas where the problems for agricultural producers are not that acute:

According to some estimates, Mexico produces 25% of Fairtrade coffee. Mexico has the largest number of Fairtrade certified producer organisations in the world: fifty-one. The whole of India has just forty-nine; South Africa has thirty-eight; Colombia has thirty-four. Most of the subsistence economies that people think of as central to Fairtrade have far, far fewer. Burundi has no Fairtrade certified producers; Ethiopia has four; Rwanda has ten.

This from Marc Sidwell of the Adam Smith Institute.

The response: There are a couple of points here:

These figures, which I've seen quoted over and over again, are deeply misleading. A couple of reasons: (a) once you factor in the population of each of these countries involved in agriculture, the figures look a lot less disproportionate (the outlier remains India), (b) it is a little intellectually dishonest to pick three African countries that have just come out of civil war, or worse, (c) once you correct for both of those things, the real story is that FT is a much bigger deal in Latin America, and there is an obvious historical explanation for that given (i) the Solidarity Movement's presence there in the '60s, and (ii) the better levels of worker organisation in general

I'm not convinced that it is completely damning to say that a policy doesn't focus on the absolute poorest. One of the best organisations round here is Orphans of Rwanda which, by focussing on bullying students through university undeniably only helps those fortunate enough to have completed their education. One could, doubtless, focus efforts entirely on the absolute poorest, but I'm not sure why that would be the appropriate policy, given that the stated aim of the policy is agricultural sector transformation.

More generally, the conversation about where FT operates should be guided not by a misplaced sense of guilt (i.e. 'these places are poorest, therefore we throw everything at them), but by considerations to do with where this specific remedy is likely to be effective. I think part of this variation might be explainable by the sorts of crops we're talking about. For example, the majority of coffee is grown by independent small farmers. For these producers, receiving a fair price for their beans is more important than any other aspect of fair trade. Given how long it takes to grow coffee, the price stabilisation function is also very important here. Most tea, however, is grown on estates, and grows much faster than coffee. The concern for workers on tea plantations is fair wages and decent working conditions. FT can and should (and occasionally does) address this by using two sets of producer standards. Set one: smallholders organized in cooperatives or other organisations with a democratic, participative structure. Set two: organised workers, whose employers pay decent wages, guarantee the right to join trade unions and provide good housing and safety as well as environmental standards. Given the institutional history of the FT movement, they focus on the former (simple, it is what they know how to do).

2. Fair Trade distorts prices, to the detriment of the poorest

The argument (shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia): Similar to other farm subsidies, FT sets a price floor for a good that is in many cases above the market price and therefore encourages FT existing producers to produce more and new producers to enter the market, leading to excess supply. This excess supply can lead to lower prices in the non-FT market

In 2003, Cato Institute's vice president for research Brink Lindsey referred to fair trade as a "well intentioned, interventionist scheme...doomed to end in failure." Fair trade, according to Lindsey, is a misguided attempt to make up for market failures in which one flawed pricing structure is replaced with another. An article in The Economist (I had the link, but now I've lost it. Drat) alleged that the reason coffee prices are so low on the world markets is that there is too much production, and that by encouraging even more supply of coffee, fair trade makes the world price fall further making the majority of coffee producers worse off.

The response: it seems reasonable to assume that the demand for coffee doesn't rise significantly if some of it is FT (I don't buy that version of the price discrimination argument), so that bit of the logic holds. The assumption to do with market switching (i.e. that rural producers can simply move into coffee, leading to overproduction) looks a little dodgier. Probably true in some places (i.e. Kenya) and not in others (i.e. Rwanda). It's also worth pointing out that the price is almost certainly already distorted. The key conditions on which classical and neo-liberal trade theories are based are notably absent in rural agricultural societies in many developing countries: Perfect market information, perfect access to markets and credit, and the ability to switch production techniques and outputs in response to market information are fundamental assumptions which are untrue in the context of most agricultural producers and workers in developing countries.

But forget the theory: this is the sort of proposition which is actually pretty easily empirically testable. Unfortunately the evidence does not support appear to this claim. In general, it looks like the truth of this proposition depends upon whether the variant of FT used generates enough in the way of non-excludable positive externalities such that everyone is better off (I'm thinking here of the way 'social premiums' are used to build roads, drain malarial swamps, that sort of thing). The organisations set up are also sometimes the most effective groups at organised political action for legislative change. There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence:

Through Fairtrade we have been able to change our agricultural techniques to improve the quality and quantity of our teas. But we have also opened new access roads which have benefited all in the community. (Silver Kasaro-Atwoki from the Mabale Growers Tea Factory in Uganda, quoted by Terry Macalister in The Guardian, Wednesday March 8, 2006)

Our Fairtrade bananas earn us a social premium which we can spend on what we like in the community. Let's say a poor farmer's house gets burned, we can help. We can buy protective wear. We're thinking of pension schemes for our old farmers and healthcare. Our big purchase has been a 29 seater school bus to get the children safely to secondary school. (Deles Warrington, Chair of Calibishi Farmers' Group, Dominica)

This is also exactly the sort of thing people point out in Rwanda. There is also some slightly more thorough, academically respectable evidence. For example:

I can only find one quantitative study which tests for impact on both populations (i.e. FT and non-FT producers). Becchetti and Costantino in 2006 did an econometric analysis on the impact of FT certification on monetary and non-monetary measures of well-being on a sample of Kenyan farmers. The researchers compared a control sample group of farmers to Fair trade certified groups and Meru herbs farmers. The results: over the period in question, Fair trade farmers were more successful in diversifying their production, experienced a significant drop in child mortality, improvements in terms of monthly household food consumption, greater satisfaction in terms of prices obtained for their crop, living conditions etc. Methodological problems such as the relative contribution of FT and Meru herbs farmers, control sample bias (the sort of thing Sheng-Wu Li makes much of when he talks about the costs of certification in corrupt countries, and Kenya must be one of the most corrupt of them all), FT and Meru Herb selection biases are discussed and controlled for showing that ex-ante selection of Meru members contributes to explain some but not all the results of the study. Crucially, whilst the FT farmers were a lot better off, the non-FT farmers did not become worse off.

Nicolas Eberhart, researcher at the French NGO Agronomes et Vétérinaires sans frontières, in his 2005 study "Etude d'impact du commerce équitable sur les organisations et familles paysannes et leurs territoires dans la filière café des Yungas de Bolivie" found that rather than hurting conventional producers, fair trade can also have the opposite impact by raising local market prices. A case study of Bolivian coffee Fair Trade producers in 2005 concluded that FT in the Yungas has had a positive impact on local coffee prices, thus economically benefiting all coffee producers (FT certified or not). This increase was most attributed to the fact that many non-FT producers benefited from fair trade funded infrastructure and programs: processing, credit facilities, quality improvement, crop diversification, conversion to organic production etc. In the case of Bolivia, conventional producers also benefited from greater political influence as a result of reforms pushed through by stronger, NGO supported, fair trade producer organizations

Sarah Lyon, anthropologist at the University of Kentucky, in "Fair Trade Coffee and Human Rights in Guatemala" (Journal of Consumer Policy, 2007 – I can't find an online link, but I can email a copy to anyone interested), found that FT can improve worker conditions across the board, because the FT certification process alters the internal structure of firms in democratic ways. In Guatemala, FT ended up providing the organisational space for producer-initiated community organisation. The organisations which emerged out of FT here became some of the most vocal human-rights groups around. Their capacity to lobby for improved worker conditions benefits all workers, in much the same way that Trade Unions don't just operate on behalf of their members.

In fairness, there are also some clangers:

A 2006 Financial Times article has found that some wage workers hired by FT producers in Peru were making 10 soles per day ($3 USD) as opposed to 8 soles per day made on non-FT farms. This higher wage was still less than the legal minimum wage of 11 soles (16 soles less 5 soles for room and board) in 4 out of the 5 farms visited, and violated Fairtrade's standards

The description of this film suggests it has been disastrously implemented in Ghana, but Rwandatel internet is not good enough to allow me to download it. Anyone feel like watching it and telling me what it says?

So this is fairly inconclusive. Much of this does not appear to have been systematically tested cross-nationally, or distinguishing between different types of FT. I suspect lazy FT does not take into account making sure that the programme benefits the entire community, in which case this criticism might be fair. I suspect part of the problem is also that a theory as etiolated as microeconomics cannot incorporate things like improved political voice. However, if there is evidence to the contrary, please send it to me and I'll print it.

