INTRODUCTION
1. The International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events was created by the Organization of African Unity. As the genocide was unprecedented in African annals, so is the Panel. This is the first time in the history of the OAU that Africa's Heads of State and Governments have established a commission that will be completely independent of its creators in its findings and its recommendations. We are honored by the responsibility that has been entrusted to us.
2. Throughout our work, which began with a meeting in Addis Ababa in October 1998, we have attempted to function in a manner worthy of this honor and consistent with the gravity of the subject matter. The expansive and comprehensive mandate within which we operated appears in full as the first appendix of this report, but we want to reproduce a key portion of it here:
The Panel is expected to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the surrounding events in the Great Lakes Region...as part of efforts aimed at averting and preventing further wide-scale conflicts in the... Region. It is therefore expected to establish the facts about how such a grievous crime was conceived, planned and, executed; to look at the failure to enforce the Genocide Convention in Rwanda and in the Great Lakes Region; and to recommend measures aimed at redressing the consequences of the genocide and at preventing any possible recurrence of such a crime.
3. We are conscious of the great expectations that have awaited this report and are grateful at the same time for the realism that has tempered those expectations. Hardly any person to whom we have spoken thinks that the genocide was a simple event or expects that, in some magical way, this Panel will divine simple lessons for the future. On the contrary, in the very course of our investigation, we watched as regional complexities throughout the nations of the Great Lakes Region added complicating new dimensions to our work. The 1994 genocide in one small country ultimately triggered a conflict in the heart of Africa that has directly or indirectly touched at least one-third of all the nations on the continent. This does not mean that we are dealing with an exclusively African phenomenon, however. On the contrary, while it is not reasonable to assign the responsibility for all of Africa's present problems to external forces or ancient historical roots, our work for this report underlines the perils of ignoring external or historic realities. Of course, there would have been no genocide if certain Rwandans had not organized and carried it out; there is no denying that fundamental truth. But it is equally true that throughout the past century external forces have helped shape Rwanda's destiny and that of its neighbors. Sixty years of colonial domination and the later spread of globalization are integral aspects of the Rwanda story. The truth, as we will see repeatedly in our analysis, is that both the so-called international community and history have had powerful and decisive impacts on Rwanda specifically, and on the Great Lakes Region in general.
4. It is important that we articulate our conviction on a central matter. From the start, we have been acutely conscious of another dimension of our great responsibility in preparing this document: We are an international group asked by the Heads of State of Africa to speak out on an African calamity. A small library of books, reports and studies of the Rwandan genocide has already been published, and it is certain that many more will emerge. But what is notable about the existing material is how much of it has been produced by non-Africans, let alone by non-Rwandans. These works reflect the reality that a genocide, almost by definition, becomes the world's property. Nevertheless, we have made a conscious effort to present a report from an African perspective, aimed at both African and international audiences.
5. We have also understood from the outset that the credibility of our findings depends on solid, demonstrable evidence, and we have scrupulously attempted to follow that precept. We adhered to the usual research protocols. We met with, listened to, and had extensive dialogues with 270 people in 10 countries, representing every facet of this tragedy: academics; United Nations officials; representatives of Rwandan, neighboring, and several other governments; survivors; accused perpetrators; refugees; and human rights groups. We have read the burgeoning literature mentioned above. We have had access to many original documents, and we commissioned studies of our own where there were vacuums to fill.
6. We have also had experiences that are almost impossible to convey in words. Rwanda has transformed certain of its killing fields into memorial sites, and we visited some of them. We confronted the twisted remains of literally thousands of people still lying in the very classrooms and churches where they had been mercilessly slaughtered only a few years before. It was easy to see, especially in the schools, how many of the murdered were young children. We were left numb. There was nothing to say. We met with victims and heard their almost unbearable stories. We want to share one such experience here because, for all of us, hearing it ranked among the most traumatic episodes of our lives. We were taken to Rwanda's capital, Kigali, to visit a little facility called the Polyclinique de l'Espoir, - the Polyclinic of Hope. It provides basic services for women who were brutalized, physically and sexually, during the genocide. The clinic grew slowly because so many female victims were still terrified after their ordeal, and many were ashamed of what had been inflicted on them. But over the ensuing few years, more than 500 women have used its services. We had already met a number of these women when the clinic supervisor asked us to enter a small room at the back. In this tiny room, we heard from three survivors - three women, sitting side-by-side on a steel cot, who spoke of their tribulations as if in the desperate hope that somehow we could do something. One was a young woman who had been raped repeatedly over several days and then abandoned. She was now HIV-positive and saw no reason for living. The second was a woman who had been beaten and sexually mutilated, and who lived in terror because her attackers, who had been and continued to be her neighbors, still passed freely by her home every day. The third was a woman who was imprisoned, lashed to a bed for several months, and gang-raped continuously. Her final words to us were the stuff of nightmares, vivid, awful, impossible ever to forget. She said, with a chilling matter-of-factness: "For the rest of my life, whether I am eating or sleeping or working, I shall never get the smell of semen out of my nostrils."
7. The Panel decided to recount this experience here for two reasons. First, it conveys a sense of the outrages against humanity that were commonplace during the genocide, and we have deliberately chosen to report such abominations only sparingly in the pages that follow. Secondly, this report is a direct outcome of such experiences. We freely acknowledge that it has been impossible to do our task without being profoundly shaken by the subject matter. Our experiences in Rwanda – the witnesses to whom we listened and the memorial sites we visited – often left us emotionally drained. This is not a report that could be produced with detachment. For those seeking bureaucratic assessments or academic treatises, there are other sources. The nature of these events demands a human, intensely personal, response, and this is very much a personal report from the seven of us. Readers have a right to expect us to be objective and to root our observations and conclusions in the facts of the case, and we have striven rigorously to do so. But they must not expect us to be dispassionate.
8. Invariably, we were asked the obvious question by all who did not take part: How could they have done it? How could neighbors and friends and colleagues have slaughtered each other in cold blood? Could it happen to anyone? Could we have done it? How could an ordinary man kill innocent women and children? To answer these chilling questions, we first listened hard to Rwandans telling us their stories. From there, our technique throughout our work was to use empathy as a tool to help us understand the many actors who were involved. We tried to make sense of the world from their perspectives in order to fathom their motivations and actions. We used this approach for everyone, whether the secretary-general of the United Nations or a local official in a Rwandan village, and we hope we gained certain insights as a result.
9. But when it came to trying to understand the actual act of killing, we confess our total failure. We acknowledge from the outset this failure. We have grasped the insidious process by which people were stirred up. We understand how they were manipulated and how they came to accept the demonization and dehumanization of others. We studied the literature, some of it highly controversial, that attempts to account for collective human breakdowns in which ordinary citizens turn into monsters. We have arrived at a certain comprehension of the complex series of factors at work. But we do not pretend for a moment that we have reached any understanding of the act of one neighbor or one Christian or one teacher actually hacking another to death. Perhaps, some day, answers will emerge. But for now, we are able to offer little illumination on the first questions that so many people reasonably ask.
10. In fact, as the following pages frequently acknowledge, there are many aspects of this story that defy our understanding. Almost the entire world stood by and watched the genocide happen. Influential outsiders worked closely with the perpetrators. The victims were betrayed repeatedly by the international community, often for the most craven of reasons. At times, examining other atrocities throughout history and throughout the world, we have had much cause to wonder about humankind's humanity. Still, in the end, we remain satisfied that the genocide in Rwanda was an aberration, that killers are made, not born, and that such tragedies need never happen again. It is in the world's hands to make sure that it will never happen again. It is to that conviction that our report is dedicated.
Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
[CHAPTER 1
GENOCIDE AND THE 20TH CENTURY
1.1. Ours has been a century to test one's optimism about the human condition. On the one hand, for the first time in history, human ingenuity has evolved to the point where there is, in theory, the capacity to provide every person on earth with a healthy and materially comfortable life. On the other hand, there is the human capacity for destruction and evil.
1.2. We now understand that the 20th century was the most violent in recorded human history, and that no one people had a monopoly on causing pain and misery to any others. The Second World War, which ended just 55 years ago, was a catastrophe each member of this Panel can personally recall. Reconstruction required unprecedented massive investment through the Marshall Plan to create the prosperous, stable, western Europe of recent decades. Yet even today, conflicts rage in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, an uneasy truce prevails in Northern Ireland, and western European governments have engaged in wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, there has barely been a single decade since its independence in which the United States has not been involved in military conflict.[1]
1.3. Violence, of course, was at the heart of Europe's early empires, as well. It was the ultimate source of imperial control. Always an implicit threat, violence was often enough an active curse, and not a single colonial power was exempt from its use. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, on every continent where Europeans and Americans chose to impose their domination, savage brutality was always available to bring unwilling subjects to heel. This phenomenon was neither subtle nor hidden; on the contrary, it was based on a central premise of the “civilized world” for much of the past two centuries. Typically, Charles Darwin himself believed that, “At some future period not very distant... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Adolf Hitler grew up in a world where this view was commonplace, as did the Christian missionaries and German and Belgian officials who ruled Rwanda for a half-century. Here was the very core of the justification for European imperialism: the assumed right of the "superior race" to dominate the rest.[2]
1.4. The culture of violence that characterized so much of the colonial rule and its aftermath and that operated with such complete impunity for so long, is relevant to the story of Rwanda. But we must draw a vital distinction here: Genocide is of a different nature, a different order of magnitude, than even the unspeakable horrors we have so far been discussing. The world has known an unending torrent of violence, repression, slaughter, carnage, massacres, and pogroms (official, organized, persecutions or massacres of minorities). Terrible as they all are, none is on a par with genocide. The world recognizes this fact, and so do the members of this Panel.
1.5. It is no tribute to our era that we are becoming experts on the phenomenon of genocide. Indeed, the very term was unknown before it was coined in 1944 by legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to the United States, to describe the Nazis' near-successful attempts to exterminate the Jews and Roma of Europe. It was Hitler whose actions made the world add the question of genocide to the international agenda. After lengthy debate and ample compromise, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known more commonly as "the Genocide Convention," and reproduced in full in Appendix I of this report.) The convention's key clause is contained in the definition that appears in Article 2: genocide is committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
1.6. Those who commit genocide have deliberately set out not just to murder others. They are not merely guilty of crimes against humanity – forms of criminality and inhumane acts beyond simple murder. Genocide goes further, to the ultimate depths of human perversity. Its aim is to exterminate a part or an entire category of human beings guilty only of being themselves. Genocide is explicitly intended as a “final solution” – an attempt to rid the world of a group that can no longer be tolerated. In a genocide, attacks on women and children are not unfortunate by-products of conflict, or collateral damage, in the bloodless jargon of military bureaucracies. On the contrary, women and children are direct targets, since they ensure the future of the group that can no longer be allowed to survive.
1.7. For some 40 years after the Genocide Convention was adopted, it was hardly more than a formality of international law. As one authority puts it, “It was soon relegated to obscurity as the human rights movement focussed on more ‘modern’ atrocities: apartheid, torture, disappearances.”[3] The past 15 years have changed all that. A renewed wave of particularly grisly atrocities in Cambodia, the Balkans, and the Great Lakes Region of Africa put the phenomenon of genocide back in the headlines, while the international community's new-found focus on the criminal prosecution of human rights violations propelled the Genocide Convention to a prominent place on the public agenda. International criminal tribunals established by the United Nations Security Council are at this moment dealing with the crimes committed in recent years in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and are creating history as they proceed.
1.8. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has been highly criticized on many levels, in the long run it may be remembered for some ground-breaking precedents it has created with respect to international human rights law that are bound to influence the proposed new International Criminal Court. It has been, after all, the first international tribunal to convict for the crime of genocide; the Nuremberg tribunal did not have the mandate to convict for the crime of genocide. Jean Kambanda, Rwandan Prime Minister during the genocide, was also the first person to plead guilty to the crime of genocide before an international tribunal, although he has since recanted his confession.
1.9. In addition to the crime of genocide, the ICTR has made significant strides in the area of women's human rights, which this Panel enthusiastically welcomes. One man has been convicted for the crime of rape as a part of a systematic plan, not as genocide but as a crime against humanity. It is also notable that the ICTR has indicted the first woman ever to be charged by an international tribunal and the first to be charged with the crime of rape. Pauline Nyiramusuhuko was minister of Family and Women's Affairs in Rwanda during the genocide and has been charged with rape in the context of command responsibility. The allegation is that she was responsible because she knew that her subordinates were raping Tutsi women and failed to take measures to stop or to punish them.[4]
1.10. Specialists in the field are watching the proceedings of the ICTR with great interest and hope. For, as we explored the research for this report, we learned to our surprise that the very concept of genocide is far more controversial than we had previously understood. For one thing, many of these experts are critical of the various shortcomings of the original Genocide Convention. For another, despite the convention, to this day, the UN has never formally charged any government with genocide. And finally, critics point out that the convention has failed to prevent genocide, although the duty to do so is set out in its terms. Put bluntly, are states required, as a question of legal obligation, to take action up to and including military intervention in order to prevent the crime from occurring?[5] Paradoxically, it is this precise obligation that constrained many states from describing the catastrophe in Rwanda as a genocide.
1.11. What the Genocide Convention badly lacks, as the secretary-general of the International Commission of Jurists explained to the Panel, is a trigger mechanism which results in firm, appropriate action that prevents such atrocities ever being perpetrated by mankind again. At present the convention is almost purely reactive, in effect only providing for action after the crime has been committed, by which time it is too late for the victims and, indeed, for humanity in general. As in the case of Rwanda, countless inexplicable atrocities were allowed to occur before any action was taken under the convention. Even then, the convention merely says that states may call upon the UN to take such actions as they consider appropriate. As was demonstrated in Rwanda, what the UN considered appropriate action did anything but prevent or suppress the genocide.[6]
1.12. Genocide experts constitute a serious, dedicated, and growing group consisting primarily of human rights activists, survivor groups, legal authorities, and academics. They write books and articles on the subject, produce journals of genocide research, and devote themselves to the prevention of future genocides. They also debate at length and disagree about the precise definition of genocide, which proves to be a far more complicated and nuanced exercise than most of us would imagine. And the exercise matters, for the definition determines which acts of inhumanity deserve to be labelled genocide.
1.13. A recent volume called Century of Genocide, for example, includes no fewer than 14 case studies of what the editors consider genocides in the 20th century alone.[7] Theirs is a highly controversial list. Other authorities take exception to some of the choices made, and offer cases that this book omits. Century of Genocide begins with the German annihilation of the Hereros of south-west Africa in 1904, and ends finally with Rwanda nine decades later.
1.14. Yet it ignores the Congo, although a recent study makes a persuasive case that King Leopold of Belgium committed genocide when, as personal ruler of the entire Congo a century ago, he was responsible for the death of ten million Congolese – fully half the entire population of the territory when it was given to him by his fellow European leaders.[8] Literally dozens of other examples can be given of atrocities being described as genocide, each with its passionate champion.
1.15. It is not for this Panel to judge the appropriateness of using the word genocide to describe the various atrocities of our century, with the obvious exception of Rwanda. We are concerned, however, that the currency of the concept not be debased too frivolously by its trivialization. Any massacre is deplorable; so is any violation of human rights. But very few constitute genocide. If any atrocity can be considered an act of genocide, and if we cry genocide after every injustice, then words will lose their meaning and the gravity of the offence will soon wane. For all of humanity's evil deeds, genocide is not yet a commonplace occurrence on this earth, and we feel strongly that such words and concepts be carefully husbanded and used with the greatest care. That is why we encourage the pursuit of a definition that is comprehensive and functional.
1.16. In the end, however, we harbour no illusions that universal agreement will be found on this visceral issue. After all, there are still Holocaust deniers who refuse to acknowledge Hitler's crimes, Khmer Rouge leaders who have never admitted to their own genocidal actions and, we regret to say, Rwandans who refuse to acknowledge the genocide of 1994.
1.17. We can, however, make our own position clear. This Panel has no doubt whatsoever that the tragic events of April to July 1994 in Rwanda constitute a genocide, by any conceivable definition of that term. The chapter of this report that describes this period explains our position in detail. But whatever else the world agrees or debates, whatever crimes other Rwandans have committed at any time in the past decade, whatever the case in Burundi, we insist that it is impossible for any reasonable person to reach any conclusion other than that a genocide took place in Rwanda in 1994, and that it was surely one of this century's least ambiguous cases of genocide. That is why this Panel was created. Unless agreement is first reached on this basic premise, no peace will ever come to the soul of that troubled country.
GENOCIDE AND THE 20TH CENTURY
1.1. Ours has been a century to test one's optimism about the human condition. On the one hand, for the first time in history, human ingenuity has evolved to the point where there is, in theory, the capacity to provide every person on earth with a healthy and materially comfortable life. On the other hand, there is the human capacity for destruction and evil.
1.2. We now understand that the 20th century was the most violent in recorded human history, and that no one people had a monopoly on causing pain and misery to any others. The Second World War, which ended just 55 years ago, was a catastrophe each member of this Panel can personally recall. Reconstruction required unprecedented massive investment through the Marshall Plan to create the prosperous, stable, western Europe of recent decades. Yet even today, conflicts rage in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, an uneasy truce prevails in Northern Ireland, and western European governments have engaged in wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, there has barely been a single decade since its independence in which the United States has not been involved in military conflict.[1]
1.3. Violence, of course, was at the heart of Europe's early empires, as well. It was the ultimate source of imperial control. Always an implicit threat, violence was often enough an active curse, and not a single colonial power was exempt from its use. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, on every continent where Europeans and Americans chose to impose their domination, savage brutality was always available to bring unwilling subjects to heel. This phenomenon was neither subtle nor hidden; on the contrary, it was based on a central premise of the “civilized world” for much of the past two centuries. Typically, Charles Darwin himself believed that, “At some future period not very distant... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Adolf Hitler grew up in a world where this view was commonplace, as did the Christian missionaries and German and Belgian officials who ruled Rwanda for a half-century. Here was the very core of the justification for European imperialism: the assumed right of the "superior race" to dominate the rest.[2]
1.4. The culture of violence that characterized so much of the colonial rule and its aftermath and that operated with such complete impunity for so long, is relevant to the story of Rwanda. But we must draw a vital distinction here: Genocide is of a different nature, a different order of magnitude, than even the unspeakable horrors we have so far been discussing. The world has known an unending torrent of violence, repression, slaughter, carnage, massacres, and pogroms (official, organized, persecutions or massacres of minorities). Terrible as they all are, none is on a par with genocide. The world recognizes this fact, and so do the members of this Panel.
1.5. It is no tribute to our era that we are becoming experts on the phenomenon of genocide. Indeed, the very term was unknown before it was coined in 1944 by legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to the United States, to describe the Nazis' near-successful attempts to exterminate the Jews and Roma of Europe. It was Hitler whose actions made the world add the question of genocide to the international agenda. After lengthy debate and ample compromise, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known more commonly as "the Genocide Convention," and reproduced in full in Appendix I of this report.) The convention's key clause is contained in the definition that appears in Article 2: genocide is committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
1.6. Those who commit genocide have deliberately set out not just to murder others. They are not merely guilty of crimes against humanity – forms of criminality and inhumane acts beyond simple murder. Genocide goes further, to the ultimate depths of human perversity. Its aim is to exterminate a part or an entire category of human beings guilty only of being themselves. Genocide is explicitly intended as a “final solution” – an attempt to rid the world of a group that can no longer be tolerated. In a genocide, attacks on women and children are not unfortunate by-products of conflict, or collateral damage, in the bloodless jargon of military bureaucracies. On the contrary, women and children are direct targets, since they ensure the future of the group that can no longer be allowed to survive.
1.7. For some 40 years after the Genocide Convention was adopted, it was hardly more than a formality of international law. As one authority puts it, “It was soon relegated to obscurity as the human rights movement focussed on more ‘modern’ atrocities: apartheid, torture, disappearances.”[3] The past 15 years have changed all that. A renewed wave of particularly grisly atrocities in Cambodia, the Balkans, and the Great Lakes Region of Africa put the phenomenon of genocide back in the headlines, while the international community's new-found focus on the criminal prosecution of human rights violations propelled the Genocide Convention to a prominent place on the public agenda. International criminal tribunals established by the United Nations Security Council are at this moment dealing with the crimes committed in recent years in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and are creating history as they proceed.
1.8. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has been highly criticized on many levels, in the long run it may be remembered for some ground-breaking precedents it has created with respect to international human rights law that are bound to influence the proposed new International Criminal Court. It has been, after all, the first international tribunal to convict for the crime of genocide; the Nuremberg tribunal did not have the mandate to convict for the crime of genocide. Jean Kambanda, Rwandan Prime Minister during the genocide, was also the first person to plead guilty to the crime of genocide before an international tribunal, although he has since recanted his confession.
1.9. In addition to the crime of genocide, the ICTR has made significant strides in the area of women's human rights, which this Panel enthusiastically welcomes. One man has been convicted for the crime of rape as a part of a systematic plan, not as genocide but as a crime against humanity. It is also notable that the ICTR has indicted the first woman ever to be charged by an international tribunal and the first to be charged with the crime of rape. Pauline Nyiramusuhuko was minister of Family and Women's Affairs in Rwanda during the genocide and has been charged with rape in the context of command responsibility. The allegation is that she was responsible because she knew that her subordinates were raping Tutsi women and failed to take measures to stop or to punish them.[4]
1.10. Specialists in the field are watching the proceedings of the ICTR with great interest and hope. For, as we explored the research for this report, we learned to our surprise that the very concept of genocide is far more controversial than we had previously understood. For one thing, many of these experts are critical of the various shortcomings of the original Genocide Convention. For another, despite the convention, to this day, the UN has never formally charged any government with genocide. And finally, critics point out that the convention has failed to prevent genocide, although the duty to do so is set out in its terms. Put bluntly, are states required, as a question of legal obligation, to take action up to and including military intervention in order to prevent the crime from occurring?[5] Paradoxically, it is this precise obligation that constrained many states from describing the catastrophe in Rwanda as a genocide.
1.11. What the Genocide Convention badly lacks, as the secretary-general of the International Commission of Jurists explained to the Panel, is a trigger mechanism which results in firm, appropriate action that prevents such atrocities ever being perpetrated by mankind again. At present the convention is almost purely reactive, in effect only providing for action after the crime has been committed, by which time it is too late for the victims and, indeed, for humanity in general. As in the case of Rwanda, countless inexplicable atrocities were allowed to occur before any action was taken under the convention. Even then, the convention merely says that states may call upon the UN to take such actions as they consider appropriate. As was demonstrated in Rwanda, what the UN considered appropriate action did anything but prevent or suppress the genocide.[6]
1.12. Genocide experts constitute a serious, dedicated, and growing group consisting primarily of human rights activists, survivor groups, legal authorities, and academics. They write books and articles on the subject, produce journals of genocide research, and devote themselves to the prevention of future genocides. They also debate at length and disagree about the precise definition of genocide, which proves to be a far more complicated and nuanced exercise than most of us would imagine. And the exercise matters, for the definition determines which acts of inhumanity deserve to be labelled genocide.
1.13. A recent volume called Century of Genocide, for example, includes no fewer than 14 case studies of what the editors consider genocides in the 20th century alone.[7] Theirs is a highly controversial list. Other authorities take exception to some of the choices made, and offer cases that this book omits. Century of Genocide begins with the German annihilation of the Hereros of south-west Africa in 1904, and ends finally with Rwanda nine decades later.
1.14. Yet it ignores the Congo, although a recent study makes a persuasive case that King Leopold of Belgium committed genocide when, as personal ruler of the entire Congo a century ago, he was responsible for the death of ten million Congolese – fully half the entire population of the territory when it was given to him by his fellow European leaders.[8] Literally dozens of other examples can be given of atrocities being described as genocide, each with its passionate champion.
1.15. It is not for this Panel to judge the appropriateness of using the word genocide to describe the various atrocities of our century, with the obvious exception of Rwanda. We are concerned, however, that the currency of the concept not be debased too frivolously by its trivialization. Any massacre is deplorable; so is any violation of human rights. But very few constitute genocide. If any atrocity can be considered an act of genocide, and if we cry genocide after every injustice, then words will lose their meaning and the gravity of the offence will soon wane. For all of humanity's evil deeds, genocide is not yet a commonplace occurrence on this earth, and we feel strongly that such words and concepts be carefully husbanded and used with the greatest care. That is why we encourage the pursuit of a definition that is comprehensive and functional.
1.16. In the end, however, we harbour no illusions that universal agreement will be found on this visceral issue. After all, there are still Holocaust deniers who refuse to acknowledge Hitler's crimes, Khmer Rouge leaders who have never admitted to their own genocidal actions and, we regret to say, Rwandans who refuse to acknowledge the genocide of 1994.
1.17. We can, however, make our own position clear. This Panel has no doubt whatsoever that the tragic events of April to July 1994 in Rwanda constitute a genocide, by any conceivable definition of that term. The chapter of this report that describes this period explains our position in detail. But whatever else the world agrees or debates, whatever crimes other Rwandans have committed at any time in the past decade, whatever the case in Burundi, we insist that it is impossible for any reasonable person to reach any conclusion other than that a genocide took place in Rwanda in 1994, and that it was surely one of this century's least ambiguous cases of genocide. That is why this Panel was created. Unless agreement is first reached on this basic premise, no peace will ever come to the soul of that troubled country.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 2
THE ROOTS OF THE CRISIS TO 1959
2.1. One question more than any other dominates all analyses of the Rwandan genocide: Could it have been prevented? Ultimately, we reached the extremely disturbing conclusion that the international community was in fact in a position to avert this terrible tragedy entirely or in part. But in exploring the background of the tragedy, we discovered three important truths that confront anyone wanting to understand Rwanda properly. First, there are hardly any important aspects of the story that are not complex and controversial; it is almost impossible to write on the subject without inadvertently oversimplifying something or angering someone.
2.2. Secondly, in Rwanda, interpretations of the past have become political tools routinely used by all parties to justify their current interests. This is true at every stage, from the pre-colonial period to the genocide itself. For this reason, any discussion of these matters risks appearing to be biased towards one side or another and being dismissed accordingly. We want to stress that we have come to our task with few preconceptions and, conscious of the traps that awaited us, we have worked especially hard to ground our judgements on the best evidence we have uncovered.
2.3. Finally, we have found major disagreements among students of Rwandan history on questions of numbers. Time after time, conflicting figures are proffered: for the number of those who fled the country at independence, the number killed in various massacres, the total number eliminated during the genocide, and the numbers of killers and refugees who fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the genocide. At times, amazingly enough, these numbers differ by as much as hundreds of thousands, yet the authors are all recognized authorities in the field. All scholars agree, however, that the overriding reality was that large numbers of innocent people suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens and that the outside world did nothing to stop it. This reality, not discrepant figures, was for us the important issue to focus on.
Let us look briefly at the historical background. The first thing an outsider must understand is that there exists today two conflicting versions of Rwandan history, one favoured essentially by Hutu, the other reflecting the present government's stated commitment to national unity. The fundamental historical debate revolves around whether ethnic differences between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi existed before the colonial era. The two groups themselves disagree profoundly on this issue, and each can find certain authorities to support their position. Certainly, there were Hutu and Tutsi for many centuries. The former had developed as an agricultural people, while the Tutsi were predominantly cattle herders. Yet the two groups had none of the usual differentiating characteristics that are said to separate ethnic groups. They spoke the same language, shared the same religious beliefs, and lived side-by-side; intermarriage was not uncommon. Relations between them were not particularly confrontational; the historical record makes it clear that hostilities were much more frequent among competing dynasties of the same ethnic category than between the Hutu and the Tutsi themselves.
2.4. Even today, after all the carnage, one historian estimates that at least 25 per cent of Rwandans have both Hutu and Tutsi among their eight great-grandparents. Looking back even further, the percentage with mixed ancestry would most likely exceed 50 per cent.[1] These conclusions are inconsistent with the preferred Hutu version of history, which asserts that the Tutsi were treacherous foreign conquerors who had rejected and oppressed the Hutu since time immemorial.
2.6. But the view that ethnic differentiation began prior to the colonial era also contradicts the Tutsi version of history, which our Panel heard in Kigali from several persons and officials.[2] This position holds that Tutsi and Hutu lived in harmony until European colonialism created artificial divisions that led ultimately to the final genocidal catastrophe. In the new, post-genocide Rwanda, ethnic classification has officially disappeared, and even the terminology of ethnicity is forbidden. Officially, all Rwandans are again what they ostensibly once were: simply Rwandans.
2.7. Since history can matter greatly to a country's sense of itself, these conflicting views of the past should be reconciled. The most positive way would be to recognize the flaws in both versions. Using this quite conventional test, it seems most likely that it was under Mwami (King) Rwabugiri, the Tutsi who ruled during the late 1800s, that the chief characteristics of modern Rwanda were fixed. From that point, a powerful head of a centralized state provided firm direction to a series of subordinate structures that were ethnically differentiated under Tutsi domination. And while there was no known violence between the Tutsi and the Hutu during those pre-colonial years, the explicit domination of one group and the subordination of the other could hardly have failed to create antagonism between the two.[3] In short, it is clear that Rwandans have, in some way, regarded themselves as members of either one or the other ethnic group for well over a century now, and when we take into account the massive trauma of the past decade, it seems inconceivable to us that any future lasting peace for this country is possible if it fails to take that reality squarely into account.
2.8. Having said that, we now come to two of the great culprits in this tragic saga. From 1895 to 1916, Rwanda was a German colony. In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Germany was forced to retreat from its east African territories and was replaced in Rwanda and Burundi by Belgium. For the next 45 years, the Belgians controlled the destinies of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. Virtually all authorities (including both Hutu and Tutsi) agree that first Germany, but above all Belgium, organized the colony very much along the lines that Mwami Rwabugiri had drawn, though the colonizers made those lines far more rigid, inflexible, and self-serving. But the point to be noted is that they did not have to do so. The interpretation that the European powers were merely maintaining the status quo as they had found it ignores their power to impose on their new African acquisitions more or less whatever form of governance they chose.
2.9. This was the first defining moment in the modern history of the country, a building block upon which all others would stand and, eventually, fall. It served the purposes of the colonizers to recognize the King and the Tutsi rulers surrounding him and to assign to them significant – if always subservient – political power and administrative duties. Through the classic system of indirect rule, a mere handful of Europeans were able to run Rwanda in whatever manner they deemed most beneficial to imperial interests. They also shared the Tutsi aristocracy's interest in extending its control over the small Hutu kingdoms in the north-west that had resisted this fate until now and in bringing the other peripheral regions of the country more tightly under central command. At the same time, the colonizers did not hesitate to change any aspect of society they found wanting. These included making the King subject to his colonial masters and reducing the influence of the remaining Hutu sub-chiefs.
2.10. Colonizer and the local elite also shared an interest in endorsing the pernicious, racist notions about the Tutsi and the Hutu that had been concocted by missionaries, explorers, and early anthropologists in that period. The theory was based both on the appearance of many Tutsi – generally taller and thinner than were most Hutu – and European incredulity over the fact that Africans could, by themselves, create the sophisticated kingdom that the first white men to arrive in Rwanda found there. From the thinnest of air, an original racial fantasy known as the Hamitic hypothesis was spun by the first British intruders. It posited that the Tutsi had sprung from a superior Caucasoid race from the Nile Valley, and probably even had Christian origins. On the evolutionary scale then all the rage in Europe, the Tutsi could be seen as approaching, very painstakingly, to be sure, the exalted level of white people. They were considered more intelligent, more reliable, harder working, and more like whites than the “Bantu” Hutu majority.[4]
2.11. The Belgians appreciated this natural order of things so greatly that, in a series of administrative measures between 1926 and 1932, they institutionalized the cleavage between the two races (race being the explicit concept used at the time before the milder notion of ethnicity was introduced later on), culminating in identity cards that were issued to every Rwandan, declaring each to be either Hutu or Tutsi. This card system was maintained for over 60 years and, in a tragic irony, eventually became key to enabling Hutu killers to identify during the genocide the Tutsi who were its original beneficiaries.[5]
2.12. A version of the facts meant to underline the arbitrariness and foolishness of the identification exercise is repeated in many histories but, as is true of much about the country's past, is disputed by others. It contends that anyone who owned 10 cows was automatically designated a Tutsi, while the rest were deemed to be Hutu. A quite different account holds that the Belgians asked each Rwandan to declare for himself or herself, with 15 per cent identifying themselves as Tutsi, 84 per cent as Hutu, and one per cent as Twa, a group of potters and hunter-gatherers.[6] Whichever way ethnic identity was assigned, it became the basis for determining the allocation of many of the prizes the country had to offer: school places, civil service jobs, and the like.
2.13. The ramifications of the Belgian system could hardly have been clearer. Between 1932 and 1957, for example, more than three-quarters of the students in the only secondary school in the small city of Butare were Tutsi. Ninety-five per cent of the country's civil service came to be Tutsi. Forty-three out of 45 chiefs and all but 10 of 559 sub-chiefs were Tutsi.[7]
2.14. Official racism evidently was not a system about which the colonizers were in any way ashamed; nor was their spiritual partner, the Catholic church of Rwanda. Indeed, the two supported and reinforced each other in mutually beneficial ways. Although Catholic missionaries had arrived before the Belgians, large-scale conversions to Catholicism came only with the administrative reforms of the late 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans converted, making the church the country's main social institution. When the King demonstrated an unacceptable determination to keep alive Rwandan traditions and customs and to resist the will of the administrators and missionaries, they united to depose him in favour of his son, who had been educated in mission schools and was likely to accept Christianity.[8] With the population's conversion, Belgium's interests were largely satisfied. They had created the Rwanda they wanted: centralized, easy to control, efficient, intolerant of nonconformity, and Catholic.
2.15. It is not possible to write about Rwanda without writing about the role of the Catholic church, which, since the arrival of the Belgians, has functioned virtually as the country's state church. That role, as evident during the genocide as it was in the colonial period, is one about which it would be hard to feel proud at any time.
2.16. Much of the elaborate Hamitic ideology was simply invented by the Catholic White Fathers, missionaries who wrote what later became the established version of Rwandan history to conform to their essentially racist views.[9] Because they controlled all schooling in the colony, the White Fathers were able, with the full endorsement of the Belgians, to indoctrinate generations of school children, both Hutu and Tutsi, with the pernicious Hamitic notions. Whatever else they learned, no student could have failed to absorb the lessons of ethnic cleavage and racial ranking.
2.17. Together, the Belgians and the Catholic church were guilty of what some call “ethnogenesis” – the institutionalization of rigid ethnic identities for political purposes. The proposition that it was legitimate to politicize and polarize society through ethnic cleavages – to play the 'ethnic card' for political advantage, as a later generation would describe the tactic – became integral to Rwandan public life. Ethnogenesis was by no means unknown in other African colonies and, destructive as it has been everywhere, no other genocide has occurred. But it was everywhere a force of great potential consequence and, in Rwanda, it combined with other factors with ultimately devastating consequences.
2.18. Until the end of the colonial period, Rwandan society resembled a steep, clearly defined pyramid. At the very top of the hierarchy were the whites, known locally as Bazungu; a tiny cluster of Belgian administrators; and Catholic missionaries whose power and control were undisputed. Below them were their chosen intermediaries, a very small group of Tutsi drawn mainly from two clans who monopolized most of the opportunities provided by indirect rule. Wherever the Belgians gave this group the latitude to exert control, they did so stringently, almost always leaving animosity behind in their wake.
2.19. The fact that just two Tutsi clans among many were privileged by colonial rule points to a central truth of Rwanda: It has never been valid to imply that a homogeneous Tutsi or Hutu community existed at any time.[10] From the past century through to the present, the Hutu and the Tutsi have always included various groups with different interests and perspectives. This reality was evident throughout the hierarchy. Below the small indigenous Tutsi elite were not only virtually all of Rwanda's Hutu population, but the large majority of their fellow Tutsi, as well. Most Tutsi were not much more privileged in social or economic terms than the Hutu. Although they were considered superior to the Hutu in theory, in practice most Tutsi were relegated to the status of serfs. Both had more than enough reason to resent the Tutsi chiefs who regularly imposed onerous obligations on the majority of the population, including taxes and the surrender of cash crops and unpaid labour. These compulsory activities could eat up half of an adult's working time, and failure to co-operate was dealt with brutally. In 1948, a UN delegation met with 250 peasants in Rwanda, 247 of whom reported that they had been beaten, many of them frequently.[11]
2.20. Nearly every well-known study of the Rwandan people emphasizes their respect for and deference to authority; some go so far as to describe a culture of blind obedience, and they cite this characteristic to explain why so many ordinary Hutu participated in the genocide.[12] In our view, this analysis is too simplistic. As we will show, there were a number of significant occasions over the decades under review when people did not hesitate to show their anger, frustration, and disappointment towards state authority. The characterization of Rwandans as natural followers minimizes the effects on a people of systematic manipulation, indoctrination, and coercion.
