Susan Rice

Rice Material for 4pm call | WIKILEAKS PODESTA 17367 | OCT 31, 2008

Susan Rice Biography | Attachment A (SR Public Vet) (word document)

Susan E. Rice enjoyed a rapid rise in the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy apparatus, starting her career in the National Security Council and becoming an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs at the age of 33. As Assistant Secretary, she was responsible for formulating and implementing U.S. policy toward the forty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa, including political, economic, security, and humanitarian issues. Rice helped to raise the profile of African affairs and worked on the continent’s enduring problems, most notably the persistent conflicts in the region.

Rice, along with others on the Clinton foreign policy team, has been criticized for failing to cooperate with Sudan to make inroads against al-Qaeda, a charge Rice strongly denies. Regarding Rwanda, a 2002 book review in the National Journal quoted Rice as asking, at a 1994 interagency meeting, about the effect on the upcoming congressional elections if the U.S. used the word “genocide” and then failed to do anything about it, a remark that could be characterized as inappropriately political. However, Rice later characterized U.S. inaction in Rwanda as “one of the greatest failings of the Clinton administration.”

Rice, 43, is the daughter of one of Washington, D.C.’s elite black families. Her mother, Lois Rice, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants who worked as domestics, attended Radcliffe and has served as a director on corporate and nonprofit boards. Her father, Emmett Rice, was an economics professor at Cornell and has worked as an advisor to the Central Bank of Nigeria, in the Treasury Department, at the World Bank, and as a governor on the Federal Reserve Board.

From 1991-1993, she served clients in oil-and-gas, steel, transportation, retail, public/non-governmental and pulp/paper sectors.

Rice’s first post in the NSC was as Director for International Peacekeeping, which she held from 1993-1995. In 1995, she was promoted to Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs. As an NSC staffer, Rice visited Rwanda in 1994, which she has described as her “most searing experience”

Susan Rice Questionnaire | Attachment B (SR Questionnaire)

Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.

I was the junior NSC staffer responsible for the UN and peacekeeping during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and there have been some false public accounts of my role in US policy-making on this issue.

U.S. policy towards Sudan (1995-2000). During which period we sought to increase pressure on Sudan to halt its support for terrorism, its war in the South, use of starvation as a weapon against civilians, continued practice of slavery and religious persecution and efforts to destabilize it neighbors,

U.S. efforts to help resolve the civil war in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. Though my personal role was minimal, there were some who took issue with US policy at the time.

Rwanda genocide: 100 days of slaughter | BBC NEWS | APR 7, 2014

In just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists. They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

Why did the Hutu militias want to kill the Tutsis?

About 85% of Rwandans are Hutus but the Tutsi minority has long dominated the country. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. A group of Tutsi exiles formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 and fighting continued until a 1993 peace deal was agreed.

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying then President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and immediately started a well-organised campaign of slaughter. The RPF said the plane had been shot down by Hutus to provide an excuse for the genocide.

Rwanda’s mystery that won’t go away | BBC NEWS | NOV 29, 2006

The question of who shot down the plane carrying the former president of Rwanda in April 1994 could turn out to be one of the great mysteries of the late 20th Century.

The act served as a catalyst for the genocide of some 800,000 (others say as high as one million) people in just 100 days.

A French investigative judge, Jean Louis Bruguiere, has accused the ethnic Tutsi rebel leader at the time, Paul Kagame, of having been responsible.

Mr Kagame, now Rwanda’s president, was furious and broke off diplomatic relations with France.

Judge Bruguiere mounted the inquiry in France because the families of the French aircrew, also killed when the plane went down, laid a judicial complaint.

Killings

When the Rwandan president’s Mystere Falcon executive jet was blown out of the skies over Kigali airport at about 2000 local time on 6 April 1994, it was the beginning of a bloody nightmare for Rwanda.

The ethnic Hutu president, his aides and his French air crew were all killed.

Within minutes, on the ground, extremist Hutu army officers and their militias began taking revenge on the minority Tutsis and other government opponents.

The Rwandan genocide had begun.

The extremist Hutus blamed Tutsi rebels, led by Paul Kagame, and Belgian mercenaries, for downing the plane.

But others, including senior United Nations officials present on the ground suspected that Hutus, or mercenaries working for them , may have carried out the attack in order to stop the late president signing a compromise peace deal with the Tutsi rebels.

France backed the Hutu government at the time.

Evidence

A British expert on the Rwandan genocide, Linda Melvern, author of the investigative study Conspiracy to Murder, says she is surprised at the lack of convincing new evidence in the French judge’s allegations given that, at the time of the shooting down of the plane, France had very close relationships in the region.