The general point, however, is this: this attack on FT is ultimately one which is unfounded if FT is implemented properly. Unless there are insuperable barriers to the dissemination of best practices, etc, I don't see grounds to regard this as an objection to FT tout court.

3. The vast majority of the benefits of Fair Trade do not go to producers, but to First World Intermediaries

The Argument: Much of the extra you pay for FT goes to retailers. Of the portion that actually goes to whichever FT firm is it, the lion's share of that is spent on covering its own costs, particularly its ubiquitous moralising in the first world. Put simply, of the 80p extra you pay for your coffee, the Rwandan farmer gets less that 10p (100RwF, 0.57USD).

The response: this is probably more fair (there is evidence of some FT programmes where the costs of certification are so great that there is no money left for things like the social premium), but not entirely.

The retail mark-up between FT and non-FT is frequently tiny, if not non-existent. If you don't believe me, walk into your local Sainsbury's right now and compare the price.

A fair whack, but not all of the mark-up absorbed by the FT foundation will be spent on PR for them. That will not be all, however. Things like micro-credit, crop-diversification, educational work, etc, will also be costs borne by the firm which decrease the amount going to rural producers. That's not quite the same as saying it does not benefit them (particularly if the sorts of things bought are commodities they would not otherwise be able to access)

I'm not sure what the basis for comparison here is supposed to be. If the comparison is between FT and a direct transfer of all the costs involved, then this is indeed less than satisfactory. Given, however, that we know most people won't do that, I'm not sure why this is a case against FT. At most, it seems an argument to stock both products, and let the truly virtuous buy exploitation-coffee and transfer the money saved directly. However, if you think those virtuous types are outnumbered by the people who will buy cheap coffee and not transfer the money they've saved, I can see the case for forcing firms to only stock FT.

100RwF may not sound like a lot to you, but it is not an insignificant amount of money in a country where the average weekly wage is 3,500RwF (and that number is skewed by the presence of a rich urban elite – the figure for a rural producer will be a lot lower). If you have a better way to get as many people as currently buy FT to make that kind of transfer, then I'd love to hear it.

4. Fair Trade fosters the wrong kind of agriculture, and thereby dependency

The argument: the best version of this comes from Paul Collier, whom I love (even if his book on rational choice theory and civil wars has polluted the minds of every single undergraduate I have been silly enough to give it to). His version of this is in the bit on trade in The Bottom Billion (which you should read as you might a discussion of paedophilia in the Catholic Church as drafter by the Pope). Collier argues that fair trade is really foreign aid masquerading as a new model of international trade (fair enough). He writes: "The price premium in fair trade products is a form of charitable transfer... the problem with it, as compared to just giving people the aid in other ways, is that it encourages recipients to stay doing what they are doing" (163).

Why is this the wrong kind of agriculture? (a) it is agriculture full stop, and what we really want to do is encourage the shift away from primary commodities, which is at the root of the dependency, and (b) it encourages small, economically unproductive farms, which are under-capitalised and rely on unskilled labour (in part led by a Western anti-modernist vision of a charmingly bucolic 'traditional' Africa which needs to be preserved)

The response: this is fair. I have a tin of coffee sitting on my desk as I type. Grown in Rwanda. Processed in Europe. Sold to Europe for peanuts. Sold back here for about ten times the price. It is undeniably true that dependence on small-scale agriculture is a bit of a dead end in developmental terms. However:

In some cases, small scale agriculture is all that is appropriate (check out the countryside north of Kigali sometime and tell me how you would run a large commercial farm on that). Given that they are going to stay smallholders (particularly in places where land tenure is not fully capitalist), why not try and make them better smallholders?

It's not true that all FT requires small-scale cooperatives or only the employment of seasonal labour (notice, indeed, that these two things are mutually exclusive). Some FT organisations are better at this than others, and allow plantation agriculture, or the hiring of seasonal labour, or don't require the cooperative structure (See my earlier comments on the difference between tea and coffee). So: this is something FT could do better, but that is by no means impossible. Just not buying FT won't make that happen. That would be moral laziness. You could bother to work out which model works best where.

The market switch to things like manufacturing is impossible, and remains impossible, so long as international trade rules are rigged to fuck African countries trying to do anything other than sell Europe bananas. Tariff exemptions (where they exist) only ever apply to primary commodities, which means African states are trapped into a cycle of producing cheap stuff they sell to the West who then sells it back to them as more expensive stuff. Given that status quo, I'm not sure that the effect of FT can be that great. Again, has anyone seen any evidence on this?

Given the international status quo, I'm fairly happy to prop up agricultural production. If that changes, we could easily stop with FT too, right?

Much of the side-benefits of FT are directed at community transformation. In particular, I am thinking of: crop-diversification, modern techniques of production, access to credit, access to the law, access to educational facilities, unionisation. Sure, this doesn't help the transfer away from agriculture, but that is not the same as saying that it militates against the formation of a productive sector of the economy (I'm inclined to think there is a slightly urbanite contempt for agriculture in much of the writing on this).

So again: probably right in many cases, but can clearly be mitigated, and in the broader case is attributable in reality to factors which will not change.

5. Fair Trade is an inefficient form of giving

The argument: there are a couple of versions of this, but I like the version from Sheng-Wu Li of Oxford best:

To would-be donors to Fairtrade, I ask: Just as you would refrain from sponsoring an anti-malarial treatment with no medical theory or evidence in its favour, please think twice before spending the premium to get that Fairtrade latte. If at all possible, please avoid it. Spend it somewhere more useful: http://www.givewell.net/charities/top-charities may have some good suggestions for cost-effective spending.

I really only have one response to this: if you actually are this person, who will do all of this stuff, and work all this stuff out, then great. Brilliant. You are a wonderful person. I would encourage you to give your money to something where Africans, rather than you, get the important choices about what they do with their money (something in favour of FT which most of the charities on Shengs' list don't have), but in general, I salute you.

However, if you even suspect that there are people out there that you know will only engage in giving through FT, you have no grounds to criticise it as a general policy. It is possible, I grant, that actually if people were not granted this opportunity to salve their consciences in Starbuck's they would give more, and to better causes. I just don't believe it.

That, however, is testable. Has anyone seen any evidence to the effect that the rise of FT has led to a decrease in other forms of charitable giving? I've googled for a bit, and can't find anything, but would be interested to see what people come up with.

6. Fair Trade is complicit in, and thereby reinforces, existing structures which are oppressive

The argument (from the excellent Tyler Cower at Marginal Revolution, which I am retyping in full because I like his prose style):

Let's say the supermarket has some market power and would have liked to price discriminate on coffee sales. Now you can buy either normal coffee or fair trade coffee, and the richer, more conscientious people are willing to pay more for the latter. Some people can be charged lower prices, while others pay higher prices. Fair trade will likely increase coffee output, relative to a world with no fair trade. Profits will go up. But what happens to input prices? Will wages of Rwandan coffee producers rise?

It depends on the alternative to market segregation. It is possible that if only a single kind of coffee can be sold, the market would opt for the more expensive coffee, involving better treatment of all workers. Even if you don't expect this today, it might happen in a few years' time. If McDonald's can improve the treatment of all the chickens it buys, maybe Starbucks or some other force will force the coffee sector to clean up its act. So development optimists should be suspicious of fair trade. It could diminish long-run general progress by giving the conscientious an outlet for their charity. By splitting up the market, we are institutionalizing especially poor treatment for one class of workers. Furthermore the high profits from price discrimination imply that producers will be keen to continue such segregation rather than end it.

The interestingly novel bit here, though, is that if you prevent product differentiation, the market would react such as to improve the lot of all coffee farmers. This reminds me of the argument the Social Democrat Party of Germany used to make in the early 20^th century when it opposed any measure to improve the lot of workers: it is simply a band aid which delays genuine transformation.

I will freely admit I don't understand why this would happen (I find the only evidence for this cited – viz. McDonald's and chickens – less that persuasive), but if anyone could give me credible reasons to believe it, I think I might switch sides on this. Anyone?

Stick to the stuff you know

2010-05-10T17:02:00.000+02:00

(am now tempted to title all of my posts as High School Musical songs. Or would that be tasteless?).

Anyway, I've been a little distracted recently by events in Mud Island. Whilst that remains tediously inconclusive, other things have been going on here, which deserve at least a brief summary.

Before that, however, here is an letter by Paul Rusesabagina (he of Hotel Rwanda fame), in which he goes as far as to say:

"The Kagame government... is recreating the tense and polarizing conditions which helped lead to the 1994 genocide."

