President George W. Bush announced in Rwanda Tuesday that the United States would provide African nations with U.S. $100 million for peacekeeping in Darfur, including $12 million for Rwanda.
"My message to other nations," said Bush, "is join with the President [Paul Kagame of Rwanda] and help us get this problem [Darfur] solved once and for all… We [the U.S.] will help through sanctions. We will help through pressure. And we'll help provide money to get these forces in, in an effective manner."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Bush that the money would also go to Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Malawi – and possibly to other countries which came forward to join UNAMID, the African Union-United Nations hybrid force for Darfur.
Bush was on a one-day stop in Rwanda as part of his five-nation African tour. During the day, he also signed a bilateral investment treaty with Rwanda and visited a memorial to the 1994 genocide.
According to a transcript released by the White House, Bush told reporters after visiting the memorial that it "had a profound effect on me. You can't help but walk in there and recognize… that evil does exist and, in this case, in such brutal form that babies had their skulls smashed."
One of the lessons of the genocide, he said, was that when the world intervened it should do so not with observers but with forces which had a mandate to deal with the situation.
He said, however, that he believed he had been right not to intervene unilaterally in Darfur – where his administration has characterized the attacks of militia groups as "genocide." He said he was trying to persuade other nations to follow the U.S. in imposing sanctions on Sudan, but he was "not comfortable" with how quickly the world was responding to the situation in Darfur.
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A White House briefing paper released to coincide with Bush's announcement said the U.S. had already spent more than $17 million to train and equip 7,000 Rwandan peacekeepers for Darfur. The brief said that since 2004 the U.S. had spent more than $15 million airlifting peacekeepers and equipment to and from Darfur, as well as $30 million training and equipping them.
President Kagame said in public remarks in an appearance with Bush that Rwanda shared "a deep commitment to democracy and good governance." Rwanda believed in "power-sharing and consensus-building as a cornerstone of our political dispensation," he added.
He said the investment treaty amounted to an invitation to investors to come to Rwanda, and an assurance "that when they come here, their investments will be protected, will be in good hands."
