Rwanda has emerged as one of the countries where the new post-conflict agenda is being most strongly implemented, under extremely difficult conditions. This agenda poses many deep, and unsolved, ethical questions for donors. This paper from Tufts University analyses donor behaviour in relation to government and justice in Rwanda and identifies the key problems associated with the new approach. It calls for greater promotion of local dialogue and increased clarity and transparency in donor engagement.
In recent years, international donors have begun to codify and implement a new post-conflict agenda based on using aid to promote peace and reconciliation. Donors are becoming deeply engaged in political and social matters that they have avoided until now. Post-genocide Rwanda is one of the strongest examples of this trend. The work of international donors has produced some significant achievements, but it has also raised many unresolved ethical questions. As donors move towards the use of aid for conflict prevention in general, these questions will have wider relevance.
Official policy documents do not acknowledge the major ethical questions raised by this new agenda. They have hardly been discussed, and there are no tools available for solving them.
- Donors may and do differ radically in their assessments of the situation in a country, and of the way to move forward.
- When donor objectives and principles differ, who makes the choices about what actions to prioritise and on what grounds?
- The new agenda includes issues which are highly politically sensitive. Donors are in a position to make life and death decisions with a high likelihood of error, without the participation of those affected by the consequences.
- When internal or local solutions emerge, they often do not conform to Western ethical ideals or international legal principles. What are the criteria for judging them?
- Donors can only control the form, but not the substance of the institutions they help build. The latter depends on deep, locally owned social and political dynamics.
- No matter how conscious donors are of the need to involve all groups and segments of society in the dynamics of peace and reconciliation, in practice they do not manage it.
The ethical and strategic challenges encountered in finding post-conflict solutions are the extreme versions of those associated with all development aid. The difficult and dangerous choices associated with this work must be recognised, and the process by which they are made must be reformed.
- In the short-term, donors must give more priority to promoting local dialogues, listening to broad sections of people, stimulating local knowledge generation and research, and finding means of making people’s voices heard by those in power.
- There is significant room for increased clarity and transparency. DFID’s Principles for a New Humanitarianism are a good example of appropriate guidelines.
- In the longer term, the terms of engagement, both ideological and procedural, between those in rich countries seeking social change and those in whose name this change is sought must be rethought.
- This must include a privileging of justice, dignity and empowerment considerations at all times, as well as the creation of the same sorts of accountability that donors are subject to at home.
