Humanitarian Aid, Genocide, and Mass Killings: Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan Experience, 1982–1997 by Jean-Hervé Bradol, Marc Le Pape (review)

In this concise and insightful volume, Jean-Hervé Bradol and Marc Le Pape analyze the role of the aid organization Medicins San Frontieres (MSF) during the fifteen-year period that encompasses the era of the Rwandan genocide. Designed as a study of MSF in Rwanda from 1982 to 1997, the book also offers an analysis of the challenges humanitarian agencies face in situations of genocidal violence. Still, it should prove of interest to those concerned with the Rwandan genocide more broadly, presenting detailed information on specific incidents involving the experience of MSF personnel there.

The volume focuses on the period from 1994 to 1997, covering the mass killings of the Rwandan Tutsis and those of displaced Hutus in and around camps for displaced persons in Rwanda and Zaire. Operating near so much ongoing violence drove MSF to steps unprecedented for a humanitarian organization, on three occasions calling for outside military intervention. The first such initiative was a series of pronouncements in spring 1994 calling for international action to stop the genocide of Tutsis inside Rwanda. When the French government launched the controversial Operation Turquoise in late June 1994, the French section of MSF reluctantly welcomed the intervention, but many other countries’ sections did not follow suit, alienated by the French government’s support for the Hutu-led government of Rwanda.

MSF also called for international military action to protect Rwandan refugees in eastern Zaire in 1994 and again in 1996 as the violence escalated with external intervention by the new Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)-led government and its allies, who were also opposed to the Mobutu regime in the former Belgian Congo. Both MSF calls went unheeded at the time, but they are indicative of the complexities facing an aid organization in ethnically-complex, violent contexts.

The book offers valuable insight into the moral dilemmas faced by humanitarian organizations as they seek to provide food, shelter, and medical assistance to large numbers of desperate people. Maintaining access to the people that they wish to serve may require groups such as MSF to remain silent about ongoing abuses by those who control refugee camps—a practice that may very well be seen as de facto assent. On the other hand, confronting those with power over displaced persons or publicizing their human rights violations can even elicit violence against the staff of human rights organizations, or risk loss of access to a vulnerable population.

MSF repeatedly faced such dilemmas in Rwanda and adjacent countries. Following the victory of the RPF in June 1994, and thus the cessation of the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis, there was a mass exodus of Hutus to neighboring counties, especially eastern Zaïre. A minority had participated in the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis, and some who had been organizers of that genocide blended into the camps under the guise of ordinary refugees. MSF personnel in Goma in eastern Zaire came to believe that they were in danger of becoming accomplices, as organizers of the 1994 genocide reconstituted themselves as a political force in the camps. Some MSF personnel even believed that the camps might be used for organizing the resumption of the genocide. The provision of humanitarian aid came to be regarded as “feeding the monster,” and the French section of MSF opted to withdraw from Goma.

MSF and other humanitarian organizations also faced similar difficult situations as they provided services in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Rwanda. In some instances there were killings of IDPs by the forces of the now dominant RPF. MSF and other organizations believed that to maintain access to the people they wished to aid, they had to remain silent and pretend that the crimes committed by the new regime did not exist or were not consequential.

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