The Birds of Appetite

Where there is a carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. …

This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory … enrich the birds of appetite.

[But here] there is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the “nothing,” the nobody” that was there, suddenly appears.

It was there all the time, but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.**

***

A friend of mine, Enrico Pavignani, is working on a fascinating case series about the health sector in fragile and failed states. Well known for his work on Mozambique, Enrico has been working in health in some of the hardest and poorest countries in the world for some 31 odd years.

An early draft on Somalia notes:

“The lack of capacity is constantly invoked to explain the sorry condition of the healthcare field in Somalia. … Nobody would challenge the view that the aggregate performance of the health service delivery system is dismally poor. But poor performance is not uniformly distributed across the health space. …The proliferation of private healthcare outlets, including many of a certain size and complexity, implies some management capacity. The constant growth of the healthcare field, despite all its shortcomings, suggests initiative and entrepreneurship—and hence capacity.…

Orthodox aiddom has tended to focus on the three administrations of Somalia: the Ministry of Health (MOH) of the Transitional Federal Government, which fulfils the prototype of a virtual, absent and disinterested health authority, playing a fictitious role for external consumption; the Ministry of Health and Labour (MOHL) of Somaliland, eager to be recognised as legitimately ruling over the health services provided within its territory; and the Ministry of Health of Puntland.

The MOHL of Somaliland, although belonging to an administration not recognised by the international community, is submitted to the barrage of capacity-building interventions that have become a trademark of the aid industry. The recognised MOH of the Transitional Federal Government is spared this sort of support. Donor agencies in general harbor a deep mistrust of all three administrations, manifest in the reluctance to even contemplate the use of aid management instruments that apportion some control to indigenous health managers.

Then there are the local health authorities. Given their meager (or non-existent) budgets, most struggle to perform their basic functions. The support they receive from international agencies and vertical programmes is in most cases provided in exchange for the execution of specific tasks. These bargains allow for the survival of the concerned local health authorities, but do nothing to nurture their institutional advance as sector-wide local leading agents—in short they do nothing to build capacity, even though this may be the level where it is most needed, and where that type of support could be most effective….

The pervasive perception of a crushing capacity shortage may have its roots in searching for capacity in the wrong places, and in expecting that it manifests itself with familiar signals, like mastering the English jargon used by the aid industry, formulating elegant funding proposals, handling indicators or submitting solid accounts. The striking point is that many indigenous health initiatives have prospered despite (or maybe because of?) their lack of such capacity markers.”

***

One of the reasons development is hard is that donors, as well as those who implement programs, must make decisions about how to best help a country based on inadequate information.

When we don’t have enough information, or when we are pressed for time (as we always are), and looking for the right information is deemed too costly, we fall back on habits, on what is known, on what has been done already. We go to the usual people and talk about the usual things.

Sometimes, this is enough. But sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, making decisions about aid this way results, as Enrico’s discussion of capacity-building in Somalia suggests, in aid geared towards things as we see them, and not as they really are. And like birds of appetite, we miss things that could improve the impact of aid because they are not our kinds of prey.

We could do things differently.

Enrico suggests that in Somalia, investments in local-level capacity development could provide better returns than focusing on the ministries. More generally, he says that capacity discussions should focus on the incentives that condition the performance of the healthcare system as a whole, rather than on the individual and organizational skills that capacity-building measures are supposed to generate. “Provided with appealing enticements, Somali actors have demonstrated their individual and collective capacity to deliver results."

He also suggests a consideration of the thriving private health sector in Somalia, which remains outside most donor portfolios, despite its recognition as a key player in the healthcare arena.

And what about the host of other donor follies identified in the case study?

