Giving aid to Rwanda

Although the civil war in Rwanda was over with the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front over the Hutu-led government last week, the Angel of Death still lingers over this tiny central African country. The war alone, which lasted only around three months, was a scene of terrible carnage where up to half a million people comprising troops, rebels and civilians were killed.

Now another tragedy is taking place in the country plagued by decades of ethnical animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes.

The outbreak of cholera in refugee camps in Goma, a town bordering Rwanda and Zaire, has claimed the lives of thousands of Rwandan refugees who have fled their hometowns in the wake of the civil war. "Bodies arrived by the truckload and more were still lying on the streets," one press report says. Another stated that "four mass graves were full with a total of around 1,200 bodies and a fifth trench was about to be covered over". Tens of thousands more are already affected by the deadly disease.

Scarcity of food, drinking water and medicine aggravates the situation even further. The world, obviously, has to take responsibility for helping the innocent Rwandan refugees who are dying by the hour, if not by the minute.

We think the world has to respond quickly and concretely to the appeal made by the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali last Friday. There are already some signs of hope, in that member states of the World Body are expected to pledge funds amounting to US$274 million for immediate aid relief for the Rwandan refugees.

Western and industrialized countries who champion human rights issues and freedom of expression and often willingly give financial aid to human rights institutions worldwide, should not hesitate to respond to Boutros-Ghali's appeal. The response has been spearheaded by France with its "Turquoise Operation" humanitarian mission and volunteer workers of Medicins Sans Frontieres to help alleviate the refugees' suffering.

This time the financial and relief aid, assuming that the industrialized countries formulate a concrete response to the call of the United Nations, is far more important in nature. This is not only a matter of freedom of expression for the citizens of Rwanda, but their rights to live.

According to the latest UN figures -- some 2.9 million of Rwanda's population of 7.3 million has fled to neighboring countries like Zaire, Burundi and Tanzania, and nearly half of the emaciated refugees are in Goma, where relief aid is very much in demand.

Talking about relief aid, we do expect that distribution of the aid be handled professionally.

We raise this issue because a number of aid workers have been quoted as saying that "bad policy decisions and incompetence and lack of planning, especially among UN organizations, contributed to the rapidly rising death toll".

We are also of the opinion that Indonesia, as the current chairman of the 111 member countries of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), should induce NAM's members to help solve Rwanda's problems, especially many of NAM's member countries are from Africa.

Thus, with the world's cooperation and in the name of humanity, we believe that the United Nations and its peace loving member countries can readily turn the stormy days of Rwanda's future into days full of sunshine.