2.21.Certainly, no Rwandans appreciated the burdens so harshly forced on them. Most Tutsi shared the hardships of the Hutu; both were exploited by a privileged class. But to the Hutu, the oppressor was viewed not as a class, but as an ethnic group. Many Tutsi who were not among the elite contributed to this interpretation by flaunting the superior status conferred upon them by reason of ethnic identification. Many Tutsi looked upon the Hutu with open scorn, treated them with contempt and, in a variety of ways, humiliated them in social contacts.[13] The two groups virtually shared just one conviction: that the Twa were at the bottom of the Rwandan hierarchy. Whatever the objective similarities of Hutu and Tutsi, the cleavage between them had become commonplace in most aspects of Rwandan life by the end of the colonial era. The coming of independence created a perfect opportunity to bridge the gap between the two in the name of a larger Rwandan loyalty. But the chance was forfeited, as the downtrodden Hutu suddenly discovered the many convenient uses of the ethnic card. In the end, unlike that of most African countries where a single unifying nationalist movement had become predominant, Rwanda's independence was more of a repudiation by the majority of their despotic local overlords than of their harsh but remote European colonial masters.
THE ROOTS OF THE CRISIS TO 1959
2.1. One question more than any other dominates all analyses of the Rwandan genocide: Could it have been prevented? Ultimately, we reached the extremely disturbing conclusion that the international community was in fact in a position to avert this terrible tragedy entirely or in part. But in exploring the background of the tragedy, we discovered three important truths that confront anyone wanting to understand Rwanda properly. First, there are hardly any important aspects of the story that are not complex and controversial; it is almost impossible to write on the subject without inadvertently oversimplifying something or angering someone.
2.2. Secondly, in Rwanda, interpretations of the past have become political tools routinely used by all parties to justify their current interests. This is true at every stage, from the pre-colonial period to the genocide itself. For this reason, any discussion of these matters risks appearing to be biased towards one side or another and being dismissed accordingly. We want to stress that we have come to our task with few preconceptions and, conscious of the traps that awaited us, we have worked especially hard to ground our judgements on the best evidence we have uncovered.
2.3. Finally, we have found major disagreements among students of Rwandan history on questions of numbers. Time after time, conflicting figures are proffered: for the number of those who fled the country at independence, the number killed in various massacres, the total number eliminated during the genocide, and the numbers of killers and refugees who fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the genocide. At times, amazingly enough, these numbers differ by as much as hundreds of thousands, yet the authors are all recognized authorities in the field. All scholars agree, however, that the overriding reality was that large numbers of innocent people suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens and that the outside world did nothing to stop it. This reality, not discrepant figures, was for us the important issue to focus on.
Let us look briefly at the historical background. The first thing an outsider must understand is that there exists today two conflicting versions of Rwandan history, one favoured essentially by Hutu, the other reflecting the present government's stated commitment to national unity. The fundamental historical debate revolves around whether ethnic differences between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi existed before the colonial era. The two groups themselves disagree profoundly on this issue, and each can find certain authorities to support their position. Certainly, there were Hutu and Tutsi for many centuries. The former had developed as an agricultural people, while the Tutsi were predominantly cattle herders. Yet the two groups had none of the usual differentiating characteristics that are said to separate ethnic groups. They spoke the same language, shared the same religious beliefs, and lived side-by-side; intermarriage was not uncommon. Relations between them were not particularly confrontational; the historical record makes it clear that hostilities were much more frequent among competing dynasties of the same ethnic category than between the Hutu and the Tutsi themselves.
2.4. Even today, after all the carnage, one historian estimates that at least 25 per cent of Rwandans have both Hutu and Tutsi among their eight great-grandparents. Looking back even further, the percentage with mixed ancestry would most likely exceed 50 per cent.[1] These conclusions are inconsistent with the preferred Hutu version of history, which asserts that the Tutsi were treacherous foreign conquerors who had rejected and oppressed the Hutu since time immemorial.
2.6. But the view that ethnic differentiation began prior to the colonial era also contradicts the Tutsi version of history, which our Panel heard in Kigali from several persons and officials.[2] This position holds that Tutsi and Hutu lived in harmony until European colonialism created artificial divisions that led ultimately to the final genocidal catastrophe. In the new, post-genocide Rwanda, ethnic classification has officially disappeared, and even the terminology of ethnicity is forbidden. Officially, all Rwandans are again what they ostensibly once were: simply Rwandans.
2.7. Since history can matter greatly to a country's sense of itself, these conflicting views of the past should be reconciled. The most positive way would be to recognize the flaws in both versions. Using this quite conventional test, it seems most likely that it was under Mwami (King) Rwabugiri, the Tutsi who ruled during the late 1800s, that the chief characteristics of modern Rwanda were fixed. From that point, a powerful head of a centralized state provided firm direction to a series of subordinate structures that were ethnically differentiated under Tutsi domination. And while there was no known violence between the Tutsi and the Hutu during those pre-colonial years, the explicit domination of one group and the subordination of the other could hardly have failed to create antagonism between the two.[3] In short, it is clear that Rwandans have, in some way, regarded themselves as members of either one or the other ethnic group for well over a century now, and when we take into account the massive trauma of the past decade, it seems inconceivable to us that any future lasting peace for this country is possible if it fails to take that reality squarely into account.
2.8. Having said that, we now come to two of the great culprits in this tragic saga. From 1895 to 1916, Rwanda was a German colony. In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Germany was forced to retreat from its east African territories and was replaced in Rwanda and Burundi by Belgium. For the next 45 years, the Belgians controlled the destinies of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. Virtually all authorities (including both Hutu and Tutsi) agree that first Germany, but above all Belgium, organized the colony very much along the lines that Mwami Rwabugiri had drawn, though the colonizers made those lines far more rigid, inflexible, and self-serving. But the point to be noted is that they did not have to do so. The interpretation that the European powers were merely maintaining the status quo as they had found it ignores their power to impose on their new African acquisitions more or less whatever form of governance they chose.
2.9. This was the first defining moment in the modern history of the country, a building block upon which all others would stand and, eventually, fall. It served the purposes of the colonizers to recognize the King and the Tutsi rulers surrounding him and to assign to them significant – if always subservient – political power and administrative duties. Through the classic system of indirect rule, a mere handful of Europeans were able to run Rwanda in whatever manner they deemed most beneficial to imperial interests. They also shared the Tutsi aristocracy's interest in extending its control over the small Hutu kingdoms in the north-west that had resisted this fate until now and in bringing the other peripheral regions of the country more tightly under central command. At the same time, the colonizers did not hesitate to change any aspect of society they found wanting. These included making the King subject to his colonial masters and reducing the influence of the remaining Hutu sub-chiefs.
2.10. Colonizer and the local elite also shared an interest in endorsing the pernicious, racist notions about the Tutsi and the Hutu that had been concocted by missionaries, explorers, and early anthropologists in that period. The theory was based both on the appearance of many Tutsi – generally taller and thinner than were most Hutu – and European incredulity over the fact that Africans could, by themselves, create the sophisticated kingdom that the first white men to arrive in Rwanda found there. From the thinnest of air, an original racial fantasy known as the Hamitic hypothesis was spun by the first British intruders. It posited that the Tutsi had sprung from a superior Caucasoid race from the Nile Valley, and probably even had Christian origins. On the evolutionary scale then all the rage in Europe, the Tutsi could be seen as approaching, very painstakingly, to be sure, the exalted level of white people. They were considered more intelligent, more reliable, harder working, and more like whites than the “Bantu” Hutu majority.[4]
2.11. The Belgians appreciated this natural order of things so greatly that, in a series of administrative measures between 1926 and 1932, they institutionalized the cleavage between the two races (race being the explicit concept used at the time before the milder notion of ethnicity was introduced later on), culminating in identity cards that were issued to every Rwandan, declaring each to be either Hutu or Tutsi. This card system was maintained for over 60 years and, in a tragic irony, eventually became key to enabling Hutu killers to identify during the genocide the Tutsi who were its original beneficiaries.[5]
2.12. A version of the facts meant to underline the arbitrariness and foolishness of the identification exercise is repeated in many histories but, as is true of much about the country's past, is disputed by others. It contends that anyone who owned 10 cows was automatically designated a Tutsi, while the rest were deemed to be Hutu. A quite different account holds that the Belgians asked each Rwandan to declare for himself or herself, with 15 per cent identifying themselves as Tutsi, 84 per cent as Hutu, and one per cent as Twa, a group of potters and hunter-gatherers.[6] Whichever way ethnic identity was assigned, it became the basis for determining the allocation of many of the prizes the country had to offer: school places, civil service jobs, and the like.
2.13. The ramifications of the Belgian system could hardly have been clearer. Between 1932 and 1957, for example, more than three-quarters of the students in the only secondary school in the small city of Butare were Tutsi. Ninety-five per cent of the country's civil service came to be Tutsi. Forty-three out of 45 chiefs and all but 10 of 559 sub-chiefs were Tutsi.[7]
2.14. Official racism evidently was not a system about which the colonizers were in any way ashamed; nor was their spiritual partner, the Catholic church of Rwanda. Indeed, the two supported and reinforced each other in mutually beneficial ways. Although Catholic missionaries had arrived before the Belgians, large-scale conversions to Catholicism came only with the administrative reforms of the late 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans converted, making the church the country's main social institution. When the King demonstrated an unacceptable determination to keep alive Rwandan traditions and customs and to resist the will of the administrators and missionaries, they united to depose him in favour of his son, who had been educated in mission schools and was likely to accept Christianity.[8] With the population's conversion, Belgium's interests were largely satisfied. They had created the Rwanda they wanted: centralized, easy to control, efficient, intolerant of nonconformity, and Catholic.
2.15. It is not possible to write about Rwanda without writing about the role of the Catholic church, which, since the arrival of the Belgians, has functioned virtually as the country's state church. That role, as evident during the genocide as it was in the colonial period, is one about which it would be hard to feel proud at any time.
2.16. Much of the elaborate Hamitic ideology was simply invented by the Catholic White Fathers, missionaries who wrote what later became the established version of Rwandan history to conform to their essentially racist views.[9] Because they controlled all schooling in the colony, the White Fathers were able, with the full endorsement of the Belgians, to indoctrinate generations of school children, both Hutu and Tutsi, with the pernicious Hamitic notions. Whatever else they learned, no student could have failed to absorb the lessons of ethnic cleavage and racial ranking.
2.17. Together, the Belgians and the Catholic church were guilty of what some call “ethnogenesis” – the institutionalization of rigid ethnic identities for political purposes. The proposition that it was legitimate to politicize and polarize society through ethnic cleavages – to play the 'ethnic card' for political advantage, as a later generation would describe the tactic – became integral to Rwandan public life. Ethnogenesis was by no means unknown in other African colonies and, destructive as it has been everywhere, no other genocide has occurred. But it was everywhere a force of great potential consequence and, in Rwanda, it combined with other factors with ultimately devastating consequences.
2.18. Until the end of the colonial period, Rwandan society resembled a steep, clearly defined pyramid. At the very top of the hierarchy were the whites, known locally as Bazungu; a tiny cluster of Belgian administrators; and Catholic missionaries whose power and control were undisputed. Below them were their chosen intermediaries, a very small group of Tutsi drawn mainly from two clans who monopolized most of the opportunities provided by indirect rule. Wherever the Belgians gave this group the latitude to exert control, they did so stringently, almost always leaving animosity behind in their wake.
2.19. The fact that just two Tutsi clans among many were privileged by colonial rule points to a central truth of Rwanda: It has never been valid to imply that a homogeneous Tutsi or Hutu community existed at any time.[10] From the past century through to the present, the Hutu and the Tutsi have always included various groups with different interests and perspectives. This reality was evident throughout the hierarchy. Below the small indigenous Tutsi elite were not only virtually all of Rwanda's Hutu population, but the large majority of their fellow Tutsi, as well. Most Tutsi were not much more privileged in social or economic terms than the Hutu. Although they were considered superior to the Hutu in theory, in practice most Tutsi were relegated to the status of serfs. Both had more than enough reason to resent the Tutsi chiefs who regularly imposed onerous obligations on the majority of the population, including taxes and the surrender of cash crops and unpaid labour. These compulsory activities could eat up half of an adult's working time, and failure to co-operate was dealt with brutally. In 1948, a UN delegation met with 250 peasants in Rwanda, 247 of whom reported that they had been beaten, many of them frequently.[11]
2.20. Nearly every well-known study of the Rwandan people emphasizes their respect for and deference to authority; some go so far as to describe a culture of blind obedience, and they cite this characteristic to explain why so many ordinary Hutu participated in the genocide.[12] In our view, this analysis is too simplistic. As we will show, there were a number of significant occasions over the decades under review when people did not hesitate to show their anger, frustration, and disappointment towards state authority. The characterization of Rwandans as natural followers minimizes the effects on a people of systematic manipulation, indoctrination, and coercion.
2.21.Certainly, no Rwandans appreciated the burdens so harshly forced on them. Most Tutsi shared the hardships of the Hutu; both were exploited by a privileged class. But to the Hutu, the oppressor was viewed not as a class, but as an ethnic group. Many Tutsi who were not among the elite contributed to this interpretation by flaunting the superior status conferred upon them by reason of ethnic identification. Many Tutsi looked upon the Hutu with open scorn, treated them with contempt and, in a variety of ways, humiliated them in social contacts.[13] The two groups virtually shared just one conviction: that the Twa were at the bottom of the Rwandan hierarchy. Whatever the objective similarities of Hutu and Tutsi, the cleavage between them had become commonplace in most aspects of Rwandan life by the end of the colonial era. The coming of independence created a perfect opportunity to bridge the gap between the two in the name of a larger Rwandan loyalty. But the chance was forfeited, as the downtrodden Hutu suddenly discovered the many convenient uses of the ethnic card. In the end, unlike that of most African countries where a single unifying nationalist movement had become predominant, Rwanda's independence was more of a repudiation by the majority of their despotic local overlords than of their harsh but remote European colonial masters.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 3
THE FIRST REPUBLIC 1959-1973
3.1. In almost every way, the events of the years 1959 to 1962 constituted a tragic series of wasted opportunities for Rwanda. The country badly needed a revolution. It needed to enter the bold new era of independence under vigorous leadership that would reflect the actual make-up of the country, with a democratic government, guaranteed rights for both the majority and the minority, a national identity that would take precedence over ethnic loyalties, and a commitment to public policies that would benefit all Rwandan citizens. None of this happened.
3.2. It was not as if these were uneventful years in the life of the country. Not even conservative Rwanda could ignore the nationalist winds of change that were blowing across Africa in the late 1950s. And for all their vaunted deference to authority, many Rwandans were in a rebellious mood. One view of Rwandan history insists that the movement for independence was largely engineered by the Belgians and the Catholic hierarchy in order to replace their erstwhile Tutsi collaborators with a more co-operative Hutu administration.[1] This interpretation makes the Rwandans nothing but pawns in a European game. In fact, the so-called Rwandan Revolution of 1959 to 1962 was assisted by these outsiders, but it was hardly imposed by them.
3.3. It is certainly true that both the colonial power and the church in these years, seeing the inevitability of majority Hutu domination, had completely transferred their loyalties from the Tutsi to the Hutu. There would be an election sooner or later, the Hutu would win, and interest in the question of minority rights was, in those days, reserved for colonies where the minority was white. In almost no time, Rwanda's Hutu found themselves warmly embraced by those who had only recently scorned them.
3.4. The Hutu were more than ready for their new champions. Their disaffection with the status quo cannot be doubted. The great mass of poor Hutu peasantry had grown increasingly resentful of its harsh exploitation by the Tutsi overlords, and the prevailing racial ideology extended that resentment to all Tutsi, not just the obvious class enemy. At the same time, a small, emerging elite of Hutu who had succeeded in gaining admittance to Catholic divinity schools was now demanding its share of the rewards monopolized by the Tutsi. That this new Hutu elite had little to offer its rural ethnic kin became an issue only in later years.
3.5. What these young, educated men wanted for themselves and others like them was to share in the privileges of westernization, above all, to have greater opportunities for education and appropriate employment. This was made abundantly clear by the nine frustrated drafters of the Bahutu Manifesto of 1957. That document, which was directed quite accurately against the ‘dual colonialism’ of the Belgians and the Tutsi, expressed particular resentment toward the ‘political monopoly’ of the Tutsi that had expanded into an economic and social monopoly. The manifesto's central passage highlights this: “The problem is basically that of the monopoly of one race, the Tutsi... which condemns the desperate Hutu to be forever subaltern workers.”[2] That the Bahutu Manifesto used ethnic and even racist terminology was inevitable. It reflected the ideological language that the Belgians, the church, and the Tutsi leadership had all imposed on the Hutu.
3.6. There was to be no Rwandan revolution. It is technically true that within a mere three years a Tutsi-dominated monarchy under colonial rule gave way to a Hutu-led independent republic. But in practice, the changes mostly affected the top rungs of Rwandan society. A small band of Hutu, mainly from the south-centre and, therefore, not representative even of the entire new Hutu elite, replaced the tiny Tutsi elite. They were backed with enthusiasm by the Catholic church and their former Belgian colonial masters. Accepting the racist premises of their former oppressors, the Hutu now treated all Tutsi as untrustworthy foreign invaders who had no rights and deserved no consideration. The well-being of the peasant farmers, who comprised the vast majority of the population, was not a prominent consideration of the new leadership. In the remarkably tough and prescient words of a 1961 UN Trusteeship Council report, “The developments of these last 18 months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party... An oppressive system has been replaced by another one... It is quite possible that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsi.”[3]
3.7. Other than the change in the names and faces of the tiny ruling class, independence really produced only one major change for Rwanda: the introduction of violence between the two, increasingly divided, ethnic groups.
3.8. Perhaps what is most distressing about these unhealthy developments is that there was nothing inevitable about them. The demands of the Bahutu Manifesto were really quite modest, mostly just a share of the spoils for the signatories themselves. Moreover, some Tutsi were quite prepared to recognize the justice of this demand and were ready to go forward to independence on the basis of some kind of power-sharing agreement. Moderation was the byword of two of the new political parties thrown up in the pre-independence excitement. Although one was primarily Hutu and the other primarily Tutsi, the leaders of both parties downplayed ethnicity and appealed to the common people of all backgrounds.[4]
3.9. The poisoned colonial legacy made it impossible for the voices of moderation to prevail over those of extremism and intransigence. The kind of nationalist movement common in so many other colonies, uniting different communal elements under one broad umbrella, failed to flourish in Rwanda. In 1958, a group of conservatives at the royal court arrogantly dismissed both the Bahutu Manifesto and any other basis for Tutsi-Hutu co-operation since, after all, the Tutsi had long before subjugated the Hutu by force.[5] Extremism bred extremism, and there were more than enough demagogues on either side who understood the short-run benefits of polarization. The less power to be shared, the greater the rewards for the victors, especially in a country where the state was far and away the greatest generator of such rewards.
3.10. The first violence occurred in late 1959. Already the political climate was tense, with the death of the King in mid-year in suspicious circumstances.[6] Under the leadership of Grégoire Kayibanda, a graduate of the Catholic seminary and co-signatory of the manifesto, a predominant Hutu party had emerged – Mouvement Démocratique rwandais/Parti du mouvement de l'émancipation Hutu, or Parmehutu. When Tutsi youth beat up a Parmehutu activist, Hutu rushed to exploit the moment. They retaliated, and civil war broke out.[7] The Belgians and church leaders were both blatantly partial to their new Hutu friends. The White Fathers gave strategic advice to some of the Hutu leaders and, in general, blessed their cause. At the same time, the senior Belgian military officer on the spot directed events on behalf of the Hutu, while his troops, when they were not passively standing by, were actually encouraging Hutu attacks against Tutsi.[8]
3.11. Houses were burned, and people were clubbed or speared to death. In this first outbreak of anti-Tutsi violence, several hundred people were killed – a large number for a small country. But for the most part, the Hutu attacks were aimed selectively not at all Tutsi, but at the rich and powerful ones who had both operated and benefited from the oppressive indigenous administration. For that reason, this series of events is most accurately regarded as a class uprising rather than as a first step toward genocide.
3.12. Huge numbers of Tutsi fled the areas of the most fierce fighting, some 10,000 taking refuge in neighbouring states. A later generation would find this figure small compared to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were created through the Great Lakes Region in the 1990s, but it was a remarkable number by any standard – particularly since a mere handful of unwanted refugees can cause a panic in a host country.
3.13. And some of the exiled Tutsi did make up enormous refugee waves. They became an early example of a new reality that later would convulse the entire Great Lakes Region and many of its neighbouring countries. Conflicts that generate refugees can easily lead to conflicts generated by refugees.[9] Not all refugees remain passive victims; some turn into warriors. It was these guerrilla fighters who were famously called "inyenzi," or cockroaches, by the Hutu, a label that would be resurrected with a vengeance 30 years later. Between 1961 and 1967, Tutsi commandos operating from outside the country launched a dozen raids on Rwanda.[10] The impact was devastating for other Tutsi. After each incursion, reprisals were carried out by government troops against the Tutsi in the country. The most serious of these incidents occurred in December 1963, when an unsuccessful and ill-planned raid from Burundi led to a Hutu backlash that claimed more than 10,000 Tutsi lives in a four-day period.[11]
3.14. Before these incursions ceased, 20,000 Tutsi had been killed, and another 300,000 had fled to the Congo, Burundi, Uganda, and what was then called Tanganyika.[12] The nature of the reprisal attacks changed. Hutu government officials (senior officials were all Hutu) began accusing all Tutsi of being accomplices of the raiders. All Tutsi, in any event, were considered foreign invaders and, accordingly, all became fair game for the slaughters of these years; significantly, this included women and children. In that sense, as an aggressive and exclusivist Hutu solidarity was consciously being forged in opposition to these despised outsiders, we can see another building block in the long road to genocide. Indeed, the massacres briefly caught the attention of the outside world and were condemned as genocidal by such prominent western dissidents as philosophers Bertrand Russell in England and Jean-Paul Sartre in France.[13]
3.15. These protests changed little in Rwanda. Kayibanda and his fellow Parmehutu leaders remained in power until 1973. The deliberate widening of ethnic cleavages was the most obvious disappointment. With the full backing of the Catholic church, a conveniently twisted interpretation of democracy was propounded, based on the notion of “rubanda nyamwinshi,” meaning the majority people. Even though Kayibanda ruled as a dictator in a country that had never known democracy, since the Hutu formed a clear majority of the Rwandan population, by definition Hutu rule was deemed democratic rule.
3.16. The Tutsi were effectively banned from the upper reaches of the government and the military. Because the private sector was minute and international links negligible, the Tutsi's sole opportunity for advancement was the all-important public sector, where jobs were made available to ethnic groups in proportion to their numbers. The ethnic identity cards introduced 30 years earlier by the Belgians were retained, and these governed virtually all public and commercial relationships. Only the beneficiaries of this malevolent institution changed. Perhaps because of the massacres and exiles, or because some Tutsi managed to be re-classified as Hutu, or because Hutu were now in charge of gathering statistics, the percentage of recognized Tutsi in the population declined sharply. As high as 17.5 per cent in 1952, by the 1978 census, the Tutsi population had become a mere 10 per cent. The identification system formed the basis for a strict quota system, which, in turn, determined such key matters as school enrollments and civil service hiring.[14]
3.17. Although Rwanda was now a republic, President Kayibanda functioned very much like the Mwami of yore but, of course, as a Hutu on behalf of the Hutu. The government was authoritarian, elitist, and secretive; these values could hardly have been more out of sync with an Africa where socialism, revolution, and development were passionately debated. Only the reality of being a one-party state was shared with many other emerging independent nations. The sole values that counted were the intrinsic worth of being Hutu, “democracy” based on a demographic majority, following a moral Christian life, and the virtues of hard work over politics, especially any politics reminiscent of communism. Indeed, the majority of the population remained overwhelmingly poor, rural, hard-working, Catholic, and insular.
3.18. Despite heartfelt rhetoric about Hutu solidarity (as we have noted earlier about the Tutsi), the notion of a single Hutu people was a complete fiction. Not only was there a vast gulf between ruler and ruled, but within the elite as well there were different factions that were divided by regional background, among other ways.[15] The Hutu of the north and north-west always saw themselves, above all, as different from and better than the rest of their kin. They had developed something of an historical mythology of separateness, based on their late incorporation into the Rwandan state system.[16] By 1972, 10 years after the formal declaration of Rwandan independence, northern Hutu leaders had grown frustrated by the monopoly of power and government exercized by Kayibanda and his narrowly based Parmehutu. Desperate to hold on to office, the President saw only one viable stratagem. It was time to emphasize ethnic divisions once more – this time, to insist on Hutu solidarity at the expense of the Tutsi.
3.19. So-called Committees of Public Salvation were organized to make sure that ethnic quotas were being honoured in schools, at the country's one university (at Butare, opened a decade earlier), within the civil service, and even in private businesses. At the same time, a wave of anti-Tutsi pogroms erupted, some of them in the countryside involving the local peasantry. While the number killed was relatively small, and we stress the word “relatively,” the general atmosphere of intimidation and terror led to yet another exodus of thousands of Tutsi from the homeland.
3.20. The terror failed, however, to save Kayibanda's presidency. In July 1973, General Juvenal Habyarimana, the senior military officer, seized power with a promise to restore order and national unity. The atmosphere of the country was so oppressive at that point that the coup was met with widespread popular relief, even by most Tutsi.
THE ROLE OF BURUNDI
3.21. Another event triggered the anti-Tutsi terror of 1972-73: the massive slaughter of Hutu by the Tutsi minority government in neighbouring Burundi, one of the worst atrocities in Africa in the post-colonial era. Just as the Rwanda of recent years cannot be analyzed sensibly apart from the Congo and the rest of the Great Lakes Region nations, so it cannot over the past four decades be understood in isolation from Burundi, its partner on a deadly seesaw. It is clear that 40 years of complex reactions and counter-reactions have contributed to the triumph, in both countries, of ethnic identities at the expense of larger national loyalties.
3.22. Under German colonialism, Rwanda and Burundi had been merged into a single colony called Ruanda-Urundi for administrative purposes. Later they became, first, League of Nations Mandate Territories and then United Nations Trust Territories under Belgian administration, and were separated once again. Both countries gained independence from Belgium in 1962. In each, the ethnic mix is about 85 per cent Hutu and 15 per cent Tutsi. Neither country experienced open conflict between the two groups before their movements for independence.
3.23. The interconnectedness of the two nations has been clear since independence, when events in Rwanda offered what one authority calls “a powerful demonstration effect on both Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi, causing enormous mutual distrust between them.”[17] The ugly process that resulted in the proclamation of a Hutu republic in Rwanda offered inspiration to Burundi's Hutu politicians and nightmares to their Tutsi counterparts. Of all the factors that have sharpened the edges of Burundi's Hutu-Tutsi conflict, none has been more decisive than the 1960-1961 flight into Burundi of some 50,000 Tutsi refugees from Rwanda who had been rendered homeless by Hutu-instigated violence.[18] Burundian Tutsi determination to avoid a Rwanda-like scenario became an obsession.
3.24. In both countries, independence brought bitter and violent power struggles among factions of the ruling ethnic group and between all Hutu and Tutsi. The key difference is that, unlike Rwanda, Burundi has been ruled since independence by a sub-group of Tutsi. Another difference is that, given their minority status, the Burundian Tutsi rulers have felt compelled to deny the ethnic cleavage that Rwanda's rulers celebrated. Official Burundian ideology, like that of Rwanda under its post-genocide government, denies the centrality of ethnicity and insists, despite evidence to the contrary, that any internal divisions in Burundi have been invented by subversives.[19]
3.25. Since 1962, Burundi's Tutsi minority has dominated successive governments, the army and other security forces, the judiciary, the educational system, the news media, and the business world. In Rwanda, such domination was seen to legitimize the country's own rigid quota system. In Burundi, it has led to a state of almost permanent conflict. The decades-long struggle for power between the elites of the two groups has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Burundians, most of them civilians. Repeated Hutu challenges to Tutsi domination have been followed each time by vicious reprisals by the Tutsi army and police against Hutu civilians that were invariably disproportionate to the original provocation. In the years between independence and the genocide in Rwanda, no fewer than seven giant waves of killings occurred in Burundi: in 1965, 1969, 1972, 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1993.
3.26. Victimization of the Tutsi in one country was first aggravated by, and then used to justify, persecution of the Hutu in the other country and vice versa. Each act of repression in the one state became the pretext for a renewed round of killing in the other. Such retaliation was fuelled by the constant refugee movements across the shared border, the inflammatory tales told by all who fled, and the eagerness felt by many of them to join in any attempts to wreak revenge from their new refuge. Perhaps refugees were also emboldened by yet another perverse, common characteristic of the two nations: In both countries, massacres by governments went largely unpunished, and a pervasive culture of impunity began to complement the growing culture of violence that was emerging.
3.27. It remains something of a mystery that the two countries have never been willing to go to war with each other. Instead, a vicious cycle of what one authority describes as “pre-emptive, internalized retaliation”[20] was established between the two. Rather than come to the defence of Rwandan Tutsi when they were attacked by their own Hutu government, the Burundian government would actually retaliate against its own innocent Hutu majority, and vice versa. This almost symmetrical massacre syndrome lasted until July 1994 when, for the first time, both countries were headed by de facto Tutsi governments.
3.28. In 1972 and 1973, any talk of peace or stability seemed wildly unrealistic as violence began in Burundi, initiated by the Hutu. In April 1972, “like a bolt out of the blue” as one authority describes it,[21] a violent insurrection in two Burundian towns led to the deaths of between 2,000 and 3,000 Tutsi, as well as a number of Hutu who refused to join the rebels. Between May and August, the Tutsi military government of Michel Micombero retaliated many times over. “What followed was not so much a repression as a hideous slaughter of Hutu civilians....By August, almost every educated Hutu was either dead or in exile.”[22]
3.29. Such deliberate targeting went far beyond restoring peace and order. The ultimate objective was to systematically eliminate all Hutu who might at any time in the future threaten Tutsi rule:anyone with an education, civil servants, university students, and school children. The original Hutu outbreak persuaded many Burundian Tutsi that their very survival was in mortal danger; accounts of the horrors experienced during Rwanda's move to independence were easily resurrected. Hutu elites, present and potential, had proven themselves a threat that could no longer be tolerated. A definitive solution was clearly called for, and it worked to perfection. Conservative estimates put the total number of victims somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000.The next generation of Hutu insists the number was closer to 300,000, and few among their elite are willing to forget or forgive.[23] But the slaughter had precisely the intended effect. For the next 16 years, with Hutu leadership decimated, Burundi was calm; and peace and order eventually prevailed in Rwanda, too. It may be that the demonstration effect for once worked to positive ends.
THE FIRST REPUBLIC 1959-1973
3.1. In almost every way, the events of the years 1959 to 1962 constituted a tragic series of wasted opportunities for Rwanda. The country badly needed a revolution. It needed to enter the bold new era of independence under vigorous leadership that would reflect the actual make-up of the country, with a democratic government, guaranteed rights for both the majority and the minority, a national identity that would take precedence over ethnic loyalties, and a commitment to public policies that would benefit all Rwandan citizens. None of this happened.
3.2. It was not as if these were uneventful years in the life of the country. Not even conservative Rwanda could ignore the nationalist winds of change that were blowing across Africa in the late 1950s. And for all their vaunted deference to authority, many Rwandans were in a rebellious mood. One view of Rwandan history insists that the movement for independence was largely engineered by the Belgians and the Catholic hierarchy in order to replace their erstwhile Tutsi collaborators with a more co-operative Hutu administration.[1] This interpretation makes the Rwandans nothing but pawns in a European game. In fact, the so-called Rwandan Revolution of 1959 to 1962 was assisted by these outsiders, but it was hardly imposed by them.
3.3. It is certainly true that both the colonial power and the church in these years, seeing the inevitability of majority Hutu domination, had completely transferred their loyalties from the Tutsi to the Hutu. There would be an election sooner or later, the Hutu would win, and interest in the question of minority rights was, in those days, reserved for colonies where the minority was white. In almost no time, Rwanda's Hutu found themselves warmly embraced by those who had only recently scorned them.
3.4. The Hutu were more than ready for their new champions. Their disaffection with the status quo cannot be doubted. The great mass of poor Hutu peasantry had grown increasingly resentful of its harsh exploitation by the Tutsi overlords, and the prevailing racial ideology extended that resentment to all Tutsi, not just the obvious class enemy. At the same time, a small, emerging elite of Hutu who had succeeded in gaining admittance to Catholic divinity schools was now demanding its share of the rewards monopolized by the Tutsi. That this new Hutu elite had little to offer its rural ethnic kin became an issue only in later years.
3.5. What these young, educated men wanted for themselves and others like them was to share in the privileges of westernization, above all, to have greater opportunities for education and appropriate employment. This was made abundantly clear by the nine frustrated drafters of the Bahutu Manifesto of 1957. That document, which was directed quite accurately against the ‘dual colonialism’ of the Belgians and the Tutsi, expressed particular resentment toward the ‘political monopoly’ of the Tutsi that had expanded into an economic and social monopoly. The manifesto's central passage highlights this: “The problem is basically that of the monopoly of one race, the Tutsi... which condemns the desperate Hutu to be forever subaltern workers.”[2] That the Bahutu Manifesto used ethnic and even racist terminology was inevitable. It reflected the ideological language that the Belgians, the church, and the Tutsi leadership had all imposed on the Hutu.
3.6. There was to be no Rwandan revolution. It is technically true that within a mere three years a Tutsi-dominated monarchy under colonial rule gave way to a Hutu-led independent republic. But in practice, the changes mostly affected the top rungs of Rwandan society. A small band of Hutu, mainly from the south-centre and, therefore, not representative even of the entire new Hutu elite, replaced the tiny Tutsi elite. They were backed with enthusiasm by the Catholic church and their former Belgian colonial masters. Accepting the racist premises of their former oppressors, the Hutu now treated all Tutsi as untrustworthy foreign invaders who had no rights and deserved no consideration. The well-being of the peasant farmers, who comprised the vast majority of the population, was not a prominent consideration of the new leadership. In the remarkably tough and prescient words of a 1961 UN Trusteeship Council report, “The developments of these last 18 months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party... An oppressive system has been replaced by another one... It is quite possible that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsi.”[3]
3.7. Other than the change in the names and faces of the tiny ruling class, independence really produced only one major change for Rwanda: the introduction of violence between the two, increasingly divided, ethnic groups.
3.8. Perhaps what is most distressing about these unhealthy developments is that there was nothing inevitable about them. The demands of the Bahutu Manifesto were really quite modest, mostly just a share of the spoils for the signatories themselves. Moreover, some Tutsi were quite prepared to recognize the justice of this demand and were ready to go forward to independence on the basis of some kind of power-sharing agreement. Moderation was the byword of two of the new political parties thrown up in the pre-independence excitement. Although one was primarily Hutu and the other primarily Tutsi, the leaders of both parties downplayed ethnicity and appealed to the common people of all backgrounds.[4]
3.9. The poisoned colonial legacy made it impossible for the voices of moderation to prevail over those of extremism and intransigence. The kind of nationalist movement common in so many other colonies, uniting different communal elements under one broad umbrella, failed to flourish in Rwanda. In 1958, a group of conservatives at the royal court arrogantly dismissed both the Bahutu Manifesto and any other basis for Tutsi-Hutu co-operation since, after all, the Tutsi had long before subjugated the Hutu by force.[5] Extremism bred extremism, and there were more than enough demagogues on either side who understood the short-run benefits of polarization. The less power to be shared, the greater the rewards for the victors, especially in a country where the state was far and away the greatest generator of such rewards.
3.10. The first violence occurred in late 1959. Already the political climate was tense, with the death of the King in mid-year in suspicious circumstances.[6] Under the leadership of Grégoire Kayibanda, a graduate of the Catholic seminary and co-signatory of the manifesto, a predominant Hutu party had emerged – Mouvement Démocratique rwandais/Parti du mouvement de l'émancipation Hutu, or Parmehutu. When Tutsi youth beat up a Parmehutu activist, Hutu rushed to exploit the moment. They retaliated, and civil war broke out.[7] The Belgians and church leaders were both blatantly partial to their new Hutu friends. The White Fathers gave strategic advice to some of the Hutu leaders and, in general, blessed their cause. At the same time, the senior Belgian military officer on the spot directed events on behalf of the Hutu, while his troops, when they were not passively standing by, were actually encouraging Hutu attacks against Tutsi.[8]
3.11. Houses were burned, and people were clubbed or speared to death. In this first outbreak of anti-Tutsi violence, several hundred people were killed – a large number for a small country. But for the most part, the Hutu attacks were aimed selectively not at all Tutsi, but at the rich and powerful ones who had both operated and benefited from the oppressive indigenous administration. For that reason, this series of events is most accurately regarded as a class uprising rather than as a first step toward genocide.
