A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  I’d also been swimming in the small kidney-shaped pool at the Army Officers’ club on the outskirts of Kigali one weekend. Access there was also a sign of trust. One weekend Kagame arrived with Yoweri Museveni, the President of Uganda, Rwanda’s northern neighbour. Kagame used to be head of Museveni’s intelligence services when he was living in Uganda before the 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda. Uganda also shared a western border with the DRC. There had been no public announcement of a state visit. This was secret and got me thinking.

  The next week, in a pause in the Law of Armed Conflict training, Kilele and I noticed a group of soldiers practising an “advance to contact”. An advance to contact is the main infantry manoeuvre to attack an enemy. In my time in the army we had practised platoon advance to contact (about 30 men) and a company advance (about 100 men). Kilele had done a couple of battalion operations in his day (about 600–1000 men), so naturally the soldier in each of us came out and we just started counting to see how big this group was. As men started to advance I turned to Kilele and said, “Looks like a battalion.” As the men kept coming, he said, “Brigade”. The men kept coming; it was beyond a battalion and a brigade. We knew something big was on the horizon. No army practises brigade plus advance to contact without a reason.

  We called up my colleague in Uganda to ask what was happening there. He told us troops were moving to the south-west. We knew Rwandans were moving north-west. We knew that Museveni had been in Rwanda, Colonel Patrick Nyamvumba, the Head of Operations, had become so busy we never saw him, and we had the critical deadline of August 1 by which to finish training.

  “They are going to invade Congo,” said Kilele, “soon after August 1.”

  We sought advice from Dominique, the Head of Delegation, but he didn’t believe us. So what to do? What do you do when you have advance notice of one country invading another when confidentiality requires silence, and your chief doesn’t believe you? In the end we passed the message to Yves so preparations could begin at HQ. No statement was made though as this would breach confidentiality and put at severe risk not only the relationships in Rwanda, but in every other country. Trust is key. It cannot be visibly broken or all operations become at risk. This is one heck of a moral dilemma.

  I went to Kibuye and Gisenyi in the west of Rwanda in the last week of July and first week of August 1998. On August 2, I was woken by artillery and witnessed another advance to contact. I heard the gunfire and the results. The war that began that day was to last more than a decade and involve at least eight African nations, with ramifications and unrest continuing today. The war is now recognised as the most deadly in Africa’s history, and the most murderous in the world since World War II. Estimates indicate that there were between 5 and 20 million deaths, although true casualty figures will never be known, given the country has no way of accurately counting its population.

  I witnessed the first of those deaths, heard the first of the shells, and felt the first of the blasts. Standing on the border that night was, in African terms, the equivalent of standing on the Polish border as the Germans invaded in 1939.

  African and Expat Life Africans have a fabulous sense of humour. For a country affected by such misery, the children seemed to be happy. There were four boys who lived in the slum area across the road from my house in Kigali. Each afternoon they would wait for me to return just to wave, salute and laugh with me when I came home. Sometimes we would play football together in the street. To play a game the boys first had to make something that resembled a football from whatever scraps of cloth and rubber they could find.

  In Rwanda one would often give gifts where in normal circumstances one would not. I am a committed anti-smoker. One of my Swiss colleagues lit her cigarette as we came out of a meeting. A small child ran up and asked for a cigarette. He was about the size of an Australian 10-year-old, so given the malnutrition of the kid I guessed his age at 15.

  “ C’est très mal pour ta santé” (It is very bad for your health) I said. “Monsieur, regardez moi” (Sir, look at me) was his response. I looked him up and down. He was malnourished, had scabies and would be extremely unlikely to live long enough to get cancer. We gave him the cigarette.

  There was a group of beggar children that waited at one of only three sets of traffic lights in the country. I passed them most days. They always tapped on the window.

  “Monsieur, donnez-moi quelques chose” (Sir, give me something).