Now, I'm the last person to think that the current government is perfect, but seriously? Is Kangura back? Is the national radio talking about cockroaches again? Is the government blaming every problem on a single ethnic group? Has the country just been invaded, perhaps? Are the French arming and training death squads? Are lists being drawn up of all the people from one ethnic group? Are there arms caches in Churches in preparation for when people flee there? Actually, is there any evidence at all of government-planned ethnic massacres at this point in time?

No.

This sort of bollocks is not just untrue; it's inflammatory, and profoundly unhelpful. If anything is polarising the discourse round here, it is when international newspapers print stuff like this. This kind of crap flying around makes it so much harder to criticise the government on reasonable grounds, and makes them so much less responsive. Why did the Rwandan government ignore Human Rights Watch? Because it became obvious that there was literally nothing they could do to unseat the manichean narrative they were working with. HRW also did the international human-rights community a lot of damage round here. If the Rwandan government are not receptive to international criticism (an accusation which I think is fair), that in part because nonsense which was not adequately checked was just re-printed. You don't bother engaging in the argument once you have lost all confidence in the integrity of the interlocutor. This sort of thing also vindicates the Rwandan government's claim that freedom of speech needs to be restrained here, because no Millian class of error with truth happens. If even the Wall Street Journal prints this sort of stuff, what do you imagine normal discourse round here is like?

Let's be clear: Paul Rusesabagina's heroism is beyond question - over 1,200 people owe their lives to him. However, why does a career in hotel management make you qualified to pronounce on the structural conditions for genocide? And what makes you the best commentator on what is happening now given that you left the country in 1996? (considerations of fairness mean I should probably point out he left after a very public fight with Paul Kagame, and Francois Xavier Ngarambe, head of IBUKA - the big genocide survivors organisation, and has since been hanging out in Belgium and the States. Take from that what you will)

Paul Rusesabagina has as much right to write a letter to a newspaper as anyone else. And whilst I might not take his considered views terribly seriously, a lot of people do (including whoever picks the letters for the Wall Street Journal).

So this is the question I'd like to ask: given how many people look up to you, and respect your opinion, don't you owe them better than this?

Another week in Africa 07/5/2010

2010-05-07T12:43:00.000+02:00

A depressing week all round. The voters of Mud Island have decided to be idiots, with a few honourable exceptions

Back on the continent, things are scarcely much better:

President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua is dead. Wole Soyinka doesn't care. Others are kinder.

Zimbabwean penal reform takes an interesting turn

The UN says foolish things. Again

Two interesting articles on America and 'the continent'. Also, the ever-brilliant Pambazuka news absolutely nails it once again.

Elsewhere:

Pocahontas was a communist. True fact.

Volcanic eruptions cause communism. Slavoj Zizek says so.

Amnesty's Portugal Branch think facebook is what struggles against oppression have been missing.

The Present of Kalymkia (of which, of course, you are all wholly familiar with) has meetings with aliens on his balcony. I hope he wins his fight to become President of the World Chess Federation.

This one's for Sheng-Wu: there really are markets in everything, including escaped gorilla insurance and contraband cows

Bigot of the week is ANC Youth League President Julius Malema (whilst snappy, the pink shirt and cream jacket combination doesn't quite elevate him to fashion icon status. Sorry). Now one of the world's least influential people. Ha ha ha.

Finally, however, some good news. Readers of Liisa Malkki's truly excellent 'Purity and Exile' will remember the flight of the '72 generation of Burundian refugees in and around Kigoma. The Tanzanian government has finally agreed to grant them citizenship. So thank you Chama Cha Mapinduzi for a small bit of sanity in an otherwise depressing week.

“Last week I met a genocide survivor, who told me that David Miliband raped the beagle next door”

2010-05-06T13:39:00.000+02:00

Or, if you prefer, the British election day special. Readers not sure what this title is about should immediately go here.

For the rest of you, I suspect one of the more worrying things about the prospect of David Cameron winning is his perceived lack of international stature. Try to imagine him taking the stage with Obama, critics say, or making a speech at the G8, or trying to talk about international trade at some vital summit, and you'll realise that we're (probably) electing someone with all the presence and authority of a small whelk.

One place, however, already knows quite a lot about David Cameron and the new Conservative Party. Here. You'll probably find more people that know his name in Rwanda than you would in pretty much any other foreign country I can think of. And they like him, which very few people in Britain (even dyed-in-the-wool Tories) seem to be able to manage.

If any British readers remember this story, it will probably be this. David Cameron ponces round Africa while floods wash over his constituency of Witney. The British papers had a fit ("Sham Cam – Tory leader's African day trip in hug-an-orphan stunt" – The News of the World, ‘One million victims of the deluge, so where’s the Rt Hon member for washed-out Witney? - The Daily Mail). Even the Rwandan press core got cheeky with him, showing an independence of mind they are not often credited with.

However, David's little sojourn down here was not a one-off. Rwanda appears to have become a bit of a Tory pet project. What is known as Project Umubano (which translates, roughly, as a slightly stronger version of 'coexistence'. 'Fraternity', perhaps) has been running for over three years now. In that time, people as senior as Francis Maude, Jessica Lever, and Jeremy Hunt have come here (Ok. I know they aren't that senior. The point is they aren't just footsoldiers either). In 2009 over a hundred participants went to work on projects. And yes, they pay for their own flights and costs once here. Those with business expertise try to help develop the Rwandan private sector. Lawyers work at the Institute of Legal Practice, various universities and the Ministry of Justice, while doctors train nurses and treat patients. 40 volunteers work on English language skills at the National University in Butare alone. In the past three years, the medical team has treated over 5,000 people. The private sector has established a twinning arrangement with Harvard Business School and the Saïd Business School at Oxford. The legal team was this year supported by lawyers from Allen and Overy, a firm which recently struck its own partnership with Rwanda. This isn't small scale stuff. We must regrettably accept: David Cameron's visit is not one isolated stunt. He also doesn't come across as utterly ignorant in his speech to the Parliament (available here). In fact, it's one of his better ones.

The labour party, predictably, is very quick to label all this as blatant careerism. Here are their selections from a really quite even-handed article from the Independent:

“…Handily, it can also benefit the political careers of the volunteers.

Our group included Andrew Mitchell, the shadow International Development Secretary, Nick Hurd, shadow Minister for Charities, Social Enterprise and Volunteering, and Desmond Swayne, Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Cameron.

The volunteers seized their chance to access this Westminster bubble and capitalise on the political acumen available thousands of miles from the pressures of home.

As one floppy-haired volunteer working on the private sector project remarked: “I’m here to make contacts, to network. I’m using it as an opportunity to get closer to people who can help my company.”

The number of potential and actual parliamentary candidates on the trip meant it was hardly surprising that deals were struck over dinner, and the conversation rarely strayed from politics – primarily British, rather than Rwandan. Several possible parliamentary candidates were open about their hopes that the trip would help them to boost their political profiles, both within the party and with the electorate.

One candidate had even brought a stack of autographed photographs of himself to Rwanda, perhaps forgetting that he wasn’t yet campaigning."

So just a very ill-advised publicity stunt, with a bit of business on the side? I'm not sure.

Are there really that many votes to be picked up in Kigali? Enough to justify this sustained a commitment?
How many business deals, frankly, can young Tory candidates strike round here? Rwanda's growth miracle is a good story, I'll grant you, but this is still one of the poorest countries on earth (it's also tiny, landlocked, and without any massively profitable industries)

This isn't to say that I think this is actually really good work, or terribly well thought out. Does party researcher Corinna Matthews building a roof really change that much? Couldn't you just have spent the cost of her flight on building twenty roofs? Is a lack of football coaching a crucial problem round here? If it is, are the Tory Party the best placed agency to remedy this catastrophic gap? What does Toby Elias MP know about building a school? Couldn't Rwandans do that better and cheaper? A lot of this is just gap-yah bollocks. On the other hand, some of the rest is very good work – capacity building training schemes in particular being a nice idea. The fact that Project Umubano is a mixed bag of decent ideas and pointless well-intentioned guff doesn't, frankly, distinguish it from the vast majority of development work round here. As with most development work, there are very strong pressures helping you to believe your own bullshit.

