The phone call lasted less than two minutes, but its repercussions would change the face of Africa and global politics. Alessandro Bolzoni, an Italian aid official, had only recently joined the U.N. refugee agency, and on this particular evening was enjoying a quiet dinner with eight colleagues when the telephone rang just before 9 p.m.

It was from the wife of the chief of security at Rwanda's international airport in Kigali. As Bolzoni's host answered, his face whitened and he screamed, "The president's aircraft has crashed?" There was an immediate recognition in the room about what the diners were hearing. "We were plunging into catastrophe," Bolzoni remembered.

He was among the first group of foreigners to hear that the aircraft carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi had been shot down that night, April 6, 1994, their deaths triggering a 100-day genocide which would claim the lives of an estimated 800,000 people in the tiny central African nation.

In the ethnic cauldron that was central Africa, UNHCR was already struggling with an earlier regional crisis, helping some of the 700,000 ethnic Hutus who had fled to Rwanda and other countries from neighbouring Burundi following the murder of that country's president the previous October.

But the unfolding events in Rwanda overwhelmed everything around it. Rumours of newly-formed death squads had swept Kigali for weeks and within hours of the presidential aircraft being downed tracer bullets arched high over the city and the killings began, directed by an extreme ethnic Hutu leadership against the minority Tutsi population and other moderate Hutus.

On direct orders from New York, Bolzoni and his humanitarian colleagues were hurriedly evacuated. Reports of fighting between government forces and an advancing army of exiled Tutsis, mass murder and mass flights of civilians approaching biblical proportions swirled through the region for the next three weeks, but details were difficult to pin down.

THE EXODUS BEGINS

Maureen Connelly, in charge of UNHCR field operations in neighbouring northern Tanzania, remembers visiting the border area daily in search of refugees but noted: "There was no movement. Just silence. Had the genocide swallowed these people up as well?"

On April 28, 1994, she visited the Rusumo Bridge frontier post on a routine inspection and everything had changed. "We looked up at the Rwandan hills. There was nothing but people," she said. "The entire African landscape was awash with people, all headed our way."

More than 200,000 Rwandans crossed into Tanzania in 24 hours through that single border post at the start of what has been described as the fastest and largest exodus of refugees in modern times. Three months later, the tide of people fleeing for their lives abruptly changed direction, from Tanzania in the east, towards neighbouring Zaire in the west.

On an inspection tour of the region, UNHCR's Filippo Grandi was ordered by his Geneva headquarters to immediately head for the Zaire town of Goma and was told, "It's gonna be big."

RIVERS OF PEOPLE

As his light aircraft circled the frontier between Zaire and Rwanda, confusion and chaos reigned below. "There was a mass of humanity everywhere, as far as the eye could see," he said. "It was an unstoppable river of movement that lasted for four days." More than one million people – newly born babies, women, children, old men, and driving and controlling all of them, soldiers from the defeated Rwandan army and their militia colleagues, the infamous interahamwe.

In Switzerland, UNHCR's Japanese High Commissioner Sadako Ogata recalled, "We were not expecting so many people. There was a solid human river 25 kilometres long and we didn't know exactly what to do. I remember saying to myself 'This is going to be very bad.'" In fact, the Great Lakes crisis which lasted throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, transformed central Africa's political and military landscape.

A new, Tutsi-dominated government seized power in Rwanda. Zaire's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was toppled, the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo and became the scene of what was later dubbed Africa's First World War as armies from several countries fought over its riches and its borders. The ethnic war in Burundi rumbled on. Old resentments between Francophone and Anglophone 'spheres of influence' resurfaced and other new regional and international alliances were forged.

The dreaded 'G' word – genocide – and the international community's refusal to acknowledge it, permeated the corridors of power in New York, Washington and Paris for years with a foul smell.

In purely humanitarian terms, the emergency turned into the messiest quagmire since the modern refugee protection regime was established in the wake ofWorld War II.

