I ENVY the clarity of mind and the singularity of purpose of those who say we should do this or that about Zaire/Rwanda. I certainly envy anybody who claims to understand the region. I understand it as much as I understand Tibetan grammar. Less, actually. There is little fear of me making it as Dalai Lama - but I would feel more confident discussing Buddhist theology in the dialects of Lhasa than I would in formulating a policy towards an area which, so far as I can see, no outsider has been able to understand.
Of course, we regard it as a matter of national esteem that we can go into excolonies and uniquely empathise with their predicament. We can feel their pain, we say, with unique sensitivity. But when the pains become rival, when two groups are in conflict - and not a white man or woman in sight, except those trying to patch up the wounded and feed the starving - and each group claims: a) a monopoly of right and, b) a monopoly of pain, I feel very much like a Zairean should when asked to comment upon Northern Ireland. In other words, haven't got a clue, m'bwana.
Not everybody feels such reticence. Aengus Finucane of Concern wrote in this newspaper last Thursday calling for increased aid from the Government and from the Irish people to be sent to Rwanda. The next day, a letter from John O'Shea, of GOAL, appeared demanding that direct aid to Rwanda be suspended.
What To Do?
What - apart from sending Mary Robinson on her fifth visit to Rwanda: the other four, most surprisingly, don't appear to have solved the problem - are we to do about all this? Do something? Or do nothing? One Third World agency says do this; another says, do that. It's not easy to discuss.
Nobody takes on a Finucane lightly. There are two of them both highly likable, honourable, decent men, whose work for good is beyond description. They are formidable too; one feels that a clout from either one is a clout which you either remember for ever, or one which you will never recall, along with everything else that, ever happened to you.
So, I do not lightly exchange words with Aengus, never mind swap clouts. Yet he said in his letter that "the tragedy has roots in colonial history. It is perpetuated by the greed of postcolonial commercial, banking and political interests, taking full advantage of ethnic differences and rivalries".
And that indeed is a fair enough representation of the victim notion of Africa - that if there is trouble anywhere on the continent, it is not the fault of its rulers or its tribes or anything native: if you want to blame someone, cherchez le blanc. The engines of Africa's misfortunes are, uniquely in the world, seen to be white and capital owning. Given the quite astoundingly abominable and greedy Belgian governance of the place, it is tempting to say that this is so. But there is more to it than that.
Sad Truth
The sad truth is that tribalism in Africa was, along with voodoo, a powerful engine long before the white man arrived. It possesses a virulence that we find perplexing; much as Zaireans and Rwandans must find the feuding between - to their eyes, ears and minds - identical peoples in Northern Ireland utterly perplexing.
But no promptings of white international capitalism prompted the massacre of Tutsis and others by Hutus a couple of years ago. We are told that a million people died in that onslaught - but that is merely convenient journalese. There are no reliable population figures for any subSaharan country, not even South Africa, which has the most developed instruments of state. Why should we believe that a million died, except that the Tutsis want us to believe it, and journalists tend to like nice, round holocaust sounding figures?
And no promptings of capitalism caused those who massacred to choose machetes rather than rifles to do their work. Yes, we read of the Hutu government buying thousands of machetes from a British company, but I do really doubt that the company which received the order thought they were for harvesting live human heads rather than pineapples. And even if they were wicked enough to sell the machetes knowing that they were to be used on babies, they were not the instigators of the programme of murder - and certainly not the executioners: there seems to have been no shortage of that species ready and willing, without provocation, to take human life in as brutal and personal a way as possible. By cold steel, close up, and with personal relish.
No, I don't think I understand that at all. But there is no getting away from the fact - though there is every getting away from admitting it - that it is does seem to be the African way of bumping off folk you don't like. Machete or panga killings are a norm in ethnic disputes the length of the continent, even when Mr Kalashnikov's contribution to world civilisation is to hand.
Formidable Man
John O'Shea is also a formidable man whom I would not lightly cross. His letter of last week did not call for western intervention in the region, but he has frequently done so in radio and television interviews. Excuse me, but I think we have been down this road before. And then all we learned was that we did not know; all we knew was that we didn't understand; all we understand is if we do not learn, we are doomed to repeat the cycle of penetration and involvement, chaos and bloodshed in which every entanglement in the region has invariably ended.
Nobody has the least idea of the population of Zaire. It covers an area the size of western Europe, 900 miles by 1,000, most of it rain forest, and much of it now the scene of the most terrible massacres, done by local unto local.
What should we do about this? I do not know. But doing something merely because it makes us feel better is no better than the self gratification of the decent man who throws white liquid on a fire because he feels he should, without checking what the white liquid will do. Doing nothing confers no self gratification; it might however just be morally right.