The 20th Commemoration Of The Rwandan Genocide: Link roundup

While April is a celebration of spring in many parts of the world – or, here in Boston, at least of the hope that winter is finally over – the 7th of this month marks the beginning of Rwanda’s period of mourning, in commemoration of the 1994 genocide. On this day each year, Rwandans begin an official week-long period of mourning, in the form of ceremonies, speeches, films, marches, prayers, and shows of solidarity that take place in schools, churches, stadiums, fields, and streets across the country.

Scholars, activists, journalists, and other observers watch from abroad, recognizing the lives that were lost in 1994, measuring the progress that has been made since then, and examining the extent to which justice has been served. I, like my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Rwanda, also look back on the Aprils we spent there. I find myself holding my breath, hoping this year doesn’t see the mass violence of the Aprils I remember, and that my friends in Rwanda are safe and able to commemorate their own losses and experiences in peace.

In recognition of Genocide Memorial Day, I’d like to offer a round-up of the myriad articles about Rwanda that have come out in the past few days, in preparation for the 20th commemoration.

• The Guardian posted an overview of Rwanda’s improvement on development indicators over the past twenty years.
• This article from The Atlantic and this one was the Montreal Gazette focus on the dire state of mental health in the country and the dearth of psychosocial support.
• A Rwandan lawyer and genocide survivor now working as a professor in the U.S. published a compelling New York Times op-ed in which he examines how the country’s culture of unquestioning obedience contributed to the genocide and how it is affects reconciliation efforts today.
• Over at Slate, this piece questions the extent to which Rwandans have truly reconciled and expresses concern about the methods the government has used to promote reconciliation.
• In comparing the two dominant narratives of Rwanda today (a development miracle versus an oppressive dictatorship), Rachel Strohm asks, “What’s the right analogy for Rwanda?”
• Just yesterday, France announced it would be pulling out of genocide commemorations, in response to President Kagame’s discussion of the country’s role in the genocide.
• Finally, the newest episode of the Humanosphere podcast features an interview with Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager portrayed in the film Hotel Rwanda and, if you haven’t read it yet, this incredible BBC piece on one of the UN peacekeepers who helped protect hundreds of people inside Rusesabagina’s hotel.

Demystifying South Sudan

AidLeap published a great piece highlighting the attitudes and opinions of South Sudanese people facing an increasingly ominous looking crisis ostensibly about a tussle for power between former Vice President Minister Riek Machar and current President Salva Kiir.

Of course, the conflict also has an ethnic element to it as well as being linked to the ongoing problems the world’s youngest state has had with Sudan, from which it split in 2011. The spectre of the International Criminal Court also looms over the politics of the whole region, with both Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir and Machar himself operating under the threat of prosecution. And, as ever, the neighbouring East African states all have their roles to play – this is a region where pretty much all conflict crosses borders, either by design or by accident.

In short, it’s an extremely complicated and confused series of events leading to tragic consequences.

The most important story is how the people of South Sudan are coping , as AidLeap correctly identified. The report that their post mentions is fascinating, offering glimpses of conflict from the inside. Sure, the ethnic elements to the conflict are obvious but more is revealed. The conflation of the military and the political spheres; the use of political violence as an intimidation tactic leading into the 2015 elections; that the political will of key leaders actively combats democracy to enforce personal power. The responses of these 1200 respondents are nuanced and clear eyed, painting a picture of a crisis that can and does mean a lot of different, sometimes contradictory things*.

Sadly, this is rarely the story that we (as consumers of Western media) get presented. The news agenda tends to have focused, with depressing inevitability, on a) how this will Westerners in the country and b) the well worn clichés of African tribal conflict.

Extremely worrying signpost of segregation. #southsudan#Eritreapic.twitter.com/yw2GnsiUfH

— Hermon Yemane (@HermonE_J) January 10, 2014

Clearly, these are major issues that I do not wish to denigrate. But there is an enormous amount of context missing from the majority of reports about this conflict. Why is that? Sure, a 2 minute broadcast update on a particular offensive doesn’t give a reporter or news organisation a lot of space to discuss the background in much detail. But long, in depth newspaper copy should be dealing with all these issues.

