BURUNDI: est. population (1985), 4,537,000. 10,747 square miles. Rwanda: est. population (1985), 6,070,000. 10,169 square miles. Bosnia: population (1985), 4,124,256. 19,471 square miles.
All right? Does that tell you something? It should tell you, for a start, that the core of the Central African conflict covers the same sized areas as the Bosnian war (but with ethnic hatred expressed normally in terms of the machete.).
And anyone who has been to Bosnia, and that includes myself and my excellent colleague, Mark Brennock, now doing such a sterling job in Zaire - ah yes, we'll come to Zaire in a minute - will know what a heart stopping expanse of mountainous forest covers Bosnia. Maybe you already knew that; what you probably didn't know is that the war was quite limited there. The conflict was concentrated into zones of enormous ferocity, but most of Bosnia remained at peace, of a sort.
The UN put a huge force into a well organised society with a well organised infrastructure and a population which is not marked "best." In my encyclopaedia. Within a year its aircraft were being shot down, many of its troops were effectively deserting, while others contented themselves playing the black market. Some even handed over the Muslims in the UN self declared "safe havens" to certain death by Serb fascists. The all embracing spiral of conflict finally even drew in the SAS (two of whom were killed by the Serbs).
Warning bells
It was not simply the imperfectly worded UN mandate, which owed its benign origins to an attempt to insert peacekeepers next door in Croatia, which was the problem in Bosnia (and even that should ring warning bells about how problems seep across international boundaries, changing their nature as they travel). The fundamental question was: how do outsiders impose their will on a region determined on war? The answer is that if those outsiders are democracies, answerable to the rule of law and responsive to the wishes of their electorates, who hate seeing bodybags coming home, they don't.
They don't. Remember that, and cling on to that notion while the momentum for troop involvement from outside gathers throughout a world which seems to take pride in perverse amnesia. It almost passes belief that the European Union, never mind that sterling body, the Organisation of African Unity, should have condemned the UN Security Council for hesitating about forming a force to insert into the region.
Meltdown
The one commendable response in the middle of a social earthquake is hesitation. To send in troops without maps or training or any knowledge of the society in which they are expected to operate, with no mandate, no lawful authority and no specific military goals, in a country with no roads, no courts, no policemen and no functioning state, but with loads of Kalashnikovs and machetes, is like sending a school party into a nuclear power station at meltdown.
So far, I have been talking about Rwanda/Burundi, the main theatre of conflict between Hutus and Tutsis; but just like Croatia, there is a spill over across international boundaries. This time, as you know, the spillover affects Zaire. Zaire, Zaire, what do we know about Zaire? Est. population, 34,670,000 (1987); area, 995,000 square miles - which might not mean very much to you. Let me put it another way. If you lump together Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, you get an area a little smaller than Zaire.
Does that give you some perspective of the impossibility of the problem? We have in recent days heard talk of UN troops being inserted to hold a corridor from Zaire into Rwanda, to enable Hutus to return; talk, too, of UN troops isolating bad Hutus from good Hutus and disarming them. Of course. It's that simple. It always is in Africa.
Africans don't think so. Listen to Nelson Mandela. What is he saying about sending troops into Zaire? Nothing. He's got the best army in Africa and he's not volunteering it for service there. His deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, has offered to play "honest broker" in the region. Big deal, Thabo. Meanwhile, the Organisation of African Unity - an assembly of some of the most corrupt and disgusting men in the world - has been squealing condemnation at the UN suggestion that African countries should bear some of the cost of a UN mission to the region.
An abbreviation has thrice appeared in this column. It is best." That est. refers to the populations of the three countries in the region at times of peace, or what passes for it there. So how is it possible that we are all quite certain that "one million Tutsis" were the victims of genocide two years ago?
Where does this figure come from? Who was counting? What happened to the bodies? How do we know that the Hutu killers went up to the nice round figure of one million, and then stopped? Are those who are so free with the magic one million number aware of the logistical difficulties involved in that much murder, as the Germans discovered a generation ago?
Pious approximations
There is in fact another force at work here, a truly African force - the force of pious approximations. The Force of Pious Approximations allows people to declare: "One Million Die in Genocide". The Force of Pious Approximations lets us declare: "Good Hutus will be allowed home, but Bad Hutus will be disarmed and tried for war crimes".
The Force of Pious Approximations says troops will guard a 200 hundred mile corridor, through the rain forest right here. The Force of Pious Approximations even permits the quite wretched governments of the region to declare what nations they do not want to help them out of the mess they are in.
Of course, what is happening in Africa is appalling, and if people in Concern and like organisations wish to help, as, free men and women, that is their right. But there is no overriding duty which compels us to rescue Africans from crises of their own making - but not Afghans or Chechens or East Timorese. Only the Force of Pious Approximations says otherwise.