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which offered misleading explanations of why conflict had broken out in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and which apparently justified inaction rather than intervention. At the same time, it is also claimed that greater attention to the suffering of victims of human rights abuses or humanitarian crises offered the possibility of a new role for journalists in pricking the conscience of the West and encouraging
Heads of State and Government in November 1966. The body passed a resolution supporting a fair referendum, which took place in March 1967. Ultimately, with the support of the OAU, French Somaliland decided to become an independent country with loose ties to France. It became independent on 27 June 1977 as the Republic of Djibouti. 18 Rwanda and Burundi The crises in Rwanda and Burundi began with the Rwandan revolution in 1959. There were multiple crises through the late 1970s that show just how differently the OAU handled internal violence compared with
oppression and colonial conquest (Dunn 2002: 55). As noted in Chapter 3, Kabila had been a member of Lumumba’s cabinet and fought with Pierre Mulele, who led one of the biggest revolts against Mobutu and was a driving force for the creation of the Simba and Mai Mai popular militias in the 1960s.2 During the 1996 and 1998 wars, Mai Mai militias generally fought on the side of the Government to repel the RCD rebellion and the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian invasions. However, they remained autonomous from the army, and since the transition most groups have developed an anti
rape in Rwanda4 among others are suggestive of mass sexualised violence and children fathered by foreign soldiers as a phenomenon of the twentieth century. However, intimate contacts between foreign soldiers and local civilians, both coercive and consensual, are likely to have been a feature of almost all wars, from antiquity5 into modernity; in the middle ages, the Vikings had a reputation for bravery as much as for pillage and rape, as did Genghis Khan and his Mongol soldiers;6 similarly, during the crusades it was customary for kings to enlist women to provide
the administered territories of Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi). A problem that many of the chapters in this book tackle, if sometimes indirectly, is what medicine is and who defines it. This question, while already difficult in the context of heterogenous communities in Belgium, is often the central problematic in studies of medicine in the colonies. The disciplinary
It all started with a strange coincidence, when American Jacqueline Novogratz was only twenty-five years old. It was 1987, and Novogratz was working in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to establish the country's first microfinance institution for women. Jogging through the streets one day, she was stopped in her tracks by the appearance of a young boy ‘wearing the sweater – my sweater ’. She thought back to her childhood, growing up as the oldest of seven children in a working-class family in 1970s Virginia. Only receiving new clothing on special
people in ‘developing countries’. When still a fresh-faced charity worker in Rwanda in 1987, Novogratz saw a boy in the street wearing her unique beloved blue knitted sweater which she had treasured as a child growing up in the US but later thrown in a local clothing donation box. In the decades since then, the image of the sweater has been a key prop for Novogratz as she travels the world to promote the work of Acumen as the best way to recognize the profound ways in which we are all connected by globalization and to remedy the gap between rich and poor. Yet, as Kish
MSF’s teams had been operating in the African Great Lakes region for more than ten years before the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis. The organisation’s first operation was delivering assistance to victims of famine in north-west Uganda in 1980. It subsequently maintained its presence in Uganda and neighbouring countries Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zaire ensuring emergency
extractive context of plural authorities. Alongside the already militarised environment caused by the wars of 1996 and 1998, both North and South Kivu have been targets of unilateral UN and UN-backed military operations of the DRC and Rwanda against remaining armed groups. This is in addition to continuous proxy wars between the DRC and Rwanda, which both cooperate and antagonise at multiple levels, and a corresponding mushrooming of popular Mai Mai militias. Militarisation has also followed from the tendency to deploy the military as representatives of state authority and
In the early twenty-first century, children fathered by foreign soldiers during and after conflicts are often associated directly with gender-based violence. This book investigates the situations of children born of war (CBOW) since the Second World War, provides a historical synthesis that moves beyond individual case studies, and explores circumstances across time and geopolitical location. The currently used definitions and categorisations of CBOW are presented together with an overview of some key groups of CBOW. Specific conflict areas are chosen as key case studies on the basis of which several core themes are explored. These conflicts include the Second World War (1939-1945) with the subsequent post-war occupations of Germany and Austria (1945-1955). The Vietnam War (1955-1975), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), some African Conflicts of the 1990s and early 2000s, in particular in Rwanda (1994) and Uganda (1988-2006), are also examined. In the case studies, the experiences of the children are explored against the background of the circumstances of their conception. For example, the situation of the so-called Bui Doi, children of American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers is examined. The experiences of Amerasian CBOW who were adopted into the United States as infants following the Operation Babylift and those who moved as young adults following the American Homecoming Act are juxtaposed. The book also looks into the phenomenon of children fathered by UN peacekeeping personnel as a starting point for a discussion of current developments of the international discourse on CBOW.