“At the time of the planning of the genocide the French government had 47 senior officers embedded into the Rwandan army , which subsequently played such a large role in the genocide , and the best informed government of (them) all of what was going on in Rwanda was the French,” she says

Ms Melvern said the evidence the French judge had presented alleging President Kagame’s involvement in the murder of his predecessor was very sparse, and that some of it, concerning the alleged anti-aircraft missiles used to down the presidential jet, had already been rejected by a French Parliamentary enquiry.

A brief look at the Judge’s 64 page report, as made available on the websites of some French newspapers, also reveals that the report appears to have been written in something of a rush.

Several of the key players, including two former heads of state, have their names mis-spelt.

Doubts

Anyone who has followed Rwanda in recent years, and seen the extraordinary lengths to which people are prepared to use violence, to gain and hold on to power, will accept that almost anything is possible.

I met Paul Kagame many times when he was a rebel commander, and have interviewed him since he became president.

I have no doubt that had he wanted to down the plane he would have had the technical and military capacity to do so.

But his denials have been so vehement, so public and so consistent that they might put his domestic political credibility on the line if he is ever proven wrong.

Kagame is not overly-concerned about his international credibility – ever since the genocide he has made it clear that he has no respect for an international community which largely stood by while hundreds of thousands were killed.

Of course, the debate about who shot down the Mystere Falcon may be a purely theoretical one.

It is most unlikely that any of the accused Rwandans would make the mistake of finding themselves in France and available for arrest. Judge Bruguiere’s allegations may never be tested in an independent court.

France

The current Rwandan government accuses France of deliberate political manipulation of the facts.

While the genocide of ethnic Tutsis and other government opponents was being carried out by the extremist Hutu regime, the then-Tutsi rebel Paul Kagame mounted a conventional war against the French-backed government.

His officers were almost all men – and a few women – who had been exiled and educated in neighbouring, English-speaking Uganda.

When he won the war, the outcome, highly unusually, led to a change in Rwanda’s official second language from French to English.

Some observers believe that whatever crimes Paul Kagame may or may not have committed, the French establishment has never really forgiven him for challenging its influence in Africa.

CLINTON IN AFRICA: THE BLOOD BATH; Critics Say U.S. Ignored C.I.A. Warnings of Genocide in Rwanda | NEW YORK TIMES | MAR 26, 1998

When President Clinton confessed today that ”people like me” failed to see the storm of mass killings that swept Rwanda in 1994, he acknowledged a bitter truth for the first time.

The Clinton Administration ignored powerful warnings of impending genocide, including a Central Intelligence Agency study saying half a million people could die if Rwanda exploded, former Administration officials and human rights experts said today.

”Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence,” Mr. Clinton said.

But even when it was clear that hundreds of thousands of Rwandan civilians were in mortal danger, the United States stopped the United Nations from taking action that might have saved those lives, the critics of the Administration’s policy said.

”By definition, when a human catastrophe like that takes place, the whole international community, including the United States as a leader in it, has failed,” Anthony Lake, the national security adviser to President Clinton at the time, said today.

A 2,500-member United Nations force sought authorization under the United Nations charter to stop the killing. The United Nations commander in Rwanda at the time, Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, said last month that if he had had the mandate, the massacres would have ceased.

Bystanders to Genocide | THE ATLANTIC | SEP 01, 2001

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country’s Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide | THE GUARDIAN | MAR 31, 2004

President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis” before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington’s top policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his senior officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

“It’s powerful proof that they knew,” said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington DC, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that the CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to “stop the genocide, which … is spreading south”.

The Great Rwanda “Genocide Coverup” | GLOBAL RESEARCH | FEB 20, 2008

As George Bush begins his much bally-hooed African safari, he has already begun to heap praise on Rwandan President Kagame as a “model for Africa .” But, recently issued French and Spanish international “war-crimes” warrants and new evidence at the UN Rwanda Tribunal have exposed Kagame as the war-criminal who actually touched-off the 1994 “Rwanda Genocide” by assassinating the previous President and who is benefiting from a decades-long U.S.-sponsored “cover-up” of Pentagon complicity in massacres committed by Kagame’s regime, which even Britain’s Economist has called “the most repressive in Africa.” [1]

As genocide raged, general’s pleas for help ignored | CNN | DEC 10, 2008

The Canadian lieutenant general and son of a soldier was about to take up the biggest command of his career — leading United Nations peacekeepers in the central African nation.

A year later he left Rwanda a broken man, having watched helplessly as more than 800,000 people perished in Rwanda’s genocide despite his pleas for more troops to stop the massacre.

“We could have actually saved hundreds of thousands,” Dallaire told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for “Scream Bloody Murder.”