3.12. Huge numbers of Tutsi fled the areas of the most fierce fighting, some 10,000 taking refuge in neighbouring states. A later generation would find this figure small compared to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were created through the Great Lakes Region in the 1990s, but it was a remarkable number by any standard – particularly since a mere handful of unwanted refugees can cause a panic in a host country.
3.13. And some of the exiled Tutsi did make up enormous refugee waves. They became an early example of a new reality that later would convulse the entire Great Lakes Region and many of its neighbouring countries. Conflicts that generate refugees can easily lead to conflicts generated by refugees.[9] Not all refugees remain passive victims; some turn into warriors. It was these guerrilla fighters who were famously called "inyenzi," or cockroaches, by the Hutu, a label that would be resurrected with a vengeance 30 years later. Between 1961 and 1967, Tutsi commandos operating from outside the country launched a dozen raids on Rwanda.[10] The impact was devastating for other Tutsi. After each incursion, reprisals were carried out by government troops against the Tutsi in the country. The most serious of these incidents occurred in December 1963, when an unsuccessful and ill-planned raid from Burundi led to a Hutu backlash that claimed more than 10,000 Tutsi lives in a four-day period.[11]
3.14. Before these incursions ceased, 20,000 Tutsi had been killed, and another 300,000 had fled to the Congo, Burundi, Uganda, and what was then called Tanganyika.[12] The nature of the reprisal attacks changed. Hutu government officials (senior officials were all Hutu) began accusing all Tutsi of being accomplices of the raiders. All Tutsi, in any event, were considered foreign invaders and, accordingly, all became fair game for the slaughters of these years; significantly, this included women and children. In that sense, as an aggressive and exclusivist Hutu solidarity was consciously being forged in opposition to these despised outsiders, we can see another building block in the long road to genocide. Indeed, the massacres briefly caught the attention of the outside world and were condemned as genocidal by such prominent western dissidents as philosophers Bertrand Russell in England and Jean-Paul Sartre in France.[13]
3.15. These protests changed little in Rwanda. Kayibanda and his fellow Parmehutu leaders remained in power until 1973. The deliberate widening of ethnic cleavages was the most obvious disappointment. With the full backing of the Catholic church, a conveniently twisted interpretation of democracy was propounded, based on the notion of “rubanda nyamwinshi,” meaning the majority people. Even though Kayibanda ruled as a dictator in a country that had never known democracy, since the Hutu formed a clear majority of the Rwandan population, by definition Hutu rule was deemed democratic rule.
3.16. The Tutsi were effectively banned from the upper reaches of the government and the military. Because the private sector was minute and international links negligible, the Tutsi's sole opportunity for advancement was the all-important public sector, where jobs were made available to ethnic groups in proportion to their numbers. The ethnic identity cards introduced 30 years earlier by the Belgians were retained, and these governed virtually all public and commercial relationships. Only the beneficiaries of this malevolent institution changed. Perhaps because of the massacres and exiles, or because some Tutsi managed to be re-classified as Hutu, or because Hutu were now in charge of gathering statistics, the percentage of recognized Tutsi in the population declined sharply. As high as 17.5 per cent in 1952, by the 1978 census, the Tutsi population had become a mere 10 per cent. The identification system formed the basis for a strict quota system, which, in turn, determined such key matters as school enrollments and civil service hiring.[14]
3.17. Although Rwanda was now a republic, President Kayibanda functioned very much like the Mwami of yore but, of course, as a Hutu on behalf of the Hutu. The government was authoritarian, elitist, and secretive; these values could hardly have been more out of sync with an Africa where socialism, revolution, and development were passionately debated. Only the reality of being a one-party state was shared with many other emerging independent nations. The sole values that counted were the intrinsic worth of being Hutu, “democracy” based on a demographic majority, following a moral Christian life, and the virtues of hard work over politics, especially any politics reminiscent of communism. Indeed, the majority of the population remained overwhelmingly poor, rural, hard-working, Catholic, and insular.
3.18. Despite heartfelt rhetoric about Hutu solidarity (as we have noted earlier about the Tutsi), the notion of a single Hutu people was a complete fiction. Not only was there a vast gulf between ruler and ruled, but within the elite as well there were different factions that were divided by regional background, among other ways.[15] The Hutu of the north and north-west always saw themselves, above all, as different from and better than the rest of their kin. They had developed something of an historical mythology of separateness, based on their late incorporation into the Rwandan state system.[16] By 1972, 10 years after the formal declaration of Rwandan independence, northern Hutu leaders had grown frustrated by the monopoly of power and government exercized by Kayibanda and his narrowly based Parmehutu. Desperate to hold on to office, the President saw only one viable stratagem. It was time to emphasize ethnic divisions once more – this time, to insist on Hutu solidarity at the expense of the Tutsi.
3.19. So-called Committees of Public Salvation were organized to make sure that ethnic quotas were being honoured in schools, at the country's one university (at Butare, opened a decade earlier), within the civil service, and even in private businesses. At the same time, a wave of anti-Tutsi pogroms erupted, some of them in the countryside involving the local peasantry. While the number killed was relatively small, and we stress the word “relatively,” the general atmosphere of intimidation and terror led to yet another exodus of thousands of Tutsi from the homeland.
3.20. The terror failed, however, to save Kayibanda's presidency. In July 1973, General Juvenal Habyarimana, the senior military officer, seized power with a promise to restore order and national unity. The atmosphere of the country was so oppressive at that point that the coup was met with widespread popular relief, even by most Tutsi.
THE ROLE OF BURUNDI
3.21. Another event triggered the anti-Tutsi terror of 1972-73: the massive slaughter of Hutu by the Tutsi minority government in neighbouring Burundi, one of the worst atrocities in Africa in the post-colonial era. Just as the Rwanda of recent years cannot be analyzed sensibly apart from the Congo and the rest of the Great Lakes Region nations, so it cannot over the past four decades be understood in isolation from Burundi, its partner on a deadly seesaw. It is clear that 40 years of complex reactions and counter-reactions have contributed to the triumph, in both countries, of ethnic identities at the expense of larger national loyalties.
3.22. Under German colonialism, Rwanda and Burundi had been merged into a single colony called Ruanda-Urundi for administrative purposes. Later they became, first, League of Nations Mandate Territories and then United Nations Trust Territories under Belgian administration, and were separated once again. Both countries gained independence from Belgium in 1962. In each, the ethnic mix is about 85 per cent Hutu and 15 per cent Tutsi. Neither country experienced open conflict between the two groups before their movements for independence.
3.23. The interconnectedness of the two nations has been clear since independence, when events in Rwanda offered what one authority calls “a powerful demonstration effect on both Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi, causing enormous mutual distrust between them.”[17] The ugly process that resulted in the proclamation of a Hutu republic in Rwanda offered inspiration to Burundi's Hutu politicians and nightmares to their Tutsi counterparts. Of all the factors that have sharpened the edges of Burundi's Hutu-Tutsi conflict, none has been more decisive than the 1960-1961 flight into Burundi of some 50,000 Tutsi refugees from Rwanda who had been rendered homeless by Hutu-instigated violence.[18] Burundian Tutsi determination to avoid a Rwanda-like scenario became an obsession.
3.24. In both countries, independence brought bitter and violent power struggles among factions of the ruling ethnic group and between all Hutu and Tutsi. The key difference is that, unlike Rwanda, Burundi has been ruled since independence by a sub-group of Tutsi. Another difference is that, given their minority status, the Burundian Tutsi rulers have felt compelled to deny the ethnic cleavage that Rwanda's rulers celebrated. Official Burundian ideology, like that of Rwanda under its post-genocide government, denies the centrality of ethnicity and insists, despite evidence to the contrary, that any internal divisions in Burundi have been invented by subversives.[19]
3.25. Since 1962, Burundi's Tutsi minority has dominated successive governments, the army and other security forces, the judiciary, the educational system, the news media, and the business world. In Rwanda, such domination was seen to legitimize the country's own rigid quota system. In Burundi, it has led to a state of almost permanent conflict. The decades-long struggle for power between the elites of the two groups has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Burundians, most of them civilians. Repeated Hutu challenges to Tutsi domination have been followed each time by vicious reprisals by the Tutsi army and police against Hutu civilians that were invariably disproportionate to the original provocation. In the years between independence and the genocide in Rwanda, no fewer than seven giant waves of killings occurred in Burundi: in 1965, 1969, 1972, 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1993.
3.26. Victimization of the Tutsi in one country was first aggravated by, and then used to justify, persecution of the Hutu in the other country and vice versa. Each act of repression in the one state became the pretext for a renewed round of killing in the other. Such retaliation was fuelled by the constant refugee movements across the shared border, the inflammatory tales told by all who fled, and the eagerness felt by many of them to join in any attempts to wreak revenge from their new refuge. Perhaps refugees were also emboldened by yet another perverse, common characteristic of the two nations: In both countries, massacres by governments went largely unpunished, and a pervasive culture of impunity began to complement the growing culture of violence that was emerging.
3.27. It remains something of a mystery that the two countries have never been willing to go to war with each other. Instead, a vicious cycle of what one authority describes as “pre-emptive, internalized retaliation”[20] was established between the two. Rather than come to the defence of Rwandan Tutsi when they were attacked by their own Hutu government, the Burundian government would actually retaliate against its own innocent Hutu majority, and vice versa. This almost symmetrical massacre syndrome lasted until July 1994 when, for the first time, both countries were headed by de facto Tutsi governments.
3.28. In 1972 and 1973, any talk of peace or stability seemed wildly unrealistic as violence began in Burundi, initiated by the Hutu. In April 1972, “like a bolt out of the blue” as one authority describes it,[21] a violent insurrection in two Burundian towns led to the deaths of between 2,000 and 3,000 Tutsi, as well as a number of Hutu who refused to join the rebels. Between May and August, the Tutsi military government of Michel Micombero retaliated many times over. “What followed was not so much a repression as a hideous slaughter of Hutu civilians....By August, almost every educated Hutu was either dead or in exile.”[22]
3.29. Such deliberate targeting went far beyond restoring peace and order. The ultimate objective was to systematically eliminate all Hutu who might at any time in the future threaten Tutsi rule:anyone with an education, civil servants, university students, and school children. The original Hutu outbreak persuaded many Burundian Tutsi that their very survival was in mortal danger; accounts of the horrors experienced during Rwanda's move to independence were easily resurrected. Hutu elites, present and potential, had proven themselves a threat that could no longer be tolerated. A definitive solution was clearly called for, and it worked to perfection. Conservative estimates put the total number of victims somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000.The next generation of Hutu insists the number was closer to 300,000, and few among their elite are willing to forget or forgive.[23] But the slaughter had precisely the intended effect. For the next 16 years, with Hutu leadership decimated, Burundi was calm; and peace and order eventually prevailed in Rwanda, too. It may be that the demonstration effect for once worked to positive ends.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 4
HABYARIMANA'S REGIME: 1973-LATE 1980s
4.1. Juvenal Habyarimana ruled Rwanda for 21 years until his death in a plane crash, on April 6, 1994, that was the trigger for the genocide. For at least two-thirds of his presidency, the country was stable and peaceful and enjoyed an outstanding reputation in the world. The question that inescapably follows is simple: How did such a regime change and become the organizer and executor of genocide?
4.2. Certainly for the Tutsi in the country, the relief felt by Kayibanda's fall and Habyarimana's accession was not entirely unjustified. Tutsi were not about to become equals under any Hutu government of the time but, during the first 17 years of Habyarimana's regime, life became tolerable. He offered the Tutsi a modus vivendi. If they were strict about staying away from any of the levers of power and eschewed politics, government, and the military, they could otherwise live a mostly normal existence. This deal was well understood as non-negotiable.
4.3. The first positive consequence of the implicit deal between Habyarimana and the Tutsi was an end to violence. Physical harassment largely ceased and, for 17 years, there were no massacres of Tutsi. By itself, of course, such peace was a dramatic development, and it demonstrated that the Hutu and the Tutsi could live together in relative harmony when their leaders stopped their cynical manipulations.
4.4. During this period, much about Rwanda remained as it had been for some time. Identification cards, ethnic quotas, and spheres of exclusive ethnic concentration remained hallmarks of the society. Power at every level was still monopolized, now by the Hutu. There was neither a single Tutsi head of a prefecture nor a single Tutsi burgomaster until, curiously, the very end of the period. There was only a handful of Tutsi officers in the entire army, and officers were discouraged from marrying Tutsi women.[1] One Tutsi held a seat in a Cabinet of 25 to 30 ministers,[2] and two Tutsi sat in a Parliament of 70 members.
4.5. On the other hand, the private sector was now thrown open, and many Tutsi flourished as businesspeople, some becoming very successful and largely dominating international trade. In a small capital such as Kigali, there are few secrets, and it was well known that some Tutsi entrepreneurs had developed cordial relations and a certain influence with government officials. While ethnic quotas remained the rule, they were now loosely enforced, and Tutsi were known to have considerably more than their allotted nine per cent of the places in schools, universities, the professions, and even the civil service.[3] Life was hardly ideal for Rwanda's Tutsi, but it was incomparably better than it had been for some years.
4.6. The kind of ambiguity demonstrated in the treatment of the Tutsi was characteristic of Habyarimana's reign. Here was a harsh military dictatorship based on open ethnic exclusion and hailed by many outsiders as “the Switzerland of Africa”: peaceful, stable, hardworking, and reliable. In the same way that the Tutsi were relatively better off than they had been during the previous decade, so Rwanda was relatively attractive compared with the competition. As one German missionary later recalled, “[In the early 1980s] we used to compare the nearly idyllic situation in Rwanda with the post-Idi Amin chaos in Uganda, the Tutsi apartheid in Burundi, the ‘real African socialism’ of Tanzania, and Mobutu's kleptocracy in Zaire, and we felt the regime had many positive points.”[4]
4.7. After all, the coup that toppled the Kayibanda government was bloodless, with the exception of about 50 of its leaders,including the President himself. They later either were executed or died miserably in prison. There was a party system, but it had only one party, created by Habyarimana personally after he outlawed all others. His new Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) was explicitly recognised in the Rwandan constitution, which was changed to enshrine one-party rule as a core value of the country.[5] The structures of a totalitarian regime were put into place systematically. All officials were chosen from party cadres. The party was everywhere, from the very top of the government hierarchy to its very base.
4.8. Twice in this period, Habyarimana submitted himself to the public's scrutiny in presidential elections. Fortunately for him, under the constitution, there could be only one candidate, and in both 1983 and 1988 the President was triumphantly re-elected with 99.98 per cent of the vote.[6]
4.9. Control was the obsession of the regime. The domination of the state was firmed up in even the remotest corners of the land and in virtually every aspect of life. The country was divided into 10 prefectures run by centrally-appointed prefects, then into some 145 communes, each headed by a burgomaster, and finally into cells or "collines." [7] Communes had, for the most part, an average of between 40,000 and 50,000 residents. The burgomasters influenced their lives in every aspect, from mediating conflicts over property, to hiring and firing commune staff (including the communal policemen who were at the burgomasters' command), to finding places in secondary school. The burgomaster was the ultimate authority at the local level, and every one was appointed and could be removed by the President personally.
4.10. The communes were sub-divided into 5,000-person sectors and then into 1,000-person cells; and though there were elected councillors at each level, in reality they were primarily there to execute the decisions of the burgomasters.
4.11. Rwanda became a byword for efficiency, one of the reasons, of course, that foreigners admired it so uncritically. This characteristic has endured from pre-colonial times, through the genocide itself, and remains true today. Yet efficiency is merely a tool and, under Habyarimana, Rwanda came close to being a textbook case of efficiently dictatorial government. Identification cards included place of residence and, while travel was tolerated, changing addresses was frowned upon and, in any event, needed official authorization. Each commune submitted frequent reports of births, deaths, and movements in and out, while each burgomaster sent information to agents of the government's pervasive secret service about any strangers seen in his district. “Collines” made up the country's main geographic and social points of reference and, at every moment, each was visibly rife with centrally-appointed administrators, chiefs, security agents, policemen, and local party cadres of all kinds.
4.12. Rwanda's one-party status was similar to that prevailing in many African countries during these years. Many African governments at the time insisted that real democracy was only possible within a single governing party that could contain and reconcile all opposition views. Tanzania under Julius Nyerere was the best-known model of this political structure. Trade unions were expected to be a component of the ruling coalition. Local human rights organizations were largely unknown. Rwanda fit the one-party mould with the added local twist that it practised demographic democracy: since the Hutu constituted 85 per cent of the population, a Hutu government was inherently democratic.[8]
4.13. As in most one-party states, the fate awaiting those Rwandans who did not accept the rules was clear to all. Dissenters were few and far between, and the few nonconformists were subjected to arbitrary arrests, torture, and long stretches in wretched prisons without benefit of trial. The justice system was independent in name only. There was a small, almost exclusively Hutu intellectual elite, including academics at the country's only university, on whom the government could count for active support or, at the least, acquiescent silence. Job loss was the price of speaking out. Press freedom was tightly controlled.
4.14. The hierarchy of the Catholic church remained a firm, reliable bulwark of Habyarimana's republic, literally until the end. More than 60 per cent of Rwandans were Catholic. To all intents and purposes, separation between church and state barely existed. Though Tutsi had always made up the majority of the Catholic clergy and still did, seven of the nine bishops in place at the start of the genocide were Hutu; and church leaders were active in both state and party structures at all levels, including the very top. As virtually every study of the period pointedly notes, the archbishop of Kigali, Mgr. Vincent Nsengiyumva, a Hutu from the north, was a close and trusted colleague of the President.[9] The personal confessor of the President's wife, Agathe, and known for wearing Habyarimana's portrait pin on his cassock, Nsengiyumva served as an active member of the central committee of the ruling MRND party until Rome forced his reluctant resignation from the committee in 1989.
4.15. As we have seen, church and state had historically maintained mutually beneficial working relationships, a phenomenon that was strengthened throughout Habyarimana's long regime. The churches provided additional symbolic legitimacy to the state, which, in turn, facilitated church activities. Both emphasised the principle of obedience and increased dependency on the structures of authority. Together they co-operated in “extending control over the population, regulating their behaviour and integrating them into the economy and the political realm.” [10] They shared key social values as well, including those that had direct impact on state policy. Although Rwanda was described by all as a country with too little land and too many people, birth control, for example, was anathema both as public policy and private practice. In time, Habyarimana was able to use the common acceptance of the country's steady population growth as an excuse for refusing to allow the return of refugees who had fled during massacres of the Tutsi that were organised by the previous government. Only toward the end did he appear to relent on the issue but, by then, it was too late.
4.16. Almost 20 per cent of the population were affiliated with various Protestant denominations, none of which had an institutional position in the regime. The Anglican hierarchy and the Baptists were supportive generally, however, and the president of the country's Presbyterian church was a member of an MRND committee in his prefecture.[11]
4.17. Few of the structural characteristics of the Habyarimana regime distinguished it from its predecessor, although there were some significant differences. Ethnic policies aside, the Habyarimana government was very much in the mainstream of contemporary Africa. Unlike the conservative and insular Kayibanda, Habyarimana was a modernizing leader who opened the country to the outside world. He travelled outside the country frequently, establishing close relationships with other members of the Francophonie, especially among its African members and France itself, as well as with his fellow leaders in the Great Lakes Region.[12] Zaire's Mobutu became something of a mentor, private sector investment was welcome, and foreign aid was encouraged. Although the population remained overwhelmingly rural, the capital city of Kigali, a tiny town of 15,000 at independence, grew into a small urban centre of 250,000 by the early 1990s.
4.18. Impressive economic strides were made. Compared with the other four Great Lakes Region nations – Zaire, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania – Rwanda saw a significant increase in GNP per capita during the first 15 years of the Habyarimana government. Comparisons with its four immediate neighbours cast an even better light on Rwanda, which had the lowest GNP per capita among the five when the regime began and climbed to the highest, by a substantial amount, before it ended.[13] At independence, only two countries in the world had a lower per capita income than Rwanda. A quarter-century later, it was 19th from the bottom,[14] a ranking that meant the country, while still staggeringly poor, was making progress at the same time as its neighbours languished.
4.19. The economy diversified. In the period from 1962 to 1987, agriculture declined to 48 per cent of total GNP, from 80 per cent.[15] Beginning with a base of subsistence farming, Belgium had constructed a colonial economy on a foundation of export crops that were wholly dependent on price fluctuations in the international commodity markets. Coffee, tea, and tin prices substantially determined the health of the economy, accounting for fully 80 per cent of foreign exchange earnings.[16] Through the first decade or so of the Habyarimana government, prices for all three were relatively high. For a very poor country, Rwanda could almost have been said to be booming. As a result, the mortality rate went down, health indicators improved, and more children went to school. The government co-operated in such productive development projects as reforestation and land reclamation, draining marshes and lowlands, and greatly increasing production of crops.
4.20. Led by the World Bank, the outside world saw Rwanda as an African success story.[17] Its good road system and reliable supplies of electricity, water, and telephones made it a favourite of the ever-booming international aid community. Rwanda was not only the land of a thousand hills, went the local joke, it was also the land of a thousand aid workers.[18] Foreign aid, which represented less than five per cent of GNP in the year of Habyarimana's coup, exploded to 22 per cent by 1991.[19] Like so many poor countries with enormous needs, Rwanda had revenues that were preposterously small. Soon enough, foreign aid constituted more than three-quarters of the state's capital budget and a significant share of the operating budget as well.[20]
4.21. Clearly the data were reflective of the remarkable international confidence in the President's apparently benevolent despotism. Juvenal Habyarimana may have been a military dictator but, as one German missionary said approvingly, he ran a “development dictatorship.”[21] Why was this not regarded as a contradiction in terms? The concept, after all, implied a fundamental divorce between development and politics, especially democratic politics. According to this proposition, development workers and representatives of aid agencies, stayed out of politics. It was possible, the theory held, for a country to develop satisfactorily regardless of the level of democracy, justice, or equality that its citizens enjoyed.
4.22. If one dismissed as “political” such practices as ethnic quotas, ethnically-based identification cards, the absence of multi-party democracy, disregard for human rights, a subservient judiciary, and the brutal suppression of dissent and free speech, Rwanda seemed to be working just fine. In fact, some international institutions seemed oblivious to most of the elementary realities of Rwandan society. In several reports of the 1980s and early 1990s, the World Bank actually referred to “the cultural and social cohesion of its people.”[22] It is true that ethnicity rather than colour was the all-important variable in Rwanda (although extremists among both the Hutu and the Tutsi regarded one another as virtually separate races). However, whatever its form, the function of social categorization was the same: to exclude, to divide, to breed hatred, and to de-humanize. To our knowledge and to their shame, not a single aid agency ever challenged the government to change these practices. In its silence, the morally influential world of international aid joined the Catholic church to legitimize the Habyarimana regime and made it easy, in turn, for the government to believe it could count on their blessings irrespective of its policies.
HABYARIMANA'S REGIME: 1973-LATE 1980s
4.1. Juvenal Habyarimana ruled Rwanda for 21 years until his death in a plane crash, on April 6, 1994, that was the trigger for the genocide. For at least two-thirds of his presidency, the country was stable and peaceful and enjoyed an outstanding reputation in the world. The question that inescapably follows is simple: How did such a regime change and become the organizer and executor of genocide?
4.2. Certainly for the Tutsi in the country, the relief felt by Kayibanda's fall and Habyarimana's accession was not entirely unjustified. Tutsi were not about to become equals under any Hutu government of the time but, during the first 17 years of Habyarimana's regime, life became tolerable. He offered the Tutsi a modus vivendi. If they were strict about staying away from any of the levers of power and eschewed politics, government, and the military, they could otherwise live a mostly normal existence. This deal was well understood as non-negotiable.
4.3. The first positive consequence of the implicit deal between Habyarimana and the Tutsi was an end to violence. Physical harassment largely ceased and, for 17 years, there were no massacres of Tutsi. By itself, of course, such peace was a dramatic development, and it demonstrated that the Hutu and the Tutsi could live together in relative harmony when their leaders stopped their cynical manipulations.
4.4. During this period, much about Rwanda remained as it had been for some time. Identification cards, ethnic quotas, and spheres of exclusive ethnic concentration remained hallmarks of the society. Power at every level was still monopolized, now by the Hutu. There was neither a single Tutsi head of a prefecture nor a single Tutsi burgomaster until, curiously, the very end of the period. There was only a handful of Tutsi officers in the entire army, and officers were discouraged from marrying Tutsi women.[1] One Tutsi held a seat in a Cabinet of 25 to 30 ministers,[2] and two Tutsi sat in a Parliament of 70 members.
4.5. On the other hand, the private sector was now thrown open, and many Tutsi flourished as businesspeople, some becoming very successful and largely dominating international trade. In a small capital such as Kigali, there are few secrets, and it was well known that some Tutsi entrepreneurs had developed cordial relations and a certain influence with government officials. While ethnic quotas remained the rule, they were now loosely enforced, and Tutsi were known to have considerably more than their allotted nine per cent of the places in schools, universities, the professions, and even the civil service.[3] Life was hardly ideal for Rwanda's Tutsi, but it was incomparably better than it had been for some years.
4.6. The kind of ambiguity demonstrated in the treatment of the Tutsi was characteristic of Habyarimana's reign. Here was a harsh military dictatorship based on open ethnic exclusion and hailed by many outsiders as “the Switzerland of Africa”: peaceful, stable, hardworking, and reliable. In the same way that the Tutsi were relatively better off than they had been during the previous decade, so Rwanda was relatively attractive compared with the competition. As one German missionary later recalled, “[In the early 1980s] we used to compare the nearly idyllic situation in Rwanda with the post-Idi Amin chaos in Uganda, the Tutsi apartheid in Burundi, the ‘real African socialism’ of Tanzania, and Mobutu's kleptocracy in Zaire, and we felt the regime had many positive points.”[4]
4.7. After all, the coup that toppled the Kayibanda government was bloodless, with the exception of about 50 of its leaders,including the President himself. They later either were executed or died miserably in prison. There was a party system, but it had only one party, created by Habyarimana personally after he outlawed all others. His new Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) was explicitly recognised in the Rwandan constitution, which was changed to enshrine one-party rule as a core value of the country.[5] The structures of a totalitarian regime were put into place systematically. All officials were chosen from party cadres. The party was everywhere, from the very top of the government hierarchy to its very base.
4.8. Twice in this period, Habyarimana submitted himself to the public's scrutiny in presidential elections. Fortunately for him, under the constitution, there could be only one candidate, and in both 1983 and 1988 the President was triumphantly re-elected with 99.98 per cent of the vote.[6]
4.9. Control was the obsession of the regime. The domination of the state was firmed up in even the remotest corners of the land and in virtually every aspect of life. The country was divided into 10 prefectures run by centrally-appointed prefects, then into some 145 communes, each headed by a burgomaster, and finally into cells or "collines." [7] Communes had, for the most part, an average of between 40,000 and 50,000 residents. The burgomasters influenced their lives in every aspect, from mediating conflicts over property, to hiring and firing commune staff (including the communal policemen who were at the burgomasters' command), to finding places in secondary school. The burgomaster was the ultimate authority at the local level, and every one was appointed and could be removed by the President personally.
4.10. The communes were sub-divided into 5,000-person sectors and then into 1,000-person cells; and though there were elected councillors at each level, in reality they were primarily there to execute the decisions of the burgomasters.
4.11. Rwanda became a byword for efficiency, one of the reasons, of course, that foreigners admired it so uncritically. This characteristic has endured from pre-colonial times, through the genocide itself, and remains true today. Yet efficiency is merely a tool and, under Habyarimana, Rwanda came close to being a textbook case of efficiently dictatorial government. Identification cards included place of residence and, while travel was tolerated, changing addresses was frowned upon and, in any event, needed official authorization. Each commune submitted frequent reports of births, deaths, and movements in and out, while each burgomaster sent information to agents of the government's pervasive secret service about any strangers seen in his district. “Collines” made up the country's main geographic and social points of reference and, at every moment, each was visibly rife with centrally-appointed administrators, chiefs, security agents, policemen, and local party cadres of all kinds.
4.12. Rwanda's one-party status was similar to that prevailing in many African countries during these years. Many African governments at the time insisted that real democracy was only possible within a single governing party that could contain and reconcile all opposition views. Tanzania under Julius Nyerere was the best-known model of this political structure. Trade unions were expected to be a component of the ruling coalition. Local human rights organizations were largely unknown. Rwanda fit the one-party mould with the added local twist that it practised demographic democracy: since the Hutu constituted 85 per cent of the population, a Hutu government was inherently democratic.[8]
4.13. As in most one-party states, the fate awaiting those Rwandans who did not accept the rules was clear to all. Dissenters were few and far between, and the few nonconformists were subjected to arbitrary arrests, torture, and long stretches in wretched prisons without benefit of trial. The justice system was independent in name only. There was a small, almost exclusively Hutu intellectual elite, including academics at the country's only university, on whom the government could count for active support or, at the least, acquiescent silence. Job loss was the price of speaking out. Press freedom was tightly controlled.
4.14. The hierarchy of the Catholic church remained a firm, reliable bulwark of Habyarimana's republic, literally until the end. More than 60 per cent of Rwandans were Catholic. To all intents and purposes, separation between church and state barely existed. Though Tutsi had always made up the majority of the Catholic clergy and still did, seven of the nine bishops in place at the start of the genocide were Hutu; and church leaders were active in both state and party structures at all levels, including the very top. As virtually every study of the period pointedly notes, the archbishop of Kigali, Mgr. Vincent Nsengiyumva, a Hutu from the north, was a close and trusted colleague of the President.[9] The personal confessor of the President's wife, Agathe, and known for wearing Habyarimana's portrait pin on his cassock, Nsengiyumva served as an active member of the central committee of the ruling MRND party until Rome forced his reluctant resignation from the committee in 1989.
4.15. As we have seen, church and state had historically maintained mutually beneficial working relationships, a phenomenon that was strengthened throughout Habyarimana's long regime. The churches provided additional symbolic legitimacy to the state, which, in turn, facilitated church activities. Both emphasised the principle of obedience and increased dependency on the structures of authority. Together they co-operated in “extending control over the population, regulating their behaviour and integrating them into the economy and the political realm.” [10] They shared key social values as well, including those that had direct impact on state policy. Although Rwanda was described by all as a country with too little land and too many people, birth control, for example, was anathema both as public policy and private practice. In time, Habyarimana was able to use the common acceptance of the country's steady population growth as an excuse for refusing to allow the return of refugees who had fled during massacres of the Tutsi that were organised by the previous government. Only toward the end did he appear to relent on the issue but, by then, it was too late.
4.16. Almost 20 per cent of the population were affiliated with various Protestant denominations, none of which had an institutional position in the regime. The Anglican hierarchy and the Baptists were supportive generally, however, and the president of the country's Presbyterian church was a member of an MRND committee in his prefecture.[11]
4.17. Few of the structural characteristics of the Habyarimana regime distinguished it from its predecessor, although there were some significant differences. Ethnic policies aside, the Habyarimana government was very much in the mainstream of contemporary Africa. Unlike the conservative and insular Kayibanda, Habyarimana was a modernizing leader who opened the country to the outside world. He travelled outside the country frequently, establishing close relationships with other members of the Francophonie, especially among its African members and France itself, as well as with his fellow leaders in the Great Lakes Region.[12] Zaire's Mobutu became something of a mentor, private sector investment was welcome, and foreign aid was encouraged. Although the population remained overwhelmingly rural, the capital city of Kigali, a tiny town of 15,000 at independence, grew into a small urban centre of 250,000 by the early 1990s.
4.18. Impressive economic strides were made. Compared with the other four Great Lakes Region nations – Zaire, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania – Rwanda saw a significant increase in GNP per capita during the first 15 years of the Habyarimana government. Comparisons with its four immediate neighbours cast an even better light on Rwanda, which had the lowest GNP per capita among the five when the regime began and climbed to the highest, by a substantial amount, before it ended.[13] At independence, only two countries in the world had a lower per capita income than Rwanda. A quarter-century later, it was 19th from the bottom,[14] a ranking that meant the country, while still staggeringly poor, was making progress at the same time as its neighbours languished.
4.19. The economy diversified. In the period from 1962 to 1987, agriculture declined to 48 per cent of total GNP, from 80 per cent.[15] Beginning with a base of subsistence farming, Belgium had constructed a colonial economy on a foundation of export crops that were wholly dependent on price fluctuations in the international commodity markets. Coffee, tea, and tin prices substantially determined the health of the economy, accounting for fully 80 per cent of foreign exchange earnings.[16] Through the first decade or so of the Habyarimana government, prices for all three were relatively high. For a very poor country, Rwanda could almost have been said to be booming. As a result, the mortality rate went down, health indicators improved, and more children went to school. The government co-operated in such productive development projects as reforestation and land reclamation, draining marshes and lowlands, and greatly increasing production of crops.
4.20. Led by the World Bank, the outside world saw Rwanda as an African success story.[17] Its good road system and reliable supplies of electricity, water, and telephones made it a favourite of the ever-booming international aid community. Rwanda was not only the land of a thousand hills, went the local joke, it was also the land of a thousand aid workers.[18] Foreign aid, which represented less than five per cent of GNP in the year of Habyarimana's coup, exploded to 22 per cent by 1991.[19] Like so many poor countries with enormous needs, Rwanda had revenues that were preposterously small. Soon enough, foreign aid constituted more than three-quarters of the state's capital budget and a significant share of the operating budget as well.[20]
4.21. Clearly the data were reflective of the remarkable international confidence in the President's apparently benevolent despotism. Juvenal Habyarimana may have been a military dictator but, as one German missionary said approvingly, he ran a “development dictatorship.”[21] Why was this not regarded as a contradiction in terms? The concept, after all, implied a fundamental divorce between development and politics, especially democratic politics. According to this proposition, development workers and representatives of aid agencies, stayed out of politics. It was possible, the theory held, for a country to develop satisfactorily regardless of the level of democracy, justice, or equality that its citizens enjoyed.
4.22. If one dismissed as “political” such practices as ethnic quotas, ethnically-based identification cards, the absence of multi-party democracy, disregard for human rights, a subservient judiciary, and the brutal suppression of dissent and free speech, Rwanda seemed to be working just fine. In fact, some international institutions seemed oblivious to most of the elementary realities of Rwandan society. In several reports of the 1980s and early 1990s, the World Bank actually referred to “the cultural and social cohesion of its people.”[22] It is true that ethnicity rather than colour was the all-important variable in Rwanda (although extremists among both the Hutu and the Tutsi regarded one another as virtually separate races). However, whatever its form, the function of social categorization was the same: to exclude, to divide, to breed hatred, and to de-humanize. To our knowledge and to their shame, not a single aid agency ever challenged the government to change these practices. In its silence, the morally influential world of international aid joined the Catholic church to legitimize the Habyarimana regime and made it easy, in turn, for the government to believe it could count on their blessings irrespective of its policies.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 5
ECONOMIC DESTABILIZATION AFTER 1985
5.1. After 1985, things started going wrong again for Rwanda, its government, and its people. The economic, political, and social fabric of the nation began to unravel. All the building blocks that had been set in place began to crack. Some had been set in the colonial past; some were imports; and some were internal constructs for which neither history nor the outside world could be deemed responsible. Over the decades, these blocks had joined to form an organic whole, the foundation of modern Rwanda. By the second half of the 1980s, that foundation began to disintegrate. Instead of trying to rebuild in a more inclusive and constructive way, the Hutu elite chose a course that would soon cause the entire edifice to collapse. We want to describe briefly the key markers on the road to disaster.
Economic problems
5.2. There are countless poor countries in the world with economies in shambles, yet there have been only a handful of genocides. Neither poverty nor economic collapse alone caused the Rwandan genocide. We surely can say, however, that poverty increases social stress and that economic crises increase instability, and that these conditions make people more susceptible to the demagogic messages of hate-mongers. In Rwanda, a poor people became poorer in the late 1980s, with enormous consequences that inadvertently played into the hands of ethnic manipulators.
5.3. Dependence on commodity markets controlled by powerful interests in rich countries took its toll in these years, when coffee, tea, and tin prices all plummeted. As Rwandans watched helplessly, resources were transformed into major liabilities. Large US coffee traders were pressuring their government to abandon the system of quotas established under an international coffee agreement, regardless of the consequences for poorer coffee-growing countries. Following a fateful meeting of producers in mid-1989, coffee prices dropped by 50 per cent.[1] The losses were felt at every level of Rwandan society, causing widespread discontent. Growing inequality between most rural and some urban dwellers exacerbated the frustration of peasant farmers.
5.4. A drought in the south in 1989 brought further distress. State policies served only to worsen the situation. Here was an overwhelmingly agricultural population where so many small farmers were producing cash crops for export that they could no longer feed themselves. Many families could not afford food, and several hundred people died of hunger while many more came under extreme duress. It was clear to all that the drought was not solely responsible for the famine, but that political and economic policies were equally to blame. Confidence in the government declined dramatically. After decades of strict control and careful manipulation by one of Africa's most highly-centralized and well-organized states, the Rwandan people had earned a reputation for docility and deference to authority. Now, however, this considerably exaggerated submissiveness gave way to anger and protest.
