We did what needed to be done.
by Nigel FisherIn May 1994, Jim Grant phoned me in Amman. “Nigel, you told me you want to work in emergency operations. I need you to go to Rwanda”.
At Kigali airport, we were met with the overpowering stench of death and an almost-empty city. The UNICEF office had been mined and booby-trapped, so we slept in the vacant WFP office. The Rwandan Patriotic Front had taken over Kigali just days before and was pursuing the remnants of the previous genocidal government and its militias south towards Cyangugu, while refugees streamed out of the country to locations between Goma and Bukavu in neighbouring DR Congo (then Zaire) and to eastern Tanzania.
We met whomever we could on the RPF side, as well as with Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, head of the UNAMIR military contingent, together with his chief of staff. Back in the WFP office, we covered the wall in flip chart paper and started to plan for UNICEF’s return. I asked Major Rose (Rose Kabuye of the RPF, who became the first post-genocide mayor of Kigali), where we could open an office, given that our former office was off-limits. She suggested that we set up shop in the then-vacant Soras building, which housed the World Bank and an insurance company. She also gave me a list of houses formerly occupied by the embassy staff of a certain European country, saying: “they won’t be coming back any time soon”. We commandeered several houses for our staff. Entering the World Bank office through a broken window, I called the Bank in Washington DC on our one satellite phone: “This is UNICEF Kigali. We have just liberated your office – can we keep it for a while?” They agreed.
We returned to Nairobi and I announced to the team that we would be going back to Rwanda. We contacted a Nairobi-based safari company to operate a canteen for us in Kigali (in one of those commandeered houses), persuaded an Australian volunteer organization (was it called AVSO?) to commit to sending us a team to operate a garage and vehicle repair shop in Kigali. Another Canadian C-130 took the first thirteen of us back to Kigali, where we worked and slept in our newly-liberated office (and where thieves stepped over our recumbent bodies at night, trying to steal our laptops).
The following weeks were a blur of newly arriving staff and equipment, forays to trace surviving national staff within Rwanda and in refugee camps in neighbouring Zaire, regular calls with Dan Toole who was managing UNICEF’s operations in Tanzanian refugee camps and who joined the Kigali team shortly thereafter, meetings with the new government, with the coordinators of the overall UN humanitarian operations and with other international agency personnel trickling back into Kigali. As we travelled the countryside, we would encounter groups of children living in open fields, under trees, in deserted villages.
The office grew exponentially in a matter of weeks, as new international staff arrived in droves and as surviving national staff returned with some trepidation. We were setting up recovery programmes for children, but saw that the new government had almost no capacity, with some ministry buildings destroyed, others looted and all in complete disarray. We quickly set up a small operation to provide fledgling counterpart government departments with the minimum required to re-establish their offices. The health ministry building was a pile of rubble, so I invited the new minister of health and his small team to share our office for a while – which launched a close friendship and working relationship that stood us in good stead.
The UNICEF team worked day and night, but we made sure that we all met for a short time every day to touch base, share progress and ideas – it was also essential for the team’s emotional health and generated considerable creativity too.
Timelines are a blur, so there is no particular timeline to this narrative.
We contacted the Ethiopian, Nigerian and South African governments to ask for a mine action team to check all school buildings around the country for unexploded ordnance, so that the schools could reopen at the start of the school year in September. The Ethiopians sent a team.
Our joint UNICEF-UNESCO team, led by Pilar Aguilar, came up with the school-in-a-box initiative that ensured the distribution of learning materials to schools countrywide when they reopened. We scoured the country and refugee camps for adults, mostly women, who could be trained as teachers. They were trained not only in basic pedagogy, but in how to identify and support traumatised children – but only after our trauma team (advised by Norwegian trauma psychologists with whom I had worked in the Middle East), had worked with trainee women teachers to address their own extreme, traumatic experiences. Counselling came first, but for the women, their real healing came when they started to teach and nurture the children in their care. Schools were reopened in September.
The health team worked tirelessly to plan vaccination programmes and re-establishment of health facilities, with the health ministry team just down the hall.