U.S./U.N. cover-up of Kagame’s genocide in Rwanda and Congo | SF BAY VIEW | SEP 17, 2010

A long-standing code of silence inside the U.N. is coming to an end regarding what is probably the largest genocide ever since the U.N. founding: the genocide committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since 1990

What Susan Rice Has Meant for U.S. Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa | THE ATLANTIC | DEC 3, 2012

How the possible-next Secretary of State helped the U.S. continue a Cold War-style approach to the continent — and aided a new generation of dictators in the process.

Susan Rice and Africa’s Despots | NEW YORK TIMES | DEC 9, 2012

ON Sept. 2, Ambassador Susan E. Rice delivered a eulogy for a man she called “a true friend to me.” Before thousands of mourners and more than 20 African heads of state in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Ms. Rice, the United States’ representative to the United Nations, lauded the country’s late prime minister, Meles Zenawi. She called him “brilliant” — “a son of Ethiopia and a father to its rebirth.”

Few eulogies give a nuanced account of the decedent’s life, but the speech was part of a disturbing pattern for an official who could become President Obama’s next secretary of state. During her career, she has shown a surprising and unsettling sympathy for Africa’s despots.

This record dates from Ms. Rice’s service as assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, who in 1998 celebrated a “new generation” of African leaders, many of whom were ex-rebel commanders; among these leaders were Mr. Meles, Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Jerry J. Rawlings of Ghana, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Yoweri K. Museveni of Uganda.

Rice’s Failure in Rwanda Precludes Her From Becoming Secretary of State | HUFFINGTON POST

That Susan Rice either willfully misled the American people on the Benghazi attacks, or lazily absorbed intelligence briefings without the least bit of personal involvement, is obvious. That she was covering for the Obama Administration in denying a terror attack just weeks before the election is speculative but likely. That she does not, therefore, deserve to become Secretary of State is arguable.

But what is not arguable is that she deserves to be denied the post for a different reason altogether: Rwanda. What emerges when taken together — Rice’s weak response in Benghazi, blaming the murder of four Americans on a stupid video, and her shameful lack of action in the Rwandan genocide — is a career diplomat of singular weakness, lacking the spine or muscularity to assert American moral influence in the world.

Rice was part of Bill Clinton’s National Security Team that in 1994 refused any involvement whatsoever in the Rwanda genocide, leaving more than 800,000 men, women, and children to be hacked to death by machete in the fastest genocide ever recorded. The Clinton Administration had just been spooked by the Black Hawk down incident in Somalia and wanted no further foreign entanglements. But the lengths to which they went to deny assistance to the Tutsis, with Rice being central to the decision-making process, will forever live in infamy.

Genocide Under Our Watch | FOREIGN POLICY | APR 16, 2015

Newly declassified White House documents place Richard Clarke and Susan Rice at the forefront of U.S. efforts to limit a robust U.N. peacekeeping operation before and during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Nearly two weeks into the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda that would ultimately be called genocide, Eric P. Schwartz, a human rights specialist on the National Security Council, wrote a memorandum to his White House colleagues voicing alarm over reports of tens of thousands of slaughtered ethnic Tutsis.

Human rights groups were pleading for the Clinton administration to help keep 2,500 U.N. peacekeepers on the scene in the Central African country. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, was warning that “Rwandans will quickly become victims of genocide.”

“Is this true?” Schwartz asked Susan Rice, at the time a 29-year-old director of international organizations and peacekeeping on the National Security Council (NSC), and Donald Steinberg, then the NSC’s new director for African affairs, according to a recently declassified White House memo dated April 19, 1994. “If so, shouldn’t it be a major factor informing high-level decision-making on this issue? Has it been?”

Susan Rice, the War-Lord-Dictator of African Dictators | TESFA NEWS | OCT 9, 2014

Susan Rice has been waltzing with Africa’s slyest, slickest and meanest dictators for nearly two decades. She has been the acknowledged Guardian Angel, champion, apologist, promoter, advocate and matriarch of the late Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi. When it comes to Eritrea, however, her hate for President Isaias Afewerki and the people of Eritrea has clouded her judgment to the point where she cannot differentiate between American national interests and her personal vendetta.

