THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-AID

Well, it all goes to show that you can’t predict anything. There I was, like all distant observers, predicting an apocalypse in Mid-Africa, and what happens? The Hutu refugees, among whom a million deaths were forecast, lift their burdens and turn for home. Hundreds of thousands, shuffling along, winding their various ways back to whence they came a year and a half ago.

Observers have spoken in biblical terms. The scale of the movement is such that Cecil B de Mille would have blanched. It is like nothing we can have imagined. This was an exodus. Similar things have happened before, but not on such an extraordinary scale.

But size isn’t everything. What is even more amazing is that nobody expected it. There was no publicity campaign. In fact, the UN and the aid agencies anticipated a bloodbath before there was a resolution of the refugee crisis.

What happened, as far as we can tell, was a short sharp shootout between the Banyamulenge Tutsi rebels of eastern Zaire (backed up by Rwandan soldiers) and the Interhamwe militia who had been preventing the refugees from returning home.

These were the executioners who orchestrated the genocide last year. The butchers. I’m not saying that there weren’t other atrocities, but these were the ones who made Rwanda a byword for slaughter.

In her article in the Sunday Tribune last week, Nell McCafferty recounted how 5,000 Tutsis had been slaughtered in a church when the Hutu militia broke through the walls of a church, hurling grenades and hacking the survivors to death. Outside the church, she said, a thousand skulls have been stacked on tables ...

And now the monsters are gone. It is said that they knew the jig was up, and slipped away. Perhaps they took hostages, perhaps not. We may find out in time. Indeed, there could be mass murderers hiding among those who are on their way back. That is another thing that must wait another day. For now, movement is sufficient. Unexpected, extraordinary, welcome.

And it heightens our awareness of the ineffectiveness and political compromise of the UN, and the enduring legacy of imperialism. It wasn’t the West, or the UN that ended the genocide in this part of Africa. It was the Africans themselves, from Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire and Uganda.

The UN fed the refugee camps, which were ruled by the Interhamwe, who in effect held the inmates hostage while they plotted a return to Rwanda to complete the genocide they had started. Meanwhile, Western governments dithered as the plot thickened.

They had some justification. This was shaping up to be a right mess. But at the same time, it was hard not to see the West’s attitude as largely imperialist and, indeed, racist.

A lot of the discussion over the last weeks had strong paternalistic and directive undertones. “These people can’t manage their affairs”. 19th century imperialism, in other words.

The same might well be said of some Western aid. In general, Irish aid agencies have a strong commitment to empowerment and development. But somewhere along the line there will have to be an evaluation of the meaning and purpose of development aid.

As I said, the Irish agencies seem to have a strong development focus. In some instances they also have a political agenda. I have no particular problem with this. In general it springs from the experience of missionary priests and nuns who were politicised in barrios of South America and the Philippines, and who advance the ideas of Paulo Freire.

But much aid is a sham. At governmental level, it frequently emerges that those aided actually lose in the transaction. And, of course there is another, more venal, element to agency work: without humanitarian disasters, they would be out of business.

It isn’t easy, especially for the Irish, to establish distance from a famine, or a war-induced horror. But we’ll have to. Because somewhere in the backs of our minds we’ll remember that in Rwanda, they sorted it out for themselves.

And so to something completely different. The Hog was saddened to hear of the death of Bernard Lafferty a couple of weeks ago. Bernard was the so-called billionaire butler who inherited the estate of the late Doris Duke. He only had three years in which to savour his luck, though he seems to have packed a fair bit of living in to all three.

Born in Creeslough in County Donegal in 1945, Lafferty was orphaned at 17 and went to live with an aunt in Philadelphia. And boy did he live. He was manager of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where a lot of big glitzy stars played, like Bill Cosby and Joel Grey. Apparently he was very close to Peggy Lee.

But he will be remembered above all as the billionaire butler, for his extraordinary relationship with Doris Duke (18th richest woman in America), and the fact that she left him in charge of the Doris Duke Foundation, which was to receive most of her $1.2 billion.

Not bad for an “illiterate Irishman” who, according to his obituaries, carried out his duties in full butler uniform, but barefoot, with a ponytail and an earring.

In fact, his enemies fought his inheritance tooth and nail. The total amount earned by wrangling lawyers so far is a staggering $50 million. And Lafferty agreed to forego his share in the estate in return for $4.5 million in executor’s fees and an annual income of half a million dollars.

During one of the court cases, the judge described him as “a profligate illiterate drunk with a cavalier attitude towards money”. Not untrue, it seems. And yet, not true. Sure, he had an alcohol problem. But even his detractors agreed he was also warm and considerate, and apparently very kind. “Always there when Doris needed him”, said one of the doctors who had attended her.

In the end he was found dead in bed in his vast Bel Air mansion by Sally Blake from Donegal, also a former employee of the bould Doris, whom he had invited to Los Angeles for a holiday with her mother.

She said he had died peacefully in his sleep. He was a big lad, as soccer managers say, and probably died of heart failure. 250 pounds is a lot of Donegal beef to haul around the gay nightclubs of LA, but he probably never felt a thing.

So why am I writing about a big fat flamboyant with a load of money he liked to spend?

Well, like most people, I thought his inheritance a great story. Life is bloody dull, and the idea of this bloke falling into that kind of good fortune really appealed.

In a world in which so many look for predictability and control, Lafferty was out on his own. He was a Mick. One of the diaspora. And he played the hand he was dealt, and at the final throw he scooped the pot. One of life’s eccentrics, he was the sort of person we need more of. Just one of those characters you’d like to have met.

• The Hog