PROBLEMS AND DILEMMAS

Aid agencies faced appalling logistical problems – and equally difficult moral dilemmas. Huge camps, some containing hundreds of thousands of people, sprung from the red dust plains of Tanzania and the unforgiving black volcanic rock of Goma. At least two billion dollars worth of assistance was pumped into Zaire in the first two weeks of the emergency alone, but still 50,000 people died from cholera. And it quickly became clear that members of the old regime and their gunmen controlled the sites, the refugees in them and much of the assistance meant to alleviate their suffering.

Too, many of the camps were within gunshot of Rwanda's vulnerable borders, allowing the militias to recruit volunteers and launch hit-and-run raids across the border, a situation which helped spark a broad military conflict two years later.

Though hundreds of agencies poured into the region, their flags, banners and decals turning camps into some type of squalid mediaeval pageant, it was obvious that only military logistical muscle, eventually supplied by the United States, France and others, could meet the overwhelming humanitarian needs.

In 1996, a fledgling rebellion in eastern Zaire, supported by a Tutsi government in Kigali frustrated by the ongoing insecurity and persistent raids, destroyed the camps. In the next several weeks many of the uprooted civilians were cut off from the outside world and the international media talked about "one million missing refugees." In November, an estimated 600,000 civilians flooded back into Rwanda in chaotic scenes reminiscent of the original exodus. Several hundred thousand people – though some governments at the time insisted for political reasons that virtually everyone had returned home – fled in the opposite direction, deeper into the rain forests and toward the key town of Kisangani.

Retreating refugees, interahamwe, soldiers from the collapsing Zaire government, rebels intent on bloody revenge and aid agencies intent on saving lives played a deadly game of chase and catch-up across central Africa.

There was evidence of widespread massacres and when UNHCR field staff did find pockets of survivors, gunmen were often close by ready to kill them too.

Filippo Grandi's crisis moment came in the killing fields around Kisangani. "I called the High Commissioner directly in Geneva, the first time I had done so in 10 years," he said. "The camps were being cleansed. I told her 'You have to tell me what to do. We can go public, condemn the killings and be thrown out.' But our withdrawal would have doomed more people to die."

"Several times I wanted to pull out," Ogata says. "But we were the last hope of the refugees. We stayed." Eventually, more than 260,000 civilians were plucked from the rain forests. An estimated 62,000 of them were flown home in the largest humanitarian air-bridge in African history.

Around Kisangani and throughout the crisis in Zaire and Tanzania, UNHCR faced a fundamental protection headache: under what circumstances should the Rwandans be returned? A cornerstone of repatriation is that it should at all times be 'voluntary' but in the heat and chaos of the Great Lakes most refugees were faced with a stark choice: almost certain death in the rain forests, forcible repatriation at the point of a gun, or an assisted return by UNHCR to an admittedly uncertain future.

NO EASY ANSWERS

Ogata remains unrepentant on possibly the most contentious issue during that period, the continued feeding of both refugees and the gunmen who controlled the camps. UNHCR is a non-political, purely humanitarian agency without any military or security apparatus of its own. In refugee situations, host governments are responsible for the safety of refugee camps.

When Zaire was unable or unwilling to provide this safety net, Ogata, through then U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, asked as many as 50 governments for assistance. All of them declined, a point deliberately ignored by several journalist-authored books with their own political axes to grind which simplistically blamed the agency for the entire political mess.

"Of course we were aware of the terrible security situation," Ogata said. "But could I just say 'We are leaving. Someone else take care of the women and the children, a million people.' Of course not. We were doing the work we were mandated to do. The failure was elsewhere."

When the agency also suggested moving the camps away from the volatile borders, the international response was the same – no interest and no support.

Ogata acknowledged that UNHCR had 'compromised' over the issue of voluntary returns, especially from Tanzania. "There were innocent refugees, but there were also killers in those groups," she said. "The situation was full of contradictions. The Tanzanians were determined to send them back, but the refugee leaders resisted." UNHCR went along reluctantly with the Tanzanian government but "I think we failed," she said. "There is no excuse. We could have been tougher" in defending the refugee mandate.