Even relatively good examples – like this New York Times article – deal with (some) of the other issues related to the conflict but uncomfortably package the whole crisis as to how it relates to US geopolitical interests, rather than, I don’t know, the actual problems that South Sudanese people are going through. Take a look at this quote from the piece. I don’t know about you, but including this quote instead of, say, an opinion from a South Sudanese person smacks of a disturbing lack of interest in real reporting:

“We can’t allow the carnage to go on; we can’t allow the capital to be overrun,” said Tom McDonald, who worked on Sudan issues as the American ambassador to Zimbabwe during the administration of Bill Clinton. “We have too much to lose; we’ve put too much into this.”

No wonder people get annoyed with Western reporting on these kinds of issues. (For the record, there are seven quotes in this piece, none from South Sudanese people, none from East African people).

Even worse, as highlighted by this recent Al Jazeera article, foreign reporting within African countries is largely sourced from Western media organisations. This sort of thing isn’t just making people in Europe or the USA take on skewed views of conflicts like the one in South Sudan, its messing with readers in neighbouring states. Hopefully, more people will turn away from shoddy coverage like this and turn to the blogosphere for real nuance.

Good sources

Three cheers for AidLeap!

Paan Luel Wel, a South Sudanese reporter whose blog gathers news focused on the country.

For Twitter users, I recommend James Copnall, a BBC South Sudan reporter.

___

* Interesting as the report was, it was lacking a lot of detail about respondents and, crucially, direct quotes. Perhaps the authors at the Community Empowerment for Progress Organisation has a more detailed version which I have not seen? Let me know if you find anything.

The Sharing Doctrine: Why communication is vital for public institutions

This is a short paper I will be presenting at the Global Public Policy Network Conference in Tokyo in December. A couple of people have asked me to send it to them and I’m lazy so I thought I’d put it up on here.

Citizens exist in wider networks in which they are more connected than ever before. So far, government led initiatives to react to this new reality have been tokenistic and too focused on benefits related to communication strategies than serious improvements to public institutions. This reflects an unpopular cynical political reality that will have to adapt in the future: with that adaptation will come improvements and innovations to public institutions.

In response to the 2007 post-election turmoil in Kenya, a small team of bloggers and programmers put together a website to record and categorise eye-witness accounts of incidents of violence as well as mapping them online as a resource for other citizens. This website, Ushahidi (meaning ‘testimony’ in Kiswahili), was found to be more accurate and more timely than information supplied by both the traditional media and the government¹.

This platform for responsive, open information has since been implemented in a number of crises around the world including the Haiti earthquake of 2010, the so-called Arab Spring on 2011 and during the Queensland floods in Australia in 2012. Ushahidi has received a huge amount of praise and shown itself to be adaptable to many situations.

The Open Government movement (OGM) has been growing in support since the advent of the networked age but, in particular, since 2008 when President Obama brought it to the mainstream by declaring his dedication “to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.²” The public will become included, relevant, vital in the policy process by giving them access to the pertinent data – that’s the ideal of Open Government.

Obama’s government in particular has come under massive scrutiny for which data it chooses to publish. Furthermore, the inclusion of the public into such matters leaves much to be desired – Obama’s administration has harboured an unprecedented hostility for whistleblowers and leaks of any kind, rather than openness.

They are not alone. Numerous other Governments that have preached the virtues of openness have since been embarrassed by revelations from civil society actors, the media and the public about hypocrisy on this matter. A look at the list of past and present member states of the Open Government Partnership (the global initiative that Obama’s administration helped to start with the aim to spread the mission of the OGM) has some high-profile cases: the UK, Brazil, South Africa, and Russia probably the biggest.

While the OGM has laudable theoretical foundations, the current wave is too government dominated. These ‘open governments’ only publish what they want to publish – ‘openness’ is defined primarily in terms of what these dominant actors perceive will benefit them, not the general public.

Trust in governments has fallen behind other major social institutions in recent years³. Business, the media and NGOs are now, more than ever, regarded as a safer bet by the general public. Any new framework for crisis response must take into account the high degree of scepticism that governments now face: government agencies are not necessarily regarded as the best choice to control these situations. While they might remain the best choice for now, this deep-seated mistrust will likely hamper crisis response in the future if it is not addressed.

