They discovered new risks when warring factions could now monitor international communications and threaten retaliation within a couple of hours if they did not like what was being reported, especially if it contained sensitive military information or evidence of killings. Central to these combined failures was a naivete and fundamental lack of understanding of the new role of information management in conflict. In that, the local African forces were far ahead of the NGOs and media who assumed for too long they were reporting a 'tin pot war' and monitoring a crisis that easily fitted the classic template of a regional conflict like Bosnia. The press and aid workers were outflanked by a clever and ruthless campaign of information conceived at the highest levels which they found impossible to counter effectively. Despite the lessons of the Great Lakes, humanitarian agencies continue to founder on the issue of information, failing to understand the new dynamics of real-time information in conflict.
Information is no longer just about press releases and sound-bite interviews.
It is about anyone in a conflict and what happens to their information, how it is eventually used and by whom. In the real-time environment of short news cycles and instant communications what is legitimate 'humanitarian' information to an aid worker is intelligence gathering and a military threat to a warring faction. NGOs continue to treat information handling as secondary, a preserve of often ill-prepared press officers, when it is in fact about guaranteeing the survival of an operation. On the media side, it is clear virtually none of the reporting failures identified by the Joint Steering Committee Report on Rwanda 1994 have been considered, let alone acted upon. Even experienced Africa hands who admitted a degree of guilt at their failures in Rwanda in 1994, confirmed when it comes to accuracy and balance, they by and large failed again.