The issue of humanitarian-military cooperation and how closely two basically opposite groups should and could work, remains controversial and has only been exacerbated since the Great Lakes by subsequent messy crises in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mistakes were made. Dilemmas were wrestled with and rarely resolved satisfactorily. Tens of thousands of persons died, including aid workers. Thirty-six people from UNHCR alone were killed, died or went missing during the emergency. But humanitarian agencies also helped save the lives of other untold numbers of innocent victims, though as Filippo Grandi said, "In the process we lost most of our own innocence."

More than 2.5 million people had fled Rwanda starting in 1994. But by early 2004, 3.2 million had gone home, many with the help of UNHCR. They included not only people uprooted by the genocide, but those who had left the country in earlier crises.


Things get back to normal. Downtown Kigali. © UNHCR/B.Heger

RETURN TO NORMALCY

Today, the camps and the killing fields have largely disappeared. Meadows of bright green grass cover the unforgiving volcanic rock at Kibumba, north of Goma, where several hundred thousand people squatted and died for two years, corpses sewn into bamboo or cloth shrouds and left daily alongside the road for collection.

At Mugunga camp, thousands of displaced civilians whose homes were destroyed by the eruption of nearby Mount Nyiragongo in January 2002, long after the refugees returned home, have replaced those earlier squatters, but their huts of plastic sheeting, wooden bits, twigs and breeze-block are eerily reminiscent of that earlier, dark age.

Signs now warn of the dangers of crevices in the volcanic rock where noxious gases from nearby Lake Kivu seeped through and killed unknown numbers of refugees. A network of yellow, orange and red flags are hoisted to alert the population to the possible dangers of another volcanic blast.

Goma, once a glamorous retreat of the region's wealthy and then the nerve centre of a multi-billion dollar humanitarian operation lies partially buried by the recent lava flows. Two-storey buildings, now reduced to only one level, and rusting vehicle hulks lie trapped forever in the hardened rock.

Nearby frontier crossings which once witnessed the frenzied movements of hundreds of thousands of traumatized civilians and piles of bloodstained machetes, clubs and rifles, sway to a more languid African pace of peaceful cross-border trade these days.

In the aftermath of the genocide , Rwanda, which until then had been the most crowded corner of Africa, was a place haunted by fear, dead bodies, empty fields and deserted towns and villages.

But even there a surface vibrancy has returned. Tea and coffee plantations luxuriate under a tropical sun, fields are full of crops and villages hum with life. Kigali has undergone a modest building boom, including construction of a sparkling Intercontinental Hotel. Another hostel, the Mille Collines, which became a sanctuary for at least a few enemies of the regime at the height of the slaughter, underwent a facelift and once more the city's elite gather around the swimming pool for cocktails on lazy Sundays.

A UNHCR ROLE

The U.N. refugee agency played its own modest part in piecing the country back together again. Under the terms of its mandate, the organization had concentrated on helping people fleeing the country in 1994, but when this flow reversed itself two years later, the agency refocused its attention toward helping to reintegrate more than three million people into a shattered society.

An initial priority, monitoring the safe return of refugees, a difficult role at the time in a country still deeply traumatized by the genocide and where untold numbers of revenge ethnic killings undoubtedly took place. Monitors were at great physical risk, and relations with a government incensed at what it considered the disproportionate help given to genocidaires rather than innocent Tutsi victims, were often spiky.

Eventually, UNHCR spent almost $200 million on a variety of projects including the construction of 100,000 homes, the rehabilitation of water systems and schools, training a new judiciary and encouraging small-scale economic activities.

The agency has now reverted to its more traditional role of assisting nearly 40,000 mainly Congolese and some Burundi refugees who live in Rwanda.

And tying up the last loose end of the genocide and its aftermath by assisting between 60,000 to 80,000 Rwandans still living in surrounding countries to finally come home (see separate story).

RWANDA'S FUTURE

At the start of 1994 Rwanda was already one of the world's poorest countries and also one of its most densely populated. During that year, out of a population of some 6.5 million, nearly one half were either murdered or fled the country. Of those who stayed, three-quarters were forced from their homes. Most of the country's basic infrastructure was destroyed. With the possible exception of Somalia, no state was nearer to total meltdown.