  While we would rarely give money, we would often give a comic book or similar. One time a box with 100 or so Chinese-made imitation ICRCbranded Swiss Army knives arrived at the Delegation. Apparently someone in headquarters had figured out that they were cheaper than the genuine Swiss item, but their quality was so poor we could not give them as gifts to our interlocutors. Shipping was too expensive to return them so we were told to throw them away. I had a box of them in the back of my car when I stopped at the traffic light and had a swarm of kids asking for “something”.

  Normally giving out knives in a violent country to beggar boys would not be a good idea. In Rwanda they all had knives, machetes and various sorts of weapons anyway. Ignoring the changing green light I made sure each kid received a cheap imitation ICRC pocket knife. The next day at the same traffic light there wasn’t a kid to be seen. Just before the light changed a small kid ran from behind some bushes, knocked on my window. He smiled and said, “Monsieur, merci beaucoup pour la couteau” (Sir, thank you very much for the knife) and then handed me a Rwandan twenty franc coin to say thanks. Twenty francs is worth about one third of one Australian cent. It is not much money at all, but that one beggar kid was so pleased with his gift, he had to give something back. For me that return gift said so much about humanity and for years I carried the coin with me and eventually had it framed.

  The behaviour of many expatriates in war-like circumstances is strange. In general, people choose to cope with daily threats to life in one of two ways: retreat into themselves (my preferred option), or seek physical comfort from others. When you add this to night-time curfews, it means that if you went to an expatriate party you had to arrive before dark and leave before dark, or stay all night. Expatriate parties tended to last all night and often became sexually active, as well described in the book Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.

  An ICRC nurse once told me the HIV infection rates among aid workers in the early 1990s, before HIV training became compulsory, approached 25 per cent. This figure might at first seem shocking. But when you consider that the HIV infection rates among prostitutes in many areas of Africa exceeds 99 per cent, and given the physically uninhibited environment in which aid workers often operate, it would only take one male visiting a prostitute in Africa for HIV to enter the expatriate community. Florida 2000 was a well-known nightclub in Nairobi, Kenya. One of my Swiss colleagues would boast that he would sleep with a different prostitute every night he was there and, “never wear a condom”. When I asked him if he was concerned about HIV his reply, somewhat astonishingly was, “No, because I am Swiss.” To this day I don’t know if he was foolhardy, naïve, or so deranged he actually believed his Swiss passport would prevent HIV infection.

  One female colleague had slept with six partners in her first three months. Kathryn, my nurse house-mate, explained the HIV statistics to her. The question for her was not if she had slept with an infected person. Statistically she had. The question was had the disease transferred. Now that is a wake-up call.

  Threats to Aid Workers On March 31, 1999, near the end of my time in Rwanda, two Australians working for Care Australia in the former Yugoslavia, Steve Pratt and Peter Wallace, together with their local translator, Branko Jellin, were arrested by Serbian authorities while trying to cross the border into Croatia. They were charged with spying.

  On April 1 the Pratt and Wallace story was all over CNN.

  I headed off for a regular afternoon visit to the Rwandan Army Officers’ Mess. I approached the gates expecting the guard to salute and open them. The car dre
w nearer, the window lowered, the car slowed yet the gates stayed firmly shut. I stopped at the guard house, bemused and then frightened as the guard simply put his AK-47 to my head. This was one of three times in my life that I feared death. “Steve Pratt and Peter Wallace are former Australian military NGO spies. You are former Australian military and an NGO worker. You have 30 seconds to convince me you are not a spy.”

  In circumstances such as these there are two ways to respond. Beg and grovel, or bluster. Both mechanisms are dangerous, but one has dignity.

  “Fuck-off and get Colonel Nyamvumba”, I said.

  Bluster worked. The Colonel let me in, and the guard was never to know just how scared I was.

