Related Research Articles
Rwanda has been the center of much international attention since the war and genocide of 1994.
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
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 Hutu militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 662,000 Tutsi deaths.
The Rwanda Defence Force is the military of the Republic of Rwanda. The country's armed forces were originally known as the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), but following the Rwandan Civil War of 1990–1994 and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front (Inkotanyi) created a new organization and named it the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). Later, it was renamed to its current name.
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.
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.
The period from 1986 to 1994 of the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency is the early history of the ongoing insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group in Uganda, which has been described as one of the most under-reported humanitarian crises in the world. The Lord's Resistance Army was formed in early 1987 out of the conflict following the successful rebellion of the National Resistance Army (NRA), though remained a relative small group through the counterinsurgency of the NRA. As the peace talks initiated by Minister Betty Bigombe failed Sudanese support to the LRA intensified the conflict.
Fred Gisa Rwigyema was a Rwandan politician and military officer. He was the founder of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a political and military force formed by Rwandan Tutsi exile descendants of those forced to leave the country after the 1959 Hutu Revolution.
The start of the period 1994 to 2002 of the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency in northern Uganda saw the conflict intensifying due to Sudanese support to the rebels. There was a peak of bloodshed in the mid-1990s and then a gradual subsiding of the conflict. Violence was renewed beginning with the offensive by the Uganda People's Defence Force in 2002.
The Uganda People's Army (UPA) was a rebel group recruited primarily from the Iteso people of Uganda that was active between 1987 and 1992. The UPA was composed mostly of former soldiers in the special forces of the Uganda National Liberation Army and opposed the National Resistance Army (NRA) government of Yoweri Museveni, who took power in January 1986. Reaching a height after the widespread cattle raid by Karamojong in 1987, the UPA rebellion was eventually ended through the mediation of the Teso Commission.
Operation Support Hope was a 1994 United States military effort to provide immediate relief for the refugees of the Rwandan genocide and allow a smooth transition to a full United Nations humanitarian management program. The inhabitants of the camp consisted of approximately two million Hutus, participants in the genocide, and the bystanders, who had fled Rwanda as the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of the country. On July 22, 1994 President Clinton announced Operation Support Hope. Two days later, American joint task forces were airlifted to Goma, Zaire; Kigali, Rwanda; Entebbe, Uganda; and Mombasa, Kenya. U.S. Air Force liaison officers were assigned to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) air operations cell in Geneva and assigned to joint logistics cells and civil-military operations centers in the field.
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), also known as the Lord's Resistance Movement, is a rebel group and heterodox Christian group which operates in northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Originally known as the United Holy Salvation Army and Uganda Christian Army/Movement, its stated goals include establishment of multi-party democracy, ruling Uganda according to the Ten Commandments, and Acholi nationalism.
Gersony Report is the name given to the 1994 findings made by a team under Robert Gersony, which was under contract to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and identified a pattern of massacres by the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels during and after their military victory in the civil war in post-genocide Rwanda. The findings were suppressed by the United Nations and involved governments for political reasons, and its existence was denied. No final written report was ever completed, though purported early written documentation has been leaked. The validity of Gersony's purported findings continue to be disputed.
Australian military involvement in peacekeeping operations has been diverse, and included participation in both United Nations sponsored missions, as well as those as part of ad hoc coalitions. Indeed, Australians have been involved in more conflicts as peacekeepers than as belligerents; however, according to Peter Londey "in comparative international terms, Australia has only been a moderately energetic peacekeeper." Although Australia has had peacekeepers in the field continuously for 60 years – the first occasion being in Indonesia in 1947, when Australians were among the first group of UN military observers – its commitments have generally been limited, consisting of small numbers of high-level and technical support troops or observers and police. David Horner has noted that the pattern changed with the deployment of 600 engineers to Namibia in 1989–90 as the Australian contribution to UNTAG. From the mid-1990s, Australia has been involved in a series of high-profile operations, deploying significantly large units of combat troops in support of a number of missions including those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia and later in East Timor. Australia has been involved in close to 100 separate missions, involving more than 30,000 personnel and 10 Australians have died during these operations.
The Kampala Convention is a treaty of the African Union (AU) that addresses internal displacement caused by armed conflict, natural disasters and large-scale development projects in Africa.
INTERSOS is a non-profit humanitarian aid organization that works to assist victims of natural disaster and armed conflict. INTERSOS has operated as an independent organization since its foundation in 1992. A Mine Action Unit was established within INTERSOS to deal specifically with the mine danger and its effects through mine awareness, victims assistance and mine clearance operations.
Nakivale refugee settlement is a settlement located in Isingiro District near the Tanzania border in Southwest Uganda.
The following lists events that happened during 2020 in East Africa. The countries listed are those described in the United Nations geoscheme for East Africa: Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Réunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
References
- ↑ A summary of Gersony's findings is available at Robert Gersony (1994-11-10). "Summary for UNHCR Presentation Before Commission of Experts, 10 October 1994: Prospects for Early Repatriation of Rwandan Refugees Currently in Burundi, Tanzania and Zaire" (PDF). United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees . Retrieved 2010-09-20.
- ↑ "Appendix 2: Literature Review" (PDF). in 01 Mar 2004: Monograph No 99: Behind the Violence. The War in Northern Uganda, Zachary Lomo and Lucy Hovil
- 1 2 Gardner, John S (13 February 2021). "The Good American review: Bob Gersony and a better foreign policy". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
