Aid Groups in Rwanda Rethink Mission

Senior United Nations and other international aid officials meeting here Thursday suddenly froze in stunned silence when a U.N. security officer angrily accosted others at the table.

“How many bodies do you want?” he said emotionally. “We’re soft targets! And we make headlines.”

The outburst highlighted the anguished debate that has erupted here over the role and responsibilities of international aid workers. At issue is whether Rwanda suddenly has become too dangerous for the U.N. agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and about 140 nongovernmental humanitarian aid and development groups providing a broad array of assistance here.

Six expatriates have been killed in this Maryland-sized nation since Jan. 18. The most recent and most horrific attack occurred Tuesday, when five U.N. human rights workers--two foreigners and three Rwandans--were slain in a savage ambush. One of the victims, a Cambodian, was beheaded.

The deaths have shocked and frightened a large foreign aid community that, according to the U.N., delivers almost 80% of basic services--from building houses to providing clean water--in rural areas of one of the world’s poorest countries.

Several aid officials cited a growing sense of panic that foreigners, long seen as neutral players, are now fair game in the mounting violence that the U.S. State Department roundly condemned Thursday. Many here fear more attacks are inevitable.

“There are no guarantees now,” said Dominic MacSorley, head of the Irish aid group Concern. “Daytime, wherever you are, whoever you are, there are no guarantees left. . . . My fear is this is the beginning.”

MacSorley said Concern and most other aid groups have begun reducing staff and operations beyond the announced pullout Wednesday. In that action, all U.N. and other aid workers were withdrawn under military escort from four western provinces where the worst bloodshed has occurred.

Although hard proof is lacking, government officials and diplomats blame the assassinations of foreigners on ethnic Hutu zealots seeking to destabilize a government dominated by minority Tutsis. Many Hutu extremists slipped back to Rwanda amid the chaotic return last year of more than 1 million Hutus from now-closed refugee camps in Tanzania and Zaire.

“This is a security nightmare,” said Omar Bakhet, the top U.N. official here who must ultimately decide whether and how to resume now-suspended aid operations. “We have become targets like anyone else.”

Despite the dangers, Bakhet argued that a large-scale evacuation of U.N. and other international aid groups here would not only abandon Rwanda’s needy. The absence of the outside world could also reignite the ethnic slaughter and civil war that ravaged the country in 1994, he warned. “The presence of the U.N. and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] is the only guarantee that 1994 will not happen again,” he said in an interview. “That is the burden on our shoulders.”

There is a terrifying precedent. A small U.N. peacekeeping force fled Rwanda after 10 Belgian soldiers were massacred at the start of the Hutu-led genocide of Tutsis in April 1994. The U.N. did not return until the carnage ceased, about 800,000 deaths later. “If we pull out, we’ll create panic,” Bakhet said. “It will be a slaughterhouse. . . . People want to commit another genocide.”

For now, the U.N. has stepped up security, including banning most staff travel in rural areas. Still under discussion is a Rwandan government offer to provide military escorts for aid workers. But that would compromise many groups, especially U.N. human rights workers who often investigate summary executions and other abuses by the Rwandan army.

Some organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, have begun flying nonessential staff out of the country until conditions improve. Red Cross delegates working in rural areas have been confined to their quarters. An overnight curfew has been ordered for those in Kigali, the capital.

“We are not working,” spokesman Josue Anselmo said. “We are freezing our operations for the next week to 10 days to find a solution to assist the victims and, at the same time, to stay alive.”

Red Cross operations are among the most crucial here since they help provide protection, food and medical care to more than 94,000 mostly Hutu inmates detained in desperately overcrowded prisons on suspicion of participating in the genocide. But the Red Cross knows too well about the risks in a world where traditional mandates of safe conduct and neutrality are no longer assured.

Nine Red Cross delegates were slain last year: Three were shot to death in Burundi in June, and six were executed at their home in Chechnya in December.

Anselmo blames the deaths on the post-Cold War upsurge of conflicts in which warlords and militias, rather than generals and armies, battle for plunder and power. The result, he said, is protections guaranteed by the Geneva Convention and other international rules of war are now ignored.

“The way we used to work is no longer possible,” he said. “The consequence is it’s extremely difficult to avoid having delegates killed.”