But I don't know. If anyone knows more about this (why the decision was taken, who has this idea, whether or not they do it elsewhere) I'd love to hear about it. The other question I have, however, is why Rwanda. The Tories aren't alone in this: the Tony Blair Foundation love this place. USAID can't hurl enough money at the place. Rwanda, to paraphrase Walpole, is indeed coming into fashion. Particularly for les Anglos. I've got two big thoughts why:

Rwanda offers us guilt-free starving Africans to save. Neither the UK or the USA played any part in the truy catastrophic history of colonialism in this place. There were no cold war proxy conflicts (well, none that boiled over), and people here tend to focus more on French complicity than US inaction with regards to 1994. How perfect is that? They also share our love of France-baiting. Even better.
Rwanda is well-known enough to avoid the blank looks you might get if you said you were off to Burundi (just accross the border, but not on the radar of any of the folks back home).
Rwanda is up there with Zimbabwe on the list of 'places-which-the-folks-at-home-believe-to-be-awful-but-are-actually-really-easy-places-to-work-in' (people unfamiliar with this dream category for the development industry should check out HRI's inspired spoof of Zimbabwean aid agencies). Tell people in Britain you're going to Rwanda, and most people think you're heading off to some primordialist bloodbath (the thought process goes something like this: genocide, tribes, genocide, machetes, Hotel Rwanda, Conrad, genocide. My grandmother basically thought people here were still swinging from the trees). Once you're here, you find one of the most liveable cities around. The roads all work (as does ther water and electricity), crime is almost nonexistent, corruption is under control like nowhere else in Africa, the altitude makes the climate palatable, and there are plenty of nice restaurants serving good European food and cheap beer. The politics is a little fractious, don't get me wrong, but everyone is very assiduous to make sure that doesn't affect the bazungu. It's perfect: you get to have a nice holiday, and everyone at home thinks you've re-enacted Apocalypse Now.

I'm sure there are other pieces to this puzzle. Thoughts?

Not Good

2010-05-06T01:15:00.000+02:00

Requiescat In Pace. Also: shit.

Those Tigrean Revolutionary Songs you've been yearning to hear

2010-05-03T12:18:00.000+02:00

This is amazing. Anyone looking for the sound of Zaïre as the Berlin Wall came down, or Malian dance music, and all sorts of other amazing stuff, the search is over.

Umuseso and Umuvugizi: The Charge Sheet

2010-05-03T10:39:00.003+02:00

Last friday was World Press day: the day after one newspaper editor here was arrested, two days after another fled the country, and a week after Human Rights Watch were thrown out of the country. (UPDATE: I've also just noticed Rwanda has been named on Reporters Without Borders' 'Freedom Predators' list).

Which I think makes this a good moment for a survey of the Rwandan media. In the interests of keeping blog posts to a sane length, I'm not going to comment on the less than graceful exit of HRW here, or say much about the media beyond Umuseso and Umuvugizi (the suspended papers). I mention it only to avoid accusations of bias.

Why were these papers suspended?

Right. These papers have not, strictly speaking, been banned by the government. They have been suspended for six months by the High Media Council, an (ostensibly) independent organisation. This is a fairly new organisation, with a much newer set of leaders, working with a very new set of rules to effect the suspension.

The grounds? “insulting the Head of State, sowing discontent in the army and causing panic in the population”. Brandishing many copies of Umuseso and Umuvugizi, the Council chairman Mr. Arthur Asiimwe and Executive Secretary Patrice Mulama argued that the papers were also creating the impression the situation in the country was insecure to investors. That last bit is not grounds for suspension under the rules as they stand, but worrying investors is something they really don't like round here. The first three grounds, however, are in the law:

Articles of Law no. 22/2009:

Article 12:
A journalist shall have the following main responsibilities:
1.to publish authentic and verified information;
2.to give all parties subject of news and information an opportunity to respond to allegations made
against them;

Article 13:
A journalist shall be prohibited from:
[...]
5. slander, libel or defamation;
[...]
9. Pass judgement while publishing information.

Article 83:
Without prejudice to provisions of Article 82 of this Law, the following crimes committed through the media are punishable with penalties provided for by the Criminal Law, and so notwithstanding their suspension by the Media High Council:
3. contempt to the Head of State of Rwanda, the Head of a foreign State, Ambassadors and representatives of countries and international organizations accredited to Rwanda;
4. inciting the army or the national police to insubordination;
5. publication of false information intended to undermine the moral of Rwanda Defense Forces and the National Police and to endanger national security;

There is also the professional code of ethics:

Article 5 : Avoid rumors, amplifying or keeping it alive, speculation, staged news events, falsification of documents or suppression of essential information.

Article 11 : Always question the motive of, and identify sources. The only exception to this rule shall be in relation to information given in confidence. Before making any promises, always clarify conditions attached. Whenever such a pledge is made, keep the promise.

Article 20 : Avoid intrusion and inquiries into an individual’s private life without the person’s consent unless public interest overrides.

Article 22 : Respect the presumption of innocence for suspects and cases until concluded by competent courts or tribunals. This shall include avoiding implicating innocent persons not involved in the case but who may be directly related to the suspect or referring to his/her ethnicity, tribe, religion, sex, family or friends, unless their mention would serve public interest.

Note that the HMC has not once invoked the much maligned genocide ideology laws, or the clauses of the constitution to do with negationism (some people should really check their facts). I haven't been able to find out what legal bite the code of ethics has. Can anyone help me out?

However, the HMC is pretty clearly empowered to suspend these papers on these grounds with the law as it stands. More specifically, Umuseso is accused of:

Publishing false news with the intention of inciting or discouraging security organs.
News that are detrimental to public order and the security of the country
Insulting, slandering, defaming innocent individuals
Interfering in other people’s private lives without good reasons;
Publishing photographs without any relationship with the news published, without caption, or without indicating their source;
Publishing biased information;
Using journalism as a means of confrontation and intimidation;
Abusing and insulting the President of the Republic of Rwanda.

Which seems fairly comprehensive, and Umuvugizi gets this (comparatively restrained) charge sheet:

Publishing false news with the intention of inciting or demoralizing security organs.
Publishing news that are detrimental to public order and the security of the country
Publishing stories that are insulting, slandering and defaming innocent individuals to spread rumours, to amplify them Groundless information containing exaggerated language;
To disseminate partisan information
To insult to slander,to hurt any body and to threaten authorities and national institutions
To interfere in the privacy of people with no reason;
Not to present information source;
To support riots;
Mixing news and a journalist’s own thoughts and opinions.

Now, some of these are not crimes under law 22/2009 (for example, interfering in pricacy without an overriding public interest defence is not precluded by that law, although – I suppose – you could argue such a prohibition is implicit in the constitution), which is presumably why the HMC are invoking the code of ethics as well, which is why I'd really appreciate an answer from someone about the legal bite of this. There is also some quibbling about whether or not the HMC followed the appropriate steps before that (they're supposed to issue papers with a written warning: HMC say they did, Umuseso say they didn't), but the complaint there is procedural, not substantive.

What did Umuseso and Umuvugizi actually do?

The first point I want to make is that not one person I have met thinks these papers are innocent of the charges. That is not to say that they are not unhappy – a lot of people are – but not because they believe it to be illegitimate. These papers really are gutter press: they are widely believed to make stuff up, they print stories peppered with unnattributed quotations and anonymous sources, they have been implicated in extorting money from people in return for not printing embarrassing stories about it. Imagine the Daily Star, but worse, and a little bit racist.

Here's some examples from Umuseso:

1. “As predicted: General Kayumba has also fled the country”

"Considering the love he enjoys with the army, for some of them this is an important reason to desert and group together and eventually fight Kagame.…”;

"I swear to you that many of these soldiers will desert Kagame because of the good initiative Kayumba has taken”;

"Secondly, those still pampered, particularly Ndahiro or Kabarebe must start thinking about their eventual end.…”,

Given the clause in the law about inciting the military, this seems pretty clear. The final quotation also looks like a veiled death threat.

2. “The reasons why Rwanda is drifting into darkness”

"… He who refuses a peaceful political revolution makes a bloody revolution necessary"

"… The queue of those who want change in the governance of this country, (and not a peaceful one since all avenues for peaceful revolution can no longer work) is growing by the day. This is leading Rwanda into total darkness"

"… Anyone who wishes to analyze Kagame’s policies and opinions since 1994 to date can never fail to conclude that Rwanda future is doomed"

"Even if Kagame cannot admit it openly, but anyone who concludes that Kagame leaves in fear of being overthrown anytime, would not be lying himself at all"

"If Kagame was capable, he would protect us from darkness; otherwise we are getting closer and closer to it"

This, I would imagine, falls under the 'don't incite riots' part of the law.

3. Twins?

This was a front page depicting Juvenal Habyarimana and Paul Kagame (taking up pretty much the whole page). The headline? 'Twins'. I've commented here before that – regardless of whether or not you like Kagame – comparing him to a genocidaire is inflammatory and unjustified.

