No position we (US leftists) could have taken in 1994 would have made any difference in Rwanda. If we had acted earlier, say in 1990, vigorously opposing US support for Paul Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Army (see below), or better yet, if we had built our strength enough to effectively counter the Washington consensus on economy (see below), we might have been able to make a difference. (Likewise, we [US leftists] couldn't have done anything to prevent the 9.11 attacks in 2001, but we could have acted earlier, when the USSR still existed, to vigorously oppose US support of mujahideen in Afghanistan, which might have made a difference.)
***** Cheney at the Helm
At Halliburton, oil and human rights did not mix
By Wayne Madsen
...Cheney's links to defense contractors and the intelligence community have made him suspect among human rights activists. Halliburton and Brown & Root have played a role in some of the world's most volatile trouble spots. These include Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia, Haiti, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, Rwanda, and Somalia.
In 1998, while I was in Rwanda conducting research for my book, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen, 1999), a number of U.S. military personnel assigned to that country raised questions about Brown & Root's activities. "Brown & Root is into some real bad shit," one told me. The U.S. Army Materiel Command has confirmed that Brown & Root was in Rwanda under contract with the Pentagon. One U.S. Navy de-mining expert told me that Brown & Root helped Rwanda's U.S.-backed government fight a guerrilla war. Brown & Root's official task was to help clear mines. However, my research showed it was more involved in providing covert military support to the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Army in putting down a Hutu insurgency and assisting its invasion of the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (Cheney and Halliburton declined numerous opportunities to comment on this story.)
Cheney was no stranger to covert activities in Rwanda. In 1990, during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, Rwandan strongman Major General Paul Kagame, then a colonel in the Ugandan People's Democratic Force, attended the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kagame, with the likely knowledge of the U.S. Army and Cheney, suddenly dropped out of the school to assume command of the nascent Rwanda Patriotic Army, which later that year launched a full-scale invasion of Rwanda from rear bases inside Uganda. U.S. military advisers were present in Uganda at the time of the invasion, another fact that would have been known to Cheney and his Pentagon advisers.
While three separate commissions appointed by Belgium, France, and the Organization of African Unity have charged their own officials with complicity in central Africa's turmoil, no American panel has ever probed the involvement of the U.S. government, military, and defense contractors in central Africa's woes. If there were such a panel, Dick Cheney, the man in charge of both the Pentagon and Halliburton during various invasions of Rwanda and the Congo, would certainly have to be called and asked, "What did you know about covert U.S. military operations in central Africa and when did you know about them?"...
<http://www.progressive.org/wm0900.htm> *****
Cf. <http://www.house.gov/international_relations/mads0517.htm>.
***** [UK House of Commons] Select Committee on International Development Sixth Report
...Poverty also means that a country and its population are more vulnerable to economic shocks. For those who are in any event only just surviving, a sudden decline in standard of living can well be life-threatening and encourage desperation. The DFID memorandum states, "Poor countries are particularly vulnerable to sharp reductions in their terms of trade. The Multi-Donor Evaluation of the Rwanda genocide highlighted the very destabilising impact of the end of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 - which halved the export price of Rwanda's coffee, affecting some 70 per cent of rural households. By 1993, the result of this change was that coffee export receipts had fallen from US$144 million to only US$30 million - with serious consequences for the country's stability".[21] One aspect of economic exclusion which both International Alert[22] and Save The Children[23] mentioned as particularly related to risks of conflict was that of exclusion from land tenure. Mark Bowden from Save the Children considered land tenure to be "one of the major issues affecting conflict in Africa".[24] He suggested that the Rwanda crisis was precipitated "by the increasing levels of marginalisation of the rural population ... far fewer people have formal tenure to land than ever before and the importance of the cash economy, even if it is small, becomes that much more critical so that the effects of structural adjustment in marginalised economies where there is tremendous land pressure is that much greater and can be an exacerbating factor".[25] This linkage between international macroeconomic decisions and details at the national level of land distribution demonstrates both how central economic issues are to the discussion of conflict, but also how detailed any analysis must be.
<http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm199899/cmselect/cmintdev/55/5506.htm> *****
***** 1. IMF-World Bank policies and the Rwandan holocaust...
By Michel Chossudovsky Third World Network Features
...In 1987, the system of quotas established under the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) started to fall apart. World prices plummeted, the Fonds d'egalisation (the State coffee stabilisation fund) which purchased coffee from Rwandan farmers at a fixed price started to accumulate a sizeable debt. A lethal blow to Rwanda's economy came in June 1989 when the ICA reached a deadlock as a result of political pressures from Washington on behalf of the large US coffee traders. At the conclusion of a historic meeting of producers held in Florida, coffee prices plunged in a matter of months by more than 50%. For Rwanda and several other African countries, the drop in price wreaked havoc. With retail prices more than 20 times that paid to the African farmer, a tremendous amount of wealth was being appropriated in the rich countries....
While the Rwandan rural economy remained fragile, marked by acute demographic pressures (3.2% per annum population growth), land fragmentation and soil erosion, local-level food self-sufficiency had, to some extent, been achieved alongside the development of the export economy. Coffee was cultivated by approximately 70% of rural households, yet it constituted only a fraction of total monetary income. A variety of other commercial activities had been developed including the sale of traditional food staples and banana beer in regional and urban markets.
