No diplomat left behind

It’s been a tough few days here for the UN Security Council. All they wanted to do was come to Rwanda, and then they got shot at.

First, the context: Members of the Council are on their annual tour of “African hotspots,” as the wires like to say. Rwanda’s still on that list, despite being the most peaceful country in the Great Lakes, with a capital full of cash (judging by the rate at which I spend here, anyway) and an earnestness to do big business that makes capitalist havens like my own home come a-courtin’.

So the UN guys squeezed Rwanda between trips to the DRC, where they know better than we do that that war’s not going to end, and Ivory Coast, where anyone who has attention span enough to think past where, precisely, Ivory Coast is gets worried about the return of violence.

The delegates were supposed to fly from Goma, in eastern DRC, to Kigali. It’s a quick and easy flight–if you bring your own plane, which the UN did, but it was too come to Goma; part of the runway in Goma is still covered in lava from the eruption of the volcano there 6 years ago, and the kind of plane that belongs in a Western entourage needs a longer airstrip. So the UN hitched a ride with their footsoldiers, one of whom, in the course of a security check, managed to…compromise the plane.

Here’s what happened, because the dryness of the wire voice is just too damn good:

Top U.N. ambassadors were forced to hitch a bus ride from Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda on Sunday after a security guard accidentally shot a hole in their plane, a U.N. spokesman said.

Honestly, I don’t feel too bad for them. The bus ride from Goma to Kigali isn’t too terribly long, and scenery is spectacular. I’d bet they all put money down on villas on the lake.

But then the poor guys couldn’t get out, either. They couldn’t afford the gas.

The company with a contract to refuel at the Kigali airport lost it, and so it demanded the diplomats pay the $20,000 immediately–in cash.

They opened their wallets to see what they could come up with, but apparently even the outrageous UN per diem doesn’t quite cover fronting the fuel for a 747.

Apparently, several disgruntled super-travelers wondered whether this was Rwanda getting the UN back for inaction during the genocide, and that they’d call Kagame and complain. South Africa’s UN ambassador suggested to the disgruntled that the suggestion was rather like “blaming and calling U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for a delay at an American airport.”

I wonder if, instead, this is Rwanda–whose own ‘intractable conflict’ world leaders so often say gleefully behind it–getting the UN back for making it a stop on “a trip to promote peacekeeping operations and other efforts to end some of the most intractable conflicts in Africa.”