  Australians were ready to think of Steve Pratt as a hero “wrongfully detained” by the ‘evil Serbs’. However, an investigation in 2000 by journalist Graham Davis of the Australian SBS network suggested something more balanced. His report revealed an arrangement between CARE Canada and the government of Canada, to recruit a team of people, including former military personnel, to help ‘monitor’ events in Kosovo during the Yugoslav civil war. Perhaps the Serbian government was right to be concerned as actions shown in Davis’ report would have been a breach of Yugoslav law, and indeed would have been a breach of similar law in Australia. The Serbs may very well have been justified.

  The actions of an aid worker in one part of the world can immediately threaten the lives of another aid worker’s half a world away. This is why we could not breach confidentiality about Congo. We would never understand the impact of our decision if we had done so. Aid workers can only be effective if they have access to conflict zones. If we have no access then we can’t deliver aid. This means that we need to win the trust and confidence of some dodgy people. Confidentiality in what we see and do is critical. If a commander on the ground thinks that you are a risk of allowing secret information to flow, you will either be removed from the area and prevented from delivering vital aid, or killed. That’s why confidentiality is so important. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

  Frustration and a Bad Decision About halfway through my time in Rwanda, in early 1999, a sense of frustration began to build. The frustration was not due to the conflict, the sadness, poverty, or the difficulty of living in Rwanda, but from bureaucracy. The ICRC is the best and most effective organisation in the field of humanitarian assistance. However, I make the subjective judgement that the ICRC is about 20 per cent efficient. If one concentrates on the 80 per cent that it could do, but doesn’t, it can get enormously frustrating. But if one concentrates on the 20 per cent that nobody else does then the work can be quite uplifting. I was deeply frustrated in Rwanda by the approach that the ICRC was taking with both the local government and the community. The neo-colonialist approach was unnecessarily hindering the effectiveness of the ICRC work program. The inherent racism, demonstrated by the treatment of people like Kilele, was having a broader impact on operations. I felt this strongly and was losing sight of the 20 per cent and instead concentrated on the 80. This adversely affected my decision-making.

  The ICRC can and does have an impact on people and fundamentally improves their lives. There is no doubt in my mind, that even with its flaws, the world is a better place with the ICRC in it. It does some incredible work, it could do it better, but the things it does well no one else could do.

  At any rate, my decision-making process was diminishing and I had decided to leave the ICRC after my mission had finished. Robert Ray and Duncan Kerr, two Australian politicians, had said they would help me gain pre-selection for public office and I was going to follow that path. It was the start of some bad decisions for me.

  A couple of weeks before I was due to leave Rwanda, Rick Skow and I were having a couple of beers in the Mess. We were looking at the UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) maps of Rwanda and noted three small words source du Nil (source of the River Nile). Following its discovery in 1863 by John Speke, the source of the Nile used to be considered Ripon Falls outside Kampala in Uganda at the exit point of Lake Victoria. Recently, geographers have noted the lake has feeder rivers of considerable size. The Akagera River, which flows into Lake Victoria near the Tanzanian town of Bukoba, is the longest feeder and flows from Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda, giving the Nile a length of 6758 km. So what do two alpha males with a couple of beers under their belt decide to do when they realise that the Source of the Nile is really near them in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda?

  The ICRC has six golden rules. You may never travel to an area declared off-limits for security reasons; never travel before sunrise, or after sunset; never travel in someone else’s vehicle; never go anywhere without telling the Delegation; and above all, never, absolutely never, carry a weapon. If you break any of them you are dismissed and removed from the country.

  People often ask ICRC Delegates if they are armed. A Rwandan army captain once asked during one of our Law of Armed Conflict training programs. He clearly didn’t believe we were not armed, nor did the room full of officers. “Do you have a side arm?” I asked. He did. “Make your weapon safe and pass it over.” He did so.

  “If you knew I had this pistol, would I be a threat to you?” “Yes,” he said, “and I would use a rifle against you.”

  “And if I had a rifle?” I asked.

  “I’d use a tank.” he said.