• As in other disrupted (i.e., war-torn) contexts, donors set very lows bars in terms of the support they provide in Somalia. The donor imperative to disburse often overrules most other considerations. As an example, UNICEF drug kits were for a long time distributed to unsupervised health facilities that had no requirement to report back. Similarly, funding continues to be provided by some donors to under-performing hospitals, whose accounts raise concerns.
• Only a few donor officials are allowed to devote their entire attention to Somalia. Most scramble around, handling large and diverse portfolios covering several East African countries. Their quick turnover undermines memory: functioning arrangements are forgotten, lessons learned are ignored, abandoned models are rewrapped as hot novelties, and old mistakes are repeated.
• There is a glaring mismatch between health needs and funding allocation and levels. For example, among the diseases targeted by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, tuberculosis ranks high, malaria middle and HIV/AIDS at the bottom of major health concerns in Somalia. The respective funding shares, however, are reversed, with HIV/AIDS getting the largest and tuberculosis the smallest donor allocation.

These follies are hardly unique to Somalia. They are also things that we can do something about.

*The countries in the case series include Afghanistan, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Haiti, Palestine and Somalia. For information, contact: enricopavignani@hotmail.com

**Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton

The Ambiguity of Aid (Zambia Journal)

Driving through Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, is like a first trip to Las Vegas. Everything is in your face, something to see. Dusty streets, potholes like craters, people hanging off the back of pickup trucks, women wearing babies like backpacks as they hack away at maize, the smell of smoke from burning trash on the side of the road, horns honking, traffic that moves like liquid.

Almost two-thirds of Zambians live below the international poverty line—around 7.5 million people. The average life expectancy is a stunning 46 years. Only 58 percent of the population has access to clean water.

Zambia is a poor country. It is also a cauldron of donor activity. In 2005, the country received $1.7 billion in official development assistance—that’s 17.3 percent of gross national income for a country of 12 million people.

“The question people ask,” says Justin Mubanga, the Director of the Economic Management Department at the Ministry of Finance and National Planning, “is, in the last fifteen years Zambia got so much aid but there was little progress. What caused this?”

Some people say that aid caused this. They say that it has hampered, stifled and retarded Africa’s development. But there are others who say, on the contrary, that aid improves the lives of the poor and makes the sick well.

Gordon

Gordon Brown is standing at his desk in a crisp navy blue blazer and khaki slacks, a phone in one hand, the other tapping his keyboard. Even standing still, he’s humming with energy.

Gordon is the 35-year-old Zambia country representative for Africare, a U.S-based non-governmental organization (NGO). His job is to develop new programs, oversee those that already exist, and form alliances and partnerships.

It’s a long way from Augusta, Georgia, where he grew up. “The first time I walked into a store [in Africa] and nobody knew who I was or cared, I felt like I fit in by not being noticed, you know what I’m saying?”

Africare’s work in Zambia centers on health, food security and agriculture, and emergency response. Their projects, Gordon says, are about meeting peoples’ essential needs. So for example, they are helping to install something called PlayPumps, a merry-go-round of sorts that, when children spin it, pumps clean water into a storage tank that can be accessed by a simple tap on the ground below.

“Market forces alone aren’t enough to solve the problem of poverty in Africa. If we take the Darwinian approach—if you have resources, then you’ll succeed—if we believe that and act on that belief, people will die.”

There are many who think that putting things in such stark terms is just a clever way to drown out the voices of critics.

“[But] it’s okay to be motivated by wanting to do good,” Godron says. “We don’t live in a purely dog eat dog world. We want to believe there’s something greater. We want to be able to respond to need. Not everything we do is about self interest.”

Boyd

Looking at Boyd is like staring into the bottom of a well. His eyes are small and dark, impenetrable. I ask him: What is it like to care for orphans? What is it like to live in a village in the Zambian bush? What is it like to be poor? My words are like arrows shot into the ocean, pointed and tiny against the vast waves.

