Reconstruction in Rwanda

UN Chronicle, Summer, 1997 by Xi Pei

Shahryar M. Khan recalls Rwanda at the time of UNAMIR, in a conversation with Xi Pei

First of all, please imagine a country which has been completely devastated. There was no electricity, no water, no medicare, no communications, no telephones, no government, no police, there was nothing.

When we and the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) went into Rwanda during and after the genocide, it was really in a kind of vacuum, with no governance at all. NGOs came with very significant humanitarian efforts. In every community, there were people being killed or wounded, who had no means of sustenance of any kind - it was here that the NGOs very quickly began to help. Apart from the Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres, CARE, Oxfam and Help the Children, there was a large number of smaller NGOs who came with medical and humanitarian help; for instance, there were organizations that were helping women who had been raped, or were expecting children as a result of rape. There were NGOs looking after a large number of children who had been devastated, often not knowing who they were. Much work that was done to reunite them with their families was through UNICEF and UNHCR, and the NGOs who integrated with us, with the UN family, do deliver.

So if you can imagine a completely bleak landscape, then you can understand the need to provide basic essentials. I knew of many NGOs who were out there just to provide clean water, restore telephone links, and start the power grid system again. You could not rely on anything locally; there was no local administration, no local policemen. Everyone had run away; whatever was done was by the NGOs themselves. They set up their own units, went into broken-down houses, opened offices in abandoned buildings which had nothing but a room - no chairs, no tables - you had to bring your own bed, you had to bring everything, and then start to work. And where do you get water? Where do you get food? There was no food.

At the start, there were only international NGOs. Then local organizations gradually came into being, and they cooperated. For instance, the wife of the Rwandan Vice-President, Mrs. Kagame, had an NGO going which was doing very good work. They had people to make mud bricks and use them to build houses. She was getting help from us, the NGOs, and from UNDP and UNICEF to get this unit going. It was not only building the house; she also made sure that the house went to a widow, or someone directly affected by the genocide, not just anyone. Also, they sold these bricks in the market, so that the people working on the bricks were paid. And she also made sure that these people were from both the Tutsi and Hutu communities, working together. This provided a chain reaction at all levels. People were getting to work and were learning to work with each other - Hutus and Tutsis - and they were doing something vital for the rebuilding of the country.

Having said that, I think I should use the channel of the UN Chronicle to indicate some pitfalls. When we all came, there was nothing but a devastated landscape. But gradually a government came into being and it began to resume its sovereign responsibilities. This was where the problem began, because as a sovereign Government assumes increasing sovereignty, control and governance, which any Government should, NGOs must adapt after being used to having no government at all, obeying nobody's orders and just doing what they considered the right thing. The Government expects that anyone operating in their country should at least coordinate on what they have been doing, and this assumption of control, governance and sovereignty has to be accepted and acknowledged by the NGOs. But this proved to be difficult. Why? Because those organizations thought they were doing what was right, what was important. And this led to friction. For instance, the Government said to us: "Please tell your NGO friends (there were over 180 NGOs there) at least they should register with us and tell .us what they are doing; we'll not stop them, but we should know what they are doing." It took us a long time to persuade all the NGOs to register, and they kept on saying: "Why is this bureaucratic thing happening when we are doing all this for the people?"

This was only one problem. And this problem grew. As time went by, as the Government gained more and more control, it began asking: "What are you doing? Why are you having a hospital there in the south when we want the hospital in the north?" The NGOs said, "We think the hospital should be in the south". And this led to friction. Or the Government said: "We appreciate what you're doing, but please bring it into the overall plan, take what we think is important first, not what you think." Here, too, there was some tension. I tried my best to make the NGOs understand that they have to be careful, be sensitive to the Government, especially to a Government that is new. This is why after a year and a half, there was quite a lot of tension; in fact, at one point, the Government simply asked unregistered NGOs to go, leading to a huge furor and complaints that the Government was very, very unfair. Well, to some extent, I felt that the measure was harsh, but it had a history, a history of the Government continuously asking them to perform according to its plan, to accept its sovereignty.