New revelations emerged while I was in Goma in early 1995 about the major miscalculations that were made in planning for the mass exodus of Rwandan refugees fleeing genocide in that country. At the time, relief workers told me they hoped lessons could be learned so that the same mistakes would not be repeated the next time there was an African refugee crisis. I leave it to you to judge whether lessons were learned. In late April 1994, as fighting and killing raged in Rwanda, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees dispatched several emergency teams to neighboring countries in the region. The missions were considered so sensitive that one of the team members called them "James Bond" assignments after the fictional British secret agent.
Their specific job was to discretely prepare for a likely outpouring of refugees, a job that included the selection of sites for potential camps and the stockpiling of relief supplies.
One of the teams was dispatched to Goma, Zaire -- on a cargo plane so packed with aid items that a UN official recalls the members had to sit in the seats of vehicles that had also been loaded on board. The team even included a cameraman sent out from the Geneva headquarters of the UNHCR to record the movement of refugees into the Goma area.
But the team saw no great movement -- and one week before the bulk of the more than one million Rwandans who eventually gathered in Goma fled across the border in July, the emergency unit of 15 international officials was scaled down to just three persons.
The team itself had made preparations for receiving just 50 thousand Rwandans.
It proved to be a major miscalculation, UN refugee officials now admit. Why did it happen? One of those who took part in the Goma mission says "that's a good question."
This official says there had been warnings that a mass exodus was likely as forces of the then rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front pressed Rwandan government soldiers and extremist Hutu militia west towards the Zairean border.
One of those warnings even came from a top official of another UN agency, the World Food Program. In mid-June, Bronek Szynalski, the WFP’s emergency division director, told reporters in Nairobi that in excess of a million people would probably be forced into Zaire by the continued fighting in Rwanda.
Yet UN refugee authorities believed until the end that most of the movement from the violence-torn central African country would be southwards into Burundi -- not Zaire.
What is the lesson to be drawn from last year's disaster? Panos Moumtzis is a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He believes money from big donors like the United States, Japan and the European Community could be better spent trying to avert trouble ahead of time through political efforts before much larger amounts need to be spent on humanitarian assistance. He acknowledges there is a dilemma, though.
“It's a very difficult dilemma, we're thinking, because on the one hand we cannot just rely one hundred percent on a political solution and say this is going to work and then be caught up unprepared and everyone would then accuse us and say "well you didn't do anything…”
Note: the photo above shows the hotel where I and other journalists stayed in Goma. I love the "Holiday Zaire" notion.
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