ABSTRACT
The limitations of the Bureaucratized Good Samaritan were apparent throughout the conduct of the Rwanda refugee relief operation. In a general way they were the following: Lack of a well-defined planning horizon, susceptibility to manipulation by politically interested parties and the press, and artificial rigidification of new social boundaries by the assistance bureaucracies. Each of these limitations was inherited from a structure that was brought to Tanzania—from Somalia, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and the other emergencies that the international refugee relief regime responded to. In the same vein, in 1999 the problem in Kosovo shifted from the KLA, which was described by the US government as being a "terrorist organization" involved in the drug trade, to Slobodan Milosevic within a period of a few months. In Kosovo the problem is still working itself out. Predictably, more recent estimates of the dead tend toward the lower end of those made on CNN during the war.