5.5. Government earnings from coffee exports declined from $144 million in 1985 to $30 million in 1993.[2] A giant expansion in military capacity, triggered by the civil war that began in 1990, further skewed public finances. Already dependent to an unhealthy extent on international assistance, the Habyarimana government reluctantly concluded that it had little choice but to accept a Structural Adjustment Programme from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in return for a loan conditional on the rigid and harsh policies that characterized western economic orthodoxy of the time. The premise was that Rwanda needed economic shock therapy. The World Bank believed that most of the country's economic woes were externally induced and not the result of domestic mismanagement. Yet the conditions it was imposing were identical to those it demanded of countries that had been blatantly corrupt and incompetent.
5.6. Although in the end, not all the components of the program went ahead, those that were introduced managed to add to the existing misery. Devaluation was particularly resisted by the government, but it was a strict condition of the loan, presented by the international agencies' experts as a step along the road to increased consumption levels, greater investment, and an improved balance of trade. Not surprisingly, devaluation achieved exactly the opposite. Prices rose immediately for virtually all Rwandans who, by now, were at least indirectly linked to the commercial economy. Government social programmes were slashed dramatically, while the costs of school fees, health care, and even water increased. Civil servants' wages were frozen.
5.7. In one way or another, almost every family suffered a substantial reduction in income. By the early 1990s, according to one analysis, 50 per cent of Rwandans were extremely poor (incapable of feeding themselves decently), 40 per cent were poor, nine per cent were “non-poor” and one per cent – the political and business elite, foreign technical assistants, and others – were positively rich.[3] US Agency for International Development (USAID) 1993 data place 90 per cent of Rwanda's rural population and 86 per cent of the total population below the poverty line, which put Rwanda ahead of Bangladesh and Sudan, earning it the dubious distinction of having the highest poverty figure for the entire world. The World Bank, we should acknowledge, disagrees that it was responsible for exacerbating Rwanda's economic woes, though not with its usual confidence. In 1994, it stated that “it is difficult to analyze the effects of the adjustment programme on the incomes of the poor because overall economic conditions worsened and everybody was worse off.”[4]
5.8. The agreement between the international financial institutions and the government of Rwanda was reached in mid-September 1990; the programme began shortly after. In the interim, the country was invaded and a civil war ensued; yet at no time was consideration given to the likely political or social repercussions of economic shock therapy to a country engaged in armed conflict. Rather, following the usual guidelines, the World Bank team reviewing Rwanda's economic situation excluded all “non-economic variables” from their calculations and simulations.[5] The result was that, at a time of profound instability within Rwanda, the international community ended up de-stabilizing the country further.
5.9. Even apart from the economic collapse, real problems had been evident behind the positive economic figures that had so gratified the self-satisfied aid agencies. Somehow, in the land that foreigners mythologized as “the Switzerland of Africa,” awkward data consistently received limited attention, although it was readily available. As a result, it has been too little noted that, even before the 1990 civil war and the 1994 genocide, Rwanda was one of the world's least-developed countries. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Rwanda in 1990 ranked below average of all of sub-Saharan Africa in life expectancy, child survival, adult literacy, average years of schooling, average caloric intake, and per capita GNP.[6]
5.10. By the end of the 1980s, rural land was being accumulated by a few at the expense of the many, and the largely Catholic population was increasing. The number of peasants who were land-poor (less than half a hectare) and those who were relatively land-rich (more than one hectare) both rose. By 1990, over one-quarter of the entire rural population was entirely landless; in some districts the figure reached 50 per cent. Not only was poverty on the rise, but so was inequality.[7]
5.11. Besides adding to societal tensions, this phenomenon had another major social impact as well. Without land and a dwelling, Rwandan youth could not marry. The land-poverty crisis created an entire cohort of males into their thirties with no family responsibilities and, often, no work and little hope. Since most Rwandans were Hutu and most Hutu were rural dwellers, most of the young men in these circumstances were naturally Hutu as well.
5.12. As in every age and every part of the globe, such rootless young men turn into big trouble looking for the right opportunity; they are made-to-order recruits for possible violence. Lacking all conviction, these are the young men who become mercenaries and paid killers for whichever side grabs them first. The new political parties rushed to take advantage of this convenient pool of idle, bored males for their militias or youth wings. The law may have constrained the army from recruiting youth under 16, but there were no fetters whatsoever on the parties' activities.
5.13. There seems to us an obvious lesson in this analysis for the international financial institutions. The issue does not concern economics, but the politics of economics. There is no such thing as an economic programme that is purely neutral and has no political or social impact. Just as the aid agencies believed that human rights were somehow distinct from development, so the World Bank and the IMF considered politics and economics separable spheres. This proposition makes no more sense now than it did then. It is true that some scholars who agree that economic factors helped create an environment in which genocide could occur do not attribute all Rwanda's economic troubles to the adjustment programme. Yet even they consider it “irresponsible in the extreme” for the international financial institutions to have ignored the overall circumstances of Rwanda at the time. “Even if the adjustment programme did not contribute directly to the tragic events of 1994, such a reckless disregard for social and political sensitivities in such a conspicuously sensitive situation would unquestionably have increased the risk of creating or compounding a potentially explosive situation.”[8] As one major study concluded, “... the priorities of aid in the early 1990s were largely unrelated to the challenges of increasing polarization, inequality, hatred, and violence Rwanda was facing at the time. Thus, important opportunities to use aid to induce a response away from increasingly violent conflict through the strategic use of incentives and disincentives were missed.”[9]
5.14. At the same time, aid increased significantly as the rich world came to the rescue of one of its favourite aid destinations, and certain traditional truths about the aid enterprise remained the rule. Probably more than two-thirds of all project costs everywhere go to fund the salaries of foreign experts, the construction of project infrastructures, and vehicles. Most development aid, in other words, ends up in the hands of the richest one per cent of people in society, those for whom it is least intended.[10]
5.15. Few Rwandans felt the benefit of foreign assistance. As one student of development aid in rural Rwanda put it, as far as farmers are concerned, most projects “benefit only those who promote them and those who work for them.”[11] In its annual report for 1992, USAID stated: “In the past two years ...people have attacked local authorities for launching [foreign-funded] development projects that brought little or no benefit to the community, for being personally corrupt, and for being inaccessible to and scornful of citizens in general.” Clearly, the degree of malaise had become serious indeed: “People are refusing to do compulsory community labour and to pay taxes. They are refusing to listen to the burgomaster and even lock him out of his office or block the road so he cannot get there.”[12]
Intra-elite conflict
5.16. The military dictatorship frustrated the ambitions of many within the Rwandan elite. Pressure for democratization from both within and outside the country forced Habyarimana to accept multiparty politics. New formations created new sources of intra-elite tensions, while the small clique of north-western Hutu who dominated the organs of state grew increasingly anxious about losing their control and dominance in the state and its institutions.
5.17 As the Habyarimana years rolled on, complacency, arrogance, widespread corruption, and distance from the people inexorably increased. The small faction of insiders was called the Akazu (“little house”), or sometimes “le Clan de Madame,” since its core was the President's wife, family, and close associates. The favouritism they showed towards their old regional loyalties, always a characteristic of the Habyarimana years, became increasingly flagrant. Whether in terms of educational places, government work, or aid projects, the northern regions derived benefits from government policies out of all proportion to their population.
5.18 But the Akazu also was the centre of a web of political, mercantile, and military machinations. Beyond favouring the north, Habyarimana's in-laws, his wife's brothers, were involved in various kinds of illicit and corrupt activities, including currency transactions and generous commissions on government contracts.[13] Much development aid actually ended up in their deep pockets. In the words of André Sibomana, a Catholic priest and perhaps the ruling clique's most courageous and effective foe, “We had evidence that he or his wife were diverting funds allocated to buying food for the population to import luxury items instead, for example, televisions, which were sold at vastly inflated prices.”[14] Now, as the economic collapse significantly reduced the available spoils of power, the Akazu decided its only serious option was to reduce the number of its competitors.
5.19. For the President's wife and her family, the movement toward power sharing was simply a challenge to their privileges. Once Habyarimana could not resist the pressure to negotiate sharing power, not just with other Hutu, but with the hated Tutsi invaders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as well, the conscious decision was taken to resist this threat using any means available. Many observers were well aware of the greed of the Akazu and did not doubt their fanatical determination to maintain their privileges. But, as members of this Panel can understand perfectly well, few could even contemplate the lengths they would go to do so.
5.20. For the rest of the political class, regional grievances were at the heart of most discontent. Non-northerners wanted a larger share of government positions, but Rwandan leaders were too clever to be caught fighting publicly over their own enrichment. Soon the Akazu was using the tried-and-true ethnic card to divert attention away from differences among the Hutu. Meanwhile, the frustrated Hutu outsiders discovered that democracy was an appealing battle cry and one cheered on by westerners who had rediscovered the virtues of democracy for poorer countries when the Cold War ended.
5.21. The majority of people watched the new competition among elites with growing alienation, since none of it seemed to have any connection with their lives. What rural Rwandans wanted was not more self-seeking politicians, but policies and programmes to alleviate their severe distress. What they got from their leaders was a proliferation of largely irrelevant new political groups and the insistence that the real predicament was the treachery of their Tutsi neighbours. The most significant consequences of the so-called democratization movement were profoundly unintended: the movement ended up inciting malevolent forces within society while alienating even further the majority of the population.
5.22. Once again, Rwandans confounded those who persisted in seeing them as almost mindlessly obedient to authority. Anti-government demonstrations and strikes were held in 1990, and even the Catholic church felt obligated to express publicly its dissatisfaction with government policies. On the other hand, with only a few laudable exceptions, it must be recorded that the leadership of church and state remained tightly bound throughout these eventful years, earning the former the nickname in anti-government circles of “the Church of Silence.” [15]
5.23. Growing discontent had to be dealt with by using both carrots and sticks. At first, Habyarimana used the October 1990 invasion by the Tutsi-dominated RPF as an excuse to terrorize Hutu opponents (see next chapter). But as the RPF advanced, it seemed more prudent to try to woo them with concessions, though it was always evident that the government begrudged every opening it was forced to offer. Habyarimana's one-party dictatorship was replaced with a swarm of 15 parties. In at least one, the Liberal Party, Tutsi felt at home. Another, the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), was a radical anti-Tutsi group, many of whose members were extremists even by Rwandan standards. All seem to agree, however, that, at the very least, the right wing of the MRND had close ties to the new CDR and used it to spread extremist Hutu propaganda. The other new parties consisted largely of Hutu from outside the north-western regions who had been cut out of the inner circles. Few observers fail to note that what distinguished the MRND from most of the new parties was that it had power, while the others wanted it.
5.24. By 1992, the level of anti-Tutsi violence, both rhetorical and physical, was escalating significantly. With massacres, terrorism, and street demonstrations increasing, Habyarimana could not resist the pressure to agree to a coalition Cabinet, with the position of Prime Minister going to the largest opposition party. Tensions between Habyarimana's MRND and its opponents never disappeared, however, especially since the MRND never stopped accusing the opposition of collaborating with the RPF enemy as the two-year old civil war continued to dominate the energies of the country's elites.
ECONOMIC DESTABILIZATION AFTER 1985
5.1. After 1985, things started going wrong again for Rwanda, its government, and its people. The economic, political, and social fabric of the nation began to unravel. All the building blocks that had been set in place began to crack. Some had been set in the colonial past; some were imports; and some were internal constructs for which neither history nor the outside world could be deemed responsible. Over the decades, these blocks had joined to form an organic whole, the foundation of modern Rwanda. By the second half of the 1980s, that foundation began to disintegrate. Instead of trying to rebuild in a more inclusive and constructive way, the Hutu elite chose a course that would soon cause the entire edifice to collapse. We want to describe briefly the key markers on the road to disaster.
Economic problems
5.2. There are countless poor countries in the world with economies in shambles, yet there have been only a handful of genocides. Neither poverty nor economic collapse alone caused the Rwandan genocide. We surely can say, however, that poverty increases social stress and that economic crises increase instability, and that these conditions make people more susceptible to the demagogic messages of hate-mongers. In Rwanda, a poor people became poorer in the late 1980s, with enormous consequences that inadvertently played into the hands of ethnic manipulators.
5.3. Dependence on commodity markets controlled by powerful interests in rich countries took its toll in these years, when coffee, tea, and tin prices all plummeted. As Rwandans watched helplessly, resources were transformed into major liabilities. Large US coffee traders were pressuring their government to abandon the system of quotas established under an international coffee agreement, regardless of the consequences for poorer coffee-growing countries. Following a fateful meeting of producers in mid-1989, coffee prices dropped by 50 per cent.[1] The losses were felt at every level of Rwandan society, causing widespread discontent. Growing inequality between most rural and some urban dwellers exacerbated the frustration of peasant farmers.
5.4. A drought in the south in 1989 brought further distress. State policies served only to worsen the situation. Here was an overwhelmingly agricultural population where so many small farmers were producing cash crops for export that they could no longer feed themselves. Many families could not afford food, and several hundred people died of hunger while many more came under extreme duress. It was clear to all that the drought was not solely responsible for the famine, but that political and economic policies were equally to blame. Confidence in the government declined dramatically. After decades of strict control and careful manipulation by one of Africa's most highly-centralized and well-organized states, the Rwandan people had earned a reputation for docility and deference to authority. Now, however, this considerably exaggerated submissiveness gave way to anger and protest.
5.5. Government earnings from coffee exports declined from $144 million in 1985 to $30 million in 1993.[2] A giant expansion in military capacity, triggered by the civil war that began in 1990, further skewed public finances. Already dependent to an unhealthy extent on international assistance, the Habyarimana government reluctantly concluded that it had little choice but to accept a Structural Adjustment Programme from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in return for a loan conditional on the rigid and harsh policies that characterized western economic orthodoxy of the time. The premise was that Rwanda needed economic shock therapy. The World Bank believed that most of the country's economic woes were externally induced and not the result of domestic mismanagement. Yet the conditions it was imposing were identical to those it demanded of countries that had been blatantly corrupt and incompetent.
5.6. Although in the end, not all the components of the program went ahead, those that were introduced managed to add to the existing misery. Devaluation was particularly resisted by the government, but it was a strict condition of the loan, presented by the international agencies' experts as a step along the road to increased consumption levels, greater investment, and an improved balance of trade. Not surprisingly, devaluation achieved exactly the opposite. Prices rose immediately for virtually all Rwandans who, by now, were at least indirectly linked to the commercial economy. Government social programmes were slashed dramatically, while the costs of school fees, health care, and even water increased. Civil servants' wages were frozen.
5.7. In one way or another, almost every family suffered a substantial reduction in income. By the early 1990s, according to one analysis, 50 per cent of Rwandans were extremely poor (incapable of feeding themselves decently), 40 per cent were poor, nine per cent were “non-poor” and one per cent – the political and business elite, foreign technical assistants, and others – were positively rich.[3] US Agency for International Development (USAID) 1993 data place 90 per cent of Rwanda's rural population and 86 per cent of the total population below the poverty line, which put Rwanda ahead of Bangladesh and Sudan, earning it the dubious distinction of having the highest poverty figure for the entire world. The World Bank, we should acknowledge, disagrees that it was responsible for exacerbating Rwanda's economic woes, though not with its usual confidence. In 1994, it stated that “it is difficult to analyze the effects of the adjustment programme on the incomes of the poor because overall economic conditions worsened and everybody was worse off.”[4]
5.8. The agreement between the international financial institutions and the government of Rwanda was reached in mid-September 1990; the programme began shortly after. In the interim, the country was invaded and a civil war ensued; yet at no time was consideration given to the likely political or social repercussions of economic shock therapy to a country engaged in armed conflict. Rather, following the usual guidelines, the World Bank team reviewing Rwanda's economic situation excluded all “non-economic variables” from their calculations and simulations.[5] The result was that, at a time of profound instability within Rwanda, the international community ended up de-stabilizing the country further.
5.9. Even apart from the economic collapse, real problems had been evident behind the positive economic figures that had so gratified the self-satisfied aid agencies. Somehow, in the land that foreigners mythologized as “the Switzerland of Africa,” awkward data consistently received limited attention, although it was readily available. As a result, it has been too little noted that, even before the 1990 civil war and the 1994 genocide, Rwanda was one of the world's least-developed countries. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Rwanda in 1990 ranked below average of all of sub-Saharan Africa in life expectancy, child survival, adult literacy, average years of schooling, average caloric intake, and per capita GNP.[6]
5.10. By the end of the 1980s, rural land was being accumulated by a few at the expense of the many, and the largely Catholic population was increasing. The number of peasants who were land-poor (less than half a hectare) and those who were relatively land-rich (more than one hectare) both rose. By 1990, over one-quarter of the entire rural population was entirely landless; in some districts the figure reached 50 per cent. Not only was poverty on the rise, but so was inequality.[7]
5.11. Besides adding to societal tensions, this phenomenon had another major social impact as well. Without land and a dwelling, Rwandan youth could not marry. The land-poverty crisis created an entire cohort of males into their thirties with no family responsibilities and, often, no work and little hope. Since most Rwandans were Hutu and most Hutu were rural dwellers, most of the young men in these circumstances were naturally Hutu as well.
5.12. As in every age and every part of the globe, such rootless young men turn into big trouble looking for the right opportunity; they are made-to-order recruits for possible violence. Lacking all conviction, these are the young men who become mercenaries and paid killers for whichever side grabs them first. The new political parties rushed to take advantage of this convenient pool of idle, bored males for their militias or youth wings. The law may have constrained the army from recruiting youth under 16, but there were no fetters whatsoever on the parties' activities.
5.13. There seems to us an obvious lesson in this analysis for the international financial institutions. The issue does not concern economics, but the politics of economics. There is no such thing as an economic programme that is purely neutral and has no political or social impact. Just as the aid agencies believed that human rights were somehow distinct from development, so the World Bank and the IMF considered politics and economics separable spheres. This proposition makes no more sense now than it did then. It is true that some scholars who agree that economic factors helped create an environment in which genocide could occur do not attribute all Rwanda's economic troubles to the adjustment programme. Yet even they consider it “irresponsible in the extreme” for the international financial institutions to have ignored the overall circumstances of Rwanda at the time. “Even if the adjustment programme did not contribute directly to the tragic events of 1994, such a reckless disregard for social and political sensitivities in such a conspicuously sensitive situation would unquestionably have increased the risk of creating or compounding a potentially explosive situation.”[8] As one major study concluded, “... the priorities of aid in the early 1990s were largely unrelated to the challenges of increasing polarization, inequality, hatred, and violence Rwanda was facing at the time. Thus, important opportunities to use aid to induce a response away from increasingly violent conflict through the strategic use of incentives and disincentives were missed.”[9]
5.14. At the same time, aid increased significantly as the rich world came to the rescue of one of its favourite aid destinations, and certain traditional truths about the aid enterprise remained the rule. Probably more than two-thirds of all project costs everywhere go to fund the salaries of foreign experts, the construction of project infrastructures, and vehicles. Most development aid, in other words, ends up in the hands of the richest one per cent of people in society, those for whom it is least intended.[10]
5.15. Few Rwandans felt the benefit of foreign assistance. As one student of development aid in rural Rwanda put it, as far as farmers are concerned, most projects “benefit only those who promote them and those who work for them.”[11] In its annual report for 1992, USAID stated: “In the past two years ...people have attacked local authorities for launching [foreign-funded] development projects that brought little or no benefit to the community, for being personally corrupt, and for being inaccessible to and scornful of citizens in general.” Clearly, the degree of malaise had become serious indeed: “People are refusing to do compulsory community labour and to pay taxes. They are refusing to listen to the burgomaster and even lock him out of his office or block the road so he cannot get there.”[12]
Intra-elite conflict
5.16. The military dictatorship frustrated the ambitions of many within the Rwandan elite. Pressure for democratization from both within and outside the country forced Habyarimana to accept multiparty politics. New formations created new sources of intra-elite tensions, while the small clique of north-western Hutu who dominated the organs of state grew increasingly anxious about losing their control and dominance in the state and its institutions.
5.17 As the Habyarimana years rolled on, complacency, arrogance, widespread corruption, and distance from the people inexorably increased. The small faction of insiders was called the Akazu (“little house”), or sometimes “le Clan de Madame,” since its core was the President's wife, family, and close associates. The favouritism they showed towards their old regional loyalties, always a characteristic of the Habyarimana years, became increasingly flagrant. Whether in terms of educational places, government work, or aid projects, the northern regions derived benefits from government policies out of all proportion to their population.
5.18 But the Akazu also was the centre of a web of political, mercantile, and military machinations. Beyond favouring the north, Habyarimana's in-laws, his wife's brothers, were involved in various kinds of illicit and corrupt activities, including currency transactions and generous commissions on government contracts.[13] Much development aid actually ended up in their deep pockets. In the words of André Sibomana, a Catholic priest and perhaps the ruling clique's most courageous and effective foe, “We had evidence that he or his wife were diverting funds allocated to buying food for the population to import luxury items instead, for example, televisions, which were sold at vastly inflated prices.”[14] Now, as the economic collapse significantly reduced the available spoils of power, the Akazu decided its only serious option was to reduce the number of its competitors.
5.19. For the President's wife and her family, the movement toward power sharing was simply a challenge to their privileges. Once Habyarimana could not resist the pressure to negotiate sharing power, not just with other Hutu, but with the hated Tutsi invaders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as well, the conscious decision was taken to resist this threat using any means available. Many observers were well aware of the greed of the Akazu and did not doubt their fanatical determination to maintain their privileges. But, as members of this Panel can understand perfectly well, few could even contemplate the lengths they would go to do so.
5.20. For the rest of the political class, regional grievances were at the heart of most discontent. Non-northerners wanted a larger share of government positions, but Rwandan leaders were too clever to be caught fighting publicly over their own enrichment. Soon the Akazu was using the tried-and-true ethnic card to divert attention away from differences among the Hutu. Meanwhile, the frustrated Hutu outsiders discovered that democracy was an appealing battle cry and one cheered on by westerners who had rediscovered the virtues of democracy for poorer countries when the Cold War ended.
5.21. The majority of people watched the new competition among elites with growing alienation, since none of it seemed to have any connection with their lives. What rural Rwandans wanted was not more self-seeking politicians, but policies and programmes to alleviate their severe distress. What they got from their leaders was a proliferation of largely irrelevant new political groups and the insistence that the real predicament was the treachery of their Tutsi neighbours. The most significant consequences of the so-called democratization movement were profoundly unintended: the movement ended up inciting malevolent forces within society while alienating even further the majority of the population.
5.22. Once again, Rwandans confounded those who persisted in seeing them as almost mindlessly obedient to authority. Anti-government demonstrations and strikes were held in 1990, and even the Catholic church felt obligated to express publicly its dissatisfaction with government policies. On the other hand, with only a few laudable exceptions, it must be recorded that the leadership of church and state remained tightly bound throughout these eventful years, earning the former the nickname in anti-government circles of “the Church of Silence.” [15]
5.23. Growing discontent had to be dealt with by using both carrots and sticks. At first, Habyarimana used the October 1990 invasion by the Tutsi-dominated RPF as an excuse to terrorize Hutu opponents (see next chapter). But as the RPF advanced, it seemed more prudent to try to woo them with concessions, though it was always evident that the government begrudged every opening it was forced to offer. Habyarimana's one-party dictatorship was replaced with a swarm of 15 parties. In at least one, the Liberal Party, Tutsi felt at home. Another, the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), was a radical anti-Tutsi group, many of whose members were extremists even by Rwandan standards. All seem to agree, however, that, at the very least, the right wing of the MRND had close ties to the new CDR and used it to spread extremist Hutu propaganda. The other new parties consisted largely of Hutu from outside the north-western regions who had been cut out of the inner circles. Few observers fail to note that what distinguished the MRND from most of the new parties was that it had power, while the others wanted it.
5.24. By 1992, the level of anti-Tutsi violence, both rhetorical and physical, was escalating significantly. With massacres, terrorism, and street demonstrations increasing, Habyarimana could not resist the pressure to agree to a coalition Cabinet, with the position of Prime Minister going to the largest opposition party. Tensions between Habyarimana's MRND and its opponents never disappeared, however, especially since the MRND never stopped accusing the opposition of collaborating with the RPF enemy as the two-year old civil war continued to dominate the energies of the country's elites.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 6
THE 1990 INVASION
6.1. Refugees have been at the heart of the crisis in central Africa for the entire past decade, beginning on October 1, 1990, when the children of Tutsi refugees who had been forced to flee to Uganda and were not permitted to return re-emerged as the trained soldiers of the RPF and invaded Rwanda. Even those sympathetic to the invaders’ cause acknowledge that the attack triggered a series of pivotal consequences that ultimately led, step by step, to the genocide. In the words of one human rights group, “...it is beyond dispute that the invasion ...was the single most important factor in escalating the political polarization of Rwanda.” [1]
6.2. While such consequences were unintended, they were by no means all unpredictable. It is our view that the invasion of October 1, 1990 ranks, along with the Belgian policy of institutionalizing ethnicity and the triumph of the ethnic extremists in the early 1960s, as one of the key defining moments in Rwandan history.
6.3. The fighting force did not materialize out of thin air. It was the end product of a series of decisions taken over many decades and in several countries. The RPF were the children of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who had been targeted by the anti-Tutsi pogroms that punctuated the Hutu take-over of the government in the early 1960s. The refugees fled to the four neighbouring countries of Burundi, Zaire, Uganda, and Tanzania. As we have observed earlier, while conflicts generate refugees, it is equally true that refugees can generate conflicts.
6.4. The experience of the Tutsi who escaped to Uganda makes this point dramatically. For the first few years, life was hard but quiet. By the end of the 1960s, Ugandan President Milton Obote, looking for a convenient scapegoat against whom to unite his party, singled out the 200,000 Rwandan Tutsi for persecution. As a result, the Tutsi exiles welcomed Idi Amin when he took power in 1971; he, in turn, rehabilitated them, and some Tutsi joined his army. [2] With the overthrow of Amin, the return of Obote, and the 1980s civil war, Rwandan refugees once again found themselves handy victims. As many as 6,000 may have been killed during this period. Obote publicly identified Ugandan rebel leader Yoweri Museveni and the Rwandans as people with common “Tutsi/Hima” origins as opposed to “Bantu” (Hutu) ones, unhistorical concepts that even now, as we will see, are causing divisiveness among Africans in many parts of the continent. [3]
6.5. Many Tutsi chose not to be helpless victims, joining Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) against their common foe. By the time the NRA took over in 1986, a remarkable 3,000 of its 14,000 men were Rwandans, many of them with high rank.[4] Although large numbers of these Tutsi had not been in Rwanda since they were children, and others had actually been born in Uganda and had never stepped foot in Rwanda, they were still seen as foreigners in Uganda and caused Museveni acute embarrassment as he began knitting his strife-torn country together again.
6.6. Life steadily became more difficult for Rwandans in Uganda. Promises of massive naturalizations were not kept. Army promotions were blocked. The most senior military officer of Rwandan nationality, who had actually become Uganda’s deputy commander-in-chief and deputy minister of defence, was removed from his posts in 1989. Finally, Rwandans were explicitly forbidden by the Uganda Investment Code from owning land in Uganda. Returning “home” was beginning to seem an attractive choice to increasing numbers of the exiled leadership.
6.7. Habyarimana’s policies were equally significant in the exiles’ decision to fight their way back to Rwanda. Until the late 1980s, his unyielding position was that the refugees were not his concern: Rwanda was too poor and had too little land to accommodate the enormous exiled community. So far as he was concerned, that was the end of his responsibility. As pressure for democratization increased, however, pressure on Habyarimana to moderate this stance arose from foreign donors, UN agencies, and Uganda. Visits between Habyarimana and Museveni initially led nowhere, notwithstanding the latter’s argument that it was in Habyarimana’s own interests to address the grievances of the Rwandan Tutsi in exile.
6.8. Finally, the two governments agreed to establish a joint commission on Rwandan refugees in Uganda to determine how many wanted to return and what capacity Rwanda had to absorb them; a Rwandan national commission was struck as well. But observers still doubted Habyarimana’s good will as he continued adamantly to refer to the Tutsi outside the country as emigrants instead of refugees, implying a voluntary decision to leave Rwanda.
6.9. Whether it was a charade or not, the commission functioned. In fact, a visit to Rwanda by a group of refugees was scheduled for October 1990, but by that time, it was already too late. Rwanda’s inflexibility and unreliability had reinforced the arguments of the militants against the moderates within the Tutsi leadership in Uganda. On October 1, 1990, the fateful invasion began when several thousand soldiers, mostly well trained and well armed from their years with Museveni, crossed the border into Rwanda. [5]
6.10. Inevitably, there are many questions about the invasion’s timing, motives, appropriateness, and consequences. Equally inevitable are profound differences of opinion. This matters, since part of the propaganda war still being waged today revolves around the legitimacy of the invasion of October 1, 1990, and, therefore, the legitimacy of today’s government.
6.11. Even Hutu who opposed Habyarimana, for example, and disavowed ethnic categorizations must have resented the attack. What right had this band of unknown soldiers to invade a sovereign country with the aim of taking over its government by force? Most of the invaders had probably not even been born in Rwanda, had no known roots in the country, certainly had no support from the majority of Rwandans, may or may not have had any among their own people, and were backed by a state with whom Rwanda had formal diplomatic ties.
6.12. After all, even the RPF agreed, during the subsequent Arusha negotiations, that anyone who had been away from Rwanda for more than 10 years had no further claim on property that might once have been their family’s. So what entitlements were held by those who had been away for 25 or 30 years, whose families had fled when they were as young as three (as was the case for Paul Kagame, Museveni’s former deputy head of military intelligence, who became commander of the RPF forces), or who had been born in Uganda and were in Rwanda now for the first time in their lives? How could one begin to trust a group of armed, foreign, invaders who pretended to represent all Rwandans, when everyone knew that the group was overwhelmingly Tutsi in composition and entirely Tutsi in leadership?
6.13. We have to say that these seem like very sensible questions to us, and it is little wonder that Habyarimana and his followers could easily appeal to the vast majority of Rwandans to unite against the outsiders. The crime of the Hutu leaders, however, was their cynical and deliberate decision to play the ethnic card, rekindling smouldering embers of inter-ethnic hostilities and opportunistically escalating the level and intensity of anti-Tutsi animosities.
6.14. The timing of the RPF invasion lent credence to their divisive strategy. Habyarimana was demonstrating, however reluctantly, a new openness towards both multiparty democracy and the exiles. This bolstered his sagging popularity and undermined the RPF’s credibility as a more attractive alternative. The outsiders were claiming to stand for a new democracy and the right of exiles to return, and yet they launched their invasion just when both were high on Rwanda’s public agenda.
6.15. The RPF response was straightforward enough: They were Rwandans and had a right to return to their native land. They would have preferred to do so in a more gradual, systematic way, working co-operatively with the government to ensure that returnees could be settled properly. Clearly, Habyarimana did not have the slightest intention to make any such arrangement, and, therefore, the exiles had no choice but to use force. Refugees and warriors had to become refugee-warriors, even if they were bound inevitably to generate new conflicts and, perhaps, new refugees. Given the Habyarimana record, this argument is certainly understandable.
6.16. In the end, the invasion went ahead because of the conjunction of events in both countries; Uganda pushed while Rwanda pulled. In Uganda, Tutsi exiles had suddenly found themselves unwelcome, and their leaders were losing their status. They had come to think of Rwanda as their parents’ home and of themselves as Ugandans. Now they discovered their Ugandan countrymen of the past 30 years regarded them as pushy foreigners. It was time to return. From their close contacts at the top of Uganda’s government, they understood that Museveni could not actively support their plans or even openly endorse them, but that he would not be embarrassed or unhappy if they went ahead, taking their Ugandan weapons with them.
6.17. At the same time, the RPF was convinced that Habyarimana knew an invasion was inevitable and was discussing refugees and democracy only to buy time to increase his military strength and to line up support from his allies. But at the moment, his government seemed an easy target, given the conflict between the Akazu and other Hutu for the spoils of office and considering the difficulties caused by the economic crisis. October 1, 1990, a day when both Habyarimana and Museveni happened to be in New York for a UN summit on children, the RPF struck with a large, well-organized force led by former senior officers of Museveni’s NRA. [6]
6.18. The civil war launched that day lasted, with long periods of cease-fire, for close to four years. Its final three months coincided with the period of the genocide, which was halted only by the ultimate triumph in July 1994 of the refugee-warriors over the “genocidaires” (the French word for perpetrators of genocide, widely used even by English-speaking Rwandans). By that time, hardly anyone seemed to remember that an eight-point political platform had been issued by the RPF prior to the invasion. [7] Even in 1990, it had been mostly important as a public relations document.. Its drafters had observed Museveni’s shrewd appeal to a wide range of potential supporters in Uganda.
6.19. The RPF programme was designed with an eye to appeal not only to Rwanda’s Tutsi, but also to the many Hutu alienated from Habyarimana’s government. To the Hutu, it promised democracy and an end to corruption and nepotism. To the Tutsi, it offered national unity, a national military, and an end to a system that generated refugees. The large majority of citizens who had suffered because of the economic slump and the Structural Adjustment Programme would be assured a self-sustaining economy and improved social services. The final point was commitment to a progressive foreign policy.
6.20. The RPF’s expectations that Rwandans would embrace them as saviours from the Habyarimana regime were swiftly dispelled. Their troops’ advances through the north and north-east, combined with the government’s cynical anti-Tutsi propaganda, produced a massive movement of terrified Hutu into settlement camps in the centre of the country. In a short time, close to 300,000 Rwandans, mostly Hutu, had been driven from or had fled their land to become “internally displaced persons” (the term used to distinguish refugee groups who do not flee across national boundaries) within their own country. [8] In early 1993, another large-scale RPF attack led to a further million, again mostly Hutu, being displaced. The food their productive lands had provided to urban Rwanda was sorely missed, and the growing scarcity contributed to inflationary pressures on other food supplies. Equally disastrous was the fact that the camps became another fertile source of recruitment for politicians who were busily organizing their own militias, armed groups of civilians, largely rootless young males, who owed their loyalty only to those who trained, armed, fed, and commanded them.
6.21. The remarkable internal displacement may not have been foreseeable, but several other consequences of the RPF invasion were surely predictable at the time. The influence within the government of its radical Hutu and hardcore military factions was likely to be reinforced. Almost certainly, the Rwandan army would be expanded. Existing economic problems were bound to be exacerbated. As had happened without exception after each military invasion into Rwanda by Tutsi exiles during the 1960s, there would very likely be violent reprisals against innocent Rwandan Tutsi. And finally, it was always at least possible, if not probable, that history would repeat itself and an opportunistic and threatened government would once again awaken the sleeping dogs of ethnic division.
6.22. This is exactly what happened. The invasion gave an ethnic strategy immediate credibility. The carefully inculcated fears about Tutsi conspiracies – fears about alleged plots to regain control of the republic and launch merciless attacks on all Hutu – that had been dormant for so many years were deliberately revived. The nation was reminded that the Tutsi were, from the first, the “other”; they were all alien invaders. Was it therefore not self-evident that all Tutsi were accomplices of the invaders? Any question of class or geographical division among Hutu had to be submerged in a common front against the devilish intruders. It was not difficult for the government to exploit its own failures in order to rally the majority behind them. In a country where so many had so little land, it took little ingenuity to convince Hutu peasants that the newcomers would reclaim lands they had left long before and on which Hutu farmers had immediately settled.
6.23. Almost immediately after October 1, 1990, the government retaliated. Some 8,000 Tutsi and perhaps a few hundred Hutu were arrested throughout Kigali. Thousands were forced into the national stadium for questioning. [9] Many were held for months. By early 1991, ethnic violence had crossed thresholds that had not been approached for many years. In response to an RPF raid on a district jail, local Hutu militias massacred hundreds of Tutsi pastoralists. This was only the first in a series of anti-Tutsi pogroms, culminating in March 1992 with the cold-blooded massacre of 300 Tutsi civilians in the south.
6.24. For their part, whether or not they were acting in counter-retaliation, the invaders showed little restraint in dealing with Hutu civilians in the areas they “liberated,” a pattern they have followed throughout the past decade. Although it was a disciplined fighting force, the RPF had major grievances to settle with the Rwandan Hutu. The fury of the RPF invaders only increased as they observed the escalating rhetoric being used against them. At the same time, their numbers were expanding as dramatically, with the addition of raw young recruits who had none of the discipline of the soldiers who had come through the wars of Uganda. As the fighting continued, the RPF terrorized peasants, who fled their small plots, ending up in squalid camps for the internally displaced. [10]
6.25. Although the precise numbers are in question, RPF troops committed crimes against humanity as they advanced through the country. [11] Whether their leaders explicitly ordered such behaviour, implicitly condoned it, or simply failed to stop it, is not clear to us. But the fact remains there was a great deal of abuse, all of which is anathema to this Panel, and we condemn all cases of it without equivocation.