Poverty, Global Health and Infectious Disease: Lessons from Haiti and Rwanda | US NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

Rwanda’s recent history makes these processes clear. The 1994 Rwandan genocide took an enormous toll on the population—at least 800,000 Rwandans massacred in three brutal months by approximately 15 percent of the population [19]. What commonly escapes our memories, however, is that the Rwandan genocide was predicated on far more than physical violence alone. Structural violence played a very significant role in setting the stage. Peter Uvin has argued that an uncritical development enterprise, dominated by foreigners, contributed to the creation of the processes that led towards genocide. In Aiding Violence, he summarizes:

[A]id financed much of the machinery of exclusion, inequality, and humiliation; provided it with legitimacy and support; and sometimes directly contributed to it. To their credit, some aid agencies—some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) foremost among them—may have had different impacts; they may have softened some parts of the crises faced by ordinary Rwandans. Yet, by and large, aid was an active and willing partner in the construction of structural violence in Rwanda, as it is elsewhere in Africa [20].

SHATTERED LIVES | Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath | HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | 1996

During the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women were subjected to sexual violence on a massive scale, perpetrated by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe, by other civilians, and by soldiers of the Rwandan Armed Forces (Forces Armées Rwandaises, FAR), including the Presidential Guard. Administrative, military and political leaders at the national and local levels, as well as heads of militia, directed or encouraged both the killings and sexual violence to further their political goal: the destruction of the Tutsi as a group. They therefore bear responsibility for these abuses.

Although the exact number of women raped will never be known, testimonies from survivors confirm that rape was extremely widespread and that thousands of women were individually raped, gang-raped, raped with objects such as sharpened sticks or gun barrels, held in sexual slavery (either collectively or through forced “marriage”) or sexually mutilated. These crimes were frequently part of a pattern in which Tutsi women were raped after they had witnessed the torture and killings of their relatives and the destruction and looting of their homes. According to witnesses, many women were killed immediately after being raped.

Other women managed to survive, only to be told that they were being allowed to live so that they would “die of sadness.” Often women were subjected to sexual slavery and held collectively by a militia group or were singled out by one militia man, at checkpoints or other sites where people were being maimed or slaughtered, and held for personal sexual service. The militiamen would force women to submit sexually with threats that they would be killed if they refused. These forced “marriages,” as this form of sexual slavery is often called in Rwanda, lasted for anywhere from a few days to the duration of the genocide, and in some cases longer. Rapes were sometimes followed by sexual mutilation, including mutilation of the vagina and pelvic area with machetes, knives, sticks, boiling water, and in one case, acid.

Throughout the world, sexual violence is routinely directed against females during situations of armed conflict. This violence may take gender-specific forms, like sexual mutilation, forced pregnancy, rape or sexual slavery. Being female is a risk factor; women and girls are often targeted for sexual abuse on the basis of their gender, irrespective of their age, ethnicity or political affiliation.