In due course, the prospect of a small UNICEF “office support package” led us to discussions with the Ministry of Justice. Outcome: a joint commitment to establish a juvenile justice department (supported by a technical team which was led by a judge and legal team from Quebec) and, together with the international Red Cross, to establish separate detention facilities for children and women accused of genocide, while their cases were being documented (packed into overcrowded prisons with men, children and women were being regularly abused). A similar meeting with Gen. Paul Kagame, then defence minister, led to an agreement, again in cooperation with the Red Cross, to demobilise child soldiers from RPF ranks.
Unaccompanied children were everywhere – in due course, we estimated that there were over 120,000. With the agreement of a very small ministry of social welfare, with Everett Ressler and Marie de la Soudière leading the UAC team and once again working in cooperation with the Red Cross, we established a phototracing programme, using very early digital cameras, as I recall, with which our team recorded separated children throughout Rwanda and in refugee camps. My memory remains vivid of the first family reunification that I witnessed in September 1994, of a young boy reunited with his mother. Eventually, tens of thousands of children were reunified with surviving immediate or extended family members, or adopted by adults from their communities.
While the efforts of our WATSAN team to quickly repair community wells and water supply systems were much appreciated, the minister of transport and telecommunications (correct title?) informed me that the real answer to Rwanda’s water supply and energy challenges would be to repair the national grid. Not normally a UNICEF focus. But after a permission-seeking call to Jim Grant, we made a $3 million grant for rehabilitation of the grid and contacted various donors to pitch into a grid recovery fund – funding commitments were quick to come in. Just by chance, one of the Aussie garage team was the former head of the Queensland energy authority, so he was instantly promoted from mechanic to advisor to the Minister, for rehabilitation of the national grid.
I am writing 27 years after that turbulent time, the recollections of just one person among many who were there, each with their unique perspective and story. Memories have become indistinct, jumbled, names unclear – some have just disappeared. There is so much that I have missed out – the names of the so many tireless and wonderful human beings who were our staff, whether for a few weeks or for much longer; the first returning national staff – Cyriaque Ngoboka, who had taken refuge in the stadium, Alphonse Tuyisenge, the first staff member to come back from a refugee camp in Goma; the early suspicions, office tensions and the daily message: when we walk in this door, we are all UNICEF, with one common cause; the untiring work of UNICEF teams with Rwandan refugees in Tanzania and DR Congo; the cholera epidemic in the Goma camps in August 1994; the many tears; the memorial service for our staff and their families who had been murdered; the struggles with HQ to agree on a recovery package for national staff, many of whose homes were destroyed; the anguished cries of our colleague who discovered the mass grave in her village containing the remains of her family, our weeping together; the staff counseling sessions with regional psychologist Duda Susevic (correct spelling?); the daily acts of courage; our disastrous operations systems, not helped by incredibly frequent international staff turnover and misplaced/non-existent records; André Roberfroid’s observations and support as my “senior advisor” for a while; the continuity provided by Dan Toole, who joined the Kigali-based team in August 1994 and who succeeded me in February 1995; the first staff party in September, when so much emotion was released; the cautious rekindling of laughter; the visit of UNICEF ambassador Harry Belafonte, who I asked not to sing, “because children have been traumatised enough already” – he laughed and we remain friends today.
Jim Grant came to Rwanda in 1994. Was it in September, October? He was then close to the end, but he was absolutely determined, refused to take it easy, taking frequent catnaps and then plunging on. He danced with newly-demobilised child soldiers, he met unaccompanied and newly-reunited children, children in newly-established children’s homes, the women teaching and looking after children who had lived through unspeakable trauma just months before. He talked to our Rwandan staff, who had been through so much horror, to our internationals pushing themselves to the limit. He visited project sites, paid his respects at the Nyamata church massacre site, met government officials, UN peacekeepers, clambered on and off helicopters. He drove his protective staff frantically and inspired us all.
After leaving Rwanda in February, I crashed. It took me several years to come to grips with the depression that descended. Now, I look back on that anguished time and remember it as the best of times for UNICEF and recall the camaraderie, the constant creativity, the innovation and incredible dedication of the team’s work for children.
As Geneviève Uwamariya wrote in 2004 “We did what needed to be done”.
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