We pick him up at a small church made of exposed cement blocks where he and other volunteers are being trained in Gender Equity. The words seem sterile and queer in the dust beneath the jacaranda tree, where a little girl stands, hiding in the folds of her mother’s skirt, while some wazungu (white people) try to coax her to speak

Boyd Hamuchemba lives in Shimukuni, a village two hours up the Great North Road from Lusaka. He is a volunteer caregiver with a PEPFAR-funded program called RAPIDS (Reaching HIV/AIDS Affected People with Integrated Development Support). RAPIDS gives him training, a bicycle and a modest medical kit, and Boyd and his wife look after eight orphans, three of whom are his dead brother’s children, and five from the surrounding village. He visits them each week and records each visit in a ledger that is signed by the orphan’s guardian. If they are hungry, he tries to bring them food. If they are sick, he gives them a ride on his bike to the clinic. It was a volunteer caregiver like him who took Boyd to a clinic in February 2008, where he was diagnosed as HIV+.

***

The adult (aged 15-49) HIV prevalence rate in Zambia is 14.3 percent, according to the country’s 2007 Demographic and Health Survey—the seventh highest prevalence rate in the world. Anti-retroviral therapy was introduced in 2004, and 120,000 people now receive treatment in no small part because of the vast sums of money PEPFAR has poured into the country—more than $269.2 million in FY2008 alone. (The entire budget of Zambian Ministry of Health in 2008 was $317.5 million.)

PEPFAR has been criticized for devoting too much money to a single disease and for channeling aid mostly through international NGOs, circumventing the government. One afternoon I asked Dr. Ben Chirwa, Director General of the National HIV/AIDS/STI/TB Council, if Zambia’s battle against the epidemic is too reliant on donor funds.

“AIDS is a global problem,” he said. “It is beyond what any one government can do.”

What about the Washington economist who termed ballooning U.S. funds for AIDS treatment an entitlement that is unsustainable?

Dr. Chirwa just grinned like a pumpkin. “Life is priceless,” he said.

***

Boyd showed me around his compound—the hut where he stores food, his two goats, a checker board carving in the dirt where his children play games. I ask what he would do without RAPIDS.

“I was already a guardian and parent. But the work has become easier. When given a bike, it lightened my work. I felt very good.”

Aid is keeping Boyd alive. It is also helping him help kids in his village who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. He would do it anyway, but the help makes his burden light.

Joy

I meet Joy Hutcheon at her office on the second floor of the British High Commission, on Independence Avenue. Joy is country director for the Department for International Development (DFID), the national aid agency of the United Kingdom.

Joy’s interest in development began early. “I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been interested in the different ways people do things in different parts of the globe.” After a visit to India, she applied for a position with the U.K. civil service, marking the Overseas Development Administration (DFID’s predecessor) as her first choice.

“For any country,” she says, ‘the way it is governed is so fundamental. I had the feeling that [in government] I could change something.”

***

The U.K gives about two-thirds of its aid to Zambia directly to the government, more than any other bilateral donor. The idea is to help build the accountability and capability of the state so it can provide for its citizens. Aid to an NGO that buys HIV/AIDS medicine will save lives today, but working with the government to improve its drug distribution system (one of the things DFID is doing) will help all Zambians access essential medicines over the long term.

Chris Pain, who works for the GTZ, the German development agency, as an advisor to the Ministry of Finance, attributes much of Zambia’s strong economic performance over the past four years to budget support, and the way it is helping to slowly strengthen the civil service. “Budget support opens up the whole budget for discussion, so it’s good for enhanced transparency.”

Justin Mubanga at the Ministry of Finance (MOF), who oversees the economic technical cooperation department (the four people in the MOF who manage donors), says that budget support has brought some predictability to the flow of funds, and the division of labor helps “but they still want an audience. They come indirectly to tinker.”

One of the ways donors “tinker” is through the performance assessment framework. Twice a year, they meet with the government to assess its performance on a number of predetermined indicators. If the indicators are not met, funding can be pulled.

Monitoring the government’s performance is necessary because donors must sell aid to policymakers and their constituencies back home, and assure them that funds are not being wasted.

“You can’t have budget support without being worried about corruption,” says Joy.

DFID is trying to help the government create an environment in which finances are well-managed and where corruption is not tolerated. So for example, DFID is helping the MOF install a single Treasury bank account (as opposed to the 300 or so accounts it currently has), to make is easier to track spending. The result is that corruption is more noticeable, Joy says, but there are also voices prepared to speak out and challenge it.

