The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros.
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 bodies—mostly skeletal remains—in 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 slaughtered—mostly by machete—in 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 didn’t even realize, until I was loading into a van outside the airport, that I had entered Rwanda without passing through customs and immigration—because there was no customs and immigration. The usual and powerfully subconscious markers of order and civilization—and security—had been utterly swept away in an engulfing orgy of genocidal war. And it didn’t feel good.
In those early days, my task was to help the UN’s 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 them—strewn 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: “Woman—machete. Woman—machete. Child—machete. Woman—machete. Child—machete. Child—blunt trauma. Man— machete. Woman— machete . . .” 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 couldn’t 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 machete—and 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 descended—and 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 poor’s 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 the locust effect. This plague of predatory violence is different from other problems facing the poor; and so, the remedy to the locust effect must also be different.
In the lives of the poor, violence has the power to destroy everything— and is unstopped by our other responses to their poverty. This makes sense because it can also be said of other acute needs of the poor. Severe hunger and disease can also destroy everything for a poor person—and the things that stop hunger don’t necessarily stop disease, and the things that stop disease don’t necessarily address hunger. The difference is that the world knows that poor people suffer from hunger and disease—and the world gets busy trying to meet those needs.
But, the world overwhelmingly does not know that endemic to being poor is a vulnerability to violence, or the way violence is, right now, catastrophically crushing the global poor. As a result, the world is not getting busy trying to stop it. And, in a perfect tragedy, the failure to address that violence is actually devastating much of the other things good people are seeking to do to assist them._
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The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros are the authors of The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. Gary A. Haugen is founder and president of International Justice Mission, a global human rights agency that protects the poor from violence. The largest organization of its kind, IJM has partnered with law enforcement to rescue thousands of victims of violence. Haugen was Director of the U.N. investigation in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and has been recognized by the U.S. State Department as a Trafficking in Persons “Hero” — the U.S. government’s highest honor for anti-slavery leadership. Victor Boutros is a federal prosecutor who investigates and tries nationally significant cases of police misconduct, hate crimes, and international human trafficking around the country on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. He is also a member of the Justice Department’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, which consolidates the expertise of some of nation’s top human trafficking prosecutors and enhances the federal government’s ability to identify and prosecute large human trafficking networks.
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