The general public expects to be involved in processes now, in feedback mechanisms and in sharing. The promise of massive smart-web access has been bought into: the explosion of smartphone devices in both the developed and developing world is evidence of this. It is a phenomenon that government has yet to truly embrace: the sharing age of internet communication is a two-way street. The benefits of this paradigm are particularly clear in instances of disasters when public institutions are most likely out of position and outmatched – no institution can be prepared for everything.

The failings of the OGM to date are thrown into harsh relief by the relative success of IT start-ups like Ushahidi. The modern world is a networked society⁴ and citizens expect to be given full and prompt access to information in times of crisis. Given a well managed platform, citizens will collaborate in the face of adversity to try to guide crisis management. What they will not respond well to is governments withholding information in the wake of crises – the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake is an excellent example of withdrawn or manipulated information to the public backfiring⁵.

There will be situations in which withheld information has a clear benefit – as in ongoing terrorist attacks like the tragedy in Westgate Mall earlier this year. It is, in such cases, important to relay the reasoning of the managing public body as and when the situations arise. It is also vital not to allow governments to hide behind such reasons without proper scrutiny of these decisions after the danger has passed. The government must engage with technological advances and the related cultural changes in society to restore public trust in them.

Crisis management can be improved by establishing a foundation of meaningful openness. Borrowing techniques from the private sector or partnering with such experts as the team behind Ushahidi would be an excellent step. It is incredibly difficult to coordinate and manage resources during crises; it is even more difficult to do so when various groups of people are poorly or incorrectly informed. It is the role of public institutions to endeavour that this happens as little as possible.

Footnotes

1: Clay Shirky, 2011. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Penguin: London

2: Barack Obama, 2009. Memorandum to the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies: Transparency and Open Government. [Link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment]

3: Edelman, 2013. Trust Barometer. [Link: http://www.edelman.com/insights/intellectual-property/trust-2013/]

4: Manuel Castells, 2009. Communication Power. Oxford University Press: Oxford

5: Norimitsu Onishi & Martin Fackler, New York Times, 2011. Japan Held Nuclear Data, eaving Evacuees in Peril. [Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/world/asia/09japan.html?pagewanted=all]

Community Driven Development & The Challenge of Governance

I recently attended a talk at The Hertie School in Berlin by the acclaimed political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Whether or not you agree with his famous ‘End of History’ thesis, it’s always interesting to hear from such a famous academic name.

The talk mostly focused on the importance of thinking about the implementation side of governance – what Fukuyama termed ‘public administration’. He also touched on an aspect of international development thinking over the last twenty years or so which I thought was very interesting.

Bypassing government with community driven #development actually infantalises government rather than improving it – Fukuyama

— Rowan Emslie (@RowanEmslie) September 5, 2013

He was using the example of various World Bank driven projects but never explicitly mentioned Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Development Villages while roundly criticising the methodology behind them. As most people interested in global development will know, yet another voice from development attacked Sachs recently in a scathing piece for the New York Times which documented a reporter’s increasing disillusionment with Sachs’ projects as she spent several years investigating them all over Africa. Sachs has long been the recipient of some fierce criticism from development academics (most notably Bill Easterly and Michael Clemens) and now, it would seem, lay-observers are coming to similar conclusions.

The question of governance in international development, Fukuyama argued, is a way for the development community to avoid talking about two things: democracy and government. Because of various historical and contextual issues with these terms have become tainted and subsequently euphemised. The anti-government movement in the West, the rise of NGOs as powerful domestic and international actors, the relative successes of authoritarian governments in accelerating development and the increasing globalisation and networked world we live in – all of these things have muddled the post Cold War picture of progress. I should note that Fukuyama neatly sidestepped mentioning his own most famous work while talking about these issues!

Regardless, this is an interesting point. Governance remains the most common way the international community refers to the proper management of large scale development – like health, education, combating corruption and most of the other Millennium Development Goals. Are development actors like international lending agencies and large NGOs actually worsening these issues by looking to go direct to the people they want to help and cutting out state or local governments?

Another recent fad in the development blogosphere has been the championing of direct cash transfer programmes (here is a good, if critical look at the topic from AidSpeak). While Economic researchers get all hot and heavy about the idea of development being as simple as handing out wodges of cash like Mario Balotelli at Christmas time, perhaps they should think about the infantilisation of institutions and structures that this system will almost certainly contribute to.

Are the short term gains of this set-up worth potentially crippling the very institutions that underpin the functioning developed states around the world?