***

When Joy first arrived in Zambia, before anyone knew who she was, she visited a remote village called Kazuni in Southern Province. She shared a mud hut, walked to the river to get water, burned her fingers cooking nshima, laughed around a crackling fire with the women who were hosting her.

One day, a plane passed overhead. The women asked: what is it like to be way up there, in the sky? She felt clumsy as she tried to describe it: imagine you’re in a bus, sitting next to someone, little windows on the side. Are there are toilets, they asked? Yes, there are toilets. There are trays that fold down, and sometimes televisions. The women stared at Joy in wonder. They would probably never set foot on a plane.

“Everyone in Zambia has a village,” Joy said, “and will talk about going to the village. I have heard people I know say things like: this isn’t so bad; it’s like camping. But it’s your life. It’s everything you’ve got and there is no prospect of it changing.”

After three days she returned to Lusaka, over dirt roads, then paved roads, past buildings until she was back in her office, sitting in front of her computer, listening to the hum of the air conditioning.

As she told the story her voice cracked, like a rock breaking the surface of the water. “I really, really have to be sure that what I’m doing matters."

***

Night comes early in Lusaka. In the dark sounds are amplified. The rustle of leaves, dogs barking down an alley, a car engine trying to turn over.

An aid worker from Ireland once told me about a man she met at a health center who was holding his dead daughter in his arms. He needed a ride home; my friend said she could take him. The coffin he had was too small, but he hurried to squeeze the little girl’s body in, worried if he didn’t move fast enough, his ride might leave. The aid worker panicked: she won’t fit in there, let’s find something else. But there wasn’t anything else, so they took a hammer, knocked the end out of the coffin, and drove home with the wooden casket in the back of the pickup truck, the little girl’s legs dangling out the end.

Sometimes it feels like you’re being swallowed up, pulled under by a rip tide. The enormity of need. The limits of what we can do.

Boyd said it was hard to show up at someone’s home, ask them if he could help, and realize that sometimes he couldn’t. I remember him walking across a dirt path to the garden where he grows vegetables for the orphans; Gordon striding across a school yard to see a new water pump; Joy walking down the hall to meet some government officials.

They put one foot in front of the other.

*This is adapted from a piece I wrote in 2009 for the Center for Global Development.

Reintegration

We used to talk about it in Dar—what it would be like when we went back. Went home. What overload we’ll feel, we said! Shopping malls, anything you want, stuff everywhere, expensive jewelry, perfume, crowded restaurants.

We thought it would be unsettling, unnerving, shocking even. But in so many ways it’s not shocking.

You just go back.

***

Landed at Heathrow at 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday. Zipped through immigration, followed the helpful signs to baggage claim, picked up a trolley for my bags, grabbed a coffee at Costa, and some money at the ATM (there were three to choose from). Used the toilet, then followed the signs to the bus stop, made it just in time for the 5:30 to Oxford.

It was rush hour and the motorway was bustling but moving steadily. Out the window, the hills were soft and green and dotted with sheep. A church steeple shone in the pale yellow sun. Tidy little cars drove down tidy little roads. Ten hours earlier I’d been with Frank, my taxi driver and friend in Dar, driving up the airport road in the sweaty crush of rush hour traffic, guys streaming by the window selling bananas and water.

Of course, I thought. Of course I am back and this is how it is.

I waited for the shock, the smack, but my mind was as flat as the window I was pressed up against.

Set out the next morning, grabbed a coffee and walked down Cornmarket street. Stopped in at Boots and walked down the lotion isle, the shampoo isle, flipped through some magazines. Tried on a sweater at Topshop. Kept walking. Felt listless. It started to rain, so I ducked in to a bookstore, sat down at a table in the café, and looked around at all the people sipping lattes, nibbling on cookies and cakes, talking, and I started to cry.

