On the other hand, there is a very serious humanitarian crisis in Darfur and
a lot of the problem is the al-Bashir regime, who are very nasty people
(third world strongmen of the worst kind, with a very bad tracj record.
What does one do?
best
dd
Well, Africa has seen nothing but serious
humanitarian crises over the past 40 years or so
from Rwanda to Uganda under Idi Amin, from
Liberia to Somalia. It would seem that in order
to resolve these crises, it is necessary to go to
their root causes, which is not about "nasty
people" in power but in the desperate economic
conditions that cause people to use violence
against each other. Here's something I wrote
about Rwanda a while back at
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2004/12/19/hotel-rwanda/:
For an alternative to these sorts of the West
should have done more arguments we can turn to
Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia professor and
author of When Victims Become Killers:
Colonialism Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda.
He also wrote an article in the March-April 1996
New Left Review titled Understanding the Rwandan
Massacre that is unfortunately not online.
Fortunately there is a good presentation of
Mamdanis ideas in the December 1996 Socialist
Review, the theoretical magazine of the British
SWP, by Charlie Kimber. Drawing from Mamdanis
work and other critical-minded journalists and scholars Kimber writes:
>>From 1973 to about 1990 Rwanda was relatively
peaceful. This had little to do with Habyarimana
himself and much to do with the generally stable
price of coffee and tin. The economic blizzard of
the later 1980s caused havoc. The striped blazer
brigade on the London commodity exchange traded
Rwandas coffee and tin. As they settled the
claims of supply and demand matched the
purchasing power of the multinationals against
the weakness of African countries they were
sealing the fate of peasants 6000 miles away.<<
He has an extensive quote from Gerard Pruniers
The Rwanda Crisis which is worth requoting in its entirety:
>>The political stability of the regime followed
almost exactly the curve of coffee and tin
prices. For the elite of the regime there were
three sources of enrichment: coffee and tea
exports briefly tin exports and creaming off
foreign aid. Since a fair share of the first two
had to be allocated to running the government by
1988 the shrinking sources of revenue left only
the third as a viable alternative. There was an
increase in competition for access to this very
specialised resource. The various gentlemens
agreements which had existed between the
competing political clans started to melt down as
the resources shrank and internal power struggles intensified.
Internal battles meant not only further pressure
on the Tutsi elite but also more clashes between
regional leaders who were Hutu. These battles
were projected onto the much bigger screen of the
tensions created over a century by colonialism
and its aftermath. The countdown to murder had begun.
In 1989 the government budget was cut by 40
percent. The peasantry faced huge increases in
water fees health charges school fees etc. Land
became scarce as farmers tried to increase their
holdings to make up for the fall in raw material
prices. The peasantry -both Hutu and Tutsi were
on the verge of open rebellion by 1990. The state
absorbed more and more of the land which parents
hoped to pass on to their children. State tea
plantations opened up new sources of foreign
exchange but restricted family holdings. The
IMFs structural adjustment programme for Rwanda
was imposed in 1990. As usual it meant the
removal of food subsidies privatisation and devaluation and job losses.
The World Bank and the IMF took no account of the
likely effects of their shock therapy on a
country that was ripe for civil war and had a history of massacres.
A second devaluation followed in June 1992. Just
as the war began these [economic changes] saw
urban living standards cut and a dramatic decline
in the standards of health care and education.
Inflation accelerated
By 1993 there was acute
hunger in much of southern Rwanda.<<
full: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj73/kimber.htm
What films like Welcome to Sarajevo and Hotel
Rwanda miss is the fact that West *was* involved
in places like Yugoslavia and Rwanda all along.
The IMF and the World Bank did not neglect such
places at all. They were intimately involved
along the line with turning such countries into
pressure cookers. If a country like Rwanda had
simply been *left alone* to begin with it is
doubtful that conditions would have reached the bloody state that they did.
This is something that ideologues like Samantha
Powers cannot acknowledge. Despite the fact that
there is an element of human rights imperialism
in Hotel Rwanda this should not detract from
the personal story of Paul Rusesabagina. Terry
George has made a very good film and Don
Cheadles performance is top-notch. Hotel
Rwanda is appearing in theaters all around the
USA right now and is well worth seeing as opposed
to the meretricious Welcome to Sarajevo.