They also at one point (I can't find the reference any more) urged 'the rural majority' to 'rise up and fight the RPF. And we all know what 'the rural majority' means.

And here are some examples from Umuvugizi:

1. "A colonel and three (3) captains of RDF degraded due to intrigues”

“ … As for colonel Semana, after his seven (7) month suspension, he was arrested after having been attributed gratuitously crimes like those of Lucifer, and later on, the J7 stick was inflicted to him.”

Note: J7 is supposed to be a secret internal military police, frequently alleged to be involved in various misdemeanors (kind of like a Rwandan Stasi). You probably shouldn't make claims like this with no evidence.

“ … He was accused of having disobeyed his superiors, a shadow position was given to him, and since 1993 to date, he kept the rank of major… a part from his great heart, anyone else in his place would apply for retirement instead of being abused unceasingly and would leave for private business, given that he is a doctor, and he was a doctor when he joined the rebellion and he was in a better situation.”

Again, this seems a fairly open call for military disobedience and desertion.

2. ‘‘Prosecutor Mutangana and Dr Diane Gashumba‘s adultery”

“... So she met with the Prosector Mutangana the skirt-hunter with no border,who is like a Commune’s bull ”

“… but had the bad luck to marry an adulterous woman ”

“ The Prosecutor Mutangana used the public powers in his own interest ”

“The Prosecutor has forsaken his legal spouse and took one else’s wife”

“Information reaching the newspaper UMUVUGIZI shows that Prosecutor ended to destroy his family in order to enjoy sex with Kanyamahanga’s wife without pain”

“Information we hold, is from women friends of Prosecutor Mutangana Jean Bosco telling that they express concern about the way he destroys other people’s households…”

“Information we hold affirms that the Prosecutor would have just prepared the to blast UMUVUGIZI, by force and different ways …”

This is probably slander, and even if it isn't, is a pretty clear breach of the privacy laws. You could make a public interest defence I suppose, but you'd be hard pressed to explain the need for all the grisly details of their sex life (which I haven't included here)

4. "Misunderstanding, greed and opulence can destroy RPF-Inkotanyi“

"Our dear readers, the RPF situation is so horrible, that many of those men count among greedy people not committed to the benefit of the party in particular and that of the country in general“.

"And this reminds me the proverb which goes like this " `they share blood, they do not share milk"

For people not familiar with their Kinyarwanda proverbs, the full version goes like this: “Tutsis share blood, they do not share milk”

So, to recap:

Umuseso and Umuvugizi are very very tabloid (for example, they didn't just report on the affair but went into Daily Mail levels of detail). This seems beyond dispute. The Western Press should stop acting like the Wall Street Journal has been closed down. I've just been told that they predicted recently that Frank Habineza would be assassinated within 60 days, with no support for that claim whatsoever). They don't uphold brilliant standards of journalism either (pretty much everything they do is based on 'anonymous sources'). Are Umuseso guilty of 'blackmail, lies, and extortion'? (one of the other accusations). Quite possibly. It's apparently fairly normal across the press to get bribes from people for not releasing embarrassing stories. The consensus was that they do make stuff up fairly regularly as well, and their material does degenerate into more or less coded-racism on occasion. For all that the New Times and the Rwanda Focus aren't in any way critical, I've seen no evidence that they just make stuff up.

But: despite this, they are sometimes right (for example, they saw the arrests of the generals coming). Umuseso also easily had the biggest circulation of any paper, and both were increasingly isolated critical voices in a generally very well-behaved media. That, I think, is why some people are a little unhappy. The timing of the suspension also looks dodgy. Everyone thinks it is obviously political (it's not based on recent stuff, and does get rid of these papers for the election cycle andits immediate aftermath) However, the argument against would be that the HMC is very new, and doesn't really know what they are doing, so the timing doesn't mean anything.

The laws regulating the media are also far more restrictive than, say, those of Britain or the USA. But as someone who likes their press laws French, these don't look that draconian to me. Can anyone comment more broadly on how these laws look comparatively? Furthermore, I can see the case here that the media should be regulated extremely tightly (the role of hate media in the genocide is well documented, to say nothing of the 'genocide laundering' industry which bloomed afterwards – there is a huge amount of misinformation out there, and it's not that unreasonable to try and counter it). The problem is that there isn't a moderate, measured version of Umuseso (i.e. a paper which was critical of the government, but mature enough not to sink to this stuff).

So here's my question for the week: is it really that innappropriate to manage the media this way, when the media outlets you have are this irresponsible, and when the society you live in is this fragile?

Over to you.

Another Week in Africa 30/4/2010

2010-04-30T16:01:00.002+02:00

Nobody wants your t-shirts, your shoes, your bicycles, or your footballs. These people explain why.

The era of election-rigging in Nigeria is over. Apparently. However, the era of journalists getting death threats continues.

Who needs food when you have experimental theatre?

Ask not what you can do for the African Elephant, but what African Elephants can do for you.

And outside the continent:

In what may become a regular feature, Australians still don't get it

I have never been so proud of my alma mater

One I missed from last week, which is too good to ignore: female promiscuity causes earthquakes (fellow political scientists: anyone else spot an endogeneity problem? Copies of KKV to the ready...)

Finally, fashion-icon-and-bigot of the week goes to King Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II, pictured here at his wedding in 1999, and his fellow 'cultural leaders of Uganda'

Goodnight, and good luck.

Lies, delusions, and Catholics

2010-04-28T14:15:00.000+02:00

With Britain exploding over yet another Catholicism story, I thought you might appreciate a Rwandan perspective. I could write about it, but I lack Martin Kimani's eloquence, and controlled anger, so have left it to him. None of what follows is my own work, and I claim no credit for it, (except any of the typos).

I've also attached a rare picture of a Pope looking for his moral compass.

For the Pope, Rwanda's genocide of a million is insignificant
Martin Kimani, Rwanda Dispatch, April 2010

If you are an Irish Catholic, and have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, you were recently read a letter from Pope Benedict that less you: “You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.”

For any practicing Catholic in Rwanda, this letter must be unbearable. For it tells you how little you mean to the Vatican. Fifteen years ago, tens of thousands of Catholics were hacked to death inside churches. Sometimes priests and nuns led the slaughter. Sometimes they did nothing while it progressed. The incidents were not isolated. Nyamata, Ntarama, Nyarubuye, Cyahinda, Nyange, and Saint Famille were just a few of the churches that were sites of massacres.

To you, Catholic survivor of genocide in Rwanda, the Vatican says that those priests, those bishops, those nuns, those archbishops who planned and killed were not acting under the instruction of the church. But moral responsibility changes dramatically if you are a European or US Catholic. To the priests of the Irish church who abused children, the Pope has this to say: “You must answer for it before almighty God and before propoerly constituted tribunals. You have forfeited the esteem of the people of Ireland and brought shame and dishonour upon your confreres”

The losses of Rwanda have received no such consideration. Some of the nuns and priests who have been convicted by Belgian courts and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, respectively, enjoyed refuge in Catholic churches in Europe while on the run from prosecutors. One such is Father Athanase Seromba, who led the Nyange parish massacre and was sentenced to 15 years in jail by the tribunal. In April, 1994, Seromba helped lure over 2,000 men, women and children to his church, where they expected safety. But their shepherd turned out to be their hunter.

One evening Seromba entered the church and carried away the chalices of communion and other clerical vestments. When a refugee begged that they be left the Eucharist to enable them to at least hold a (final) mass, the priest refused and told them that the building was no longer a church. A witness at the ICTR trial remembered an exchange in whch the priest's mindset was revealed.

One of the refugees asked: “Father, can't you pray for us?” Seromba replied: “Is the God of the Tutsis still alive?” Later, he would order a bulldozer to push down the church walls on those inside and then urge militias to invade the building and finish off the survivors.

At his trial, Seromba said, “A priest I am and a priest I will remain.” This, apparently, is the truth, since the Vatican has never taken back its statements defending him before his conviction.

In the last century, Catholic bishops have been deeply mired in Rwandan politics with the full knowledge of the Vatican. Take Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva. Until 1990, he had served as the chairman of the ruling party's central committee for fifteen years, championing the authoritarian government of Juvenal Habyarimana, which orchestrated the murder of almost a million people. Or Archbishop Andre Perraudin, the most senior representative of Rome in 1950s Rwanda. It was with his collusion and mentorship that the hateful, racist ideology known as Hutu Power was launched – often by priests and seminarians in good standing with the church. One such was Rwanda's first president, Gregoire Kayibanda, a private secretary and protege of Perraudin, whose political power was unrivalled.