***

I was happy with less. The struggle we have in the West—with consumption, with the ability, now back again, to gratify any desire, any time, any place, is crushing, crushing in the sense that I sometimes feel so helpless against it.

But there’s another, subtler struggle that keeps burning long after you’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat less and spend less and live, mostly happily, with less.

***

It’s 6pm on a Thursday in Washington, DC, where I’ve settled now some three months out of Africa. My colleague, an old development hand, is packing her bag to go home, putting on a woolen cap to guard against the January chill.

—Terrible out isn't it, I say, while a dark spatter of rain hits the window.

—Yes, she says. I can't wait to get out of here.

She tells me she’s leaving for Bali soon, to wait out the winter. She’s lived overseas for most of her career and misses the field. Life is better over there, she says.

I ask her: why do you think it is better?

I want her to explain it, to explain away the awfulness I’ve felt since I’ve been back, the longing to return.

I hadn’t wanted to leave Africa. I’d realized this gradually during my last few months living on the continent. But things were set, and when I stood on the rooftop in Dar and looked out over the city the night before flying out, I felt a sort of inevitability about it. And a strange sense of loss.

A month later I was back in Washington, walking down K Street on my wait to a meeting, when I noticed my finger: the thin silver band I had bought in Swaziland was gone.

I’d found it at a little shop just outside Mbabane. It was small—two very thin silver bands, one rough, the other polished, fused together. To me, it was perfect. I don’t wear jewelry, but when I saw it, I wanted to seize it, as if I’d finally found some little scrap that fit me. I would look down at it all the time, turn it round and round on my finger.

I ran in my high heels back to the World Bank, to the bathroom where I thought I left it while I was washing my hands, but it wasn’t there. So I ran to the reception and told them I had lost something. I was out of breath, my face was red, and I spoke in the unnatural voice that comes when you are trying to hold back tears.

The woman manning the phones sat up in her chair and asked: Have you gone back to the bathroom and looked for it?

—Yes, I said.

She frowned a little, straightening her navy blue blazer. Have you gone to lost and found?

—Yes. And now there were tears streaming down my face.

She gave her colleague an uncomfortable sideways glance. Sorry, she said. Was it your wedding ring?

—No, I said, choking out the words. But it was precious to me. I can never replace it. I have to get it back.

We searched and searched—the security folks, the people who work in the cafeteria, everyone. But it was gone.

***

I remember sitting around an outdoor fire one night in Lusaka with some expat aid workers. The evening was wearing thin, and while people murmured quietly and stared into their glasses, I watched the fire.

A friend, sitting directly across from me, broke the quiet murmur: Lindsay, he said, what’s your favorite thing about Zambia?

All eyes on me. “The expats,” I said. They laughed quietly.

He pressed on, no really, what is it about this place that made you want to come back?

I said: the space.

***

A friend of mine spent two years in Mauritania. One night in DC, over a dinner of hotdogs and red wine (if you know me then you understand how typical this is), I tell him how hard it is to be back, how unhappy I am, and unhappy I am at myself for feeling unhappy.

—What was it like for you, when you came back, I ask him?

—Everything seemed banal, he said, circumscribed.

I tell him I feel the same way but then point out the irony. I complained all the time when I lived in Dar: “And you? Life here—boring and banal? You lived in a village in rural Mauritania.”

He laughed: “Yeah, I was bored all the time there. But just being there was enough. Just going through the motions was interesting.”

He tells me about being at a party one night and thinking that every conversation was meaningless. “I felt like everyone needed to be shaken out of the routines they were living in. It was hard. And I had a hard time connecting. It was like there were people everywhere, but they were just passing each other.”

It was like what my colleague, now in Bali, eventually told me on that cold January night: “There’s too much stuff here. Over there, we were a part of each other’s lives.”

***

I guess the longing for Africa comes from a combination of these things. I liked having fewer choices; I was happy when I had less stuff.

I liked how involved friends were in each others lives, almost as if we were family. I liked how we saw each other all the time, stayed at each other’s houses, the sense of camaraderie, the way we felt bound together by shared experience, like refugees in a foreign land.

