Britain under pressure to end all aid to Rwandan government

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

9:00PM BST 06 Oct 2012

Britain is under mounting international pressure to stop all aid to the Rwandan government.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, Britain’s Minister for International Development Andrew Mitchell and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni talk in Kigali Photo: REUTERS

The United Nations and the European Union wants the UK to withhold millions of pounds it is due to hand to President Paul Kagame’s government as part of an international campaign to choke his regime of funds.

Rwanda is accused of arming rebels responsible for atrocities, including mass rape, in the neighbouring Democrat Republic of Congo.

They hope that Britain will fall in line after David Cameron replaced Andrew Mitchell as international development secretary in his Cabinet reshuffle last month.

Britain initially agreed to go along with international condemnation of Rwandan involvement and to cancel £83 million it gives it in aid each year.

But Mr Mitchell’s last act in the job, before he was moved to the role of Chief Whip, had been to restore about £8m aid to the regime, with another £8m to follow later this year, apparently against the advice of officials in his department and from the Foreign Office.

He based the decision on personal assurances from the Rwandan president and on his own experiences running a small Conservative “charity” project in the country.

Officials were told his personal experience with Project Umubano outweighed evidence from a group of experts from the UN, Human Rights Watch observers and Foreign Office officials.

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that the UN and EU privately expressed their “disappointment” with Mr Mitchell’s decision at a hastily convened international contact group meeting at the Foreign Office last month.

A source at the meeting said there were “obvious differences” between Foreign Office officials and “between different officials in the Department for International Development”.

Mr Mitchell apparently also ignored police intelligence reports that suggest Rwandan dissidents living in exile in Britain are being targeted by the regime.

Last year the Metropolitan Police took the unusual step of issuing the Rwandan exiles with formal warning notices stating that “the Rwandan government poses an imminent threat to your life”.

The United Nations and Europe have both accused President Kagame of giving support and weapons to the so-called 23 March Movement (known as M23) in the Democrat Republic of Congo, accusing it of attacking civilians and “acts of sexual violence”.

At a meeting at the UN in New York last week the EU directly accused Rwanda of backing the M23 rebels. President Kagame and senior figures in his regime may now face sanctions over their links to the group and human rights abuses it has carried out.

Two new confidential reports on Rwanda’s involvement with the M23 rebels were presented to Security Council officials last week and are likely to lead to further action being taken against the regime at the UN in the next few weeks.

A UN source said: “Britain’s position has come as a bit of a disappointment to those who are trying to alter the position on the ground. Everyone else is united in putting pressure on Rwanda.”

Britain is Rwanda’s largest aid contributor and the source said its involvement in bring pressure to bear on President Kagame was “vitally important”.

Internal documents from DfID, released under the Freedlom of Information Act, reveal that in a February 2011 telephone conversation, Mr Mitchell had promised the Rwandan president that Britain would increase its aid from £60m to £90m by 2015. Two months earlier, he had flown to Rwanda for a “90-minute tete-a-tete followed by lunch” with the newly re-elected president.

But the memos also reveal doubts within the department about the “political risk” in Rwanda. Mr Mitchell’s ministerial colleague, Stephen O’Brien, highlighted international concern about human rights in Rwanda.

Justine Greening, the new International Development Secretary, must now decide whether Rwanda should receive the second tranche of the money promised by Mr Mitchell. Her office did not respond to requests for comment last night.

It is understood that Mr Mitchell based his decision to continue aiding Rwanda on “personal assurances” from Mr Kagame who had previously attended the Conservative conference and lavished praise on Project Umubano calling it an “unprecedented” example of aid. He is also understood to claim, though, that the decision was later agreed by Downing Street.

The Conservatives’ Rwanda project was Mr Mitchell’s personal brainchild but was designed to show the caring side of Mr Cameron’s Party when it was in opposition.

Now also working in Sierra Leone, the project has seen more than 200 Tory supporters, including Mr Mitchell, his wife Sharon and their daughter Rosie, fly to Rwanda for two-week stints to help as the country slowly recovers from the genocide which saw an estimated 800,000 people murdered there in 1994.

Mrs Mitchell, a GP, has also spent several months working as a doctor in Rwanda.

The Prime Minister praised the project as “the first time that any British political party had engaged in a social action project in the developing world”.

He said he and Mr Mitchell had set it up “to raise awareness of global poverty and play a small part in tackling it on the front line”.

Yesterday a Conservative spokeswoman said the project, which includes an annual Tories versus locals cricket match, had “provided English lessons to over 3,000 Rwandan primary school teachers, renovated a school, established a small medical library and built a community centre”.

Conservative volunteers, including ministers, MPs, Parliamentary candidates and local councillors, pay their own airfares, but much of the start up money for the project came from a wealthy widow from Hove, Helena Frost.

Despite having little interest in politics, according to her family, Mr Mitchell personally persuaded Mrs Frost to provide the funding. Electoral Commission files show that before her death last November, she gave the party £250,000 in donations – £200,000 of which went to fund Mr Mitchell’s office in opposition and £50,000 directly to the Rwanda project.