Until the late 1980s, imports of cereals including food aid were minimal compared to the patterns observed in other countries of the region. The food situation started to deteriorate in the early 1980s with a marked decline in the per capita availability of food. In overt contradiction to the usual trade reforms adopted under the auspices of the World Bank, protection to local producers had been provided through restrictions on the import of food commodities. They were lifted with the adoption of the 1990 structural adjustment programme.
The fragility of the State
The economic foundations of the post-Independence Rwandan State remained extremely fragile, a large share of government revenues depended on coffee, with the risk that a collapse in commodity prices would precipitate a crisis in the State's public finances. The rural economy was the main source of funding of the State. As the debt crisis unfolded, a larger share of coffee and tea earnings had been earmarked for debt servicing, putting further pressure on small-scale farmers.
Export earnings declined by 50% between 1987 and 1991. The demise of State institutions unfolded thereafter. When coffee prices plummeted, famines erupted throughout the Rwandan countryside. According to World Bank data, the growth of GDP per capita declined from 0.4% in 1981-86 to - 5.5% in the period immediately following the slump of the coffee market (1987-91). -- Third World Network Features
2. Rwandan Tragedy Not Just Due to Tribal Enmity...
By Michel Chossudovsky Third World Network Features
...After careful economic `simulations' of likely policy outcomes, the World Bank concluded with some grain of optimism that if Rwanda adopted Scenario II, levels of consumption would increase markedly over 1989-93 alongside a recovery of investment and an improved balance of trade. The `simulations' also pointed to added export performance and substantially lower levels of external indebtedness. These outcomes depended on the speedy implementation of the usual recipe of trade liberalization and currency devaluation alongside the lifting of all subsidies to agriculture, the phasing out of the Fonds d'egalisation, the privatization of State enterprises and the dismissal of civil servants...
The `With Strategy Change' (Scenario II) was adopted, the government had no choice... A 50% devaluation of the Rwandan franc was carried out in November 1990, barely six weeks after the incursion from Uganda of the rebel army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
The devaluation was intended to boost coffee exports. It was presented to public opinion as a means of rehabilitating a war-ravaged economy. Not surprisingly, exactly the opposite results were achieved exacerbating the plight of the civil war. From a situation of relative price stability, the plunge of the Rwandan franc contributed to triggering inflation and the collapse of real earnings. A few days after the devaluation, sizeable increases in the prices of fuel and consumer essentials were announced. The consumer price index increased from 1.0% in 1989 to 19.2% in 1991. The balance-of-payments situation deteriorated dramatically and the outstanding external debt which had already doubled since 1985, increased by 34% between 1989 and 1992.
The State administrative apparatus was in disarray, State enterprises were pushed into bankruptcy and public services collapsed. Health and education collapsed under the brunt of the IMF imposed austerity measures. Despite the establishment of `Social Safety' (earmarked by the donors for programs in the social sectors), the incidence of severe child malnutrition increased dramatically, the number of recorded cases of malaria increased by 21% in the year following the adoption of the IMF programme largely as a result of the absence of anti-malarial drugs in the public health centers. The imposition of school fees at the primary school level was conducive to a massive decline in school enrollment.
The economic crisis reached its climax in 1992 when Rwandan farmers in desperation uprooted some 300,000 coffee trees. Despite soaring domestic prices, the government had frozen the farmgate price of coffee at its 1989 level (125 RwF a kg), under the terms of its agreement with the Bretton Woods institutions. The government was not allowed (under the World Bank loan) to transfer State resources to the Fonds d'egalisation. It should also be mentioned that a significant profit was appropriated by local coffee traders and intermediaries serving to put further pressure on the peasantry.
In June 1992, a second devaluation was ordered by the IMF leading -- at the height of the civil war - to a further escalation of the prices of fuel and consumer essentials. Coffee production tumbled by another 25% in a single year.... Because of over-cropping of coffee trees, there was increasingly less land available to produce food, but the peasantry was not able to easily switch back into food crops. The meager cash income derived from coffee had been erased yet there was nothing to fall back on. Not only were cash revenues from coffee insufficient to buy food, the prices of farm inputs had soared and money earnings from coffee were grossly insufficient.
The crisis of the coffee economy backlashed on the production of traditional food staples leading to a substantial drop in the production of cassava, beans and sorghum... The system of savings and loan cooperatives which provided credit to small farmers had also disintegrated. Moreover, with the liberalization of trade and the deregulation of grain markets as recommended by the Bretton Woods institutions, (heavily subsidized) cheap food imports and food aid from the rich countries were entering Rwanda with the effect of destabilizing local markets.
Under `the free market' system imposed on Rwanda, neither cash crops nor food crops were economically viable. The entire agricultural system was pushed into crisis, the State administrative apparatus was in disarray due to the civil war but also as a result of the austerity measures and sinking civil service salaries... A situation which inevitably contributed to exacerbating the climate of generalized insecurity which had unfolded in 1992... The seriousness of the agricultural situation had been amply documented by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which had warned of the existence of widespread famine in the southern provinces. A report released in early 1994 also pointed to the total collapse of coffee production due to the war but also as a result of the failure of the State marketing system which was being phased with the support of the World Bank. Rwandex, the mixed enterprise responsible for processing and export of coffee, had become largely inoperative....
<http://www.udayton.edu/~rwanda/articles/chossudovsky.html> *****
In short, anti-imperialism takes more than reacting to this or that emergency (once an emergency arises, whatever you do is most likely too little, too late to have any impact on it). -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>