Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: Although Aid Groups Called The Goma Camp Conditions Dangerous, They Dismissed A UN Warning About the Threat

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Although Aid Groups Called The Goma Camp Conditions Dangerous, They Dismissed A UN Warning About the Threat

In a bizarre and seemingly contradictory move, aid officials working with Rwandan refugees in Zaire (Congo) in late 1994 disputed a UN security council warning that armed extremist forces among the refugees might be planning to invade their former homeland. The move came shortly after aid groups warned they might be forced to withdraw from the refugee camps because of deteriorating security conditions. I was in Goma and had this report:

UN and relief agency officials operating in the main Hutu refugee camps around the eastern Zairean town of Goma suggest that a recent statement of alarm issued by the UN Security Council was exaggerated.

In that statement, Security Council members expressed concern over what were termed indications that forces loyal to Rwanda's ousted Hutu-led government may be preparing for an armed invasion of Rwanda.

These aid officials say that first of all, former Rwandan government soldiers and extremist militia do not, in their view, have enough military firepower to pose a serious threat.

Secondly, they note these forces have lately adopted a much lower profile, and no longer have as visible a presence in the camps as before.

The aid workers acknowledge this may be linked to growing Zairean resentment over the presence of the refugees. But they also tie this lower profile to what they believe is an effort by the Hutu government-in-exile to project a more moderate image.

They suggest it is part of an effort aimed at promoting negotiations with the new Tutsi-installed government in Kigali -- negotiations aimed at giving officials of the old government and army a chance to return to Rwanda and to share power in the future.

UN and relief agency officials favor such talks -- mainly because they feel some sort of compromise is necessary if the more than one million Hutu refugees now in Zaire and elsewhere are ever to return to their homes in Rwanda.

But authorities in Kigali remain adamantly opposed to making any deals with former officials whom they consider killers -- killers they blame for the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in rwanda earlier this year.

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Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Although Aid Groups Called The Goma Camp Conditions Dangerous, They Dismissed A UN Warning About the Threat

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