THE 1990 INVASION
6.1. Refugees have been at the heart of the crisis in central Africa for the entire past decade, beginning on October 1, 1990, when the children of Tutsi refugees who had been forced to flee to Uganda and were not permitted to return re-emerged as the trained soldiers of the RPF and invaded Rwanda. Even those sympathetic to the invaders’ cause acknowledge that the attack triggered a series of pivotal consequences that ultimately led, step by step, to the genocide. In the words of one human rights group, “...it is beyond dispute that the invasion ...was the single most important factor in escalating the political polarization of Rwanda.” [1]
6.2. While such consequences were unintended, they were by no means all unpredictable. It is our view that the invasion of October 1, 1990 ranks, along with the Belgian policy of institutionalizing ethnicity and the triumph of the ethnic extremists in the early 1960s, as one of the key defining moments in Rwandan history.
6.3. The fighting force did not materialize out of thin air. It was the end product of a series of decisions taken over many decades and in several countries. The RPF were the children of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who had been targeted by the anti-Tutsi pogroms that punctuated the Hutu take-over of the government in the early 1960s. The refugees fled to the four neighbouring countries of Burundi, Zaire, Uganda, and Tanzania. As we have observed earlier, while conflicts generate refugees, it is equally true that refugees can generate conflicts.
6.4. The experience of the Tutsi who escaped to Uganda makes this point dramatically. For the first few years, life was hard but quiet. By the end of the 1960s, Ugandan President Milton Obote, looking for a convenient scapegoat against whom to unite his party, singled out the 200,000 Rwandan Tutsi for persecution. As a result, the Tutsi exiles welcomed Idi Amin when he took power in 1971; he, in turn, rehabilitated them, and some Tutsi joined his army. [2] With the overthrow of Amin, the return of Obote, and the 1980s civil war, Rwandan refugees once again found themselves handy victims. As many as 6,000 may have been killed during this period. Obote publicly identified Ugandan rebel leader Yoweri Museveni and the Rwandans as people with common “Tutsi/Hima” origins as opposed to “Bantu” (Hutu) ones, unhistorical concepts that even now, as we will see, are causing divisiveness among Africans in many parts of the continent. [3]
6.5. Many Tutsi chose not to be helpless victims, joining Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) against their common foe. By the time the NRA took over in 1986, a remarkable 3,000 of its 14,000 men were Rwandans, many of them with high rank.[4] Although large numbers of these Tutsi had not been in Rwanda since they were children, and others had actually been born in Uganda and had never stepped foot in Rwanda, they were still seen as foreigners in Uganda and caused Museveni acute embarrassment as he began knitting his strife-torn country together again.
6.6. Life steadily became more difficult for Rwandans in Uganda. Promises of massive naturalizations were not kept. Army promotions were blocked. The most senior military officer of Rwandan nationality, who had actually become Uganda’s deputy commander-in-chief and deputy minister of defence, was removed from his posts in 1989. Finally, Rwandans were explicitly forbidden by the Uganda Investment Code from owning land in Uganda. Returning “home” was beginning to seem an attractive choice to increasing numbers of the exiled leadership.
6.7. Habyarimana’s policies were equally significant in the exiles’ decision to fight their way back to Rwanda. Until the late 1980s, his unyielding position was that the refugees were not his concern: Rwanda was too poor and had too little land to accommodate the enormous exiled community. So far as he was concerned, that was the end of his responsibility. As pressure for democratization increased, however, pressure on Habyarimana to moderate this stance arose from foreign donors, UN agencies, and Uganda. Visits between Habyarimana and Museveni initially led nowhere, notwithstanding the latter’s argument that it was in Habyarimana’s own interests to address the grievances of the Rwandan Tutsi in exile.
6.8. Finally, the two governments agreed to establish a joint commission on Rwandan refugees in Uganda to determine how many wanted to return and what capacity Rwanda had to absorb them; a Rwandan national commission was struck as well. But observers still doubted Habyarimana’s good will as he continued adamantly to refer to the Tutsi outside the country as emigrants instead of refugees, implying a voluntary decision to leave Rwanda.
6.9. Whether it was a charade or not, the commission functioned. In fact, a visit to Rwanda by a group of refugees was scheduled for October 1990, but by that time, it was already too late. Rwanda’s inflexibility and unreliability had reinforced the arguments of the militants against the moderates within the Tutsi leadership in Uganda. On October 1, 1990, the fateful invasion began when several thousand soldiers, mostly well trained and well armed from their years with Museveni, crossed the border into Rwanda. [5]
6.10. Inevitably, there are many questions about the invasion’s timing, motives, appropriateness, and consequences. Equally inevitable are profound differences of opinion. This matters, since part of the propaganda war still being waged today revolves around the legitimacy of the invasion of October 1, 1990, and, therefore, the legitimacy of today’s government.
6.11. Even Hutu who opposed Habyarimana, for example, and disavowed ethnic categorizations must have resented the attack. What right had this band of unknown soldiers to invade a sovereign country with the aim of taking over its government by force? Most of the invaders had probably not even been born in Rwanda, had no known roots in the country, certainly had no support from the majority of Rwandans, may or may not have had any among their own people, and were backed by a state with whom Rwanda had formal diplomatic ties.
6.12. After all, even the RPF agreed, during the subsequent Arusha negotiations, that anyone who had been away from Rwanda for more than 10 years had no further claim on property that might once have been their family’s. So what entitlements were held by those who had been away for 25 or 30 years, whose families had fled when they were as young as three (as was the case for Paul Kagame, Museveni’s former deputy head of military intelligence, who became commander of the RPF forces), or who had been born in Uganda and were in Rwanda now for the first time in their lives? How could one begin to trust a group of armed, foreign, invaders who pretended to represent all Rwandans, when everyone knew that the group was overwhelmingly Tutsi in composition and entirely Tutsi in leadership?
6.13. We have to say that these seem like very sensible questions to us, and it is little wonder that Habyarimana and his followers could easily appeal to the vast majority of Rwandans to unite against the outsiders. The crime of the Hutu leaders, however, was their cynical and deliberate decision to play the ethnic card, rekindling smouldering embers of inter-ethnic hostilities and opportunistically escalating the level and intensity of anti-Tutsi animosities.
6.14. The timing of the RPF invasion lent credence to their divisive strategy. Habyarimana was demonstrating, however reluctantly, a new openness towards both multiparty democracy and the exiles. This bolstered his sagging popularity and undermined the RPF’s credibility as a more attractive alternative. The outsiders were claiming to stand for a new democracy and the right of exiles to return, and yet they launched their invasion just when both were high on Rwanda’s public agenda.
6.15. The RPF response was straightforward enough: They were Rwandans and had a right to return to their native land. They would have preferred to do so in a more gradual, systematic way, working co-operatively with the government to ensure that returnees could be settled properly. Clearly, Habyarimana did not have the slightest intention to make any such arrangement, and, therefore, the exiles had no choice but to use force. Refugees and warriors had to become refugee-warriors, even if they were bound inevitably to generate new conflicts and, perhaps, new refugees. Given the Habyarimana record, this argument is certainly understandable.
6.16. In the end, the invasion went ahead because of the conjunction of events in both countries; Uganda pushed while Rwanda pulled. In Uganda, Tutsi exiles had suddenly found themselves unwelcome, and their leaders were losing their status. They had come to think of Rwanda as their parents’ home and of themselves as Ugandans. Now they discovered their Ugandan countrymen of the past 30 years regarded them as pushy foreigners. It was time to return. From their close contacts at the top of Uganda’s government, they understood that Museveni could not actively support their plans or even openly endorse them, but that he would not be embarrassed or unhappy if they went ahead, taking their Ugandan weapons with them.
6.17. At the same time, the RPF was convinced that Habyarimana knew an invasion was inevitable and was discussing refugees and democracy only to buy time to increase his military strength and to line up support from his allies. But at the moment, his government seemed an easy target, given the conflict between the Akazu and other Hutu for the spoils of office and considering the difficulties caused by the economic crisis. October 1, 1990, a day when both Habyarimana and Museveni happened to be in New York for a UN summit on children, the RPF struck with a large, well-organized force led by former senior officers of Museveni’s NRA. [6]
6.18. The civil war launched that day lasted, with long periods of cease-fire, for close to four years. Its final three months coincided with the period of the genocide, which was halted only by the ultimate triumph in July 1994 of the refugee-warriors over the “genocidaires” (the French word for perpetrators of genocide, widely used even by English-speaking Rwandans). By that time, hardly anyone seemed to remember that an eight-point political platform had been issued by the RPF prior to the invasion. [7] Even in 1990, it had been mostly important as a public relations document.. Its drafters had observed Museveni’s shrewd appeal to a wide range of potential supporters in Uganda.
6.19. The RPF programme was designed with an eye to appeal not only to Rwanda’s Tutsi, but also to the many Hutu alienated from Habyarimana’s government. To the Hutu, it promised democracy and an end to corruption and nepotism. To the Tutsi, it offered national unity, a national military, and an end to a system that generated refugees. The large majority of citizens who had suffered because of the economic slump and the Structural Adjustment Programme would be assured a self-sustaining economy and improved social services. The final point was commitment to a progressive foreign policy.
6.20. The RPF’s expectations that Rwandans would embrace them as saviours from the Habyarimana regime were swiftly dispelled. Their troops’ advances through the north and north-east, combined with the government’s cynical anti-Tutsi propaganda, produced a massive movement of terrified Hutu into settlement camps in the centre of the country. In a short time, close to 300,000 Rwandans, mostly Hutu, had been driven from or had fled their land to become “internally displaced persons” (the term used to distinguish refugee groups who do not flee across national boundaries) within their own country. [8] In early 1993, another large-scale RPF attack led to a further million, again mostly Hutu, being displaced. The food their productive lands had provided to urban Rwanda was sorely missed, and the growing scarcity contributed to inflationary pressures on other food supplies. Equally disastrous was the fact that the camps became another fertile source of recruitment for politicians who were busily organizing their own militias, armed groups of civilians, largely rootless young males, who owed their loyalty only to those who trained, armed, fed, and commanded them.
6.21. The remarkable internal displacement may not have been foreseeable, but several other consequences of the RPF invasion were surely predictable at the time. The influence within the government of its radical Hutu and hardcore military factions was likely to be reinforced. Almost certainly, the Rwandan army would be expanded. Existing economic problems were bound to be exacerbated. As had happened without exception after each military invasion into Rwanda by Tutsi exiles during the 1960s, there would very likely be violent reprisals against innocent Rwandan Tutsi. And finally, it was always at least possible, if not probable, that history would repeat itself and an opportunistic and threatened government would once again awaken the sleeping dogs of ethnic division.
6.22. This is exactly what happened. The invasion gave an ethnic strategy immediate credibility. The carefully inculcated fears about Tutsi conspiracies – fears about alleged plots to regain control of the republic and launch merciless attacks on all Hutu – that had been dormant for so many years were deliberately revived. The nation was reminded that the Tutsi were, from the first, the “other”; they were all alien invaders. Was it therefore not self-evident that all Tutsi were accomplices of the invaders? Any question of class or geographical division among Hutu had to be submerged in a common front against the devilish intruders. It was not difficult for the government to exploit its own failures in order to rally the majority behind them. In a country where so many had so little land, it took little ingenuity to convince Hutu peasants that the newcomers would reclaim lands they had left long before and on which Hutu farmers had immediately settled.
6.23. Almost immediately after October 1, 1990, the government retaliated. Some 8,000 Tutsi and perhaps a few hundred Hutu were arrested throughout Kigali. Thousands were forced into the national stadium for questioning. [9] Many were held for months. By early 1991, ethnic violence had crossed thresholds that had not been approached for many years. In response to an RPF raid on a district jail, local Hutu militias massacred hundreds of Tutsi pastoralists. This was only the first in a series of anti-Tutsi pogroms, culminating in March 1992 with the cold-blooded massacre of 300 Tutsi civilians in the south.
6.24. For their part, whether or not they were acting in counter-retaliation, the invaders showed little restraint in dealing with Hutu civilians in the areas they “liberated,” a pattern they have followed throughout the past decade. Although it was a disciplined fighting force, the RPF had major grievances to settle with the Rwandan Hutu. The fury of the RPF invaders only increased as they observed the escalating rhetoric being used against them. At the same time, their numbers were expanding as dramatically, with the addition of raw young recruits who had none of the discipline of the soldiers who had come through the wars of Uganda. As the fighting continued, the RPF terrorized peasants, who fled their small plots, ending up in squalid camps for the internally displaced. [10]
6.25. Although the precise numbers are in question, RPF troops committed crimes against humanity as they advanced through the country. [11] Whether their leaders explicitly ordered such behaviour, implicitly condoned it, or simply failed to stop it, is not clear to us. But the fact remains there was a great deal of abuse, all of which is anathema to this Panel, and we condemn all cases of it without equivocation.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 7
THE ROAD TO GENOCIDE: 1990-1993
THE TRIUMPH OF ETHNIC RADICALISM
7.1. Violence and extremism swiftly burgeoned in the hothouse atmosphere that soon prevailed throughout Rwanda. Old patterns re-emerged. There had been no punishment for those Hutu who had led the massacres of the Tutsi in the early 1960s and 1972-73, and the careers flourished of those who organized cruel repression of opponents throughout the first decade and a half of the Habyarimana regime. Now, in the wake of the October 1, 1990, invasion, impunity flourished for the demagogues who were deliberately fuelling the latent animosity toward those they considered perfidious outsiders, a category including not just the Tutsi refugee-warriors of the RPF but every Tutsi still in Rwanda, as well as any Hutu alleged to be their sympathizer.
7.2. But that does not mean that planning the genocide was initiated at that moment. It is important to understand that there is for the Rwandan genocide no “smoking gun.” So far as is known, there is no document, no minutes of a meeting, nor any other evidence that pinpoints a precise moment when certain individuals decided on a master plan to wipe out the Tutsi. As we have already seen, both physical and rhetorical violence against the Tutsi as a people indeed began immediately after October 1, 1990, and continued to escalate until the genocide actually started in April 1994. Without question this campaign was organized and promoted, and at some stage in this period these anti-Tutsi activities turned into a strategy for genocide. But that exact point has never been established.
7.3. This fact is reflected in all the major studies of the genocide. Virtually all authorities are notably imprecise or ambiguous in stating when systematic planning and organizing can be said to have begun. Moreover, even within this imprecision, there is also disagreement. One authority says the plot was hatched soon after the October invasion. [1] Another says “dress rehearsals” for genocide began with the formation of death squads in 1991.[2] Genocide, argues another, “began to look to the hard-line Akazu circles like both an attractive and feasible proposition” by late 1992. [3] The plan “was drawn up by January 1994,” states another. [4]
7.4. What we do know, however, is that from October 1, 1990, Rwanda endured three and a half years of violent anti-Tutsi incidents, each of which in retrospect can easily be interpreted as a deliberate step in a vast conspiracy culminating in the shooting down of the President Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994, and the subsequent unleashing of the genocide. But all such interpretations remain speculative. No one yet knows who shot down the plane, nor can it be demonstrated that the countless manifestations of anti-Tutsi sentiment in these years were part of a diabolical master plan. It seems to us from the evidence most probable that the idea of genocide emerged only gradually, possibly in late 1993 and accelerating in determination and urgency into 1994.
7.5. Many hoped that these crucial issues would be illuminated at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up after the genocide to try senior figures accused of genocide. And indeed, the tribunal has concluded that genocide had been planned and organized in advance, but with no more precision than that. Jean Kambanda, Prime Minister of the government during the genocide, pleaded guilty to genocide and confessed that the genocide had been planned in advance. But for somewhat mysterious reasons that we discuss in a later chapter, his confession was brief and general, and he shed no new light on the many details that are lacking; moreover, he has now recanted his original confession. [5]
7.6. The fact that the Rwandan government reacted vigorously to the invasion in itself proves nothing about genocidal intentions. What government anywhere would have done otherwise? Habyarimana never had any doubt that Uganda’s President Museveni was behind the invaders, a conviction that was shared and reinforced by his Zairian colleague, President Mobutu. In his meeting with the Panel, Museveni denied responsibility for the invasion. Others surely had the right to be suspicious of the complicity of at least some faction of his government and army. Uganda may or may not have actively co-operated in planning the invasion, but at the very least, it must have allowed the exiles to plan and execute the invasion of a sovereign neighbouring state that was launched from Ugandan soil and used Ugandan weapons. It is clear that Habyarimana and his advisers immediately understood what the RPF and Uganda had just handed them – an opportunity to consolidate their eroding support and to mobilize international backing for the war the invaders had begun.
7.7. It is very important to recall that, up to this point, the Tutsi had not been singled out for abuse by the government in some 17 years. Now, as news of the invasion broke, it appears that even many Tutsi were initially unsympathetic to the invaders. [6] Unexpectedly the government had a perfect opportunity to unite the country against the alien raiders. They rejected it.
7.8. As this report will repeatedly emphasize, different identities, ethnic or otherwise, do not in themselves cause division or conflict. It is the behaviour of unscrupulous governing elites that transforms differences into divisions. In the simple phrase of one scholar of such conflicts, those who choose to manipulate such differences for their own self-interest, even at the risk of creating major conflict, are “bad leaders.” [7] Fatefully, Rwanda’s bad leaders chose the path of division and hate instead of national unity. Five days into the invasion, the government announced that Kigali had been attacked by RPF forces. [8] In fact, the alleged attack on the capital was a fake. The heavy firing that could be heard across the city had been carried out by Rwanda’s own government troops. The event was carefully staged to provide credible grounds for accusing the Tutsi of supporting the enemy, and the Minister of Justice proceeded with that accusation. Hurling the epithet “ibyitso” (accomplices), he asserted that the Kigali attack could not have been organized without trusted allies on the inside. [9] Who was better suited to this than the Rwandans who happened to be of the same ethnic group as the invaders? Arrests began immediately, and eventually about 13,000 people were imprisoned. [10] They included some Hutu opponents of the regime, whose arrests were meant to either silence or intimidate them into supporting the President. Thousands of detainees were held for months, without charge, in deplorable conditions. Many were tortured, and dozens died. [11] Organized massacres of the Tutsi soon followed.
7.9. French forces had been summoned by Habyarimana when the invasion began. They arrived on the very night of the staged attack, and probably rescued the Habyarimana regime from military defeat. [12] Not surprisingly, the government’s version of those early events – the faked attack on the capital – was widely believed, and it was successful in achieving another goal as well: to gain help from other friendly foreign nations. For the next three years, French troops remained in varying numbers to support the regime and its army. [13] The Belgian government also sent troops, but it was sensitive to its controversial background in Rwanda, and its soldiers stayed only a month until any possible threat to Belgian nationals had passed. [14] Zaire’s Mobutu eagerly agreed to offer military support, grasping the opportunity to be a player on the African scene after the end of the Cold War, which had cost him much of his American support. But his troops were soon sent home for indiscipline. [15]
KILLING
7.10. Massacres of the Tutsi began at the very outset of the ensuing civil war and, in a real sense, they did not end until the RPF victory of July 1994. After the war, a major debate broke out – and continues still – over who knew what about the events unfolding in Rwanda. In our view, this is not a serious debate. The major actors in the drama, the world that mattered to Rwanda – most of its Great Lakes Region neighbours, the UN and the major western powers – knew a great deal about what was happening, and they soon learned that the events were being masterminded at the highest level of the state. They knew that this was no senseless case of “Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu,” [16] as it was sometimes dismissively described. That world knew that a terrible fate had befallen Rwanda. They even knew, and reported, that some individuals in Rwanda were talking openly of eliminating all Tutsi. [17]
7.11. Early in 1993, four international human rights organizations had come together as an International Commission of Inquiry and issued a well-documented report that came close to declaring that genocide was a serious future possibility. [18] In truth, many governments routinely ignored the findings of non-governmental organizations, as the four agencies discovered to their dismay. Only months later, however, in August of the same year, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary, Arbitrary, and Extrajudicial Executions issued another report based on his own mission to Rwanda, and it largely confirmed the conclusions of the earlier investigation. Indeed, the Special Rapporteur concluded that the massacres that had already taken place seemed to conform to the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide: “The victims of the attacks, Tutsi in the overwhelming majority of cases, have been targeted solely because of their membership in a certain ethnic group and for no other objective reason.” He also reported that violence was increasing, extremist propaganda was rampant, and the militias were organized. [19]
7.12. The situation, in other words, was abundantly clear. The only thing that was not clear was exactly how far the plotters were prepared to go. Large numbers of observers had little doubt that many massacres were virtually inevitable if not deterred somehow. But would the radicals take the unthinkable, quantum leap to a full-blown genocidal attack against every Tutsi in the country?
7.13. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of observers did not believe a genocide would be launched. More precisely, they could not bring themselves to harbour such a belief. The report by the UN Special Rapporteur broaching the subject was either ignored or downplayed. As members of the Panel wrestled with this vexing question, we came finally to understand that it was literally unthinkable for most people to believe that genocide was in fact possible; it was simply beyond comprehension that it could be possible. Each case of modern genocide has taken the world by surprise – even when, in retrospect, it is clear that unmistakable warning signs and statements of intent were there in advance for all to see. In the early 1990s, the very rarity and singularity of the phenomenon of genocide put it beyond contemplation.
7.14. Even conceding this, however, we are left with the remaining perplexing question: How is it possible that the awful horrors that were not in dispute were not sufficient to mobilize world concern?
7.15. There is a record of atrocities, all of which was publicly exposed throughout the early 1990s by credible human rights organizations. [20] Massacres of Tutsi were carried out in October 1990, January 1991, February 1991, March 1992, August 1992, January 1993, March 1993, and February 1994. [21] On virtually each occasion, they were carefully organized. On each occasion, scores of Tutsi were slaughtered by mobs and militiamen associated with different political parties, sometimes with the involvement of the police and army, incited by the media, directed by local government officials, and encouraged by some national politicians.
7.16. As we have already pointed out, it is true that no single meeting or document can be identified as the recognized, explicit, first step in planning the genocide. But looking back, as the story unfolds through 1991 and into 1992, it becomes difficult to avoid seeing a pattern emerging through these successive slaughters. It appears that the radicals and military worked together trying out different techniques of killing. As the experiments progressed, their leaders learned two lessons: that they could massacre large numbers of people quickly and efficiently (a fact that was reported to the UN Secretariat in a now-famous fax in January 1994, [22] which we will discuss later); and that, based on the reactions they had elicited to date, they could get away with it.
7.17. Between outright massacres, a reign of terror prevailed. Murder, rape, harassment or imprisonment could befall any Tutsi at any time. Early in 1992, a secret society calling itself “Amasasu” (bullets) was created within the Rwandan army by extremist officers who wanted to pursue the RPF with greater ferocity. Soon they were handing out weapons to the militias organized by the CDR, as well as to the extremists in the MRND, and working hand-in-hand with another arm of the death squads.
7.18. The death squads were formed as early as 1991. By the following year, their existence was public information. A 1992 exposé by the magazine Umurava described in detail the infamous “Zero Network,” a death squad patterned on the Latin American model and made up of a mixture of off-duty soldiers and MRND militiamen, [23] seemingly a branch of the Akazu and the secret police. The exposé revealed the Zero Network’s intimate connections to Habyarimana and its responsibility for the death squads. Its leaders included three of Habyarimana’s brothers-in-law, his son-in-law, his personal secretary, the head of military intelligence, the commander of the Presidential Guard and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, director of the defence ministry and a feared activist in the Hutu Power movement (to be discussed later). In the remote event that diplomats in Kigali failed to report the information contained in Umurava’s exposé to their respective governments, in October 1992 two Belgians held a press conference at the Senate in Brussels to reveal the secrets of the Zero Network. [24] Some months later, the report of the four human rights organizations, referred to above, stated that “the responsibility of the Head of State and his immediate entourage, including his family, is gravely engaged” in the work of the death squads. [25]
THE MEDIA
7.19. At the same time, however, public life in Rwanda in the early 1990s was thriving as never before. As one aspect of the move towards party democracy, the Habyarimana government in the early 1990s substantially relaxed state controls on the media. Almost instantly a vibrant press emerged. Hutu critics of Habyarimana and his northern clique were able to express themselves publicly for the first time. Increasing corruption among the elite was exposed by a new breed of remarkably courageous journalists, many of whom paid severe penalties for their convictions.
7.20. But liberty soon took a back seat to licence. A constant barrage of virulent anti-Tutsi hate propaganda began to fill the air. It was designed to be inescapable, and it succeeded. From political rallies, government speeches, newspapers, and a flashy, new radio station, poured vicious, pornographic, inflammatory rhetoric designed to demonize and dehumanize all Tutsi. With the active participation of well-known Hutu insiders, some of them at the university, new media were founded that dramatically escalated the level of anti-Tutsi demagoguery. [26]
7.21. For the few, a radical newspaper called Kangura was begun in 1990. [27] For the many, a hip radio station was created in mid-1993 and it instantly became a popular favourite. Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (known as RTLMC or RTLM) was funded and owned by Akazu members; it involved close relatives of the President, two Cabinet ministers and top militia leaders. The station’s cheeky style and bright music attracted local as well as expatriate listeners – none of whom, it appears, were alarmed by its scurrilous contents. [28] But Rwandans understood perfectly well its impact and influence. [29] Ferdinand Nahimana, one of a new generation of Rwandan historians to emerge in the post-colonial period, was the driving force behind the station. Here was one of many examples of a Hutu intellectual who used his skills for the cause of ethnic hatred. He was later indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for his role in fomenting hatred of the Tutsi through RTLMC.
7.22. An analysis of RTLMC’s role by Article 19, an organization that promotes free expression, suggests that the genocide would have occurred with or without the station, and that banning it would have had little impact on the course of events. “RTLMC was an instrument, not the cause, of genocide,” they concluded. “[It] did not provoke the genocide, but rather was one element in a pre-meditated plan for mass slaughter... [It] played the specific role of conveying orders to militias and other groups already involved in the slaughter.” [30]
7.23. This may well have been true during the months of the actual genocide, and we also agree that RTLMC was not the cause of the genocide. Clearly the genocide would have occurred whether or not the station had existed. But we must not minimize the station’s significance. Without a doubt, it played a prominent role in keeping passions at a fever pitch during the final months before the genocide. Because the station went so far in its verbal abuse of the Tutsi and in provoking the Hutu against them, it significantly raised the bar of permissible hatemongering. Under any sensible criminal code, RTLMC would have been silenced soon after it went on the air. It is a travesty that this never happened.
7.24. But it is also true that RTLMC had lots of company. More than 20 papers regularly published editorials and obscene cartoons rooted in ethnic hatred, and the official Radio Rwanda moved steadily from neutral reporting to open brainwashing. [31] Led by Kangura, propaganda was spread that the Tutsi were preparing a genocidal war against the Hutu that would “leave no survivors.” Despite their total exclusion from positions of power in government or the military, the Tutsi were, Kangura insisted, the real rulers of Rwanda. This was shrewd propaganda by the radicals, since it implicitly criticized Habyarimana for being “soft on the Tutsi.”
7.25. It was also Kangura, three months after the October 1990 invasion, that first published the notorious “Ten Commandments of the Hutu.” [32] These “rules” were deliberately inflammatory, calculated to incite divisiveness and resentment. They specified that any Hutu who married or was involved with Tutsi women or who did business with any Tutsi at all was a traitor to his people, and they insisted on the need to maintain Hutu purity and to avoid contamination from the Tutsi. The danger of contamination by Tutsi women was a much-repeated aspect of the Hutu campaign that was often accompanied by explicit pornographic cartoons. It was the kind of propaganda that white racists had commonly and effectively used in the American South and South Africa.
7.26. As time passed, anti-Tutsi propaganda became more and more flagrant and frequently included explicit calls for massacres, direct verbal attacks on the Tutsi, lists of names of enemies to be killed, and threats to any Hutu who might still be associating with Tutsi. Far from eliciting condemnation by Habyarimana or his followers, these fanatical voices were supported, both morally and financially, by many at the highest levels of Rwandan Hutu society, including the government itself. Of 42 new journals that were founded in 1991, 11 had direct links to the Akazu. [33]
A MILITARIZED SOCIETY
7.27. The militarization of Rwandan society after the 1990 invasion took precious little time. It is possible to see this process as further evidence of a genocidal conspiracy. But it can hardly be forgotten that the country had just been attacked. The need to increase its military capacity was hardly controversial. The Rwandan army grew at a frenetic pace, from a few thousand soldiers to 40,000 in about three years. [34] By 1992, the military consumed almost 70 per cent of the Rwandan government’s entire small budget. [35] Development funds that largely financed other expenditures in effect made the military costs possible. And with a little help from its French and other friends, military expenditures soared as well, climbing from 1.6 per cent of GNP between 1985 and 1990 to 7.6 per cent in 1993. [36]
7.28. Here was yet another step on the Rwandan road to tragedy. There is no evidence the Habyarimana were contemplating genocide when the RPF attacked in 1990. But it is indisputable that they instantly exploited the opportunity to isolate and demonize the Tutsi. With the invaluable help of foreign aid plus French military co-operation, more troops with more weapons made it possible to monitor and control the population more thoroughly.
7.29. There was an assumption that the emergence of new political parties – the process simplistically equated with democratization – would curtail the attacks on innocent civilians. This proved naive. As with the media, so with politics: unaccustomed freedom of association came perilously close to anarchy. Formal political democracy had to function in a society devoid of the culture of democracy. Disorder spread. In fact, assaults on civilians and political figures of all stripes increased sharply following the establishment of the coalition government in 1992, and continued until the genocide. The MRND’s militia, the dreaded interahamwe, who came to play such a notorious role in the years to follow, and the followers of the extremist CDR party disrupted rallies by opposition parties, blocking traffic and picking fights; their opponents responded in kind. [37] The interahamwe were particularly vigilant in harassing opposition politicians and other government critics, but their essential nihilism led them as well to rapes, robberies, and general lawlessness. In the two years leading to the genocide, bomb attacks began to occur throughout the country.
7.30. Weapons find vacuums with unerring accuracy, and they soon found Rwanda. Weapons proliferation throughout the world and certainly in Africa is one of the curses that must be faced by those who seek to prevent conflict. The power-sharing negotiations that culminated in the Arusha cease-fire accords were to designate Rwanda a “weapons-free zone.” It would be more accurate to describe Rwanda both just before and after Arusha as a free weapons zone. Some have described the country during those years as an arms bazaar for Hutu supremacists. [38] Youth militia were pointedly given free guns by their political patrons, new machetes imported from China were widely distributed, and the government decided to supply weapons to local Hutu officials for “self-defence.” Kalashnikov assault rifles, hand grenades, and other small arms were as easy to come by as fruits and vegetables and in exactly the same places – local markets. Shortly before the genocide, anyone in Kigali with the equivalent of US$3.00 could buy a grenade in the main market, and we know from subsequent events that a roaring business was conducted. [39]
7.31. The atmosphere of fear and violence and the sense that a volcano was just waiting to erupt was especially palpable in Kigali. Hutu militia youth, young men with no obvious sources of income, jetted around the capital on noisy motorbikes whipping up rallies of other idle young men. [40] No one in the capital, including the diplomatic corps and the foreign technical experts, could fail to find the feeling ominous and threatening. Everyone who cared to know perceived that even bigger trouble was brewing.
THE BURUNDI EFFECT
7.32. As we indicated above, as Rwanda continued to slip into a state of chaos throughout 1993, an old and deadly nemesis re-emerged after a lengthy period of passivity. The very last thing the country or any of its inhabitants needed was the return of the Burundi-Rwanda “parallel massacre syndrome,” which we examined in an earlier chapter. As we saw, one of the most violent episodes in the history of independent Africa transpired in Burundi in 1972, when that country suffered an orgy of carefully targeted murders. Unlike Rwanda, Burundi after independence had removed ethnic identities from citizens’ identification cards. Disappointingly, the history of the past four decades demonstrates that this made Burundians no less susceptible than Rwandans to ethnic manipulation by unscrupulous leaders.
7.33. Turmoil of a fierce kind resumed in Burundi in the years after 1988. Serious but modest attempts at democratization and greater ethnic equity resulted repeatedly in violence by both sides. Among the elites of the two ethnic groups, it remained an article of faith that each was conspiring to eliminate the other. Despite the many years of relative calm, little was required to ignite the flames of discord.
7.34. In 1988, 1990 and 1991, massacres led to the deaths of thousands of Tutsi officials and Hutu civilians, and tens of thousands fled the country. [41] In 1992, a coup attempt by rebellious soldiers was put down. Under President Pierre Buyoya, himself an army major who had come to power in a coup, attempts at reform continued, and the first free and fair election in Burundi’s history was held in June 1993.
7.35. For all the official propaganda about the irrelevance of ethnicity, an overwhelmingly Hutu electorate defeated the Tutsi incumbent Buyoya, and elected a Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye. Four months later, in October 1993, Ndadaye was assassinated during an attempted coup, resulting in one of the worst massacres in Burundi’s bloody history. In many areas, Hutu local authorities led attacks on Tutsi, while the Tutsi-dominated army launched massive reprisals. Although the Tutsi-dominated army played a key role in slaughtering Hutu civilians, both sides engaged in massacres. An estimated 50,000 people, divided between the two ethnic groups, were murdered while between 800,000 and one million Hutu refugees fled into Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zaire. [42] The world barely took note.
7.36. The calamity in Burundi was tailor-made for the ruthless opportunists of the Akazu and their network in neighbouring Rwanda. Although they had been successful, since the RPF invasion in 1990, in uniting the Rwandan Hutu against the Tutsi “outsiders,” the reality was that most Rwandans had never known anything but Hutu rule. The Tutsi had been completely cut out of political power for over 30 years, but the RPF invasion was exploited as indispensable evidence of their insatiable ambition.
7.37. Now, three years beyond the invasion, with the civil war in abeyance as a result of progress at the Arusha negotiations, a fresh new weapon was delivered into the hands of the Rwandan radicals. The assassination of Burundi’s democratically elected Hutu President – openly celebrated by some Rwandan Tutsi – and the appalling massacres that followed offered final proof to the Hutu that power sharing between the Tutsi and the Hutu was forever doomed; the Tutsi could never be trusted. Hutu extremists saw only one sure way to guarantee that Rwanda’s Tutsi could not carry out their historic aspiration to rule the country unilaterally and to wipe out as many Hutu as was necessary to accomplish this objective. The Hutu must act first. The final solution planned for the Tutsi was thereby justified as nothing more than self-defence on the part of the intended Hutu victims.
THE ROAD TO GENOCIDE: 1990-1993
THE TRIUMPH OF ETHNIC RADICALISM
7.1. Violence and extremism swiftly burgeoned in the hothouse atmosphere that soon prevailed throughout Rwanda. Old patterns re-emerged. There had been no punishment for those Hutu who had led the massacres of the Tutsi in the early 1960s and 1972-73, and the careers flourished of those who organized cruel repression of opponents throughout the first decade and a half of the Habyarimana regime. Now, in the wake of the October 1, 1990, invasion, impunity flourished for the demagogues who were deliberately fuelling the latent animosity toward those they considered perfidious outsiders, a category including not just the Tutsi refugee-warriors of the RPF but every Tutsi still in Rwanda, as well as any Hutu alleged to be their sympathizer.
7.2. But that does not mean that planning the genocide was initiated at that moment. It is important to understand that there is for the Rwandan genocide no “smoking gun.” So far as is known, there is no document, no minutes of a meeting, nor any other evidence that pinpoints a precise moment when certain individuals decided on a master plan to wipe out the Tutsi. As we have already seen, both physical and rhetorical violence against the Tutsi as a people indeed began immediately after October 1, 1990, and continued to escalate until the genocide actually started in April 1994. Without question this campaign was organized and promoted, and at some stage in this period these anti-Tutsi activities turned into a strategy for genocide. But that exact point has never been established.
7.3. This fact is reflected in all the major studies of the genocide. Virtually all authorities are notably imprecise or ambiguous in stating when systematic planning and organizing can be said to have begun. Moreover, even within this imprecision, there is also disagreement. One authority says the plot was hatched soon after the October invasion. [1] Another says “dress rehearsals” for genocide began with the formation of death squads in 1991.[2] Genocide, argues another, “began to look to the hard-line Akazu circles like both an attractive and feasible proposition” by late 1992. [3] The plan “was drawn up by January 1994,” states another. [4]
7.4. What we do know, however, is that from October 1, 1990, Rwanda endured three and a half years of violent anti-Tutsi incidents, each of which in retrospect can easily be interpreted as a deliberate step in a vast conspiracy culminating in the shooting down of the President Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994, and the subsequent unleashing of the genocide. But all such interpretations remain speculative. No one yet knows who shot down the plane, nor can it be demonstrated that the countless manifestations of anti-Tutsi sentiment in these years were part of a diabolical master plan. It seems to us from the evidence most probable that the idea of genocide emerged only gradually, possibly in late 1993 and accelerating in determination and urgency into 1994.
