The Spectator’s Notes | 4 February 2006

Cyangogu, Rwanda

It says something for the change that David Cameron has already wrought in his party that I find myself in Rwanda courtesy of Andrew Mitchell, the Conservatives’ international development spokesman, and Lord Ashcroft (who provided the plane). Aid, trade and conflict resolution provide one of the six policy themes on which the Tories are working, and the hardest of Tory hard men now pursue the subject. Mitchell says that the party’s ‘Victor Meldrew’ dislike of international development is to be banished. Rwanda is a good first stop to study the problems because it was probably the greatest disaster of international intervention ever. In 1994 the ‘international community’ proved its semi-fictional status by willing the end — an agreement for broad-based transitional government leading to multi-party elections — but not the means. The UN force in the capital, Kigali, was constantly denied the men, money and rules of engagement needed to prevent bloodshed. According to the then Force Commander, Gen. Roméo Dallaire, this actually ensured the ensuing genocide. Extremist Hutu leaders persuaded the people to kill everyone they thought was a Tutsi, and they did so at a faster rate than Hitler killed the Jews — more than 800,000 people in three months. A speciality was cutting off each limb of a child in front of the parents before killing it and, afterwards, them. The weakness of the UN force also permitted the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front, under the command of Paul Kagame (‘the Napoleon of Africa’), to take advantage of the genocidaires’ indiscipline and defeat them, causing an exodus of Hutu refugees who died in their hundreds of thousands from disease. Now Kagame is the President of Rwanda, and wants his country to join the Commonwealth. Despite its lack of historic links, Britain is the biggest aid donor in Rwanda, paying £46 million per year.