A decade on, though massive problems do remain, the country's efforts to overcome the most dreadful type of violence perpetrated against a perceived enemy, that of genocide, have been admirable.

On pain of imprisonment, ethnic incitement has been eradicated from government identity cards, school books, official documents and radio and television broadcasts.

The country has a culture of entrenched obedience and in a recent tour of the country, virtually everyone interviewed repeated the government line that "There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandans." Or, as UNHCR Representative Kalunga Lutato explained, "Whichever way you turn, that is the song that is being sung."

Sheikh Abdul Karim Harerimana, a Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Joint Commission for the Repatriation, and Reintegration of Rwandan Refugees added a note of caution: "We don't want to forget the genocide. Once you do that, it can happen again." And fellow MP Ms. Odette Nyiramirimo added: "Forgiveness is very difficult. The problem is not yet solved. In my deep consciousness, I feel it will not happen again across the breadth of the country. But there are incidents. People are still being killed."

Sheikh Abdul used a different rough rule of thumb to measure material progress.

"We have been 95 percent successful in repatriating our people," he said in an interview. "But so far, what we have achieved in reintegration is less than 40 percent."

Some 200,000 families still need homes, though the numbers have decreased sharply from 500,000 in 1996. There are few hospitals or clinics and many returning children don't even speak the national language, Kinyarwanda. Because their parents were killed, at least 100,000 children, some not even in their teens, are now 'head of households' being responsible for the care and well-being of their even younger brothers and sisters.

Before the events, each family had an average of two hectares of land to farm, but as the population actually increased to more than eight million, that has been halved. More than 90 percent of the population live off the land.

"When people first began to return everyone was willing to share – homes and land," according to Ms. Nyiramirimo, a former government secretary of state. "Everyone had been a refugee of one sort or another and they understood," she said. "But that changed and people began to say 'I won't share the land I have. Why should I?'"

Sheikh Abdul Karim Harerimana, however, quoted a Rwandan proverb which he said will help the situation: "The skin of a rabbit can accommodate five people."

LIFETIME SCARS

Rwanda and its fallout scarred everyone – victims, officials and humanitarian workers – for life.

Alessandro Bolzoni, the UNHCR field officer who was one of the first persons to hear about the presidential air crash which triggered the genocide still feels "guilty, guilty, guilty" for leaving Kigali in Rwanda's greatest hour of need. "In those early days, we as field workers couldn't do anything. We followed orders. It was very, very painful."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in launching an action plan to prevent future genocides said recently, "We must never forget our collective failure to protect at least 800,000 defenseless men, women and children who perished in Rwanda." But in a separate, earlier interview, asked how the international community would respond in a similar situation, he admitted: "I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. I'm really not sure that it would shape up differently."

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted in a mea culpa: "We did not act quickly enough after the killings began. We should have not allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."

Remembering the shrouds of Goma containing so many bodies, Filippo Grandi says he has recurrent nightmares: "Every time I see a bundle, I think of those bodies." Sadako Ogata said simply, "I never felt so much alone as in trying to manage that operation."

Responding to the criticisms of ineptitude levelled against aid agencies, UNHCR field officer Kilian Kleinschmidt said: "I still do not know what we could have done otherwise, as humanitarians, as human beings."

Emmanuel Murangira, a Tutsi, lost 50 members of his family, including his wife and five children in one of the 1994 massacres. He was severely wounded in the head and only survived by playing dead beneath piles of other bodies.

Murangira represents both the lingering fears and the tentative hopes for today's Rwanda.

He remarried after 'the events' but when his latest child died earlier this year, killed by his enemies through witchcraft, he said, he decided that enough was enough. He would not foster any more children and put them at risk. "No more," he said.

But after some hesitancy and despite his own horrific history, Murangira expressed cautious optimism that Rwanda's shattered society could slowly be patched back together. "Before the genocide we (Tutsis and Hutus) lived together," he said. And "after the genocide, we live together."


A survivor remembers the victims. © UNHCR/B.Heger

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 135: "New Europe and Asylum – What Next?" (June 2004). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (520Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here