7.5. Many hoped that these crucial issues would be illuminated at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up after the genocide to try senior figures accused of genocide. And indeed, the tribunal has concluded that genocide had been planned and organized in advance, but with no more precision than that. Jean Kambanda, Prime Minister of the government during the genocide, pleaded guilty to genocide and confessed that the genocide had been planned in advance. But for somewhat mysterious reasons that we discuss in a later chapter, his confession was brief and general, and he shed no new light on the many details that are lacking; moreover, he has now recanted his original confession. [5]
7.6. The fact that the Rwandan government reacted vigorously to the invasion in itself proves nothing about genocidal intentions. What government anywhere would have done otherwise? Habyarimana never had any doubt that Uganda’s President Museveni was behind the invaders, a conviction that was shared and reinforced by his Zairian colleague, President Mobutu. In his meeting with the Panel, Museveni denied responsibility for the invasion. Others surely had the right to be suspicious of the complicity of at least some faction of his government and army. Uganda may or may not have actively co-operated in planning the invasion, but at the very least, it must have allowed the exiles to plan and execute the invasion of a sovereign neighbouring state that was launched from Ugandan soil and used Ugandan weapons. It is clear that Habyarimana and his advisers immediately understood what the RPF and Uganda had just handed them – an opportunity to consolidate their eroding support and to mobilize international backing for the war the invaders had begun.
7.7. It is very important to recall that, up to this point, the Tutsi had not been singled out for abuse by the government in some 17 years. Now, as news of the invasion broke, it appears that even many Tutsi were initially unsympathetic to the invaders. [6] Unexpectedly the government had a perfect opportunity to unite the country against the alien raiders. They rejected it.
7.8. As this report will repeatedly emphasize, different identities, ethnic or otherwise, do not in themselves cause division or conflict. It is the behaviour of unscrupulous governing elites that transforms differences into divisions. In the simple phrase of one scholar of such conflicts, those who choose to manipulate such differences for their own self-interest, even at the risk of creating major conflict, are “bad leaders.” [7] Fatefully, Rwanda’s bad leaders chose the path of division and hate instead of national unity. Five days into the invasion, the government announced that Kigali had been attacked by RPF forces. [8] In fact, the alleged attack on the capital was a fake. The heavy firing that could be heard across the city had been carried out by Rwanda’s own government troops. The event was carefully staged to provide credible grounds for accusing the Tutsi of supporting the enemy, and the Minister of Justice proceeded with that accusation. Hurling the epithet “ibyitso” (accomplices), he asserted that the Kigali attack could not have been organized without trusted allies on the inside. [9] Who was better suited to this than the Rwandans who happened to be of the same ethnic group as the invaders? Arrests began immediately, and eventually about 13,000 people were imprisoned. [10] They included some Hutu opponents of the regime, whose arrests were meant to either silence or intimidate them into supporting the President. Thousands of detainees were held for months, without charge, in deplorable conditions. Many were tortured, and dozens died. [11] Organized massacres of the Tutsi soon followed.
7.9. French forces had been summoned by Habyarimana when the invasion began. They arrived on the very night of the staged attack, and probably rescued the Habyarimana regime from military defeat. [12] Not surprisingly, the government’s version of those early events – the faked attack on the capital – was widely believed, and it was successful in achieving another goal as well: to gain help from other friendly foreign nations. For the next three years, French troops remained in varying numbers to support the regime and its army. [13] The Belgian government also sent troops, but it was sensitive to its controversial background in Rwanda, and its soldiers stayed only a month until any possible threat to Belgian nationals had passed. [14] Zaire’s Mobutu eagerly agreed to offer military support, grasping the opportunity to be a player on the African scene after the end of the Cold War, which had cost him much of his American support. But his troops were soon sent home for indiscipline. [15]
KILLING
7.10. Massacres of the Tutsi began at the very outset of the ensuing civil war and, in a real sense, they did not end until the RPF victory of July 1994. After the war, a major debate broke out – and continues still – over who knew what about the events unfolding in Rwanda. In our view, this is not a serious debate. The major actors in the drama, the world that mattered to Rwanda – most of its Great Lakes Region neighbours, the UN and the major western powers – knew a great deal about what was happening, and they soon learned that the events were being masterminded at the highest level of the state. They knew that this was no senseless case of “Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu,” [16] as it was sometimes dismissively described. That world knew that a terrible fate had befallen Rwanda. They even knew, and reported, that some individuals in Rwanda were talking openly of eliminating all Tutsi. [17]
7.11. Early in 1993, four international human rights organizations had come together as an International Commission of Inquiry and issued a well-documented report that came close to declaring that genocide was a serious future possibility. [18] In truth, many governments routinely ignored the findings of non-governmental organizations, as the four agencies discovered to their dismay. Only months later, however, in August of the same year, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary, Arbitrary, and Extrajudicial Executions issued another report based on his own mission to Rwanda, and it largely confirmed the conclusions of the earlier investigation. Indeed, the Special Rapporteur concluded that the massacres that had already taken place seemed to conform to the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide: “The victims of the attacks, Tutsi in the overwhelming majority of cases, have been targeted solely because of their membership in a certain ethnic group and for no other objective reason.” He also reported that violence was increasing, extremist propaganda was rampant, and the militias were organized. [19]
7.12. The situation, in other words, was abundantly clear. The only thing that was not clear was exactly how far the plotters were prepared to go. Large numbers of observers had little doubt that many massacres were virtually inevitable if not deterred somehow. But would the radicals take the unthinkable, quantum leap to a full-blown genocidal attack against every Tutsi in the country?
7.13. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of observers did not believe a genocide would be launched. More precisely, they could not bring themselves to harbour such a belief. The report by the UN Special Rapporteur broaching the subject was either ignored or downplayed. As members of the Panel wrestled with this vexing question, we came finally to understand that it was literally unthinkable for most people to believe that genocide was in fact possible; it was simply beyond comprehension that it could be possible. Each case of modern genocide has taken the world by surprise – even when, in retrospect, it is clear that unmistakable warning signs and statements of intent were there in advance for all to see. In the early 1990s, the very rarity and singularity of the phenomenon of genocide put it beyond contemplation.
7.14. Even conceding this, however, we are left with the remaining perplexing question: How is it possible that the awful horrors that were not in dispute were not sufficient to mobilize world concern?
7.15. There is a record of atrocities, all of which was publicly exposed throughout the early 1990s by credible human rights organizations. [20] Massacres of Tutsi were carried out in October 1990, January 1991, February 1991, March 1992, August 1992, January 1993, March 1993, and February 1994. [21] On virtually each occasion, they were carefully organized. On each occasion, scores of Tutsi were slaughtered by mobs and militiamen associated with different political parties, sometimes with the involvement of the police and army, incited by the media, directed by local government officials, and encouraged by some national politicians.
7.16. As we have already pointed out, it is true that no single meeting or document can be identified as the recognized, explicit, first step in planning the genocide. But looking back, as the story unfolds through 1991 and into 1992, it becomes difficult to avoid seeing a pattern emerging through these successive slaughters. It appears that the radicals and military worked together trying out different techniques of killing. As the experiments progressed, their leaders learned two lessons: that they could massacre large numbers of people quickly and efficiently (a fact that was reported to the UN Secretariat in a now-famous fax in January 1994, [22] which we will discuss later); and that, based on the reactions they had elicited to date, they could get away with it.
7.17. Between outright massacres, a reign of terror prevailed. Murder, rape, harassment or imprisonment could befall any Tutsi at any time. Early in 1992, a secret society calling itself “Amasasu” (bullets) was created within the Rwandan army by extremist officers who wanted to pursue the RPF with greater ferocity. Soon they were handing out weapons to the militias organized by the CDR, as well as to the extremists in the MRND, and working hand-in-hand with another arm of the death squads.
7.18. The death squads were formed as early as 1991. By the following year, their existence was public information. A 1992 exposé by the magazine Umurava described in detail the infamous “Zero Network,” a death squad patterned on the Latin American model and made up of a mixture of off-duty soldiers and MRND militiamen, [23] seemingly a branch of the Akazu and the secret police. The exposé revealed the Zero Network’s intimate connections to Habyarimana and its responsibility for the death squads. Its leaders included three of Habyarimana’s brothers-in-law, his son-in-law, his personal secretary, the head of military intelligence, the commander of the Presidential Guard and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, director of the defence ministry and a feared activist in the Hutu Power movement (to be discussed later). In the remote event that diplomats in Kigali failed to report the information contained in Umurava’s exposé to their respective governments, in October 1992 two Belgians held a press conference at the Senate in Brussels to reveal the secrets of the Zero Network. [24] Some months later, the report of the four human rights organizations, referred to above, stated that “the responsibility of the Head of State and his immediate entourage, including his family, is gravely engaged” in the work of the death squads. [25]
THE MEDIA
7.19. At the same time, however, public life in Rwanda in the early 1990s was thriving as never before. As one aspect of the move towards party democracy, the Habyarimana government in the early 1990s substantially relaxed state controls on the media. Almost instantly a vibrant press emerged. Hutu critics of Habyarimana and his northern clique were able to express themselves publicly for the first time. Increasing corruption among the elite was exposed by a new breed of remarkably courageous journalists, many of whom paid severe penalties for their convictions.
7.20. But liberty soon took a back seat to licence. A constant barrage of virulent anti-Tutsi hate propaganda began to fill the air. It was designed to be inescapable, and it succeeded. From political rallies, government speeches, newspapers, and a flashy, new radio station, poured vicious, pornographic, inflammatory rhetoric designed to demonize and dehumanize all Tutsi. With the active participation of well-known Hutu insiders, some of them at the university, new media were founded that dramatically escalated the level of anti-Tutsi demagoguery. [26]
7.21. For the few, a radical newspaper called Kangura was begun in 1990. [27] For the many, a hip radio station was created in mid-1993 and it instantly became a popular favourite. Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (known as RTLMC or RTLM) was funded and owned by Akazu members; it involved close relatives of the President, two Cabinet ministers and top militia leaders. The station’s cheeky style and bright music attracted local as well as expatriate listeners – none of whom, it appears, were alarmed by its scurrilous contents. [28] But Rwandans understood perfectly well its impact and influence. [29] Ferdinand Nahimana, one of a new generation of Rwandan historians to emerge in the post-colonial period, was the driving force behind the station. Here was one of many examples of a Hutu intellectual who used his skills for the cause of ethnic hatred. He was later indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for his role in fomenting hatred of the Tutsi through RTLMC.
7.22. An analysis of RTLMC’s role by Article 19, an organization that promotes free expression, suggests that the genocide would have occurred with or without the station, and that banning it would have had little impact on the course of events. “RTLMC was an instrument, not the cause, of genocide,” they concluded. “[It] did not provoke the genocide, but rather was one element in a pre-meditated plan for mass slaughter... [It] played the specific role of conveying orders to militias and other groups already involved in the slaughter.” [30]
7.23. This may well have been true during the months of the actual genocide, and we also agree that RTLMC was not the cause of the genocide. Clearly the genocide would have occurred whether or not the station had existed. But we must not minimize the station’s significance. Without a doubt, it played a prominent role in keeping passions at a fever pitch during the final months before the genocide. Because the station went so far in its verbal abuse of the Tutsi and in provoking the Hutu against them, it significantly raised the bar of permissible hatemongering. Under any sensible criminal code, RTLMC would have been silenced soon after it went on the air. It is a travesty that this never happened.
7.24. But it is also true that RTLMC had lots of company. More than 20 papers regularly published editorials and obscene cartoons rooted in ethnic hatred, and the official Radio Rwanda moved steadily from neutral reporting to open brainwashing. [31] Led by Kangura, propaganda was spread that the Tutsi were preparing a genocidal war against the Hutu that would “leave no survivors.” Despite their total exclusion from positions of power in government or the military, the Tutsi were, Kangura insisted, the real rulers of Rwanda. This was shrewd propaganda by the radicals, since it implicitly criticized Habyarimana for being “soft on the Tutsi.”
7.25. It was also Kangura, three months after the October 1990 invasion, that first published the notorious “Ten Commandments of the Hutu.” [32] These “rules” were deliberately inflammatory, calculated to incite divisiveness and resentment. They specified that any Hutu who married or was involved with Tutsi women or who did business with any Tutsi at all was a traitor to his people, and they insisted on the need to maintain Hutu purity and to avoid contamination from the Tutsi. The danger of contamination by Tutsi women was a much-repeated aspect of the Hutu campaign that was often accompanied by explicit pornographic cartoons. It was the kind of propaganda that white racists had commonly and effectively used in the American South and South Africa.
7.26. As time passed, anti-Tutsi propaganda became more and more flagrant and frequently included explicit calls for massacres, direct verbal attacks on the Tutsi, lists of names of enemies to be killed, and threats to any Hutu who might still be associating with Tutsi. Far from eliciting condemnation by Habyarimana or his followers, these fanatical voices were supported, both morally and financially, by many at the highest levels of Rwandan Hutu society, including the government itself. Of 42 new journals that were founded in 1991, 11 had direct links to the Akazu. [33]
A MILITARIZED SOCIETY
7.27. The militarization of Rwandan society after the 1990 invasion took precious little time. It is possible to see this process as further evidence of a genocidal conspiracy. But it can hardly be forgotten that the country had just been attacked. The need to increase its military capacity was hardly controversial. The Rwandan army grew at a frenetic pace, from a few thousand soldiers to 40,000 in about three years. [34] By 1992, the military consumed almost 70 per cent of the Rwandan government’s entire small budget. [35] Development funds that largely financed other expenditures in effect made the military costs possible. And with a little help from its French and other friends, military expenditures soared as well, climbing from 1.6 per cent of GNP between 1985 and 1990 to 7.6 per cent in 1993. [36]
7.28. Here was yet another step on the Rwandan road to tragedy. There is no evidence the Habyarimana were contemplating genocide when the RPF attacked in 1990. But it is indisputable that they instantly exploited the opportunity to isolate and demonize the Tutsi. With the invaluable help of foreign aid plus French military co-operation, more troops with more weapons made it possible to monitor and control the population more thoroughly.
7.29. There was an assumption that the emergence of new political parties – the process simplistically equated with democratization – would curtail the attacks on innocent civilians. This proved naive. As with the media, so with politics: unaccustomed freedom of association came perilously close to anarchy. Formal political democracy had to function in a society devoid of the culture of democracy. Disorder spread. In fact, assaults on civilians and political figures of all stripes increased sharply following the establishment of the coalition government in 1992, and continued until the genocide. The MRND’s militia, the dreaded interahamwe, who came to play such a notorious role in the years to follow, and the followers of the extremist CDR party disrupted rallies by opposition parties, blocking traffic and picking fights; their opponents responded in kind. [37] The interahamwe were particularly vigilant in harassing opposition politicians and other government critics, but their essential nihilism led them as well to rapes, robberies, and general lawlessness. In the two years leading to the genocide, bomb attacks began to occur throughout the country.
7.30. Weapons find vacuums with unerring accuracy, and they soon found Rwanda. Weapons proliferation throughout the world and certainly in Africa is one of the curses that must be faced by those who seek to prevent conflict. The power-sharing negotiations that culminated in the Arusha cease-fire accords were to designate Rwanda a “weapons-free zone.” It would be more accurate to describe Rwanda both just before and after Arusha as a free weapons zone. Some have described the country during those years as an arms bazaar for Hutu supremacists. [38] Youth militia were pointedly given free guns by their political patrons, new machetes imported from China were widely distributed, and the government decided to supply weapons to local Hutu officials for “self-defence.” Kalashnikov assault rifles, hand grenades, and other small arms were as easy to come by as fruits and vegetables and in exactly the same places – local markets. Shortly before the genocide, anyone in Kigali with the equivalent of US$3.00 could buy a grenade in the main market, and we know from subsequent events that a roaring business was conducted. [39]
7.31. The atmosphere of fear and violence and the sense that a volcano was just waiting to erupt was especially palpable in Kigali. Hutu militia youth, young men with no obvious sources of income, jetted around the capital on noisy motorbikes whipping up rallies of other idle young men. [40] No one in the capital, including the diplomatic corps and the foreign technical experts, could fail to find the feeling ominous and threatening. Everyone who cared to know perceived that even bigger trouble was brewing.
THE BURUNDI EFFECT
7.32. As we indicated above, as Rwanda continued to slip into a state of chaos throughout 1993, an old and deadly nemesis re-emerged after a lengthy period of passivity. The very last thing the country or any of its inhabitants needed was the return of the Burundi-Rwanda “parallel massacre syndrome,” which we examined in an earlier chapter. As we saw, one of the most violent episodes in the history of independent Africa transpired in Burundi in 1972, when that country suffered an orgy of carefully targeted murders. Unlike Rwanda, Burundi after independence had removed ethnic identities from citizens’ identification cards. Disappointingly, the history of the past four decades demonstrates that this made Burundians no less susceptible than Rwandans to ethnic manipulation by unscrupulous leaders.
7.33. Turmoil of a fierce kind resumed in Burundi in the years after 1988. Serious but modest attempts at democratization and greater ethnic equity resulted repeatedly in violence by both sides. Among the elites of the two ethnic groups, it remained an article of faith that each was conspiring to eliminate the other. Despite the many years of relative calm, little was required to ignite the flames of discord.
7.34. In 1988, 1990 and 1991, massacres led to the deaths of thousands of Tutsi officials and Hutu civilians, and tens of thousands fled the country. [41] In 1992, a coup attempt by rebellious soldiers was put down. Under President Pierre Buyoya, himself an army major who had come to power in a coup, attempts at reform continued, and the first free and fair election in Burundi’s history was held in June 1993.
7.35. For all the official propaganda about the irrelevance of ethnicity, an overwhelmingly Hutu electorate defeated the Tutsi incumbent Buyoya, and elected a Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye. Four months later, in October 1993, Ndadaye was assassinated during an attempted coup, resulting in one of the worst massacres in Burundi’s bloody history. In many areas, Hutu local authorities led attacks on Tutsi, while the Tutsi-dominated army launched massive reprisals. Although the Tutsi-dominated army played a key role in slaughtering Hutu civilians, both sides engaged in massacres. An estimated 50,000 people, divided between the two ethnic groups, were murdered while between 800,000 and one million Hutu refugees fled into Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zaire. [42] The world barely took note.
7.36. The calamity in Burundi was tailor-made for the ruthless opportunists of the Akazu and their network in neighbouring Rwanda. Although they had been successful, since the RPF invasion in 1990, in uniting the Rwandan Hutu against the Tutsi “outsiders,” the reality was that most Rwandans had never known anything but Hutu rule. The Tutsi had been completely cut out of political power for over 30 years, but the RPF invasion was exploited as indispensable evidence of their insatiable ambition.
7.37. Now, three years beyond the invasion, with the civil war in abeyance as a result of progress at the Arusha negotiations, a fresh new weapon was delivered into the hands of the Rwandan radicals. The assassination of Burundi’s democratically elected Hutu President – openly celebrated by some Rwandan Tutsi – and the appalling massacres that followed offered final proof to the Hutu that power sharing between the Tutsi and the Hutu was forever doomed; the Tutsi could never be trusted. Hutu extremists saw only one sure way to guarantee that Rwanda’s Tutsi could not carry out their historic aspiration to rule the country unilaterally and to wipe out as many Hutu as was necessary to accomplish this objective. The Hutu must act first. The final solution planned for the Tutsi was thereby justified as nothing more than self-defence on the part of the intended Hutu victims.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 8
THE ARUSHA PEACE PROCESS
8.1. Efforts to resolve the civil war began soon after the 1990 invasion. It was the Belgian government that made the first honorable if futile moves in this regard, but the Organization of African Unity, Tanzania, the United Nations, the US, and France all played roles. France, with its unique standing in Kigali, was important in pushing Habyarimana to negotiate. The French government had concluded that “the RPF might win militarily but [could not win] politically. The government could not win militarily, though it might command the numbers to win politically. A negotiated settlement was the best way for France to salvage its interests in Rwanda.” [1]
8.2. A series of negotiations ensued, and cease-fires were agreed upon, but a pattern quickly emerged: the President would agree to proposals made under pressure at the negotiating table, but he would retract them later, when his own hardliners applied countervailing pressures. [2] At the same time, Habyarimana was being pushed to reach accommodation with the new political parties. The idea of power sharing with either the internal opposition or the outside invaders, let alone with both, remained unthinkable to the Hutu radicals, whose determination not to accept the results of the peace processes hardened as the processes themselves progressed. Privately, Habyarimana was as reluctant as his extremist faction to accept compromise with his enemies. Under constant pressure, however, and as the civil war moved into its second year, Habyarimana decided that he had no alternative but to cooperate. A real coalition government was formed in April 1992 – an historic first for Rwanda – and its first act was to agree formally to negotiations with the RPF to be held across the border in Arusha, Tanzania. [3]
8.3. In many ways, the Arusha process was an extraordinary one. [4] The RPF delegation was led by its president, but the official government delegation appeared to be leaderless. The ruling MRND party was represented, but that delegation also included two members of the opposition MDR who had become ministers – one of them the Foreign Minister – in the new coalition government. This added insult to injury for the ruling clique; not only was it forced to accept negotiations, it did not even have monopoly on the process that unfolded. The radicals were also present in the person of Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who was to become perhaps the chief architect of the genocide, but who was already known in Arusha for his involvement in appalling human rights abuses and his connection to the fanatical CDR party. [5]
8.4. Arusha was an African initiative in which both the OAU and several African states played a central role. The President of Tanzania was the facilitator of the process. But western nations were involved as well, including just about every party that should have had some presence. All told, this included Belgium, Germany, France, and the US; the relevant regional actors – Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire and Burundi; as well as the appropriate regional and international organizations – the UN, the UN High Commission for Refugees and, perhaps most importantly, the OAU. The OAU was instrumental not only in bringing the parties to the bargaining table, but also in setting an agenda that addressed the root causes of the conflict. As one scholar commented, this reflected a new willingness by the OAU “to transcend the previously sacrosanct prohibition on involvement in the internal affairs of member states and to develop mechanisms for conflict resolution to facilitate that involvement.” [6] Tanzania’s role in Arusha was later widely judged to have been that of an effective honest broker.
8.5. In a series of separate negotiations, all the major issues were tackled: the establishment of the rule of law and a culture of human rights, power sharing in all public institutions, the transitional arrangements that would obtain until elections were held, the repatriation of refugees, the resettlement of internally displaced persons, and the integration of the two opposing armies. The sensible operating premise was that if the fundamental causes of the civil war between the RPF and the government could be resolved, then the uncivil war – the parallel conflict being waged simultaneously by Hutu radicals against Tutsi and anti-Habyarimana Hutu – would stop as well.
8.6. This proved to be the premise that would eventually undermine the entire agreement. It is widely agreed that the Arusha process was impressively managed with respect to the civil war, but given the circumstances of the time, it is difficult to see how the uncivil war could have been dealt with more effectively. In the end, the process could not resolve the greatest problem of all. [7] That was the tragic irony of Arusha: the massacres against the Tutsi civilians were not directly addressed during the long months of negotiations in Tanzania, yet at the very same time in Rwanda, Hutu Power’s massacres continued, prompted by the fear that the Arusha process might succeed and deliver genuine power sharing. [8]
8.7. In Arusha itself, there was reason for both optimism and doubt, sometime simultaneously. For example, a cease-fire agreement was reached and went into effect in August 1992, but within two months Habyarimana was publicly repudiating it as “a piece of trash... which the government is not obliged to respect.“ [9] As it happens, however, it was not the government that violated the cease-fire. Seven months after it began, a major RPF attack killed hundreds of civilians, mostly Hutu, and drove hundreds of thousands more into camps in and around Kigali. The rebels justified their decision to attack by pointing to a recent massacre of several hundred Tutsi, and it was certainly true that the brutal realities of Rwanda had little relationship to the negotiations being held across the border. But the parties returned to the bargaining table, and in August 1993, a new cease-fire was negotiated along with a remarkably detailed and ambitious new peace agreement. Under severe pressure from the international community, including a threat to cut off foreign aid, Habyarimana reluctantly signed.
8.8. Bad faith remained a real possibility. Still, a deal had been done. There was to be a “broad-based transitional government” pending free elections for a Parliament in which the Prime Minister would be supreme and the President a figurehead. The key question was who to include in the BBTG, and the RPF’s answer was categorical. They simply refused to accept inclusion of the CDR on the grounds that the radical Hutu party was not only responsible for the most outrageous physical and rhetorical attacks against the Tutsi of Rwanda, but that it had refused to sign the ethical code included in the Arusha accords that prohibited the creation of political parties based on ethnicity.
8.9. At the time, all the major third parties involved in the Arusha process, both western and African, believed it was tactically necessary to include the CDR in the power-sharing agreements. [10] They strongly urged the RPF to accept this imperfect arrangement in order to make the accords work, but with no success. Some insisted, as the Americans and Tanzanians did, that the CDR would destroy any agreements arrived at unless they were included. Others argued that in principle, it is madness to expect a group mortally threatened to embrace those that want to wipe them out. This debate took central stage again after the genocide, and rages to this day.
8.10. In fact, the entire Arusha process functioned as proof to the radical ringleaders that they had no choice but to ratchet up their conspiracy even further and to follow it through to a conclusion that seemed increasingly logical. That they were being forced to share power with other Hutu was insult enough. That Arusha went further and gave formal recognition and a place in the government to the Tutsi RPF was intolerable.
8.11. What was even worse, on the all-important question of military strength, the accords seemed a complete capitulation by the government team to the RPF. Outside observers shared this view. The two parties agreed to integrate the two armies, Habyarimana’s 35,000 Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and the RPF’s 20,000 Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), into a single force of 19,000. Of the total, 60 per cent were to be FAR and 40 per cent RPA. The officer corps was to be split fifty-fifty. [11] Given the size of the two armies, this meant that more than two-thirds of the FAR troops faced demobilization. Little or no attention was paid by the negotiators to questions of severance pay (which would have been astronomical), job re-training or civilian integration. As a result, large numbers of young Hutu men, poorly educated, with little land and few prospects, trained only to be hard-boiled soldiers, were suddenly to join the ranks of the unemployed.
8.12. It was a reflection of the confusion and lack of consensus on the part of the government negotiators that they were prepared to make such a concession, and it was at the least imprudent for the RPF to have insisted on these terms despite much friendly advice to the contrary. [12] It is hard to think of any agreement more perfectly calculated to enrage virtually everyone in Rwanda with whom the RPF would need to work. It was one thing to say that an 85-per-cent Hutu population did not mean that Hutu rule equalled democracy. It was another to say that the Tutsi, with less than 15 per cent of the population, should be entitled to almost half the army. Even moderate Hutu, caught in an impossible tug of war between the two sides, found that objectionable. No one in the army, whether hardliners or not, whether at the top or bottom of the hierarchy, would ever accept such a move. Indeed, the government’s military advisers in Arusha made their disdain for the agreement abundantly clear at the time, and observers had little doubt that they would do all in their power to prevent its implementation. [13]
8.13. The heartbreak of Arusha is that it was a serious, thoughtful, comprehensive initiative to solve the conflict before it escalated further. Yet in the end it failed. While it did negotiate two cease-fire agreements lasting many months, most of the substantive agreements that were meant to address the causes of the conflict were never implemented. There were three reasons: the imbalance of the military agreements, the intransigence of the Hutu radicals, and the increasing polarization of the country.
8.14. We are skeptical that it was ever possible for the process to have worked in a way that would have been acceptable to the Akazu and averted the genocide. Even experts in conflict resolution disagree fundamentally about how the Arusha process might more successfully have been conducted, [14] and our own view is that the Hutu radicals were never prepared to accept any limits on their power and privileges. In the end Arusha had exactly the opposite consequences from the ones intended. Searching for ethnic equity and democracy, the negotiations succeeded in persuading the Akazu that unless it acted soon, its days of power were numbered.
8.15. From their perspective, they were the big losers at Arusha. The agreement would seal their fate unless they took drastic action to re-establish their supremacy. The more it appeared that power and the limited spoils of office would have to be shared not only with other Hutu parties, but also with the RPF itself, the more determined were the Akazu insiders to share nothing with anyone. The Akazu occupied key positions in the Presidential Guard, FAR, and both the MRND and CDR political parties, and they controlled the interahamwe and impuzamugambi militias as well as the radio station RTLMC. They were set to play their spoiler role with a vengeance, and now moved to accelerate their plans.
8.16. With their prodding, and given the hothouse atmosphere spreading through the country, polarization by ethnicity increased dramatically. The new parties began to split, with a Hutu Power faction emerging in each. Arusha had been predicated on what one expert, leaving aside the radicals, describes as a tripolar landscape: the Habyarimana party, the new parties, and the RPF. [15] All three were represented at Arusha, and all were to share power through the various mechanisms agreed to, precluding a winner-take-all outcome. From the middle of 1993, the rules of the game changed. Recalling the bad old days prior to independence, when moderate groups favouring compromise and national unity were rejected in favour of ethnic exclusivity, the opposition parties split in two wings, one in effect siding with the RPF, the other with the ever-radicalizing MRND. In the process, the landscape became bipolar rather than tripolar, with both sides pursuing strategies of overall control. This explains the repeated obstacles that both set up from January 1994 onwards to prevent putting into place the transitional power sharing institutions approved at Arusha. It is this impasse which contributed to discrediting such political solutions and made the logic of violent confrontation seem increasingly irresistible. [16]
8.17. Those exploiting Hutu fears of Tutsi domination and treachery received a huge boost in October 1993 with the assassination in Burundi of its newly elected Hutu President by the Tutsi-dominated army. Vast numbers of Hutu were killed or fled across the border into Rwanda. Certainly this heightened the determination of the radicals, radicalized moderates, and added to the poisoned atmosphere that pervaded the country. But we disagree with those who argue that this terrible incident was a precondition of the genocide and made it inevitable. The plotting, planning, and propaganda were all well underway before the assassination. Moreover, the genocide was never inevitable. At any time either before or during the genocide, the deployment of a well-equipped international peacekeeping force with a strong mandate could at the very least have forced the conspirators to modify their plans, thereby saving countless lives. [17]
8.18. As for the Arusha process, the inability to deal with Hutu Power and the increasing polarization of the country doomed it to eventual failure, as some predicted at the time. Although the eight months following the final signing were spent on various frustrating attempts to implement the political provisions of the accords, in truth they were stillborn. Aside from the potentially critical intervention of the UN, which we will look at below, it was understood by many even at the time that key actors in Rwanda had no intention of allowing the agreement to be implemented. Former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Herman Cohen has revealed that the CIA issued an analysis in 1993 that the extremists would never allow Arusha to go ahead. In January 1994, a human rights organization reported that, “Many observers believe there is little chance the peace accord, which calls for the integration of the armies, will be implemented.” [18] Leading OAU officials told the Panel that extremist Hutu “sabotaged the agreement.” Another participant-observer told us that the Hutu military officials in Arusha were immensely unhappy with the agreement to integrate the two armies and vowed to do whatever was necessary to prevent or stall its implementation.
8.19. No modus vivendi was possible in a country in which powerful forces were simply unprepared to countenance compromise of any kind and had the means to sabotage any agreement that was reached. With the very notion of compromise increasingly discredited, there was to be no truce for Rwanda; and it seems impossible to believe that, by this date, there was any deal that would have avoided the final outcome. Only the international community could have done that, and it consciously chose to reject that choice.
THE ARUSHA PEACE PROCESS
8.1. Efforts to resolve the civil war began soon after the 1990 invasion. It was the Belgian government that made the first honorable if futile moves in this regard, but the Organization of African Unity, Tanzania, the United Nations, the US, and France all played roles. France, with its unique standing in Kigali, was important in pushing Habyarimana to negotiate. The French government had concluded that “the RPF might win militarily but [could not win] politically. The government could not win militarily, though it might command the numbers to win politically. A negotiated settlement was the best way for France to salvage its interests in Rwanda.” [1]
8.2. A series of negotiations ensued, and cease-fires were agreed upon, but a pattern quickly emerged: the President would agree to proposals made under pressure at the negotiating table, but he would retract them later, when his own hardliners applied countervailing pressures. [2] At the same time, Habyarimana was being pushed to reach accommodation with the new political parties. The idea of power sharing with either the internal opposition or the outside invaders, let alone with both, remained unthinkable to the Hutu radicals, whose determination not to accept the results of the peace processes hardened as the processes themselves progressed. Privately, Habyarimana was as reluctant as his extremist faction to accept compromise with his enemies. Under constant pressure, however, and as the civil war moved into its second year, Habyarimana decided that he had no alternative but to cooperate. A real coalition government was formed in April 1992 – an historic first for Rwanda – and its first act was to agree formally to negotiations with the RPF to be held across the border in Arusha, Tanzania. [3]
8.3. In many ways, the Arusha process was an extraordinary one. [4] The RPF delegation was led by its president, but the official government delegation appeared to be leaderless. The ruling MRND party was represented, but that delegation also included two members of the opposition MDR who had become ministers – one of them the Foreign Minister – in the new coalition government. This added insult to injury for the ruling clique; not only was it forced to accept negotiations, it did not even have monopoly on the process that unfolded. The radicals were also present in the person of Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who was to become perhaps the chief architect of the genocide, but who was already known in Arusha for his involvement in appalling human rights abuses and his connection to the fanatical CDR party. [5]
8.4. Arusha was an African initiative in which both the OAU and several African states played a central role. The President of Tanzania was the facilitator of the process. But western nations were involved as well, including just about every party that should have had some presence. All told, this included Belgium, Germany, France, and the US; the relevant regional actors – Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire and Burundi; as well as the appropriate regional and international organizations – the UN, the UN High Commission for Refugees and, perhaps most importantly, the OAU. The OAU was instrumental not only in bringing the parties to the bargaining table, but also in setting an agenda that addressed the root causes of the conflict. As one scholar commented, this reflected a new willingness by the OAU “to transcend the previously sacrosanct prohibition on involvement in the internal affairs of member states and to develop mechanisms for conflict resolution to facilitate that involvement.” [6] Tanzania’s role in Arusha was later widely judged to have been that of an effective honest broker.
8.5. In a series of separate negotiations, all the major issues were tackled: the establishment of the rule of law and a culture of human rights, power sharing in all public institutions, the transitional arrangements that would obtain until elections were held, the repatriation of refugees, the resettlement of internally displaced persons, and the integration of the two opposing armies. The sensible operating premise was that if the fundamental causes of the civil war between the RPF and the government could be resolved, then the uncivil war – the parallel conflict being waged simultaneously by Hutu radicals against Tutsi and anti-Habyarimana Hutu – would stop as well.
8.6. This proved to be the premise that would eventually undermine the entire agreement. It is widely agreed that the Arusha process was impressively managed with respect to the civil war, but given the circumstances of the time, it is difficult to see how the uncivil war could have been dealt with more effectively. In the end, the process could not resolve the greatest problem of all. [7] That was the tragic irony of Arusha: the massacres against the Tutsi civilians were not directly addressed during the long months of negotiations in Tanzania, yet at the very same time in Rwanda, Hutu Power’s massacres continued, prompted by the fear that the Arusha process might succeed and deliver genuine power sharing. [8]
8.7. In Arusha itself, there was reason for both optimism and doubt, sometime simultaneously. For example, a cease-fire agreement was reached and went into effect in August 1992, but within two months Habyarimana was publicly repudiating it as “a piece of trash... which the government is not obliged to respect.“ [9] As it happens, however, it was not the government that violated the cease-fire. Seven months after it began, a major RPF attack killed hundreds of civilians, mostly Hutu, and drove hundreds of thousands more into camps in and around Kigali. The rebels justified their decision to attack by pointing to a recent massacre of several hundred Tutsi, and it was certainly true that the brutal realities of Rwanda had little relationship to the negotiations being held across the border. But the parties returned to the bargaining table, and in August 1993, a new cease-fire was negotiated along with a remarkably detailed and ambitious new peace agreement. Under severe pressure from the international community, including a threat to cut off foreign aid, Habyarimana reluctantly signed.
8.8. Bad faith remained a real possibility. Still, a deal had been done. There was to be a “broad-based transitional government” pending free elections for a Parliament in which the Prime Minister would be supreme and the President a figurehead. The key question was who to include in the BBTG, and the RPF’s answer was categorical. They simply refused to accept inclusion of the CDR on the grounds that the radical Hutu party was not only responsible for the most outrageous physical and rhetorical attacks against the Tutsi of Rwanda, but that it had refused to sign the ethical code included in the Arusha accords that prohibited the creation of political parties based on ethnicity.
8.9. At the time, all the major third parties involved in the Arusha process, both western and African, believed it was tactically necessary to include the CDR in the power-sharing agreements. [10] They strongly urged the RPF to accept this imperfect arrangement in order to make the accords work, but with no success. Some insisted, as the Americans and Tanzanians did, that the CDR would destroy any agreements arrived at unless they were included. Others argued that in principle, it is madness to expect a group mortally threatened to embrace those that want to wipe them out. This debate took central stage again after the genocide, and rages to this day.