And I liked the sense of freedom, the vastness of the landscape, like staring out across the ocean. I liked getting on planes every other week, hopping between countries as if they were metro stops. And meeting new people who did the same thing, floating out there in space and time.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking back.

But the truth is, being expats in excruciatingly poor countries cannot be the only way to live like that, that is, to live with less stuff, to live together, and to be free. There has to be a way to make that real where ever we are.

The Trouble With Rwanda

“We are hypnotised by the 1994 genocide, and oblivious to the atrocities of a regime we regard as exemplary. Aid, we say, must be conditional on good governance—but post-genocide government is an exception. … Democracy is a precondition of peace—but not in a post-genocidal state. Justice, truth and reconciliation heal—but not the wounds of exterminatory hatred. The invasion and plunder of eastern Congo are criminal—but not when they’re carried out by genocide survivors.”

This is Stephen W. Smith, a journalist who was Africa editor of Libération and Le Monde who covered Rwanda for nearly two decades, writing in the London Review of Books. His piece is an elegant and unnervingly detailed look at snapshots of events from 1992 to more recent days. It raises many troubling questions about the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RFP), and Paul Kagame himself.

There have always been questions about who was involved in the downing of former President Habyarimana’s jet in 1994, which sparked the genocide, but what about the various tallies and reports of reprisal killings after the RFP took power, which have been documented but largely ignored. Smith’s investigation estimates that more than 100,000 Hutus were murdered during the RFP’s first year in power, but he also cites the work of Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, who estimated that “between 25,000 and 40,000 persons were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report—in fact just briefing notes—was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and its allies, the UNHCR went on the record denying its existence.”

Or how about what happened in 1996, when the Rwandan army dispersed the Hutu camps in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). Of the 300,000 or so who fled deeper into the DRC, nearly two-thirds died over the next six months, according to a field study by Médecins Sans Frontières. Says Smith: “The UNHCR spoke of ‘crimes against humanity’, but, again, there was hardly any response. Twelve years later, in August 2010, a fresh investigation by the UN put the number killed at ‘probably in the several tens of thousands.’”

Or how about the murder in Nairobi in 1998 of Seth Sendashonga, who joined the RPF in 1991, as the only eminent Hutu-turned-rebel who was not a defector from the Habyarimana regime. Sendashonga became Kagame’s minister of the interior, but when Kagame failed to respond to his 700 letters documenting RFP abuses and reprisals, he resigned and went into exile. He was killed when gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles opened fire on his car during rush hour, soon before he was scheduled to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

There have been other murders. Like that of the vice president of Rwanda’s Democratic Green Party, who lobbied against the country’s admission to the Commonwealth, citing the regime’s gross human rights violations, and was found decapitated near Butare last year.

We could also talk about Kagame’s Soviet style popularity in elections, or the regime’s suppression of the media and civil society.

Why do these stories seldom feature, or when they do, disappear like smoke?

***

This is not the part of Rwanda that we—people who work in development—spend our time thinking about. When we think about Rwanda, we think of a shining star in Africa, of the extraordinary leadership and stunning progress since 1994.

This is how The Economist describes it:

“The discarded plastic bottles and bags that pollute almost every other country on the continent are nowhere to be seen… The tarred roads are usually in good shape; speed limits are actually enforced, by smart traffic police who fill out paperwork in exchange for a statutory fine rather than shaking you down for a bribe. Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, rates Rwanda as one of the more honest countries in Africa. The World Bank says it is fastest-improving as a place to do business. Hotels in the capital, Kigali, brim with Westerners attending conferences. Paul Kagame, the president who has overseen all this, is a darling of the aid-giving world. Western governments and prominent religious leaders have hailed him as the sort of man in whom to put their faith—and money.”