The support was Hutu Power was therefore not unknowing or naïve. It was a strategy to maintain the church's powerful political position in a decolonising Rwanda. The violence of the 1960s led inexorable to the 1994 attempt to exterminate Tutsis. These were violent expressions of a political sphere dominated by contentions that Hutu and Tutsi were separate and opposed racial categories. This, too, is one of the legacies of the Catholic missionary, whose schools and pulpits for decades kept up a drumbeat of false race theories.

This turning away from the Rwandan victims of genocide comes at a time when the Catholic church is increasingly peopled by black and brown believers. It is difficult not to conclude the church's upper reaches are desperately holding on to a fast-vanishing racial patrimony.

Perhaps it is time Catholics forced the leaders of their church to deal with a history of institutional racism that endures, if they church is truly to live up to its fine words. Apologies are not sufficient, no matter how abject. What is demanded is an acknowledgement of the church's political power and moral culpability, with all the material and legal implications that come with it.

The silence of the Vatican is contempt. Its failure to fully examine its central place in the Rwandan genocide can only mean that it is fully aware that it will not be threateneed if it buries its head in the sand. While it knows if it ignores the sexual abuse of Europeans parishioners it will not survive the next few years, it can let those African bodies remain buried, dehumanised, and unexamined.

This is a good political strategy. And a moral position whose duplicity and evil has been witnessed and documented. For, it turns out, many people, scholars, governments and institutions inside and outside Rwanda are excavating their own roles in the genocide. The Vatican stands as an exception, its moral place now even lower than that of the government of France for its enduring friendship with genocidaires.

Silence Two: The Other Opposition

2010-04-26T14:10:00.000+02:00

Victoire Ingabiré is spoken about as if she is the only opposition figure in town This annoys me.

Frank Habineza (pictured), leader of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, and Bernard Ntaganda, leader of the Parti Social Imberakuri, are both – frankly – much more serious politicians than VI, both have been here in Rwanda for longer, and actually have a base on the ground. I would imagine they are much more credible threats to the RPF than FDU. Habineza, for example, is fairly prominent ex-RPF, and broke ranks with the inner circle to form the Greens.PS-Imberakuri has been allowed to register. This is evidence against the 'Rwanda as North Korea' narrative.

However, the other thing we have lost by not talking about these parties is that they are facing continual obstacles. All the hysteria about VI is a distraction from what, to my mind, is the more serious story. There have been repeated noises about withdrawing PS-Imberakuri's registration. The Greens have now tried to hold a convention (a necessary precondition to registering) five times (and, unlike FDU, got photo evidence). More recently, there has been a spate of high profile defections from the Green party whilst Frank Habineza was out of the country. The whole thing sticks for a couple of reasons: firstly, why would you resign because your party leader overstates the membership of your party? Secondly, why publicly character assassinate your leader in exactly the same way various RPF ministers have condemned him (i.e. that he is a stooge of foreign handlers)? Thirdly, what on earth are we to make of this:

"He lied to the meeting [in Uganda] that... [Rwanda] had deployed troops in the DRC, which everyone knows is not true."

Excuse me? Seriously? The Rwandan government themselves have been quite happy to admit that they deployed troops to the DRC. Doubters should check out Paul Kagame himself, writing in 'After Genocide'. So odd. Very odd. Some have alleged this is a government stage-managed coup, which we have no evidence for, beyond that it is really wierd.

Frank Habineza was supposed to get back to Rwanda about an hour ago. He's already talking about his arrest as if it is inevitable. If he is arrested, that is a far more serious indictment of Rwandan democracy than what has happened to Ingabiré.

Taking all this together, whether or not it is part of some grand government strategy, we have a pretty serious closure of political space. I suspect it is not orchestrated from the top, given [a] how piecemeal and reactive this all seems, [b] how many players round here would quite happily try and shut down these organisations on their own initiative (for example, a Senate probe in Ntaganda doesn't have to be evidence of the Presidency pulling strings, it could just be irate Senators), and that [c] when the RPF decide to do something, they don't tend to piss around. So I don't believe the conspiracy theories. Just.

Either way, though, it's less than ideal.

Silences

2010-04-26T13:46:00.000+02:00

I've recently remarked that the international media seem to go spare about the strangest things. My point about the coverage of Ingabiré was not that people shouldn't be talking about whether or not the government has broken its own laws, and – regardless of that – whether the rather sorry story of FDU is bad for Rwandan democracy – clearly they should (people who think I should talk more about this, please be patient: I'm still trying to get enough information together). My point is that the 'oppressed woman fights state power' narrative is crowding other, more important stories.

In general, this seems a ubiquitous Rwandan disease. Mahmoud Mamdani (in 'When Victims Become Killers') has remarked that the study of the genocide itself is marked by three silences; we talk about the genocide as if it had no history, about the killers as if they had no agency, and about Rwanda itself is if it was one monolithic entity without a geography. More broadly, Johan Pottier (in 'Reimagining Rwanda') has argued Rwandan history in general gets flattened out to fit easy to digest soundbites, either for the political purposes of the state, the opposition, or the editorial needs of the media. It's a bit like when Terence Ranger asked in 2004 whether Zimbabwe has ‘too much history’. He did not mean that Zimbabwe had too many historians, or that they were publishing too often, but rather that Zimbabwe’s popular discourse was characterised by the endless repetition of a ‘single, narrow historical narrative’ as promoted by Zanu(PF) and its allies in the media and the academy. Rwanda is not quite like that: it would be more accurate to say that the various camps each hold their own endlessly reiterated historical narratives, hopelessly incommensurable with the other. For example, compare what Dambisa Moyo has to say about Rwanda in her diary for the FT, with Alex Engwete's rather hysterical claim that Rwanda is 'the African North Korea'. Inevitably, the narratives of such histories are teleological; their purpose is to legitimise, glorify or discredit particular political organisations and actions. This is not new or unusual either. It is in keeping with a long tradition of history-writing in the service of the nation state. The problem is that often these voices are so strident they drown out the less exciting, less clear-cut truth.

With that in view, the next few posts are an attempt at broadening the picture, and breaking a couple of silences. This is also the 'brief introduction' some of my overseas readers asked for. If occasionally I seem a little irate at the international media, please bear in mind that these criticisms do not apply to a series of truly excellent bloggers, who have been covering all these stories: Texas in Africa, Anne Garrison over at Coloured Opinions, Jason Stearns at Congo Siasa, and Susan Thomson have all been far more on the ball about this than I have. You should read them).

The first silence I've already spoken about: Victoire Ingabiré is spoken about as if she has no history. I'll only add a little here to what I've written already: Astonishingly, even the media outlets normally described as pro-government seem to be leaving this alone. Given that there is an RDR paper-trail (Tom Ndahiro did a great job setting this out in 'After Genocide'), why is nodoby trying to establish how deep her links to these organisations go? “Frequent shuttle flights to Kinshasa” sounds like exactly the sort of thing which could be verified relatively easily. Why doesn't someone independent of both the government and FDU try to do something about this?

More on the rest of the silences to follow.

Confusion reigns

2010-04-25T12:27:00.001+02:00

Right. Victoire Ingabiré was either released on bail on thursday, or moved out of the capital, for fear she'd try to leave the country.

Anyone out there able to confirm which?

UPDATE (26/4/2010): The former, it appears (as verified by chat in Chez Lando, which is where Romeo Dallaire went to do his information gathering too. Who was it that said history may not repeat, but it does rhyme?

Another week in Africa 23/4/2010

2010-04-23T15:50:00.001+02:00

Starting today, I will be putting together a weekly round-up of lighter news from the darker continent. A special extended version to kick us off:

Everyone's favourite Somali insurgents Al Shabab have outlawed school bells in the southern town of Jowhar for being "reminiscent of churches”.
A novel use for the Lotus position that I certainly wouldn't have seen coming
Spanish hair can protect you against bullets. Alas, this time the Enyele will have to do without
Our dear President has a new book out. Where does he find the time?
Possibly the Worst Job Title Ever
A writing guide for the sino-philic among you
Out of Africa now, progress of a kind in America, and further evidence that Australians still don't get it
Mice soaked in vaseline?

Finally, this week's fashion icon: pictured below, Malawian President Binguwa Mutharika on the campaign trail. Now you can see why those two gentlemen thought Malawi was ready for gay marriage. Happy weekend, all. Mwaramuke, umunsi mwiza, turongera.

Will the real Victoire Ingabiré please stand up?