8.10. In fact, the entire Arusha process functioned as proof to the radical ringleaders that they had no choice but to ratchet up their conspiracy even further and to follow it through to a conclusion that seemed increasingly logical. That they were being forced to share power with other Hutu was insult enough. That Arusha went further and gave formal recognition and a place in the government to the Tutsi RPF was intolerable.
8.11. What was even worse, on the all-important question of military strength, the accords seemed a complete capitulation by the government team to the RPF. Outside observers shared this view. The two parties agreed to integrate the two armies, Habyarimana’s 35,000 Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and the RPF’s 20,000 Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), into a single force of 19,000. Of the total, 60 per cent were to be FAR and 40 per cent RPA. The officer corps was to be split fifty-fifty. [11] Given the size of the two armies, this meant that more than two-thirds of the FAR troops faced demobilization. Little or no attention was paid by the negotiators to questions of severance pay (which would have been astronomical), job re-training or civilian integration. As a result, large numbers of young Hutu men, poorly educated, with little land and few prospects, trained only to be hard-boiled soldiers, were suddenly to join the ranks of the unemployed.
8.12. It was a reflection of the confusion and lack of consensus on the part of the government negotiators that they were prepared to make such a concession, and it was at the least imprudent for the RPF to have insisted on these terms despite much friendly advice to the contrary. [12] It is hard to think of any agreement more perfectly calculated to enrage virtually everyone in Rwanda with whom the RPF would need to work. It was one thing to say that an 85-per-cent Hutu population did not mean that Hutu rule equalled democracy. It was another to say that the Tutsi, with less than 15 per cent of the population, should be entitled to almost half the army. Even moderate Hutu, caught in an impossible tug of war between the two sides, found that objectionable. No one in the army, whether hardliners or not, whether at the top or bottom of the hierarchy, would ever accept such a move. Indeed, the government’s military advisers in Arusha made their disdain for the agreement abundantly clear at the time, and observers had little doubt that they would do all in their power to prevent its implementation. [13]
8.13. The heartbreak of Arusha is that it was a serious, thoughtful, comprehensive initiative to solve the conflict before it escalated further. Yet in the end it failed. While it did negotiate two cease-fire agreements lasting many months, most of the substantive agreements that were meant to address the causes of the conflict were never implemented. There were three reasons: the imbalance of the military agreements, the intransigence of the Hutu radicals, and the increasing polarization of the country.
8.14. We are skeptical that it was ever possible for the process to have worked in a way that would have been acceptable to the Akazu and averted the genocide. Even experts in conflict resolution disagree fundamentally about how the Arusha process might more successfully have been conducted, [14] and our own view is that the Hutu radicals were never prepared to accept any limits on their power and privileges. In the end Arusha had exactly the opposite consequences from the ones intended. Searching for ethnic equity and democracy, the negotiations succeeded in persuading the Akazu that unless it acted soon, its days of power were numbered.
8.15. From their perspective, they were the big losers at Arusha. The agreement would seal their fate unless they took drastic action to re-establish their supremacy. The more it appeared that power and the limited spoils of office would have to be shared not only with other Hutu parties, but also with the RPF itself, the more determined were the Akazu insiders to share nothing with anyone. The Akazu occupied key positions in the Presidential Guard, FAR, and both the MRND and CDR political parties, and they controlled the interahamwe and impuzamugambi militias as well as the radio station RTLMC. They were set to play their spoiler role with a vengeance, and now moved to accelerate their plans.
8.16. With their prodding, and given the hothouse atmosphere spreading through the country, polarization by ethnicity increased dramatically. The new parties began to split, with a Hutu Power faction emerging in each. Arusha had been predicated on what one expert, leaving aside the radicals, describes as a tripolar landscape: the Habyarimana party, the new parties, and the RPF. [15] All three were represented at Arusha, and all were to share power through the various mechanisms agreed to, precluding a winner-take-all outcome. From the middle of 1993, the rules of the game changed. Recalling the bad old days prior to independence, when moderate groups favouring compromise and national unity were rejected in favour of ethnic exclusivity, the opposition parties split in two wings, one in effect siding with the RPF, the other with the ever-radicalizing MRND. In the process, the landscape became bipolar rather than tripolar, with both sides pursuing strategies of overall control. This explains the repeated obstacles that both set up from January 1994 onwards to prevent putting into place the transitional power sharing institutions approved at Arusha. It is this impasse which contributed to discrediting such political solutions and made the logic of violent confrontation seem increasingly irresistible. [16]
8.17. Those exploiting Hutu fears of Tutsi domination and treachery received a huge boost in October 1993 with the assassination in Burundi of its newly elected Hutu President by the Tutsi-dominated army. Vast numbers of Hutu were killed or fled across the border into Rwanda. Certainly this heightened the determination of the radicals, radicalized moderates, and added to the poisoned atmosphere that pervaded the country. But we disagree with those who argue that this terrible incident was a precondition of the genocide and made it inevitable. The plotting, planning, and propaganda were all well underway before the assassination. Moreover, the genocide was never inevitable. At any time either before or during the genocide, the deployment of a well-equipped international peacekeeping force with a strong mandate could at the very least have forced the conspirators to modify their plans, thereby saving countless lives. [17]
8.18. As for the Arusha process, the inability to deal with Hutu Power and the increasing polarization of the country doomed it to eventual failure, as some predicted at the time. Although the eight months following the final signing were spent on various frustrating attempts to implement the political provisions of the accords, in truth they were stillborn. Aside from the potentially critical intervention of the UN, which we will look at below, it was understood by many even at the time that key actors in Rwanda had no intention of allowing the agreement to be implemented. Former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Herman Cohen has revealed that the CIA issued an analysis in 1993 that the extremists would never allow Arusha to go ahead. In January 1994, a human rights organization reported that, “Many observers believe there is little chance the peace accord, which calls for the integration of the armies, will be implemented.” [18] Leading OAU officials told the Panel that extremist Hutu “sabotaged the agreement.” Another participant-observer told us that the Hutu military officials in Arusha were immensely unhappy with the agreement to integrate the two armies and vowed to do whatever was necessary to prevent or stall its implementation.
8.19. No modus vivendi was possible in a country in which powerful forces were simply unprepared to countenance compromise of any kind and had the means to sabotage any agreement that was reached. With the very notion of compromise increasingly discredited, there was to be no truce for Rwanda; and it seems impossible to believe that, by this date, there was any deal that would have avoided the final outcome. Only the international community could have done that, and it consciously chose to reject that choice.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 9
THE EVE OF THE GENOCIDE: WHAT THE WORLD KNEW
9.1. No controversy about the genocide is more vexing than whether the world knew it was coming yet failed to take decisive steps to prevent it. A great deal has been written on this one topic alone. Our position, as we have already indicated, is clear. There can be not an iota of doubt that the international community knew the following: that something terrible was underway in Rwanda, that serious plans were afoot for even more appalling deeds, that these went far beyond routine thuggery, and that the world nevertheless stood by and did nothing. That does not mean the world knew that by 1992 or 1993, genocide was being systematically plotted and organized. In fact it seems to us likely that hardly anyone could quite bring themselves to believe this was the case.
9.2. After all, even in the early 1990s Rwanda remained one of the darlings of the international community. Habyarimana himself, after 20 years of power, had cordial personal relations with politicians and diplomats all over the world. It was simply impossible for these people to think of him as some kind of madman presiding over an evil regime; he seemed nothing like that at all. Indeed, he had powerful friends and champions throughout the western world.
9.3. The most steadfast were from France, and included President Mitterrand, his son, and many other important diplomats, politicians, officers and senior civil servants. In Kigali, Habyarimana had a strong, loyal ally in French Ambassador Georges Martres, whose dedication to the interests of the regime led to the joke in local diplomatic circles that he was really the Rwandan ambassador to France.[1] But Martres' role was no laughing matter. As one scholar tells us, “According to officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Co-operation, Ambassador Martres never reported on the rise of extremists, Hutu power, and the continuous violence during his tour in Rwanda from 1990 until 1993.”[2]
9.4. Even after the genocide, Martres recalled that Habyarimana “gave the impression of a man of great morality. President Habyarimana prayed regularly and went to mass regularly...generally, the image President Habyarimana presented to President Mitterrand was very favourable.” Yet Martres well knew the Rwandan reality. Christophe Mfizi, a former Habyarimana associate, who in 1992 exposed the existence of the Zero Network, personally briefed Martres on the details.[3] Nothing changed Martres' views. This unquestioning support of the regime by French officials sent the conspirators the signal that they could get away with just about anything.
9.5. We have seen earlier that the economic crunch of the late 1980s seriously reduced the available spoils of office just as the first demands for democratization and power sharing were being heard. As resentment grew towards the northern Hutu faction that dominated the government and Rwandan society in general, so the ruling elite began to fear that they would lose their positions of supremacy. The event that transformed a difficult situation into a full-blown crisis was the RPF invasion of October 1, 1990. After that, events moved with bewildering speed and escalating horrors, much of it on the public record. A full list of such incidents would take dozens of pages. But it is useful here to note some of the key events that were known publicly before the end of 1993.[4] The following list includes items of two kinds: steps that were taken toward the genocide, and the eventual public exposure of those steps.
October 1990
– RPF invasion
– Eight thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu detained
– Three hundred Tutsi slaughtered in Kabirira
– De Standaard (Belgium) reports massive arrests of Tutsi
December 1990
– Radical Hutu paper Kangura publishes “Ten Commandments of the Hutu”
January 1991
– Five hundred to 1,000 Tutsi slaughtered in Kinigi
– Le Monde (France) reports the circulation of racist anti-Tutsi propaganda
February 1991
– US State Department reports arbitrary detention of 5,000 Rwandan civilians
– Le Monde reports continuing anti-Tutsi propaganda
April 1991
– Le Monde reports on anti-Tutsi propaganda contained in Kangura newspaper
May 1991
– Amnesty International reports the October 1990 detainment of 8,000 persons and the torture and rape of civilians
October 1991
– In three different incidents, 31 Tutsi are arrested and either never return or are beaten
December 1991
– Attacks on Tutsi continue
January 1992
– Government military budget increases dramatically
March 1992
– Radical Hutu CDR party forms
– Three hundred Tutsi massacred in Bugesera
– Human Rights Watch reports on massacres in Kabirira (1990) and in the north-west (1991)
– US State Department reports on the January 1991 massacre in Kinigi
April 1992
– Habyarimana begins military training for his party's youth wing, who are transformed into the militia known as interahamwe; CDR soon follows with its own militia, the impuzamugambi
June 1992
– The New York Times reports the October 1990 detention of 8,000
September1992
– Rwandan government distributes guns to civilians in two communes
October 1992
– De Standaard reports terror against the Tutsi
– Radical Hutu death squads and exposes Zero Network
November 1992
– Habyarimana declares the Arusha cease-fire agreement with RPF is a only a scrap of paper
December 1992
– Rwandan human rights organizations report massacres of Tutsi and human rights violations against them
– Africa Watch reports government troops are on killing sprees
January 1993
– Three hundred Tutsi and other political opponents massacred in the north-west
– Le Monde reports accusations against Rwandan army of gross human rights violations against Tutsi
– International commission of four human rights organizations conducts mission in Rwanda, interviewing hundreds and excavating mass graves
February 1993
– RPF violates cease-fire; one million in the north-west are displaced
– Government distributes more guns to civilians
– More violence, rape, detainment, and torture of Tutsi
– International Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuse in Rwanda, made up of members of four organizations, reports more than 2,000 Tutsi murdered on ethnic grounds since RPF invasion; three major massacres of Tutsi by government-supported civilians; extremist, racist rhetoric widespread; militia groups formed. The press release raises possibility of genocide, but the word is absent from final report
– Le Monde covers human rights report
– US State Department reports on Bugesera and Bagogwe massacres, disappearances of Tutsi youth, and expansion of army
March 1993
– One hundred and forty-seven Tutsi killed; hundreds more beaten
– International Commission of Inquiry presents its report in Brussels and Paris
– Le Monde discusses French military assistance and political support to Rwanda in light of International Commission's findings
– Belgian paper reports on Commission report and Habyarimana's rejection of it
May 1993
– Radical Hutu wing splits from opposition MDR party
– MDR leader murdered
June 1993
– Akazu-backed extremist radio station RTLMC begins broadcasting
– Human Rights Watch publishes report on massacres in north-west in January and February 1993; other killings in February and March; arming of civilians; and several massacres carried out by civilians with government support
August 1993
– UN Special Rapporteur on Summary, Arbitrary and Extrajudicial Executions issues report based on mission to Rwanda, largely confirming report of International Commission of Inquiry. Concludes that recent massacres seem to fulfill the Genocide Convention definition of genocide; violence is increasing; extremist propaganda is rampant; and militias are organized
September 1993
– Judges and human rights activists attacked
– Bombs explode in Kigali
October 1993
–De Standaard reports on questions in Belgian Parliament about Akazu members' involvement in violence and corruption
9.6. All these events, we remind readers, happened prior to 1994. We also stress that this catalogue is minimal; it could be expanded. In its comprehensive study of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch lists 30 pages of early warnings that begin where our list ended, five months prior to April 6, 1994. All these data reflect three important truths:
1) Violence was rampant for years before the genocide and was escalating perceptibly.
2) This state of affairs was well known.
3) It was also well known that the situation was not the product of chance.
9.7. Beginning with the response to the 1990 RPF invasion, the violence had been government-initiated and provoked. As we have earlier argued, progressively over the next two years it took on the characteristics that ultimately distinguished the genocide from “ordinary” terror and made it in so many ways a remarkably faithful successor to the indisputable genocides of our century. By the time it was finally unleashed, the violence was deliberate, planned, organized, sophisticated, and coordinated. It was motivated by that which distinguishes genocide from crimes against humanity or mass murder: A clique of Rwandan Hutu consciously intended to exterminate all Tutsi in the country, specifically including women and children so that no future generations would ever appear. If the rest of the world could not contemplate the possibility that they would go that far, it was certainly known that they were prepared to go a great distance indeed.
9.8. Already by late 1992, virtually all the key protagonists existed, often “as shadowy counterparts of official institutions.” The fanatical Hutu party, the CDR, had been hived off from the ruling MRND in March, perhaps with the connivance of Habyarimana and his clique. Soon each produced its own militia group: the MRND transformed its youth wing into the now infamous interahamwe; the CDR called its group the impuzamugambi. The Rwandan army (FAR) had its Amasasu secret society, the Akazu and the secret service had their Zero Network death squads, and radical Hutu had their house intellectuals. The Amasasu, extremist officers who felt that the fight against the RPF was not being carried out with the necessary energy, handed out weapons to the interahamwe and impuzamugambi who, in turn, worked hand-in-hand with the Zero Network, which included both civilian and military assassins.[5] For the next year, these elements built links, continued their terror campaigns, and worked to undermine the ongoing Arusha peace talks.
9.9. It was during this period, in November 1992, that Leon Mugesera, an influential member of Habyarimana's party, addressed local MRND militants with a message explicitly presaging the genocide: “The fatal mistake we made in 1959 was to let them [the Tutsi] get out... They belong in Ethiopia and we are going to find them a shortcut to get there by throwing them into the Nyabarongo River [to carry them northwards]. I must insist on this point. We have to act. Wipe them all out!”[6]
9.10. The murder of Burundi's Hutu President Ndadaye by Tutsi soldiers the following October propelled the movement to its next and penultimate stage. What better witnesses to Tutsi villainy than the flood of Hutu refugees into Rwanda that followed? Countless Hutu moderates were radicalized, giving up at last on the possibility of a united country. The conspirators were not slow to exploit their opportunity.[7]
9.11. As one analyst put it, “The movement known as Hutu Power, the coalition that would make the genocide possible, was built upon the corpse of Ndadaye.”[8] Hutu Power as an explicit organizing concept had been announced earlier at a provincial meeting, but it really took off at a mass rally in Kigali on October 23, two days after the Burundi assassination.[9] Members of several political parties were present, attesting to the new reality that ethnic solidarity trumped party allegiances. Political life, in these last turbulent months before the genocide, was re-organized strictly around the two opposing ethnic poles. Hutu who opposed Hutu solidarity were seen as the enemy. Anyone who was prepared to work with the Tutsi in a transitional government was an inyenzi, or a puppet of the Tutsi.
9.12. The diplomatic community in Kigali followed these developments closely. The Belgians, French, and Americans had the best sources of information, but as we were told by a knowledgeable observer, Kigali was a small town, the elite was tiny, everyone knew everyone else, everyone had the same information, and all kept their governments back home informed. The only question was what each one chose to believe.
9.13. We began this chapter with a catalogue of some of the many atrocities committed against the Tutsi between the 1990 RPF invasion and late 1993 that were widely recognized at the time. To convey a sense of the atmosphere in Rwanda in the tumultuous few months leading to the genocide, what follows is highlights from November 1993 until Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994. It is in the light of these incidents that we will later examine the small, poorly equipped, and largely impotent military mission that the UN Security Council approved for Rwanda in October 1993.[10]
– In November 1993, the Belgian ambassador reported to Brussels that radio station RTLMC had called for the assassination of the Prime Minister, who was not in the Hutu Power camp.
– On December 1, a local human rights organization, reporting on recent massacres of and human rights violations against Tutsi, quoted the assailants as saying that “this population is an accomplice of the Inkotanyi [the RPF army] because it is mostly Tutsi, and its extermination would be a good thing.”
– On December 3, several FAR officers, announcing that they were filled “with revulsion against these filthy tactics,” wrote to UN Commander General Romeo Dallaire about a “Machiavellian plan” that Habyarimana personally was hatching with officers from his home region. Drawing attention to several incidents of recent killings of civilians, they warned that, “More massacres of the same kind are being planned and are supposed to spread throughout the country... and that opposition politicians were to be assassinated.”
– On December 27, Belgian intelligence reported that, “The interahamwe are armed to the teeth and on alert...each of them has ammunition, grenades, mines and knives...They are all waiting for the right moment to act.”
– Beginning in January 1994, Habyarimana repeatedly delayed implementation of the transitional government that had been agreed to at Arusha.
– On January 11, General Dallaire sent his controversial fax to his superior, General Baril, at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. It was prompted by a meeting the previous day between Belgian UNAMIR officers and an interahamwe commander-turned-informant known in UN correspondence only as “Jean-Pierre” (his surname was Turatsinze). Although he opposed the RPF, Jean-Pierre had informed the UN officials that he “disagrees with anti-Tutsi extermination...cannot support the killing of innocent persons.” Until UNAMIR appeared, he maintained, the principal aim of the interahamwe was to protect Kigali from RPF. “Since UNAMIR mandate he has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis.” Jean-Pierre offered to take UNAMIR officials to caches of guns. According to Dallaire's faxed cable, Jean-Pierre said that the interahamwe had 1,700 men scattered in groups of 40 around the capital, each of whom had been trained in “discipline, weapons, explosives, close combat and tactics...he informed us he was in charge of last Saturdays [sic] demonstrations which aims were to target deputies [members of Parliament] of opposition parties coming to ceremonies and Belgian soldiers. They hoped to...provoke a civil war. Deputies were to be assassinated upon entry or exit from Parliament. Belgian troops were to be provoked...a number of them were to be killed and thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.” For various reasons, this confrontation with Belgian troops had not occurred. But the scheme was only deferred, not discarded.
– On January 12, Dallaire received a response from Iqbal Riza, writing over the signature of his superior, Kofi Annan, head of UN peacekeeping operations, and denying Dallaire permission to seize the arms caches revealed by Jean-Pierre.
– On January 13, the Belgian ambassador, who had been briefed on Jean-Pierre's information, reported to Brussels that UNAMIR could not act alone against the interahamwe because of its limited mandate. Even the investigation of incidents would have to be carried out together with the national police, but many of them were working with the militia.
– On January 14 in Belgium, military intelligence reported fears that the interahamwe might attack the UN's Blue Helmets, particularly its Belgian soldiers. They also reported “increasingly well-substantiated indications of secret links and/or support to interahamwe by high-ranking officers of the Rwandan army or national police.”
– On January 17, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Rwanda told assembled African diplomats in Kigali that, “We have proof of the existence of training camps for many recruits.”
– On January 25, the Belgian ambassador was warned by a senior political official that the interahamwe were going to launch a civil war in which they would exploit hostility against the Belgians.
– On January 27, radio station RTLMC broadcast a call for the Hutu to defend themselves to the last man. After a long diatribe against UNAMIR, the station called on Rwandans to “take responsibility” for what was happening, or Belgian soldiers would give the country to the Tutsi.
– About this time, Human Rights Watch was told that a US government intelligence analyst had estimated that if conflict were renewed in Rwanda, the worst case scenario would involve one-half million people dying. Apparently, this analyst's work was usually highly regarded, but this assessment was not taken seriously.
– Around the same time, the Human Rights Watch Arms Project published a report documenting the flow of arms into Rwanda, mostly from France, or from Egypt and South Africa with French support. After detailing the distribution of arms to civilians, the report concluded that, “It is impossible to exaggerate the danger of providing automatic rifles to civilians, particularly in regions where residents, either encouraged or instructed by authorities, have slaughtered their neighbours.
– In February, Habyarimana failed to show up for the swearing-in of the transitional government, which was once again postponed.
– On February 15, Belgian military intelligence reported that the army chief of staff had put all troops on alert, cancelled leaves, and asked for more soldiers.
– On February 20, according to an interview given by banker Jean Birara to a Belgian reporter in May, Rwandan army Chief of Staff Sylvain Nsabimana, a relative of Birara's, showed him a list of 1,500 persons to be eliminated in Kigali.
– At about the same time, the Papal Nuncio– the Vatican's ambassador to Rwanda – gave the Italian ambassador two lists of Tutsi who were to be exterminated. The latter, now the ambassador in Ethiopia, told the Panel that he was absolutely confident that everyone in the diplomatic world was aware of these lists.
– On February 20, an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister-designate failed.
– On February 21, assassins alleged to have close ties to Habyarimana killed the Hutu leader of the PSD, a party of southern Hutu and some Tutsi.
– On February 22, a mob killed the head of the Hutu radical CDR party in revenge.
– Between February 22 and 26, interahamwe killed 70 people and destroyed property in Kigali. Belgian officers described the situation as “explosive” but noted that UNAMIR's limited mandate left it helpless to stop the escalating violence.
– On February 25, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to the Belgian ambassador to the UN about the need to strengthen UNAMIR's mandate. Otherwise, if the situation continued deteriorating, “Belgian peacekeepers [would] remain passive witnesses to genocide....” In response, after discussing the matter with the UN Secretariat and principal members of the Security Council, the UN's Belgian ambassador replied that “it is unlikely that either the number of troops or the mandate of UNAMIR would be enlarged; that the United States and Great Britain oppose this... for financial reasons...”
– Also on February 25, President Habyarimana confided to Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, that his life had been threatened. He did not reveal by whom.
– In February as well, the US State Department reported on massacres of Tutsi in early 1993 and the existence of death squads; Le Monde reported on massacres, the French role in the Rwandan army, and anti-Tutsi propaganda; and a Belgian paper reported on the assassinations.
– On March 1, the Belgian ambassador in Kigali reported that station RTLMC was broadcasting “inflammatory statements calling for the hatred– indeed for the extermination” of the Tutsi.
– On March 2, an MRND informant told Belgian intelligence that his party, the ruling party, had a plan to exterminate all the Tutsis in Kigali if the RPF dared to resume the war. “If things go badly, the Hutu will massacre them without pity.”
– On March 10, Belgian intelligence reported that the MRND was angry with Habyarimana for meeting with President Museveni of Uganda without consulting them.
– On March 15, a group of several of the world's leading human rights organizations, all of whom had done extensive research in Rwanda, issued a statement deploring the growing violence and the unending distribution of arms in Rwanda.
– About a week later, according to the report of the 1997 Belgian Commission of Parliamentary Enquiry into Belgium's role in the genocide, the officer in charge of intelligence for the Rwandan army told a group that included some Belgian military advisers that “if Arusha were implemented, they were ready to liquidate the Tutsi.”
– In the last days of March, radio station RTLMC broadcast increasingly bitter attacks against UNAMIR, Dallaire, the Belgians, and some Rwandan political leaders.
– At the end of March, UNAMIR's mandate was extended, but not strengthened. Nor were reinforcements sent in, mostly due to American reluctance to devote more resources to Rwanda.
– On April 2, RTLMC announced that military officers had just met with the Prime Minister to plan a coup against Habyarimana. (It is probable that she met with moderate officers to consider how to deal with the escalating crisis, but it seems inconceivable that this group believed it had the remotest chance of overthrowing the President. After all, the Prime Minister was unable even to have a meeting without its being reported on the Hutu Power radio station.[11])
– On April 3, RTLMC broadcast a prediction that the RPF would do a little something with bullets and grenades in the next three days.
–On April 4, influential Hutu Power leader Theoneste Bagasora told a group that included several high-ranking UN officials that “the only plausible solution for Rwanda would be the elimination of the Tutsi.”
– On the same day, M. D. Gutekunst, the president of Afrique Santé et Environnement, visited two high-placed friends in Kigali. They reported to him rumours that the President was off to Tanzania to “capitulate” on Arusha. The new government was to be sworn in on Friday, April 8, but Habyarimana would be killed by the RPF before that, and the civil war would recommence.
– On April 6, under intense international pressure to implement the Arusha accords, Habyarimana in fact flew to Dar Es Salaam to meet with his peers from neighbouring states. There they continued to insist that he keep the commitment to install a new broad-based government. Returning home that same evening, Habyarimana offered President Ntaryamira of Burundi a lift on his Falcon 50 jet.[12] As the plane began its descent into Kigali airport, it was hit by ground-to-air missiles and crashed, killing all aboard.
9.14. Inevitably, wildly conflicting stories and accusations about the possible perpetrators have swirled ever since. As part of a systematic attempt to lay the foundation to justify a planned assault on UNAMIR Belgian troops, radio station RTLMC immediately blamed the Belgians, among others, Since then, virtually every conceivable party has been accused of the deed – the Akazu, other Hutu radicals, the RPF, the UN, UNAMIR, the French. The truth is that to this day, this historic event is shrouded in conflicting rumours and accusations but no hard evidence. Mysteriously enough, a formal investigation of the crash has never been carried out, and this Panel has had no capacity to launch one. We address this important issue in our recommendations.
9.15. The President's plane crashed at 8.30 p.m. Some 10 hours later, the killing of some Tutsi and of Hutu opposition members began. The actual genocide was launched soon thereafter. Perhaps six hours after that, RPF troops began to engage Rwandan soldiers. The civil war had begun again.
9.16. An unforgivable tragedy for the Tutsi of Rwanda was that the international community failed to take a single step to halt the genocide once it began, even though everyone knew it was in progress. The first tragedy, however, was the one documented in this chapter. The interpretation of the countless individual incidents recorded is surely inescapable: There were a thousand early warnings that something appalling was about to occur in Rwanda. If not a genocide, it was at least a catastrophe of so great a magnitude that it should command international intervention. As we shall see, that intervention was utterly inadequate, largely owing to the political interests of the Americans and the French.
9.17. Yet the argument of this entire report is that for 150 years, the outside world played a central part in carving out the building blocks that built to the genocide. This role extended way back: to the racism of the first European explorers, to Belgian colonial policy; to Catholic church support for “demographic democracy” under a Hutu military dictatorship; to the Structural Adjustment Programme imposed by western financial institutions; and to the legitimizing of an ethnic dictatorship by France, the US, and many international development aid agencies. In our very strong view, the world carried a heavy responsibility for the events in Rwanda. There was an honourable and inestimably useful way in which the world might have discharged that responsibility. Human rights groups and a small number of UN officials tried frantically to get it to do so. Instead, world leaders chose to play politics and to pinch pennies as hundreds of thousands of innocent Rwandans needlessly died.
THE EVE OF THE GENOCIDE: WHAT THE WORLD KNEW
9.1. No controversy about the genocide is more vexing than whether the world knew it was coming yet failed to take decisive steps to prevent it. A great deal has been written on this one topic alone. Our position, as we have already indicated, is clear. There can be not an iota of doubt that the international community knew the following: that something terrible was underway in Rwanda, that serious plans were afoot for even more appalling deeds, that these went far beyond routine thuggery, and that the world nevertheless stood by and did nothing. That does not mean the world knew that by 1992 or 1993, genocide was being systematically plotted and organized. In fact it seems to us likely that hardly anyone could quite bring themselves to believe this was the case.
9.2. After all, even in the early 1990s Rwanda remained one of the darlings of the international community. Habyarimana himself, after 20 years of power, had cordial personal relations with politicians and diplomats all over the world. It was simply impossible for these people to think of him as some kind of madman presiding over an evil regime; he seemed nothing like that at all. Indeed, he had powerful friends and champions throughout the western world.
9.3. The most steadfast were from France, and included President Mitterrand, his son, and many other important diplomats, politicians, officers and senior civil servants. In Kigali, Habyarimana had a strong, loyal ally in French Ambassador Georges Martres, whose dedication to the interests of the regime led to the joke in local diplomatic circles that he was really the Rwandan ambassador to France.[1] But Martres' role was no laughing matter. As one scholar tells us, “According to officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Co-operation, Ambassador Martres never reported on the rise of extremists, Hutu power, and the continuous violence during his tour in Rwanda from 1990 until 1993.”[2]
9.4. Even after the genocide, Martres recalled that Habyarimana “gave the impression of a man of great morality. President Habyarimana prayed regularly and went to mass regularly...generally, the image President Habyarimana presented to President Mitterrand was very favourable.” Yet Martres well knew the Rwandan reality. Christophe Mfizi, a former Habyarimana associate, who in 1992 exposed the existence of the Zero Network, personally briefed Martres on the details.[3] Nothing changed Martres' views. This unquestioning support of the regime by French officials sent the conspirators the signal that they could get away with just about anything.
9.5. We have seen earlier that the economic crunch of the late 1980s seriously reduced the available spoils of office just as the first demands for democratization and power sharing were being heard. As resentment grew towards the northern Hutu faction that dominated the government and Rwandan society in general, so the ruling elite began to fear that they would lose their positions of supremacy. The event that transformed a difficult situation into a full-blown crisis was the RPF invasion of October 1, 1990. After that, events moved with bewildering speed and escalating horrors, much of it on the public record. A full list of such incidents would take dozens of pages. But it is useful here to note some of the key events that were known publicly before the end of 1993.[4] The following list includes items of two kinds: steps that were taken toward the genocide, and the eventual public exposure of those steps.
October 1990
– RPF invasion
– Eight thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu detained
– Three hundred Tutsi slaughtered in Kabirira
– De Standaard (Belgium) reports massive arrests of Tutsi
December 1990
– Radical Hutu paper Kangura publishes “Ten Commandments of the Hutu”
January 1991
– Five hundred to 1,000 Tutsi slaughtered in Kinigi
– Le Monde (France) reports the circulation of racist anti-Tutsi propaganda
February 1991
– US State Department reports arbitrary detention of 5,000 Rwandan civilians
– Le Monde reports continuing anti-Tutsi propaganda
April 1991
– Le Monde reports on anti-Tutsi propaganda contained in Kangura newspaper
May 1991
– Amnesty International reports the October 1990 detainment of 8,000 persons and the torture and rape of civilians
October 1991
– In three different incidents, 31 Tutsi are arrested and either never return or are beaten
December 1991
– Attacks on Tutsi continue
January 1992
– Government military budget increases dramatically
March 1992
– Radical Hutu CDR party forms
– Three hundred Tutsi massacred in Bugesera
– Human Rights Watch reports on massacres in Kabirira (1990) and in the north-west (1991)
– US State Department reports on the January 1991 massacre in Kinigi
April 1992
– Habyarimana begins military training for his party's youth wing, who are transformed into the militia known as interahamwe; CDR soon follows with its own militia, the impuzamugambi
June 1992
– The New York Times reports the October 1990 detention of 8,000
September1992
– Rwandan government distributes guns to civilians in two communes
October 1992
– De Standaard reports terror against the Tutsi
– Radical Hutu death squads and exposes Zero Network
November 1992
– Habyarimana declares the Arusha cease-fire agreement with RPF is a only a scrap of paper
December 1992
– Rwandan human rights organizations report massacres of Tutsi and human rights violations against them
– Africa Watch reports government troops are on killing sprees
January 1993
– Three hundred Tutsi and other political opponents massacred in the north-west
– Le Monde reports accusations against Rwandan army of gross human rights violations against Tutsi
– International commission of four human rights organizations conducts mission in Rwanda, interviewing hundreds and excavating mass graves
February 1993
– RPF violates cease-fire; one million in the north-west are displaced
– Government distributes more guns to civilians
– More violence, rape, detainment, and torture of Tutsi
– International Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuse in Rwanda, made up of members of four organizations, reports more than 2,000 Tutsi murdered on ethnic grounds since RPF invasion; three major massacres of Tutsi by government-supported civilians; extremist, racist rhetoric widespread; militia groups formed. The press release raises possibility of genocide, but the word is absent from final report
– Le Monde covers human rights report
– US State Department reports on Bugesera and Bagogwe massacres, disappearances of Tutsi youth, and expansion of army
March 1993
– One hundred and forty-seven Tutsi killed; hundreds more beaten
– International Commission of Inquiry presents its report in Brussels and Paris
– Le Monde discusses French military assistance and political support to Rwanda in light of International Commission's findings
– Belgian paper reports on Commission report and Habyarimana's rejection of it
May 1993
– Radical Hutu wing splits from opposition MDR party
– MDR leader murdered
June 1993
– Akazu-backed extremist radio station RTLMC begins broadcasting
– Human Rights Watch publishes report on massacres in north-west in January and February 1993; other killings in February and March; arming of civilians; and several massacres carried out by civilians with government support
August 1993
– UN Special Rapporteur on Summary, Arbitrary and Extrajudicial Executions issues report based on mission to Rwanda, largely confirming report of International Commission of Inquiry. Concludes that recent massacres seem to fulfill the Genocide Convention definition of genocide; violence is increasing; extremist propaganda is rampant; and militias are organized
September 1993
– Judges and human rights activists attacked
– Bombs explode in Kigali
October 1993
–De Standaard reports on questions in Belgian Parliament about Akazu members' involvement in violence and corruption
9.6. All these events, we remind readers, happened prior to 1994. We also stress that this catalogue is minimal; it could be expanded. In its comprehensive study of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch lists 30 pages of early warnings that begin where our list ended, five months prior to April 6, 1994. All these data reflect three important truths:
1) Violence was rampant for years before the genocide and was escalating perceptibly.
2) This state of affairs was well known.
3) It was also well known that the situation was not the product of chance.
9.7. Beginning with the response to the 1990 RPF invasion, the violence had been government-initiated and provoked. As we have earlier argued, progressively over the next two years it took on the characteristics that ultimately distinguished the genocide from “ordinary” terror and made it in so many ways a remarkably faithful successor to the indisputable genocides of our century. By the time it was finally unleashed, the violence was deliberate, planned, organized, sophisticated, and coordinated. It was motivated by that which distinguishes genocide from crimes against humanity or mass murder: A clique of Rwandan Hutu consciously intended to exterminate all Tutsi in the country, specifically including women and children so that no future generations would ever appear. If the rest of the world could not contemplate the possibility that they would go that far, it was certainly known that they were prepared to go a great distance indeed.
9.8. Already by late 1992, virtually all the key protagonists existed, often “as shadowy counterparts of official institutions.” The fanatical Hutu party, the CDR, had been hived off from the ruling MRND in March, perhaps with the connivance of Habyarimana and his clique. Soon each produced its own militia group: the MRND transformed its youth wing into the now infamous interahamwe; the CDR called its group the impuzamugambi. The Rwandan army (FAR) had its Amasasu secret society, the Akazu and the secret service had their Zero Network death squads, and radical Hutu had their house intellectuals. The Amasasu, extremist officers who felt that the fight against the RPF was not being carried out with the necessary energy, handed out weapons to the interahamwe and impuzamugambi who, in turn, worked hand-in-hand with the Zero Network, which included both civilian and military assassins.[5] For the next year, these elements built links, continued their terror campaigns, and worked to undermine the ongoing Arusha peace talks.
