Gary A. Haugen - The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

THE LOCUST EFFECT

WHY THE END OF POVERTY REQUIRES THE END OF VIOLENCE

BY GARY A. HAUGEN AND VICTOR BOUTROS

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International Justice Mission 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haugen, Gary A.
The locust effect : why the end of poverty requires the end of violence /
by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros.
pages cm
ISBN 9780199937875 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. ViolenceDeveloping countries.
2. PoorViolence againstDeveloping countries. 3. PovertyDeveloping countries.
4. Human rightsDeveloping countries. 5. Law enforcementDeveloping countries.
I. Boutros, Victor. II. Title.
HN981.V5H39 2013
305.569091724dc23
2013013401

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For Jan
with gratitude for your sheltering tree of grace

WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

THE HIDDEN CRISIS AT HISTORYS INFLECTION POINT

THE LOCUST EFFECT

NO ONES DRIVEN THAT TRUCK IN DECADES

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHESAT ALL

A DREAM DEVASTATED

COLONIAL LEGACIES AND A FAILURE THAT MAKES SENSE

PRIVATE JUSTICE AND PUBLIC LAWLESSNESS

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

ITS BEEN DONE BEFORE

DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS OF HOPE

It was my first massacre site. Today the skulls are all neatly stacked on shelves, but when I first encountered them, they definitely were not. They were attached to bodiesmostly skeletal remainsin a massive mess of rotting human corpses in a small brick church in Rwanda. As the director of the tiny United Nations Special Investigations Unit in Rwanda immediately following the genocide in 1994, I was given a list of 100 mass graves and massacre sites across an impoverished, mountainous country where nearly a million people had been slaughteredmostly by machetein a span of about 10 weeks. When I stepped off the military transport plane to join the small international team of criminal investigators and prosecutors that were assembling in the Rwandan capital in the early weeks after the genocide, the country carried an eerie, post-apocalyptic emptiness. I didnt even realize, until I was loading into a van outside the airport, that I had entered Rwanda without passing through customs and immigrationbecause there was no customs and immigration. The usual and powerfully subconscious markers of order and civilizationand securityhad been utterly swept away in an engulfing orgy of genocidal war. And it didnt feel good.

In those early days, my task was to help the UNs Commission of Experts make a gross accounting of what had taken place and to begin gathering evidence against the leaders of the genocide (it would be more than a year before any international tribunal would be set up). But with hundreds of thousands of murders, where were we to start?

We ended up starting in Ntarama, a small town south of Kigali, in a small church compound where all the bodies remained just as their killers had left themstrewn wall to wall in a knee-high mass of corpses, rotting clothes and the desperate personal effects of very poor people hoping to survive a siege.

But they did not survive.

And now four Spanish forensic experts were working with me in picking through the remains and lifting out each skull for a simple accounting: Womanmachete. Womanmachete. Childmachete. Womanmachete. Childmachete. Childblunt trauma. Manmachete. Womanmachete On and on it went for hours.

Our task was to assemble from survivor testimony and the horrible mess of physical evidence a very precise picture of how mass murder actually happens. And over time, the question began to take a fierce hold on me. I couldnt stop trying to picture it in my mind. What is it like, exactly, to be pressed up against the back wall of this church with panic on every side from your terrified family as the steel, blood-soaked machetes hack their way to you through your screaming and slaughtered neighbors?

What eventually emerged for me, and changed me, was a point of simple clarity about the nature of violence and the poor. What was so clear to me was the way these very impoverished Rwandans at their point of most desperate need, huddled against those advancing machetes in that church, did not need someone to bring them a sermon, or food, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a micro-loan. They needed someone to restrain the hand with the macheteand nothing else would do.

None of the other things that people of good will had sought to share with these impoverished Rwandans over the years was going to matter if those good people could not stop the machetes from hacking them to death. Moreover, none of those good things (the food, the medicine, the education, the shelter, the fresh water, the micro-loan) was going to stop the hacking machetes. The locusts of predatory violence had descendedand they would lay waste to all that the vulnerable poor had otherwise struggled to scrape together to secure their lives. Indeed, not only would the locusts be undeterred by the poors efforts to make a living, they would be fattened and empowered by the plunder.

Just as shocking to me, however, was what I found following the Rwanda genocide as I spent the next two decades in and out of the poorest communities in the developing world: a silent catastrophe of violence quietly destroying the lives of billions of poor people, well beyond the headlines of episodic mass atrocities and genocide in our world.

Without the world noticing, the locusts of common, criminal violence are right now ravaging the lives and dreams of billions of our poorest neighbors. We have come to call the unique pestilence of violence and the punishing impact it has on efforts to lift the global poor out of poverty