2010-04-23T12:40:00.000+02:00

The international press are having kittens; an opposition leader, a female, African opposition leader, has been arrested. Her only crime? Speaking the truth about the horrors of RPF rule. The lawyers of America are not happy. Nor is Africa Action. Alex Engwete goes as far to compare her to Antigone (and a 'doppelganger citizen', whatever the hell that is).

I want to dissent. Whilst a lone female struggling heroically against an oppressive dictatorship makes for lovely headlines, I'm not convinced. Against the prevailing consensus, I want to ask two questions: who is this woman? Why is this the story?

So. Lets start with the basics (thank you wiki-answers):

Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza. Born on the 3rd October 1968. Chairperson of the Unified Democratic Forces (UDF, or FDU-Inkingi) a coalition of Rwandan opposition parties with a large base of active members in Rwanda, Europe,United States of America and in Canada. Elected by the political council of her party as the official candidate for the next presidential election in Rwanda in August 2010.

Non-political background: Married and a mother of three. Trained in commercial law and accounting and graduated in business economics and corporate management in the Netherlands. Worked for an international accounting firm based in the Netherlands where she held a (fairly) senior position.

The politics: the international press start talking about her in April 2009, she resigns to 'dedicate herself to a political career and to prepare her return to her homeland and, as the head of her political party, to contribute to rebuilding of her country.' Funnily enough, she's a little quiet about her political activities before that:

In 1997, Victoire joined the Republican Rally for Democracy in Rwanda. A year later, she became the President of its Netherlands branch and in 2000, she was nominated President of RDR at the international level.
From 2003 to 2006, she occupied the post of President of the Union of Rwandan Democratic Forces UFDR (french: Union des Forces Démocratiques Rwandaises), the main coalition of political opposition parties and personalities in exile, of which RDR is an active member.
In April 2006, she participated in the creation of the United Democratic Forces (FDU) and was elected President of the political platform. FDU's stated goals areinclude “installing the rule of law in Rwanda, underpinned by the respect of democratic values enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights and other international instruments relating to democracy and good governance.”

She returns to Rwanda on the 16th of January, this year.

So, is this woman the heroic figure everyone seems to want her to be? Wikipedia (the French version, unsurprisingly) goes so far as to call her 'the Rwandan Aung San Suu Kyi'. First, a brief summary of her rather erratic behaviour since arriving in Kigali, culminating in her arrest two days ago. Second, we need to take a closer look at that biography.

The life and times of Victoire Ingabiré (16th January to now):

You've just come back to a country you've not been to for fifteen years to run for President. So what do you do first? Ah yes, go to a genocide memorial and make a really insensitive and inflammatory speech (leave aside the legal issues for the moment – just think about the politics). Let's be clear, she has 16 years to prepare her return speech and decided that the resting place of a quarter of a million people was the most tactful place to start her campaign. She then retrospectively claimed that she was tired from the flight and that we should ignore much of what she said. Including, no doubt, the bit where she compares Kagame to Habyarimana. Nice.
Apparently there is lots of violence and intimidation. Notice particularly the fate of poor Joseph Ntawagundi. Human Rights Watch, ever impartial, swallow the story given to them by FDU hook, line, and sinker.
Hang on, it couldn't be that Joseph Ntawagundi is actually a fairly shady character? Nah, this must be fabricated government lies. HRW all quiet.
Oh no, wait. Turns out FDU themselves are now admitting it was true. They did indeed hire a genocidaire. Must have not come up in the interview, I suppose. Do HRW apologise? Do they fuck. Even the really tentative call for more evidence you see here disappears before too long.
Amnesty International weigh in. As far as I can see, this is essentially a copy and paste job from an FDU press release.
This then gets even wierder. She either does or doesn't try to claim asylum from the British. The New Times paint this as a naked attempt to steal headlines. Kigaliwire has a slightly more measured view, but still thinks the whole thing stinks.
Since then, things get a little quieter. She gives some interviews. Refuses to answer some rather pertinent questions about where the money is coming from.

Then she gives an interview on monday to BBC Great Lakes, and the following morning she was arrested. She was released on bail after a preliminary hearing yesterday, but she can't leave Kigali, so that – you would think – is the end of her campaign. More on the legal stuff later. For now, what's my point?

Just this: her campaign is an amateurish joke. Bordering on farce. It seems largely to consist in doing provocative things and making provocative statements, rather than offering any reasonable, coherent platform for the voters. Everyone makes a point of stressing her frequent harassment by the government and its New Times mouthpiece (as well they should), everyone points out that many of the accusations she levels at the RPF in English (i.e. about killings in the immediate aftermath of the genocide) are legitimate, if not true. However, everyone round here says she is a lot less careful with fine distinctions like the difference between genocide and war crimes when she speaks in Kinyarwanda, and I haven't seen anyone in the international press pick up on that. But that shouldn't be the whole story. As postcardjunky pointed out in March:

'...no one (to my knowledge) has asked her pointed questions such as: why was the Gisozi memorial your first stop when returning to Rwanda? Was that really an appropriate place to make your comments, regardless of whatever basis in fact they might have? Who is backing your campaign? No, really? No, REALLY? (evasiveness on this subject is a consistent theme for her). Finally, if you really cared so much about the future of this country, shouldn’t you have been here to help in the painful process of rebuilding? Could you have been any more cynical in returning to this country just seven months before the election? Should voters REALLY believe that you care?'

Yes, I know, the RPF don't release that information either. They've faced very few accusations of being funded by genocidaires and denialists though.

Moreover, these are not idle questions. Firstly, given what we know about Rwandan politics, in particular the way ethnicity can and has been mobilised round here, understanding Ms. Ingabiré, her background, and who her friends are should be part of the debate. It currently isn't. Secondly, whilst every media outlet seems very happy to talk about how repressive Kagame's government is, there is very little by way of thoughtful discussion about exactly how open you think the political process in a place this fragile should be. After all, France has holocaust denial laws, Britain prohibits hate speech, and Germany bans extremist political parties. I struggle to think of the last sane commentator to describe any of these countries as repressive dictatorships in virtue of said laws. Is it that we trust Europeans not to misuse these laws, but not this particular government? That might – I suppose – be reasonable, but why is nobody talking about it? Again, postcardjunky is the sole voice pushing this line:

'...the absence of an educated population, the unreliability of the press, and the dangerous consequences of playing ethnic politics – are a frightening and combustible mix. What is the nightmare scenario for President Kagame, and for many Rwandans? That a charismatic Hutu ideologue will take to the collines, stir up grievances – real or imagined – make idle promises, and walk away with 75% of the vote. Can any honest observer of Rwandan and Great Lakes politics say this isn’t a plausible scenario in an open Rwanda? And don’t you think this is something Rwandans – as well as the rest of us – should be afraid of?'

So my question is this: why does Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and all the Western Press not even want to talk about the possibility that this woman might be scum, and banning her party might be entirely appropriate? I'm not saying I'm convinced of the truth of it, I just want the debate.

Right. This blog post is too long already. I will comment on her background, the law, and the wierdness of the press coverage later. Toodles.

Trouble at the top #2 - an attempt at explanation

2010-04-21T23:33:00.000+02:00

Several Ntabwo watchers (Well, my sister) have asked for a little more context and explanation. I have come up with this (hope it was what you were looking for).

Any analysis of Rwanda has to start with this rider: recent events cannot be easily fitted into a simple narrative everyone agrees on. As usual round here, there are two wildly divergent interpretations. You could polemically cast the debate as one between the New Times (Rwanda's rabidly pro-government English-language daily) or Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker on one side, and someone like Susan Thompson of the University of Ottawa, or Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp on the other (N.B. Not one of these has actually written up a full opinion on the arrests, and I am not attributing views to them). Moreover, both sides have their crazies, and both sides have their temperate, reasoned advocates. I am going to try and give the 'whig' version of both here. If it is slightly exaggerated for the purposes of clarity, I apologise.

Interpretation One: these people really are totally corrupt. The charges are legitimate, and Paul Kagame is legitimately clearing house in the military to get rid of some of the nastier elements left over from the early days. It is a purge, but an entirely justified one.