Last night, Mrs Frost’s nephew Mark, who was close to his aunt and often accompanied her to charitable events, said he was “slightly taken aback” that she gave so much.

He said: “It would appear Mr Mitchell (was) very charming and very persuasive. It was quite a large sum which doesn’t necessarily seem to fit with the amounts she ordinarily gave to the many other charities she supported.

“She was not one to meddle in politics at all and was convinced the money was going to help the poor. She would have not have given money to politicians for political use or gain, she had understood that she was helping the poor in Rwanda.”

He added: “This was a private matter and she was reticent about this particular charitable donation.

“She was a wonderful woman who had a great passion for certain causes and for many people. I can only imagine that this may have been the case on this particular case for her to have contributed such large sums to a single cause.”

He said Mr Mitchell had been introduced to her through another charity that he was involved with and to which Mrs Frost, who had a considerable personal fortune and had also set up a £6 million charitable foundation in the name of her late husband Patrick, had contributed large sums.

Source: The Telegraph

Rwanda donors were too quick to suspend aid, says fragile states expert

• Mark Tran
  Wednesday 3 October 2012 07.00 BST

LSE’s Professor James Putzel warns against aid donors sticking rigidly to formulas on democracy, human rights and governance

President Paul Kagame has strongly denied claims that Rwanda has backed rebel insurgents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photograph: Jason Szenes/EPA

Donors have acted hastily in suspending aid to Rwanda over allegations that it is supporting a rebel insurgency in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to a leading expert on “fragile states”.

Professor James Putzel, co-author of Meeting the Challenges of Crisis States, a report from the London School of Economics, questioned the decision of the EU, the US and Germany in partially freezing aid to Rwanda amid accusations that its military is supporting the violent rebel group M23. President Paul Kagame has vehemently rejected the allegations.

Britain’s position has been more ambiguous: after initially freezing £16m of general budget support to the country in July, it unblocked half that amount last month, which provoked criticism.

“Donors have been precipitous in suspending aid,” said Putzel. “The evidence is much more mixed and it’s complicated. Of course there are some ethnic and family links across the border, but generally the Rwandan government has been judicious in staying its hand.”

Puntzel’s comments highlight the sometimes testy relations between donors and aid recipients, especially at a time when donors place increasing emphasis on the importance of good governance and human rights. The EU, the world’s largest aid donor, last year said it placed far greater focus on democracy, human rights and governance in its aid programmes under its new “agenda for change” development policy.

However, the LSE report cautions against too formulaic an approach towards democratic rules, formal state institutions and elections. “If democratic rules are likely to lead to significant exclusion of either powerful elites or important regional, ethnic, language or religious groups, then they may be inferior to forms of power sharing,” says the report.

Warning that donor attempts to promote democratic or market reforms can lead to violence, it says sometimes tolerating corruption, unproductive rents and less than democratic governments has actually been the price of peace.

“The promotion of democracy in a country needs to focus on establishing mechanisms for checks and balances on executive authority rather than the form of political party competition,” said the report, which looks at why some fragile states – understood as countries particularly vulnerable to outbreaks of large-scale violence – slide into collapse while others manage to achieve periods of “resilience”.

Putzel and his co-author, Jonathan Di John, cite Zambia as an example of “resilient stagnation”, a state that managed to avoid violent conflict throughout its post-colonial history but also became an example of peaceful regime change. Stability was the result of “an inclusive bargain” among contending elites, underpinned by a dominant national political party, they said, but the trade-off has been economic stagnation because economic policies – the deployment of subsidies and access to valuable economic (mining) rights – were based more on political than economic criteria.

“Good governance reforms promoted by aid agencies need to take into account existing elite bargains or they may have unintended negative outcomes on democratic and developmental possibilities,” says the report.

Another uncomfortable message for aid agencies is that the failure to prioritise security in state building threatens to undermine aid efforts. Where the state cannot maintain power without unleashing violence against its own population, as is currently the case in the DRC, external efforts need to put the construction of accountable security forces ahead of other aid programmes, argues the report.

“Most of the attention of the international community towards security in fragile states has been related to downsizing the state’s security forces, demobilising programmes … and wider concerns or providing ‘human security’ and respect for human rights,” it says. “While these are desirable objectives, they are unattainable without the establishment of a basic security capacity within the state.”

A key finding is the importance of taxation, cited as a major indicator for measuring state performance. The report urges western donors to support the creation of taxation systems in developing countries. It also urges donors to channel aid through the state rather than bypassing it, which can contribute to the creation of a “dual public authority”, a scenario that – over time – can weaken states “in favour of rival networks of patronage”. This chimes with one of the outcomes at last year’s aid effectiveness conference in Busan, South Korea, when donors reaffirmed that aid used for general budget support should be the “default” option.

The authors’ main contention is that rather than democratic institutions, the “underlying political settlement” determines political or economic outcomes. Focusing on the political settlement, they argue, directs attention to the crucial role of elites in securing stability in a state, which should lead donors to be concerned “about the incentives elites face to play by the rules of the state”.

Source: Guardian