During four days in July 1994, some 850,000 Rwandans fled the civil war in their country to take refuge across the border, in Goma, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Despite weeks of warnings, Western governments were caught off guard by the speed and scale of the crisis. Unwilling to send troops, they relied on international and local humanitarian agencies, hundreds of which duly rushed to support the traumatized, dehydrated, and malnourished population. It took the UN World Food Pro-
gram (WFP) weeks to secure supplies and transport for these people, but in early August a plane bearing food for them finally landed outside Goma. For the next three weeks, the cargo sat on the tarmac.1 No one had thought to arrange for the distribution of the goods.
This was not the only example of poor coordination during the crisis. An interagency report on the Rwanda emergency noted that although the scale of the humanitarian response to the crisis was extraordinary and generally commendable, "there were several aspects . . . where [the] performance of the system was less impressive, and the performance of some agencies was poor."2
In Rwanda, the reputations of all humanitarian agencies...