Zaire 1994
By John O'Shea
Zaire, 1994, and we were witnessing Rwanda's second tragedy. After
the genocide of the early summer, when up to a million Tutsis lost
their lives, an outbreak of cholera in the Hutu camps was claiming
further thousands of victims by the day.
The camps needed water - and there was plenty of it available nearby
in Lake Kivu. All that was missing was a way of bringing it from
the lake to the people.
I sat one evening in that first week of the cholera outbreak and
spoke about our problems with Sam Kiley, a journalist with the London
Times. Up against a deadline, Sam was typing on his computer
as the interview continued. Fifteen minutes later, his article was
finished and, hooking up the computer to a satellite phone, he was
able to send it to London immediately.
Sitting by the shores of Lake Kivu, we were both struck by the
depth of the failure which was unfolding in front of us. Sam Kiley
could send a story from central Africa to London's Fleet Street
in a matter of seconds. Having failed to act to limit the scale
of the genocide in April, the international community now couldn't
take water from a lake and truck it fifty miles up the road to prevent
massive loss of life.
There was an evil at work in Rwanda in those years, an evil which
turned ordinary men into butchers. But for all that has been written
about that genocide, much less has been heard about our own failure
to act, to make resources available to stem this tide of suffering.
If there are lessons to be learned from Rwanda, perhaps the most
important one is this - the world has the means, the resources and
the technology to prevent large-scale loss of human life, to tackle
poverty and to limit suffering.
All that's lacking is the will.
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