Money indeed. Rwanda is a heavily aid-dependent country, having received massive increases in official development assistance (ODA) since 2003. In 2009/10 net official ODA stood at nearly US$1 billion. Neighboring Burundi, which is just as poor, has a similar history of violence among the same ethnic groups, received about half that. Almost 40 percent of this aid is provided in the form of budget support, a vote of confidence in the government—indeed, all of Norway’s aid is provided that way, and the majority of the UK’s aid is.

Rwanda is what we wish other countries could be. A donor darling, growing rapidly, determined. There is a kind of wide-eyed lore about the place. Everywhere you go—from Dakar to Abuja, to Addis, to Dar es Salaam and Lusaka, people say: have you heard about Rwanda?

And leaders from the West line up to be friends. I was in Rwanda in 2009 and remember bumping repeatedly into Tony Blair in the lobby of the Serena hotel, where I was staying. I asked the hotel staff about it. They shrugged—he’s here all the time. He and Kagame are great friends.

***

Smith’s essay is not the first time someone has written about these troubling questions. It is not as if people in power—whether in politics or in the aid business—don’t know a lot of this stuff.

What is stunning, stupefying even, is how all of it is barely a blip on the radar.

The first question is: why?

The next question is: when the development community looks back 15 years from now, what we will think about our collective silence on these issues? Will we say, yes, supporting the regime was the right thing to do during a fragile period of recovery. Or will and see our cravenness to confront these issue as a mere extension of our complicity (through silence and inaction) in violence and injustice in Rwanda before the genocide?

***

“‘Rwanda…is a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame through a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres of the RPF from behind the scenes. The majority Hutu community remains excluded from a meaningful share of political power. State institutions are as effective as they are repressive. The government relies on severe repression to maintain its hold on power … Rwanda is less free today than it was prior to the genocide. … Civil society is less free … The media is less free. The Rwanda government is more repressive than the one that it overthrew.’

This is not the preamble to a new Hutu manifesto but an excerpt from the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ published last year by four senior figures in the Kagame regime who’ve now fled abroad [one survived an attempt on his life when a commando opened fire on him last June in Johannesburg, where he now lives in exile].

The authors of the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ may not be trustworthy advocates of freedom and democracy, or paragons of ethnic inclusiveness, but they describe a system they’re familiar with and a leader they know well. To his many Western admirers they have this to say: ‘President Kagame is a very polarising figure. His policies continue to divide Rwandan society along the lines of ethnicity and to fuel conflict. The likelihood of a recurrence of violent conflict, including even the possibility of genocide, is very high.’”

--From Smith’s essay

*The former secretary general of the RPF Theogene Rudasingwa; his brother Gerald Gahima, one-time prosecutor general and vice-president of the Rwandan Supreme Court; the erstwhile chief of external security services Colonel Patrick Karegeya; and General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the ex-chief of staff of the Rwandan army. Nyamwasa survived an attempt the his life last June; the South African authorities laid the blame with the government in Kigali.

An Old City (Dispatches from Jerusalem)

We’ll start at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport where my Palestinian taxi driver is pulled over and told to get my things and get out of the car. I’m worried. I tell the young man with the machine gun who pulled us over that my flight leaves soon. I don’t want to be late.

He takes my passport and mobile phone. “This is not JFK,” he says tapping his gun. “I am not your friend.”

The taxi driver and I wait outside in the cold dark for 45 minutes while the young men with their machine guns stroll around us, talking to each other and staring. The taxi driver takes twitchy drags on three cigarettes, and tells me quietly, carefully, with sideways glances, that a few weeks ago his company had sent him to Tel Aviv to fetch someone from the airport, but security had detained him for so long that the customer decided to take another cab and the whole trip had been for nothing.

Once inside the airport, my passport now flagged, I’m stopped four times, my bags thoroughly searched each time. Why did you come here, I’m asked? Who did you visit? What does he do? Did you meet his friends? Where did you eat? Did you take their email addresses? Where do you work and why and for how long? And when I show signs of irritation, they say: maybe if you are nice, we will help you.