AIDS Intersects with Genocide | THE SENTINEL PROJECT | DEC 1, 2013 During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women and girls were raped in a systematic attempt to annihilate the Tutsi community and remove Hutu moderates and sympathizers (Amnesty International). Sexual violence has long been practised in the context of war, but what makes many armed conflicts over the past 20 years unique — besides Rwanda, think of those in the Balkans, Liberia, DRC, Sudan, CAR, Sierra Leone — is the scale at which sexual violence has been and continues to be used as a weapon of war. Add to this the exposure to sexually transmitted and other diseases that rape victims faced, especially to HIV/AIDS in countries where the epidemic was already ramping up. U.N. Ambassador Rice Helped Thwart Bin Laden Capture | INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | NOV 21, 2012 Terrorism: Our U.N. ambassador, champion of the altered Benghazi talking points, helped block attempts by Sudan to turn over the world’s most wanted terrorist outright or share intelligence leading to his capture. Our U.N. ambassador, champion of the altered Benghazi talking points, played a key role in blocking attempts by Sudan to turn over the world’s most wanted terrorist outright or share intelligence leading to his capture. It does not surprise us that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice either willfully or blindly parroted altered Benghazi talking points, going on five Sunday news shows on Sept. 16 to push the false narrative that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi was not a terrorist attack but a flash mob inflamed by a months-old Internet trailer insulting to Islam. This isn’t the first time she has been clueless about and blind to the reality of terror. As we mentioned in an earlier editorial about her possible appointment as secretary of state, “In 1996, while serving as assistant secretary of state for African affairs under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Rice helped persuade President Clinton to rebuff Sudan’s offer to turn Osama bin Laden, who was then living there, over to U.S. authorities.” RWANDAN GENOCIDE 20 YEARS LATER: HOW AMERICANS WERE LIED TO BY BILL CLINTON WHO TURNED PAUL KAGAME FROM ARSONIST INTO A HERO FIREMAN | CONGO COALITION BLOG | MAR 19, 2014 AS A DEMOCRAT WHO VOTED TWICE FOR BILL CLINTON TO BECOME PRESIDENT OF THE U.S., AS A CHRISTIAN WHO LOVE GOD AND THE TRUTH, AND AS AN AMERICAN WHO LOVE DEMOCRACY, I AM DISAPPOINTED IN PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON FOR LYING TO US, AMERICANS, ABOUT THE RWANDAN “GENOCIDE” IN 1998 WHEN HE MADE PAUL KAGAME – THE ARSONIST WHO TRIGGERED AND DID MOST OF THE KILLINGS – INTO THE HERO FIREMAN WHO ENDED THE KILLINGS… A Historical Summary of or Background on How The Rwandan “Genocide” Came About: On July 1st, 1962, Rwanda achieved independence (after having been a German colony from 1884 and a Belgian protectorate after Germany lost WWI). The Germans and the Belgians had favored the minority Tutsis, as kings, ruling over the majority Hutus. At independence, the majority Hutus won the election and formed the government. The Tutsis of mostly the ruling classes chose to go into exile, mostly into Uganda, rather than accept democracy and the rule of the Hutu majority. In exile in Uganda, these Tutsis integrated the Ugandan society up to becoming officers in the Ugandan army, intelligence, security, and other branches of the government. In the 1990’s, these Tutsis with the help of the Ugandan army, started invading Rwanda to start a civil war in order that they may overthrow the democratically elected Rwandan government. And, since Uganda was an American client state already, the US backed these incursions starting in 1990. Then, on April 6, 1994, the plane carrying two African heads of state, Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntariamira of Burundi was shot down as it approached the Kigali airport. The two presidents were returning from signing a peace accord in Arusha with Paul Kagame’s rebel movement called RPF so that Rwandans could vote for a new government by 1995. Immediately after the shooting down of the presidential plane, Kagame’s RPF and the Ugandan army invaded Rwanda and started slaughtering people, triggering killings on both sides until July when, finally, Kagame’s RPF took the capital city, Kigali. They bomb pharmacies, don’t they? | SALON | SEP 23, 1998 On Aug. 20, President Clinton personally ordered the leveling of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of Khartoum. More or less simultaneously, another flight of cruise missiles was dropped on various parts of Afghanistan and also — who’s counting? — Pakistan, in an apparent effort to impress the vile Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, of course, hopes to bring a “judgmental” monotheism of his own to bear on these United States, and is thus in some peoples’ minds a sort of Arab version of Ken Starr. The Missiles of August | NEW YORKER | OCT 12, 1998 “The Sudanese plant, depicted by the White House as a chemical-warfare facility, was one of 2 targets in a retaliatory raid against Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, who was linked to the bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania earlier that month; Tomahawks were also fired at sites in Afghanistan suspected to be terrorist training camps under the control of bin Laden.” Look at the Place! Sudan Says, ‘Say Sorry,’ but U.S. Won’t | NEW YORK TIMES | OCT 20, 2005 “Sudan’s government wants the Shifa factory preserved just as it was shortly after 13 Tomahawk cruise missiles took it out in the early evening of August 20. The destroyed factory has become a monument of sorts, a place that Sudanese authorities say symbolizes the mistreatment they have suffered at the hands of the world’s superpower.” “The government wants it as a showcase,” said Eltayeb Hag Ateya, director of the Peace Studies Institute at the University of Khartoum. “It’s still a thorn in Sudan-American relations. It will always be a point for the Sudanese government to bring up.” “Well then, what was the hurry? A hurry that was panicky enough for the president and his advisors to pick the wrong objective and then, stained with embarrassment and retraction, to refuse the open inquiry that could have settled the question in the first place? There is really only one possible answer to that question. Clinton needed to look “presidential” for a day.”

Public Complain of Malaria Vaccine Shortage | GHANA WEB | NOV 3, 2000

The general public has raised concern and doubt over malaria vaccines, which they said are running short in health centres.

In an interview in health centres, members of the public expressed ‘strong interest’, calling for ‘immediate’ explanation from the health department over what they saw as the acute shortage of chloroquine vaccines at a time when malaria is taking a high toll on the population.

Some people complained that they are always in a desperate situation when the health centre they rely on asks them to buy malaria vaccines.

‘We do not understand why the health centres don’t have sufficient malaria vaccines’ one of them noted.

They claimed that usually disputes broke out between patients and nurses over what some saw as the ‘negligible’ attention given to the sick.

However several health personnel highlighted the government’s ratification and signing of the Roll Black Malaria Chater, should have prevented the shortage. In the wake of the ratification the personnel said they are at a loss – unable to understand why there is a shortage of malaria vaccines in health centres. ‘The government should be very careful with malaria and should provide adequate vaccines in all the health centres, otherwise it can cause a serious setback for the development of this country,’ they warned.