Médecins Sans Frontières - Book promotion video: Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience, 1982-97 (ENG)

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF190265

Date taken / Date Recorded 22/03/2017 12:00 AM

Country Rwanda

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Armelle Loiseau

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) Internal Use Only

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 3m33s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 366.92 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings
Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience, 1982-97

Itv Jean-Hervé BRADOL:
The book describes where MSF’s teams were, the work they did and the problems they encountered in providing assistance to the people of Rwanda during the period 1982 to 1997, people who were either in Rwanda or who’d taken refuge in neighbouring countries.

Itv Marc LE PAPE:
Between 1990 and 1997 there was a succession of incidents of collective violence, almost unprecedented in scale.

Itv Jean-Hervé BRADOL:
MSF’s Rwandan experience is singular, not only due to the proximity we aid workers had to serious criminals and their crimes, but also, amidst the mass violence, the difficulties we faced with delivering an effective response and with maintaining control over our own resources – equipment, finances, personnel – to make sure they didn’t get sucked in for organising or perpetrating crimes. During the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis, assassins told some of our teams to divide themselves up into groups and then ordered one group to kill the other simply because they were Tutsis or opponents of the regime.

Itv Marc LE PAPE:
After the war ended, huge numbers of refugees fled to all the neighbouring countries and, towards the end of 1996, their camps were attacked by Rwanda and its Congolese allies. Some Rwandan refugees were pressured, well, forced actually, to return home. While this was happening, people were fleeing en masse to the interior of Congo to escape from advancing Rwandan and Congolese troops. When the refugees would hear there were aid workers in the vicinity, they’d come out of hiding in the forest to try and get some help. But, as soon as the workers left, soldiers from Rwanda who’d been told about the relief operation would show up and execute any Rwandan Hutus who’d come out of the forest. At that point the teams began asking themselves if, in doing their job, they weren’t drawing the attention of soldiers who were going to execute the very civilians we were trying to assist.

Itv Jean-Hervé BRADOL:
In this context, caught between violence and a manipulation of aid, how can an effective response be provided? How can aid of a standard that can impact people’s survival — in this case IDPs and refugees — be delivered?

Itv Marc LE PAPE:
What we don’t want is for the controversy triggered by the analysis of events to distort or cover up in any way what took place in Rwanda.