Back outside, waiting to get into the airport, I talk to one of the guys detaining us. Where were you born, I ask? Here, he says. How old are you? Twenty eight. I tell him I travel to countries all over the world and nothing like this has ever happened.

—Other countries are not Israel, he says.

***

His name is Sandrouni and he owns the Armenian Ceramic Center, a cheerful shop of brightly painted pottery near the New Gate in the Old City in East Jerusalem. On the morning I stop in, it’s sunny and warm and he has the doors open to the street where some boys are kicking a soccer ball.

Sandrouni has dark hair, small dark eyes and looks like a large unmade bed in a slightly tattered sweater and pants. He offers me a cup of Nescafe and tells me about his business: the split from his brothers years ago after a disagreement, his new shop outside the Armenian Quarter. When I tell him I’m part Armenian, he gives me a discount on the pottery and insists on taking me on a tour of the Armenian quarter of the Old City, specifically the Armenian convent, which is closed to the public and is where the majority of the Armenians in the quarter live.

We see the school, the library, the priests’ quarters. And on our way out, he points down an alleyway to his home.

—That’s my house, he says. My brother lives next door and my other brother lives next door to him.

—But I thought you didn’t speak, I say.

He seems confused: Of course we don’t.

***

The Old City is a labyrinth of winding alleys and staircases and darkly lit passageways. In a residential quarter, lights are strung overhead between two apartments, and thin metal piping frames an ancient wooden door, while electrical wire crawls up the side of walls and over archways.

The bazaar near Damascus Gate is always bustling with tourists and locals crowded around carts of fresh bread and falafel. Old ladies sit on the sidewalk with baskets of herbs while children dart between then, running up the steps, past three Israeli soldiers sitting in the shade with enormous guns on their shoulders.

***

The land is beautiful here, though. Outside the walls of the old city are wave after wave of rocky hills dotted with olive trees and cypruses. The air smells of chamomile and thyme and orange, and the cathedral bells ring out against a skyline dotted with minarets, steeples, domes.

I’m walking up Hebron road in the midafternoon, taking in the tranquility, when I see it suddenly in the distance: the wall. Massive. Towering. Totally out of proportion with everything else, it cuts across those lovely hills like a malicious knife.

And then there are the checkpoints, the watchtowers, the identity cards.

It’s reminiscent of another time, another place.

***

I know people who have come to Jerusalem on spiritual pilgrimages, and having grown up in the church, I waited to see if some revelation would touch me in this holy city. But in my short visit, holiness was not the dominate feeling.

Jerusalem could be a place where, side by side, the three faiths express what they have it in them at their best to be, which is a message of peace and redemption and love. Jerusalem could be an expression of that. But in so many ways it is not. Instead, these communities are like the Sandrouni brothers: side by side but not speaking. Walled off from each other, separated.

The city could be about peace, but mostly it is about guns and intimidation and humiliation.

***

It’s early evening and I’m heading back to my hotel. The sky is a fading pinkish purple, and two old men are sitting on the side of wall, smoking cigarettes and talking quietly. I pause to look across the road, to the Mount of Olives—which is actually just a big white graveyard that overlooks another graveyard on the side of the street where I’m standing.

Then in through the old city, down a stoney street, past a church where the last few tourists are filtering out; they smile as I pass. Then I bump into an old Palestinian man closing up the shop of his I’d visited a few days before—he’d made me lemon juice and we had tried to talk, which was difficult since he had no teeth and knew little English, and I, little Arabic. He says he’s going home so we walk together a while.

Then we part ways and I make my way up a dark, narrow staircase, which leads to the gate where I will exit the city. There’s no one around—it’s quiet as a cathedral. Then I hear footsteps coming up quickly behind me, and I turn a little, keen not to seem nervous. It’s just two kids, though, who brush easily past me.

Keep walking, when the older one looks back at me, and that’s when I notice he has a machine gun over his shoulder. He keeps eyeing me and suddenly the air is filled with menace. These confined spaces, that big black gun. And so when he turns around and isn’t looking I dart down a narrow alleyway, out of sight.