There is, to be fair, plenty of evidence that all four have a history of violence, corruption, and general unpleasant conduct. Kayumba was implicated in some of the nastier RPF violence in the wake of the genocide. Karegeya was widely said 'to have too much in his bank account' back when he was Head of Military Intelligence, and was briefly arrested back in 2007 on corruption charges. There was a big corruption scandal last year about the illegal expropriation of land in the Eastern Province in which (I think) Muhire and Kareke were implicated. No one will weep for them. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Interpretation Two: this is a rather naked move by an incrasingly small and authoritarian political elite bent on taking power. Several things point in this direction:

These four don't look like disconnected cases. Taken together, they have the cohesion and authority to be potential – if not actual – rivals to the power of the presidency. Kayumba, Muhire, and and Kareke were widely known to be extremely close colleagues. Kayumba and Karegeya are chums back from the good old days of the guerilla war. There is a web of further links – personal, professional, etc – linking them. Furthermore, the feeling round here is that they could have carried the support of the army in a coup. For the army, Kayumba remains 'their guy', and – however disgraced internationally and amongst Kigali's chattering classes – has a lot of pull with the troops. Kareke, similarly, still has some of the heroic sheen from the Darfur mission he commanded. Getting rid of a group of people from the old days is one way of removing people with the authority to challenge you, I suppose. Kayonga is now in charge at the military though, and I know bugger all about him. Can anyone help?
Analyses of Rwandan politics from '94 onwards have frequently seen the main axis of conflict as between the civilian administration and the military. One way of reading these events is that the battle line has shifted: now the fight appears to be military vs. the presidency. Why might this happen? [a] the military might be generally unhappy, i.e. about the (non)treatment of Laurent Nkunda (I'll blog more on this if people want). This is not utterly implausible. [b] The Presidency may no longer trust the military. For an ethnically-closed elite, the huge increase in the number of Hutu rank and file over the years (since the Second Congo War began in 1998) may lead to concern about where the ultimate loyalties of the military lie. And, as Kris Berwouts has pointed out, the withdrawal from the DRC left Rwanda with far too large an army. Another reason, if you know your history, to start getting worried.
Recent moves do increase the power and autonomy of the Presidential Guard at the expense of the normal military. The most obvious (if slightly inflammatory and paranoid) parallel is with Zaïre in the '60s and '70s (or, indeed, the DRC now). The idea would be this: the Presidential Guard will serve the same function as the Presidential Guard of DRC President Kabila, and the DSP of Mobutu. One way of retaining power if the military is your problem is to create a de facto private militia of the sitting president answerable only to him. You pay them well, give them a position of esteem within the military, and various other perks, and they will fight to preserve the status quo. You make sure you hand-pick the best troops, give them foreign training, and give them better equipment than the rank and file. Simple.

The other thing you'd need to do if this was the situation would be to draw the teeth of the military in the least volatile way possible. That makes demobilisation less than ideal (see all the literature on youth bulges, etc, or Sommers 'Fearing Africa's Young Men' for details). Fortunately, you have two other options: [1] send them off to Darfur (standard logic: if you're afraid of the military, get them out of the country and let the UN pay their wages for a bit). [2] Send them back to the DRC disguised as returning Banyarwanda or Banyamulenge refugees. Reports of Rwandans working in tandem with ex-CNDP soldiers in Lubero territory committing terrorist acts along the main roads and targeting assassinations of political and business elites in the cities have been coming in for weeks. Other Rwandans arriving with Congolese Tutsi have joined Bosco Ntaganda's FLEC and are seizing small farmland holdings from indiginous Congolese and creating weapons caches. However, no reports from Eastern DRC are terribly reliable (particularly when the allegation is about Rwandans), and even if there were Rwandan troops in the DRC, they could easily be there with a job to do, not because the Presidency wants them out of the country.

I suspect the answer is somewhere between the two (I'm always wary of excessively manichean theories which have to posit machiavellian geniuses to make sense). These four probably are corrupt, they may well have had their eye on power, and the Presidency may well have used their behaviour to neutralise a potential political threat. There may also be a quiet attempt to weaken the power of the military. The million dollar question then becomes: will it work?

BREAKING NEWS: Opposition leader arrested

2010-04-21T15:27:00.001+02:00

Fresh FM (reliable Kinyarwanda radio station) has just broadcast that Victoire Ingabire (pictured), the leader of the as yet unregistered opposition party FDU-Inkingi, has also been arrested today under the new genocide ideology laws. I can find nothing online about this at present. Will try and say more tonight. I will also try and put something together for those of you asking the (very good) question: who the hell is Victoire Ingabire?

UPDATE: RFI have confirmed the story.

Trouble at the top?

2010-04-21T12:22:00.001+02:00

Quite a lot of soldiers about on the streets of Kacyiru last night. Our cheap Chinese food was to be found almost exactly between Parliament, the American Embassy, and the Pentagon, so perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised.

After all, yesterday saw the arrest of two extremely high-profile generals, Karenzi Karake and Charles Muhire (the BBC has the story here, and here is a picture of Muhire, in the middle, flanked by Generals Kayonga and Karizari).

Now, it isn't that unusual for RPF cadres of varying degrees of seniority to go into exile, with varying degrees of intemperance – francophones should see Jean-Pierre Mugabe (no relation) for a particularly wild-eyed example. What is new about this is the number of extremely high-ranking officers which seem to be dropping out of the inner circle; Kayumba Nyamwasa (former head of intelligence during the guerilla years, then military chief of staff, mixed up in some very unsavoury business whilst doing that, and now living it up in South Africa), Patrick Karegeya (also a former head of intelligence, also now in South Africa), and now these two.

What do these four have in common? They are proper, dyed-in-the-wool, old-school RPF military elites. All of them were there in Uganda in the early '90s. All fought with Kagame, Rwigyema, et al in Acholiland in the late '80s. I don't know, but I would not be at all surprised if all four were born and raised in Nyakivara and Rucinga, in Mbarara District, Uganda. Nyamwasa was. Does anyone know if they went to Makerere University? (where almost all the RPF leadership studied) I wouldn't be surprised – Karegeye did. Basic point: these people are not unimportant disgruntled junior officers. Jason Stearns probably has it right when he says they would – until recently – not have struggled to be on a list of the twenty most important people in Rwanda.

More bizarrely still, this comes – as the Beeb points out – hot on the heats of a reshuffle in which Muhire was promoted. Congo Siasa has the full details, including the return as Minister of Defence of James Kaberebe (former Commanding Officer of the Republican Guard of Maj.-Gen. Kagame and then Chief of Staff to President Laurent Kabila after his victory over in the DRC. Not a nice man). So what the hell is going on there? If anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful.

This much, however, appears to be clear: the circle of power around the Presidency is steadily shrinking (not new), and the military appears to be deeply internally divided (quite new). The only people left from the old gang look to be Gen. Jack(son) Nkurunziza, Chief of the Presidential Guard, and Dr. Emmanuel Ndahiro, Director of the Department of Military Intelligence (and owner of the biggest daily newspaper in Rwanda). And maybe the recently re-elevated Kaberebe? Not sure.

So what else happened this week? The Presidential Guard got a pay increase. Funny that.

CORRECTION: Thanks to Ali for spotting a couple of mistakes:

1. Gen. Jack(son) Nkurunziza is not Chief of the Presidential Guard (Col Tom Byagagamba is). He is the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defense.

2. Dr. Emmanuel Ndahiro is not Director of the Department of Military Intelligence. (Col Dan Munyuza is). He is the Head of the National Security Services. And he does not own any daily newspaper in Rwanda.

One further clarification: Ali is right that Dr. Ndahiro does not own any newspapers. He is Chairman of the New Times though, Rwanda's big English-language daily.

The Beginning

2010-04-20T20:02:00.000+02:00

Murakaza neza, karibu, bienvenue, and welcome. Murisanga, I suppose.

It's seven thirty in Kigali. One of those perfect golden evenings has just died, and the inevitable monsoon, with suitably theatrical lightning arcs across the collines, has yet to materialise. I'm drinking Primus, smoking one of the surprisingly passable local cigarettes, and Kacyiru (my colline) is utterly silent. A totally normal evening.

It has not, however, been a totally normal week. As this is post #1, here is a quick summary of recent events round here:

- We had our third grenade attack in two months last saturday. Fun times.
- Our government suspended Umuseso and Umuvugizi, the only two independent daily newspapers in Kinyarwanda
- Deo Mushayidi, former President of the Rwandan Journalists' Association, now a suspected genocide ideologist, has been refused bail.
- And just today, two extremely high-ranking generals, Lieutenant General Charles Muhire and Major General Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, have been arrested.

All of which is comes just after genocide memorial week ends, just before Gacaca is wound up, and as our election season gets into full swing. None of which you could tell by the graveyard atmosphere in this neck of the woods. But, nonetheless, we live in interesting times.

The next few posts, if I get round to it, will give you a little more detail (and hyperlinks, if I ever work out how to do them). For now, the cheap Chinese round the corner is calling. I am off for noodles with the Swedes. Mwaramuke, all.