Linda Polman (born 1960 in Amstelveen) is a Dutch freelance journalist and author of three books on humanitarian aid and intervention: We Did Nothing , War Games, and The Crisis Caravan .
Linda Polman (born 1960 in Amstelveen) is a Dutch freelance journalist and author of three books on humanitarian aid and intervention: We Did Nothing , War Games, and The Crisis Caravan .
Polman's book We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn't Always Come Out When the UN Goes in was first published in 1997 in Dutch and later published in English. [1] [2]
Martin Woollacott reviewed the book along with the book A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power, for The Guardian . He concluded: "We have yet to work out properly how the post-twin towers interventions relate to those that went before. But there is obvious irony in the fact that while previously, as these books illustrate so clearly, determination was often lacking to deal with crises that most people agreed were serious, there was no shortage of it when the Bush administration moved to deal with a crisis on which there was no global consensus at all." [1] The book was also reviewed by Hugh O'Shaugnessy in The Observer alongside Never Learn to Type: A Woman at the United Nations. [3]
Polman's book War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times argued that humanitarian aid intervention often ended up fueling wars and making them worse. Her book cited the example of the Rwandan genocide, where humanitarian groups facilitated the flow of aid to Hutu militia who were involved with the killing, rather than the Tutsi who were genocide victims. [4] Her work was discussed in The Guardian . [5] The Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute issued a written response to the book. [6]
Polman's book The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? [7] was reviewed in The Economist , [8] Foreign Affairs , [9] and the Huffington Post . [10]
Linda Polman has appeared on The Daily Show to discuss her book, The Crisis Caravan . [11]
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 872 on 5 October 1993. It was intended to assist in the implementation of the Arusha Accords, signed on 4 August 1993, which was meant to end the Rwandan Civil War. The mission lasted from October 1993 to March 1996. Its activities were meant to aid the peace process between the Hutu-dominated Rwandese government and the Tutsi-dominated rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The UNAMIR has received much attention for its role in failing, due to the limitations of its rules of engagement, to prevent the Rwandan genocide and outbreak of fighting. Its mandate extended past the RPF overthrow of the government and into the Great Lakes refugee crisis. The mission is thus regarded as a major failure.
The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths.
The Second Congo War began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues. The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power. Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002, violence has continued in many regions of the country, especially in the east. Hostilities have continued since the ongoing Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts.
The failure of the international community to effectively respond to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has been the subject of significant criticism. During a period of around 100 days, between 7 April and 15 July, an estimated 500,000-1,100,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi and moderate Hutu, were murdered by Interahamwe militias.
This is a bibliography for primary sources, books and articles on the personal and general accounts, and the accountabilities, of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The Kibeho massacre occurred in a camp for internally displaced persons near Kibeho, in south-west Rwanda on April 22, 1995. Australian soldiers serving as part of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda estimated at least 4,000 people in the camp were killed by soldiers of the military wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army. The Rwandan Government estimated the death toll to be 338.
The African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, formerly the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), is a United States program to train military trainers and equip African national militaries to conduct peace support operations and humanitarian relief.
Samantha Jane Power is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat and government official who is currently serving as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. She previously served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power is a member of the Democratic Party.
The Great Lakes refugee crisis is the common name for the situation beginning with the exodus in April 1994 of over two million Rwandans to neighboring countries of the Great Lakes region of Africa in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Many of the refugees were Hutu fleeing the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had gained control of the country at the end of the genocide. However, the humanitarian relief effort was vastly compromised by the presence among the refugees of many of the Interahamwe and government officials who carried out the genocide, who used the refugee camps as bases to launch attacks against the new government led by Paul Kagame. The camps in Zaire became particularly politicized and militarized. The knowledge that humanitarian aid was being diverted to further the aims of the genocidaires led many humanitarian organizations to withdraw their assistance. The conflict escalated until the start of the First Congo War in 1996, when RPF-supported rebels invaded Zaire and sought to repatriate the refugees.
Humanitarian intervention is the use or threat of military force by a state across borders with the intent of ending severe and widespread human rights violations in a state which has not given permission for the use of force. Humanitarian interventions are aimed at ending human rights violations of individuals other than the citizens of the intervening state. Humanitarian interventions are only intended to alleviate the worst forms of suffering, which means that peacekeeping, peace-building and development aid do not fall under the definition of a humanitarian intervention.
The Responsibility to Protect is a global political commitment which was endorsed by all member states of the United Nations at the 2005 World Summit in order to address its four key concerns to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The doctrine is regarded as a unanimous and well established international norm over the past two decades.
"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002) is a book by American Samantha Power, at that time Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, which explores the United States's understanding of, response to, and inaction on genocides in the 20th century, from the Armenian genocide to the "ethnic cleansings" of the Kosovo War. It won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003.
This is the bibliography and reference section for the Darfur conflict series. External links to reports, news articles and other sources of information may also be found below.
While there is a consensus in the international community that ethnic groups have been targeted in Darfur and that crimes against humanity have therefore occurred, there has been debate in some quarters about whether genocide has taken place there. In May 2006, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur organized by United Nations "concluded that the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide ... [though] international offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be more serious and heinous than genocide." Eric Reeves, a researcher and frequent commentator on Darfur, has questioned the methodology of the commission's report.
Linda Melvern is a British investigative journalist. Early in her career, she worked for The Evening Standard and then The Sunday Times (UK), including on the investigative Insight Team. Since leaving the newspaper she has written seven books of non-fiction. She is a former Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in the Department of International Politics.
United Nations Security Council resolution 918, adopted without a vote on 17 May 1994, after reaffirming all resolutions on the situation in Rwanda, particularly resolutions 872 (1993), 909 (1994) and 912 (1994), the Council expressed its alarm and condemnation at the continuing large-scale violence, and went on to impose an arms embargo on the country and authorised an expansion of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR).
Rwandan genocide denial is the assertion that the Rwandan genocide did not occur, specifically rejection of the scholarly consensus that Rwandan Tutsis were the victims of a genocide between 7 April and 15 July 1994. The perpetrators, a small minority of other Hutu, and a fringe of Western writers dispute that reality.
The Darfur genocide is the systematic killing of ethnic Darfuri people which has occurred during the ongoing conflict in Western Sudan. It has become known as the first genocide of the 21st century. The genocide, which is being carried out against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes, has led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to indict several people for crimes against humanity, rape, forced transfer and torture. According to Eric Reeves, more than one million children have been "killed, raped, wounded, displaced, traumatized, or endured the loss of parents and families".
Rwanda–Turkey relations are the foreign relations between Rwanda and Turkey. Turkey has an embassy in Kigali since December 2014. Rwanda's embassy in Ankara opened in August 2013.
In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front is a 2018 non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Judi Rever and published by Random House of Canada; it has also been translated into Dutch and French. The book describes alleged war crimes by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda's ruling political party, during its ascent to power in the 1990s.
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