  “And if I had a tank, you would use an army. The thing is, we could never

  carry enough weapons to effectively protect ourselves. Our only protection is to prove to you that we are not a threat to you and that therefore you should not use this pistol, let alone a rifle or tank against us.” His military mind understood immediately and he believed we carried no weapons. He thought we were crazy and said so, but he believed us. The truth is, the logic doesn’t always work and too many of our colleagues die, but nonarmament is the ICRC’s best protection.

  The problem with visiting the Source of the Nile is that Nyungwe Forest in 1999 was incredibly dangerous and many thought Interahamwe were based there. Skow and I wanted to go. I was bitter, stressed and had poor decision-making. So a couple of days later, without telling anyone (rule one), we left before sunrise (rule two), to go with Rick in his armoured vehicle (rule three) to the Nyungwe Forest which was off-limits (rule four), returning well after sunset (rule five) and given the nature of where we were going we were armed and didn’t have other military personnel with us (rule six).

  We managed to drive down a small track to within 4 km of where the map had the source marked. As an infantry guy, the compass and map were my responsibility as we set about navigating 4 km through potentially hostile central-African virgin jungle. After a few hours we finally hit the small stream trickling about 50 m south of our objective. We followed it up to a peat bog, checked the map, and looked at each other with big grins. We were standing in a bog that was the source of the River Nile.

  Naturally, that sort of thing doesn’t stay secret. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead”. When headquarters found out I was told in no uncertain terms that if I hadn’t already decided to leave the Red Cross, I would have been removed and would not be welcome back. In retrospect I am torn with a number of conflicting emotions. I am bitter, but not at the ICRC. They did the right thing. The rules are there for a reason and I broke them all. Mea culpa.

  A Brighter Future for Rwanda On my last day in Rwanda I went to visit Kagame to say goodbye. “Tell me, sir,” I said, “what do you really want to do with Rwanda?”

  “I want reconciliation between the Tutsis and the Hutus,” he said.

  “Cut the crap, it’s my last day, you don’t need to give me the diplomatic answer. What do you really want to do?”

  “Andrew, I am Tutsi, my children are Tutsi. If I do not get reconciliation there will be a fourth genocide and my children will die.” He sold me. Kagame is a rare breed: one of a few leaders of a developing country that genuinely wants to bring his people out of pove
rty. And he has motivation to do just that for the future of his and his children’s children.

  In 1994, immediately after the genocide, Rwanda was unambiguously the worst country in the world. Today, Rwanda is a relative island of stability, with improving trade, corruption shrinking, quality of life improving and employment and investment growing. Rwanda has also become an extremely interesting example of independent thinking and reliance on private-sector solutions. Because the country mistrusts the UN and NGOs, it has developed a methodology to encourage business rather than aid, looking to trade as its way to wealth, and it appears to be working. Today, Rwanda is an incredible country. It remains beautiful, it is safe and it makes a powerful case study in changing the way the world looks to addressing poverty.

  Like Yugoslavia before it, and Pakistan after it, a little bit of me will always be Rwandan. And for any Rwandan who may read this, when I see you, make yourself known. Let’s have a drink and finish with agashyinguracumu. Andrew Rwigamba’s last lesson to me was its true meaning, more than the literal translation. If you become a true friend of a Rwandan, they may only then explain its true meaning.

  In late 1999 I left Rwanda and the ICRC with the promise of support to run for parliament, so long as I gained pre-selection. After Rwanda and Yugoslavia it seemed to me that Aid was a tiny plaster on a bleeding wound. Would it not be better to stop the bleeding in the first place? Could that be done through politics? I was still young enough to take a risk and try for public office and use it to assert an influence on bleeding wounds. If the attempt failed, then a return to Aid was possible. It initially felt good to be back home in Melbourne – but it was surprisingly difficult to re-adjust after being in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

  “Welcome back to the real world”, my stepmother Caroline said to me when I first arrived back in Australia.