9.9. It was during this period, in November 1992, that Leon Mugesera, an influential member of Habyarimana's party, addressed local MRND militants with a message explicitly presaging the genocide: “The fatal mistake we made in 1959 was to let them [the Tutsi] get out... They belong in Ethiopia and we are going to find them a shortcut to get there by throwing them into the Nyabarongo River [to carry them northwards]. I must insist on this point. We have to act. Wipe them all out!”[6]
9.10. The murder of Burundi's Hutu President Ndadaye by Tutsi soldiers the following October propelled the movement to its next and penultimate stage. What better witnesses to Tutsi villainy than the flood of Hutu refugees into Rwanda that followed? Countless Hutu moderates were radicalized, giving up at last on the possibility of a united country. The conspirators were not slow to exploit their opportunity.[7]
9.11. As one analyst put it, “The movement known as Hutu Power, the coalition that would make the genocide possible, was built upon the corpse of Ndadaye.”[8] Hutu Power as an explicit organizing concept had been announced earlier at a provincial meeting, but it really took off at a mass rally in Kigali on October 23, two days after the Burundi assassination.[9] Members of several political parties were present, attesting to the new reality that ethnic solidarity trumped party allegiances. Political life, in these last turbulent months before the genocide, was re-organized strictly around the two opposing ethnic poles. Hutu who opposed Hutu solidarity were seen as the enemy. Anyone who was prepared to work with the Tutsi in a transitional government was an inyenzi, or a puppet of the Tutsi.
9.12. The diplomatic community in Kigali followed these developments closely. The Belgians, French, and Americans had the best sources of information, but as we were told by a knowledgeable observer, Kigali was a small town, the elite was tiny, everyone knew everyone else, everyone had the same information, and all kept their governments back home informed. The only question was what each one chose to believe.
9.13. We began this chapter with a catalogue of some of the many atrocities committed against the Tutsi between the 1990 RPF invasion and late 1993 that were widely recognized at the time. To convey a sense of the atmosphere in Rwanda in the tumultuous few months leading to the genocide, what follows is highlights from November 1993 until Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994. It is in the light of these incidents that we will later examine the small, poorly equipped, and largely impotent military mission that the UN Security Council approved for Rwanda in October 1993.[10]
– In November 1993, the Belgian ambassador reported to Brussels that radio station RTLMC had called for the assassination of the Prime Minister, who was not in the Hutu Power camp.
– On December 1, a local human rights organization, reporting on recent massacres of and human rights violations against Tutsi, quoted the assailants as saying that “this population is an accomplice of the Inkotanyi [the RPF army] because it is mostly Tutsi, and its extermination would be a good thing.”
– On December 3, several FAR officers, announcing that they were filled “with revulsion against these filthy tactics,” wrote to UN Commander General Romeo Dallaire about a “Machiavellian plan” that Habyarimana personally was hatching with officers from his home region. Drawing attention to several incidents of recent killings of civilians, they warned that, “More massacres of the same kind are being planned and are supposed to spread throughout the country... and that opposition politicians were to be assassinated.”
– On December 27, Belgian intelligence reported that, “The interahamwe are armed to the teeth and on alert...each of them has ammunition, grenades, mines and knives...They are all waiting for the right moment to act.”
– Beginning in January 1994, Habyarimana repeatedly delayed implementation of the transitional government that had been agreed to at Arusha.
– On January 11, General Dallaire sent his controversial fax to his superior, General Baril, at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. It was prompted by a meeting the previous day between Belgian UNAMIR officers and an interahamwe commander-turned-informant known in UN correspondence only as “Jean-Pierre” (his surname was Turatsinze). Although he opposed the RPF, Jean-Pierre had informed the UN officials that he “disagrees with anti-Tutsi extermination...cannot support the killing of innocent persons.” Until UNAMIR appeared, he maintained, the principal aim of the interahamwe was to protect Kigali from RPF. “Since UNAMIR mandate he has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis.” Jean-Pierre offered to take UNAMIR officials to caches of guns. According to Dallaire's faxed cable, Jean-Pierre said that the interahamwe had 1,700 men scattered in groups of 40 around the capital, each of whom had been trained in “discipline, weapons, explosives, close combat and tactics...he informed us he was in charge of last Saturdays [sic] demonstrations which aims were to target deputies [members of Parliament] of opposition parties coming to ceremonies and Belgian soldiers. They hoped to...provoke a civil war. Deputies were to be assassinated upon entry or exit from Parliament. Belgian troops were to be provoked...a number of them were to be killed and thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.” For various reasons, this confrontation with Belgian troops had not occurred. But the scheme was only deferred, not discarded.
– On January 12, Dallaire received a response from Iqbal Riza, writing over the signature of his superior, Kofi Annan, head of UN peacekeeping operations, and denying Dallaire permission to seize the arms caches revealed by Jean-Pierre.
– On January 13, the Belgian ambassador, who had been briefed on Jean-Pierre's information, reported to Brussels that UNAMIR could not act alone against the interahamwe because of its limited mandate. Even the investigation of incidents would have to be carried out together with the national police, but many of them were working with the militia.
– On January 14 in Belgium, military intelligence reported fears that the interahamwe might attack the UN's Blue Helmets, particularly its Belgian soldiers. They also reported “increasingly well-substantiated indications of secret links and/or support to interahamwe by high-ranking officers of the Rwandan army or national police.”
– On January 17, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Rwanda told assembled African diplomats in Kigali that, “We have proof of the existence of training camps for many recruits.”
– On January 25, the Belgian ambassador was warned by a senior political official that the interahamwe were going to launch a civil war in which they would exploit hostility against the Belgians.
– On January 27, radio station RTLMC broadcast a call for the Hutu to defend themselves to the last man. After a long diatribe against UNAMIR, the station called on Rwandans to “take responsibility” for what was happening, or Belgian soldiers would give the country to the Tutsi.
– About this time, Human Rights Watch was told that a US government intelligence analyst had estimated that if conflict were renewed in Rwanda, the worst case scenario would involve one-half million people dying. Apparently, this analyst's work was usually highly regarded, but this assessment was not taken seriously.
– Around the same time, the Human Rights Watch Arms Project published a report documenting the flow of arms into Rwanda, mostly from France, or from Egypt and South Africa with French support. After detailing the distribution of arms to civilians, the report concluded that, “It is impossible to exaggerate the danger of providing automatic rifles to civilians, particularly in regions where residents, either encouraged or instructed by authorities, have slaughtered their neighbours.
– In February, Habyarimana failed to show up for the swearing-in of the transitional government, which was once again postponed.
– On February 15, Belgian military intelligence reported that the army chief of staff had put all troops on alert, cancelled leaves, and asked for more soldiers.
– On February 20, according to an interview given by banker Jean Birara to a Belgian reporter in May, Rwandan army Chief of Staff Sylvain Nsabimana, a relative of Birara's, showed him a list of 1,500 persons to be eliminated in Kigali.
– At about the same time, the Papal Nuncio– the Vatican's ambassador to Rwanda – gave the Italian ambassador two lists of Tutsi who were to be exterminated. The latter, now the ambassador in Ethiopia, told the Panel that he was absolutely confident that everyone in the diplomatic world was aware of these lists.
– On February 20, an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister-designate failed.
– On February 21, assassins alleged to have close ties to Habyarimana killed the Hutu leader of the PSD, a party of southern Hutu and some Tutsi.
– On February 22, a mob killed the head of the Hutu radical CDR party in revenge.
– Between February 22 and 26, interahamwe killed 70 people and destroyed property in Kigali. Belgian officers described the situation as “explosive” but noted that UNAMIR's limited mandate left it helpless to stop the escalating violence.
– On February 25, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to the Belgian ambassador to the UN about the need to strengthen UNAMIR's mandate. Otherwise, if the situation continued deteriorating, “Belgian peacekeepers [would] remain passive witnesses to genocide....” In response, after discussing the matter with the UN Secretariat and principal members of the Security Council, the UN's Belgian ambassador replied that “it is unlikely that either the number of troops or the mandate of UNAMIR would be enlarged; that the United States and Great Britain oppose this... for financial reasons...”
– Also on February 25, President Habyarimana confided to Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, that his life had been threatened. He did not reveal by whom.
– In February as well, the US State Department reported on massacres of Tutsi in early 1993 and the existence of death squads; Le Monde reported on massacres, the French role in the Rwandan army, and anti-Tutsi propaganda; and a Belgian paper reported on the assassinations.
– On March 1, the Belgian ambassador in Kigali reported that station RTLMC was broadcasting “inflammatory statements calling for the hatred– indeed for the extermination” of the Tutsi.
– On March 2, an MRND informant told Belgian intelligence that his party, the ruling party, had a plan to exterminate all the Tutsis in Kigali if the RPF dared to resume the war. “If things go badly, the Hutu will massacre them without pity.”
– On March 10, Belgian intelligence reported that the MRND was angry with Habyarimana for meeting with President Museveni of Uganda without consulting them.
– On March 15, a group of several of the world's leading human rights organizations, all of whom had done extensive research in Rwanda, issued a statement deploring the growing violence and the unending distribution of arms in Rwanda.
– About a week later, according to the report of the 1997 Belgian Commission of Parliamentary Enquiry into Belgium's role in the genocide, the officer in charge of intelligence for the Rwandan army told a group that included some Belgian military advisers that “if Arusha were implemented, they were ready to liquidate the Tutsi.”
– In the last days of March, radio station RTLMC broadcast increasingly bitter attacks against UNAMIR, Dallaire, the Belgians, and some Rwandan political leaders.
– At the end of March, UNAMIR's mandate was extended, but not strengthened. Nor were reinforcements sent in, mostly due to American reluctance to devote more resources to Rwanda.
– On April 2, RTLMC announced that military officers had just met with the Prime Minister to plan a coup against Habyarimana. (It is probable that she met with moderate officers to consider how to deal with the escalating crisis, but it seems inconceivable that this group believed it had the remotest chance of overthrowing the President. After all, the Prime Minister was unable even to have a meeting without its being reported on the Hutu Power radio station.[11])
– On April 3, RTLMC broadcast a prediction that the RPF would do a little something with bullets and grenades in the next three days.
–On April 4, influential Hutu Power leader Theoneste Bagasora told a group that included several high-ranking UN officials that “the only plausible solution for Rwanda would be the elimination of the Tutsi.”
– On the same day, M. D. Gutekunst, the president of Afrique Santé et Environnement, visited two high-placed friends in Kigali. They reported to him rumours that the President was off to Tanzania to “capitulate” on Arusha. The new government was to be sworn in on Friday, April 8, but Habyarimana would be killed by the RPF before that, and the civil war would recommence.
– On April 6, under intense international pressure to implement the Arusha accords, Habyarimana in fact flew to Dar Es Salaam to meet with his peers from neighbouring states. There they continued to insist that he keep the commitment to install a new broad-based government. Returning home that same evening, Habyarimana offered President Ntaryamira of Burundi a lift on his Falcon 50 jet.[12] As the plane began its descent into Kigali airport, it was hit by ground-to-air missiles and crashed, killing all aboard.
9.14. Inevitably, wildly conflicting stories and accusations about the possible perpetrators have swirled ever since. As part of a systematic attempt to lay the foundation to justify a planned assault on UNAMIR Belgian troops, radio station RTLMC immediately blamed the Belgians, among others, Since then, virtually every conceivable party has been accused of the deed – the Akazu, other Hutu radicals, the RPF, the UN, UNAMIR, the French. The truth is that to this day, this historic event is shrouded in conflicting rumours and accusations but no hard evidence. Mysteriously enough, a formal investigation of the crash has never been carried out, and this Panel has had no capacity to launch one. We address this important issue in our recommendations.
9.15. The President's plane crashed at 8.30 p.m. Some 10 hours later, the killing of some Tutsi and of Hutu opposition members began. The actual genocide was launched soon thereafter. Perhaps six hours after that, RPF troops began to engage Rwandan soldiers. The civil war had begun again.
9.16. An unforgivable tragedy for the Tutsi of Rwanda was that the international community failed to take a single step to halt the genocide once it began, even though everyone knew it was in progress. The first tragedy, however, was the one documented in this chapter. The interpretation of the countless individual incidents recorded is surely inescapable: There were a thousand early warnings that something appalling was about to occur in Rwanda. If not a genocide, it was at least a catastrophe of so great a magnitude that it should command international intervention. As we shall see, that intervention was utterly inadequate, largely owing to the political interests of the Americans and the French.
9.17. Yet the argument of this entire report is that for 150 years, the outside world played a central part in carving out the building blocks that built to the genocide. This role extended way back: to the racism of the first European explorers, to Belgian colonial policy; to Catholic church support for “demographic democracy” under a Hutu military dictatorship; to the Structural Adjustment Programme imposed by western financial institutions; and to the legitimizing of an ethnic dictatorship by France, the US, and many international development aid agencies. In our very strong view, the world carried a heavy responsibility for the events in Rwanda. There was an honourable and inestimably useful way in which the world might have discharged that responsibility. Human rights groups and a small number of UN officials tried frantically to get it to do so. Instead, world leaders chose to play politics and to pinch pennies as hundreds of thousands of innocent Rwandans needlessly died.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 10
THE PREVENTABLE GENOCIDE: WHAT THE WORLD COULD HAVE DONE
10.1. If there is anything worse than the genocide itself, it is the knowledge that it did not have to happen. The simple, harsh, truth is that the genocide was not inevitable; and that it would have been relatively easy to stop it from happening prior to April 6, 1994, and then to mitigate the destruction significantly once it began. In the words of one expert, “This was the most easily preventable genocide imaginable.”[1]
10.2. The conspirators may have seemed formidable in local terms, but in fact they were small in number, modestly armed, and substantially dependent on the outside world. On the few occasions when the world did protest against the human rights violations being perpetrated, the abuses largely halted, if temporarily. This has been documented thoroughly. Conversely, each time the world appeased the latest outrage, it enhanced the sense of Hutu Power impunity. Since no one was ever punished for massacres or human rights abuses, since the Habyarimana government remained a favourite recipient of foreign aid, and since no one demanded an end to the escalating incitement against the Tutsi, why would Hutu radicals not believe they could get away with just about anything? [2]
10.3. The plot leaders were in it for the spoils. Even a hint, let alone a threat that further aid or loans or arms would not be forthcoming was taken very seriously indeed. Such threats were invoked with success to force Habyarimana to sign the Arusha accords. They were rarely made in connection with human rights abuses or ethnic persecution, however, and when they were, the threats were never followed up, reflecting the reality that human rights were not high on the agendas of many foreign governments.
10.4. Beyond this, some outsiders were blinded by their faith in multipartyism as a panacea for all Rwanda's woes. The atrocities aimed at the Tutsi were mistaken for more violence flowing from the civil war. End the civil war and implement the Arusha accords, they reasoned, and ethnic violence will automatically stop. To forward the goal of peace, it was necessary to remain engaged. Withdrawal of aid was therefore seen as counter-productive.
10.5. Few bothered to learn the lesson from Arusha's utter failure that no agreement mattered unless Hutu Power was shattered. Precisely the same crucial analytical error was repeated throughout the period from April to July, when the Security Council and the United Nations Secretariat consistently took the position that ending the civil war took primacy over ending the genocide. When the Nigerian ambassador complained that too much attention was being paid to cease-fire negotiations and too little to stopping the massacres, he was largely ignored. The Carlsson Inquiry, appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Anna in 1999 to look into the role of the UN in the genocide, criticizes the entire UN family for this “costly error of judgment.”[3] In fact, this seems to us too generous an interpretation of the world's failure.
10.6. Here was a clear-cut case of rote diplomacy by the international community. As the UN's own Department of Peacekeeping Operations later concluded, “A fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict... contributed to false political assumptions and military assessments.” [4] Security Council members blithely ignored both the discrete realities of the situation and the urgent advocacy of the non-governmental agencies who were crying out the truth to whomever would listen.[5] Instead, the automatic reflex was to call for a cease-fire and negotiations, outcomes that would have coincided perfectly with the aims and strategy of the genocidaires. The annihilation of the Tutsi would have continued, while the war between the armies paused, and negotiators wrangled. In reality, anything that slowed the march of the RPF to military victory was a gift to Hutu Power. In the end, its victory alone ended the genocide and saved those Tutsi who were still alive by July. We count Rwanda fortunate that a military truce – the single consistent initiative pursued by the international community – was never reached.
10.7. It should only have taken the information at hand to formulate a correct response. It may well be that the mass media did not at first grasp the full extent of the genocide, but that was not true of the world's decision-makers. Eyewitness accounts were never lacking, whether from Rwandans or expatriates with the International Committee for the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, the US Committee for Refugees, or others. Week after week for three months, reports sent directly from Rwanda to home governments and international agencies documented the magnitude of the slaughter and made it plain that this was no tribal bloodletting, but the work of hardline political and military leaders. At the same time, the reports spelled how countless people could still be saved, identifying exactly where they were hiding, and what steps were needed to rescue them. Yet the world did less than nothing. As subsequent chapters fully document, the world powers assembled as the UN Security Council actually chose to reduce, rather than enhance, their presence.
10.8. The obvious, necessary response was a serious international military force to deter the killers; this seems to us aself-evident truth. This Panel wants to go on record as one that shares the conviction of UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) Commander General Romeo Dallaire: “The killings could have been prevented if there had been the international will to accept the costs of doing so...”[6] As we have seen, that will was at best half-hearted before April 6, and it collapsed entirely in the early stages of the genocide. Virtually every authority we know believes that a larger, better-equipped, and toughly mandated force could have played a critical role, possibly in deterring the conspiracy entirely or, at the least, in causing the plotters to modify or stall their plans and in significantly reducing the number of deaths. It seems certain that appropriate UN intervention at any time after the genocide began would have had a major role in stopping the killings.[7]
10.9. Dallaire has always insisted that with 5,000 troops and the right mandate, UNAMIR could have prevented most of the killings. In 1998, several American institutions decided to test Dallaire's argument. The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and the US Army undertook a joint project to consider what impact an international military force was likely to have had.[8] Thirteen senior military leaders addressed the issue, and a report based on their presentations as well as on other research, was prepared for the Carnegie Commission by Colonel Scott Feil of the US Army. His conclusion was straightforward: “A modern force of 5,000 troops...sent to Rwanda sometime between April 7 and April 21, 1994, could have significantly altered the outcome of the conflict... forces appropriately trained, equipped and commanded, and introduced in a timely manner, could have stemmed the violence in and around the capital, prevented its spread to the countryside, and created conditions conducive to the cessation of the civil war between the RPF and RGF.” [9]
10.10. Of course, we understand that this was a strictly theoretical exercise, and it is easy to be wise after the fact. On the other hand, we have no reason to question the objectivity of this analysis or of any of the participants. Neither they nor the author seem to have had a vested interest in this conclusion. Moreover, even those analyses that have recently stressed the logistic complications in swiftly mobilizing a properly equipped force do not deny that scores of thousands of Tutsi, “up to 125,000,” might have been saved at any time during the months of the genocide.[10] By any standard, these American reports stand as a humiliating rebuke to the US government whose influence was so great in ensuring that no adequate force ever was sent.
10.11. Rather than respond with appropriate force, the opposite happened, spurred by the murders of the Belgian Blue Berets and Belgium's withdrawal of its remaining troops. Exactly two weeks after the genocide began – following strenuous lobbying for total withdrawal led by Belgium and Britain, and with American UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright advocating the most token of forces and the United States adamantly refusing to accept publicly that a full-fledged, Convention-defined genocide was in fact taking place – the Security Council made the astonishing decision to reduce the already inadequate UNAMIR force to a derisory 270 men.[11]
10.12. Today, it seems barely possible to believe. The international community actually chose to abandon the Tutsi of Rwanda at the very moment when they were being exterminated. Even that was not the end of it. The UN Secretariat officials then instructed General Dallaire that his rump force was not to take an active role in protecting Rwandan citizens.[12] To his great credit, Dallaire manoeuvered to keep the force at almost twice the size authorized, and UNAMIR was still able to save the lives of an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Rwandans during the course of the genocide.[13]
10.13. In a sense, the fact that it was possible to save thousands of lives with 500 troops makes the Belgian and the UN decisions much more deplorable. The available evidence reveals the considerable authority exerted after April 6 by even a small number of Blue Helmets with a UN flag. “The general rule” was that “Rwandans were safe as long as they gathered under United Nations protection ... It was when the United Nations forces left the site that the killings started.”[14] This rule was most infamously demonstrated in the case of the Kigali technical school, l'École Technique Officielle (ETO), where 100 Belgian soldiers kept a horde of murderers at bay. As the UN troops withdrew through one gate, the genocidaires moved in through another. Within hours, the 2,000 Tutsi who had fled to ETO for UN protection were dead.[15] We will return to this shocking incident later in this report.
10.14. With the exception of the deliberate murders of the 10 Belgian Blue Helmets, experiences showed that a few UN troops could provide significant defence for those under their protection with little risk to themselves. This “power of presence” was not to be underestimated. Yet when France sent 500 soldiers to evacuate French citizens and Akazu members on April 8 and 9, Dallaire's UN troops were immediately ordered – by the Secretariat in New York, and under strong pressure from western countries – to work with the French to evacuate foreign nationals rather than protect threatened Rwandans.[16] This can only be described as a truly perverse use of scarce UN resources. No doubt innocent expatriates were threatened by a conflagration that was none of their making. But exactly the same was true of Rwanda's Tutsi, who were peremptorily abandoned by the Blue Helmets.
10.15. Equally startling were the guidelines Dallaire was given. These seem to have received little notice until documented by the Carlsson Inquiry report, yet they seem to us of extraordinary significance. “You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate,” the April 9 cable from Kofi Annan and Iqbal Riza stated, “but [you] may exercise your discretion to do [so] should this be essential for the evacuation of foreign nationals. This should not, repeat not, extend to participating in possible combat except in self-defence.”[17] This double standard seems to us outrageous. No such instructions were ever given to Dallaire about protecting innocent Rwandan civilians. He was never explicitly directed that the Blue Helmets should protect such civilians and could fight in self-defence if attacked while doing so. He was never told, “exercise your discretion...to act beyond your mandate” when it came to Rwandans. On the contrary, every time he raised the issue, he was specifically instructed not to go beyond the rigidly circumscribed mandate approved by the Security Council under any circumstances. Is there a conclusion we can draw from this incident other than that expatriate lives were considered more valuable than African lives?
10.16. The lesson to be learned from the betrayal at ETO and other experiences was that the full potential of UNAMIR went unexplored and unused, and, as result, countless more Rwandans died than otherwise might have. If anyone in the international community learned this lesson at the time, it was not evident at the UN. For the next six weeks, as the carnage continued, the UN dithered in organizing any kind of response to the ongoing tragedy. The Americans, led by US Ambassador Madeleine Albright, played the key role in blocking more expeditious action by the UN.[18] On May 17, the Security Council finally authorized an expanded UNAMIR II to consist of 5,500 personnel.[19] But there is perhaps no distance greater on earth than the one between the Security Council chambers and the outside world. Once the decision to expand was finally made, as we will soon show in detail, the Pentagon somehow required an additional seven weeks just to negotiate a contract for delivering armed personnel carriers to the field; evidently it proved difficult to arrange the desired terms for “maintenance and spare parts.”[20] When the genocide ended in mid-July with the final RPF victory, not a single additional UN soldier had landed in Kigali.
THE PREVENTABLE GENOCIDE: WHAT THE WORLD COULD HAVE DONE
10.1. If there is anything worse than the genocide itself, it is the knowledge that it did not have to happen. The simple, harsh, truth is that the genocide was not inevitable; and that it would have been relatively easy to stop it from happening prior to April 6, 1994, and then to mitigate the destruction significantly once it began. In the words of one expert, “This was the most easily preventable genocide imaginable.”[1]
10.2. The conspirators may have seemed formidable in local terms, but in fact they were small in number, modestly armed, and substantially dependent on the outside world. On the few occasions when the world did protest against the human rights violations being perpetrated, the abuses largely halted, if temporarily. This has been documented thoroughly. Conversely, each time the world appeased the latest outrage, it enhanced the sense of Hutu Power impunity. Since no one was ever punished for massacres or human rights abuses, since the Habyarimana government remained a favourite recipient of foreign aid, and since no one demanded an end to the escalating incitement against the Tutsi, why would Hutu radicals not believe they could get away with just about anything? [2]
10.3. The plot leaders were in it for the spoils. Even a hint, let alone a threat that further aid or loans or arms would not be forthcoming was taken very seriously indeed. Such threats were invoked with success to force Habyarimana to sign the Arusha accords. They were rarely made in connection with human rights abuses or ethnic persecution, however, and when they were, the threats were never followed up, reflecting the reality that human rights were not high on the agendas of many foreign governments.
10.4. Beyond this, some outsiders were blinded by their faith in multipartyism as a panacea for all Rwanda's woes. The atrocities aimed at the Tutsi were mistaken for more violence flowing from the civil war. End the civil war and implement the Arusha accords, they reasoned, and ethnic violence will automatically stop. To forward the goal of peace, it was necessary to remain engaged. Withdrawal of aid was therefore seen as counter-productive.
10.5. Few bothered to learn the lesson from Arusha's utter failure that no agreement mattered unless Hutu Power was shattered. Precisely the same crucial analytical error was repeated throughout the period from April to July, when the Security Council and the United Nations Secretariat consistently took the position that ending the civil war took primacy over ending the genocide. When the Nigerian ambassador complained that too much attention was being paid to cease-fire negotiations and too little to stopping the massacres, he was largely ignored. The Carlsson Inquiry, appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Anna in 1999 to look into the role of the UN in the genocide, criticizes the entire UN family for this “costly error of judgment.”[3] In fact, this seems to us too generous an interpretation of the world's failure.
10.6. Here was a clear-cut case of rote diplomacy by the international community. As the UN's own Department of Peacekeeping Operations later concluded, “A fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict... contributed to false political assumptions and military assessments.” [4] Security Council members blithely ignored both the discrete realities of the situation and the urgent advocacy of the non-governmental agencies who were crying out the truth to whomever would listen.[5] Instead, the automatic reflex was to call for a cease-fire and negotiations, outcomes that would have coincided perfectly with the aims and strategy of the genocidaires. The annihilation of the Tutsi would have continued, while the war between the armies paused, and negotiators wrangled. In reality, anything that slowed the march of the RPF to military victory was a gift to Hutu Power. In the end, its victory alone ended the genocide and saved those Tutsi who were still alive by July. We count Rwanda fortunate that a military truce – the single consistent initiative pursued by the international community – was never reached.
10.7. It should only have taken the information at hand to formulate a correct response. It may well be that the mass media did not at first grasp the full extent of the genocide, but that was not true of the world's decision-makers. Eyewitness accounts were never lacking, whether from Rwandans or expatriates with the International Committee for the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, the US Committee for Refugees, or others. Week after week for three months, reports sent directly from Rwanda to home governments and international agencies documented the magnitude of the slaughter and made it plain that this was no tribal bloodletting, but the work of hardline political and military leaders. At the same time, the reports spelled how countless people could still be saved, identifying exactly where they were hiding, and what steps were needed to rescue them. Yet the world did less than nothing. As subsequent chapters fully document, the world powers assembled as the UN Security Council actually chose to reduce, rather than enhance, their presence.
10.8. The obvious, necessary response was a serious international military force to deter the killers; this seems to us aself-evident truth. This Panel wants to go on record as one that shares the conviction of UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) Commander General Romeo Dallaire: “The killings could have been prevented if there had been the international will to accept the costs of doing so...”[6] As we have seen, that will was at best half-hearted before April 6, and it collapsed entirely in the early stages of the genocide. Virtually every authority we know believes that a larger, better-equipped, and toughly mandated force could have played a critical role, possibly in deterring the conspiracy entirely or, at the least, in causing the plotters to modify or stall their plans and in significantly reducing the number of deaths. It seems certain that appropriate UN intervention at any time after the genocide began would have had a major role in stopping the killings.[7]
10.9. Dallaire has always insisted that with 5,000 troops and the right mandate, UNAMIR could have prevented most of the killings. In 1998, several American institutions decided to test Dallaire's argument. The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and the US Army undertook a joint project to consider what impact an international military force was likely to have had.[8] Thirteen senior military leaders addressed the issue, and a report based on their presentations as well as on other research, was prepared for the Carnegie Commission by Colonel Scott Feil of the US Army. His conclusion was straightforward: “A modern force of 5,000 troops...sent to Rwanda sometime between April 7 and April 21, 1994, could have significantly altered the outcome of the conflict... forces appropriately trained, equipped and commanded, and introduced in a timely manner, could have stemmed the violence in and around the capital, prevented its spread to the countryside, and created conditions conducive to the cessation of the civil war between the RPF and RGF.” [9]
10.10. Of course, we understand that this was a strictly theoretical exercise, and it is easy to be wise after the fact. On the other hand, we have no reason to question the objectivity of this analysis or of any of the participants. Neither they nor the author seem to have had a vested interest in this conclusion. Moreover, even those analyses that have recently stressed the logistic complications in swiftly mobilizing a properly equipped force do not deny that scores of thousands of Tutsi, “up to 125,000,” might have been saved at any time during the months of the genocide.[10] By any standard, these American reports stand as a humiliating rebuke to the US government whose influence was so great in ensuring that no adequate force ever was sent.
10.11. Rather than respond with appropriate force, the opposite happened, spurred by the murders of the Belgian Blue Berets and Belgium's withdrawal of its remaining troops. Exactly two weeks after the genocide began – following strenuous lobbying for total withdrawal led by Belgium and Britain, and with American UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright advocating the most token of forces and the United States adamantly refusing to accept publicly that a full-fledged, Convention-defined genocide was in fact taking place – the Security Council made the astonishing decision to reduce the already inadequate UNAMIR force to a derisory 270 men.[11]
10.12. Today, it seems barely possible to believe. The international community actually chose to abandon the Tutsi of Rwanda at the very moment when they were being exterminated. Even that was not the end of it. The UN Secretariat officials then instructed General Dallaire that his rump force was not to take an active role in protecting Rwandan citizens.[12] To his great credit, Dallaire manoeuvered to keep the force at almost twice the size authorized, and UNAMIR was still able to save the lives of an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Rwandans during the course of the genocide.[13]
10.13. In a sense, the fact that it was possible to save thousands of lives with 500 troops makes the Belgian and the UN decisions much more deplorable. The available evidence reveals the considerable authority exerted after April 6 by even a small number of Blue Helmets with a UN flag. “The general rule” was that “Rwandans were safe as long as they gathered under United Nations protection ... It was when the United Nations forces left the site that the killings started.”[14] This rule was most infamously demonstrated in the case of the Kigali technical school, l'École Technique Officielle (ETO), where 100 Belgian soldiers kept a horde of murderers at bay. As the UN troops withdrew through one gate, the genocidaires moved in through another. Within hours, the 2,000 Tutsi who had fled to ETO for UN protection were dead.[15] We will return to this shocking incident later in this report.
10.14. With the exception of the deliberate murders of the 10 Belgian Blue Helmets, experiences showed that a few UN troops could provide significant defence for those under their protection with little risk to themselves. This “power of presence” was not to be underestimated. Yet when France sent 500 soldiers to evacuate French citizens and Akazu members on April 8 and 9, Dallaire's UN troops were immediately ordered – by the Secretariat in New York, and under strong pressure from western countries – to work with the French to evacuate foreign nationals rather than protect threatened Rwandans.[16] This can only be described as a truly perverse use of scarce UN resources. No doubt innocent expatriates were threatened by a conflagration that was none of their making. But exactly the same was true of Rwanda's Tutsi, who were peremptorily abandoned by the Blue Helmets.
10.15. Equally startling were the guidelines Dallaire was given. These seem to have received little notice until documented by the Carlsson Inquiry report, yet they seem to us of extraordinary significance. “You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate,” the April 9 cable from Kofi Annan and Iqbal Riza stated, “but [you] may exercise your discretion to do [so] should this be essential for the evacuation of foreign nationals. This should not, repeat not, extend to participating in possible combat except in self-defence.”[17] This double standard seems to us outrageous. No such instructions were ever given to Dallaire about protecting innocent Rwandan civilians. He was never explicitly directed that the Blue Helmets should protect such civilians and could fight in self-defence if attacked while doing so. He was never told, “exercise your discretion...to act beyond your mandate” when it came to Rwandans. On the contrary, every time he raised the issue, he was specifically instructed not to go beyond the rigidly circumscribed mandate approved by the Security Council under any circumstances. Is there a conclusion we can draw from this incident other than that expatriate lives were considered more valuable than African lives?
10.16. The lesson to be learned from the betrayal at ETO and other experiences was that the full potential of UNAMIR went unexplored and unused, and, as result, countless more Rwandans died than otherwise might have. If anyone in the international community learned this lesson at the time, it was not evident at the UN. For the next six weeks, as the carnage continued, the UN dithered in organizing any kind of response to the ongoing tragedy. The Americans, led by US Ambassador Madeleine Albright, played the key role in blocking more expeditious action by the UN.[18] On May 17, the Security Council finally authorized an expanded UNAMIR II to consist of 5,500 personnel.[19] But there is perhaps no distance greater on earth than the one between the Security Council chambers and the outside world. Once the decision to expand was finally made, as we will soon show in detail, the Pentagon somehow required an additional seven weeks just to negotiate a contract for delivering armed personnel carriers to the field; evidently it proved difficult to arrange the desired terms for “maintenance and spare parts.”[20] When the genocide ended in mid-July with the final RPF victory, not a single additional UN soldier had landed in Kigali.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 11
BEFORE THE GENOCIDE: THE ROLE OF THE OAU
Background
11.1. No analysis of the Rwandan tragedy would be complete if it failed to highlight the role played throughout the last decade by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). From the moment of the RPF invasion in 1990 through the Arusha negotiations, the creation of UNAMIR, of Opération Turquoise, and the subsequent wars of central Africa and the Great Lakes Region, the OAU has been an active, vocal, and key actor. Its consistent goal has been to resolve the series of conflicts with as much dispatch and as little violence as possible. As we know only too well, its initiatives in Rwanda were ultimately unsuccessful. But there are lessons to be learned from this decade of involvement, above all the OAU's need for the capacity and the resources to back up its diplomatic ventures.
11.2. In the process, the OAU's role reflected the dramatic changes that were occurring across the continent. On the one hand, the organization was responding to these changes in an attempt to remain relevant; on the other, the Rwanda experience helped shape the approach of the OAU to conflict management and resolution. Significantly, its efforts began to address the root causes of the internal conflicts it was facing, and its methods of consultation, mediation, and the involvement of regional leaders became stronger and more sophisticated. These characteristics were well demonstrated in its intercession in the Rwandan tragedy, and if its efforts failed to prevent disaster, it was not for want of effort. We know now that only serious threats of military intervention or economic retaliation by the international community could have prevented the genocide, which indeed the OAU pressed for without success.
11.3. The OAU, like the UN, is an intergovernmental organization. However unlike the UN where important decisions are taken by the Security Council dominated by its five permanent members, the OAU's important decisions are taken by its Assembly of 52 Heads of States, based on recommendations made to them by the Council of Ministers. This procedure is no doubt cumbersome, but it is also distinctly more egalitarian than that of the UN. Like the UN, the OAU, also has a Secretariat headed by a Secretary-General. Compared to the UN, the OAU Secretariat works with far fewer resources and even greater constraints. The powers of the Secretary-General are substantially circumscribed by the unwieldy decision-making process and the need to work in concert with the member states, especially with regards to the ultra-sensitive political process of conflict management and resolution.
11.4. The OAU Charter is categorical about the sovereignty of member states and about non-interference in their internal affairs. Attempts to deal with disputes and conflicts between states are complicated by the need to work within these strict guidelines. During the founding of the organization in 1963, the Assembly established a Commission of Mediation, Conciliation, and Arbitration. Alas, it was stillborn and has never worked. “As is known, it is the only permanent institutional framework provided for in the OAU Charter for the settlement of conflicts. However, it has remained dormant from the first day of its establishment because member states have shown a strong preference for political process of conflict resolution rather than for judicial means of settlement.[1]
11.5. Compared to other forms of conflict resolution such as military intervention or arbitration, mediation and conciliation have their drawbacks. This process needs the agreement of both parties to the conflict, often difficult to achieve quickly; and the process is generally lengthy and complicated. More fundamentally, it often achieves only a temporary modus vivendi rather than a permanent resolution to the conflict “because the political approach often steers clear of delving into the whys and wherefores and the decisions are not binding.”[2]
11.6. Over the decades, both the Assembly and its Council of Ministers set up any number of ad hoc commissions and committees to handle disputes. Overwhelmingly these disputes have been between states. Before Rwanda, the OAU was involved in only two important intra-state conflicts – successfully in the case of the 1964 Army Mutiny in Tanganyika, and less successfully in the case of the 1979 conflict in Chad between the government and Chadian rebels.
11.7. During the last 10 years the OAU has attempted to adapt to the changing socio-economic and political conditions of the African continent. The Rwandan crisis and its regional aftermath have been one of these new challenges, and it is useful to examine the role of the OAU in Rwanda within this wider context.
11.8. During the 1980s, Africa endured serious economic and political problems. Accordingly, in Addis Ababa in 1990, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government issued its unprecedented Declaration on the Political and Socio-Economic Situation in Africa and the Fundamental Changes Taking Place in the World. It pointed out that “throughout the decade of the 1980s, most of our productive and infra-structural facilities continued to deteriorate. The per capita incomes of our peoples fell drastically. There has been a sharp decline in the quality of life in our countries... and this contrasted sharply with the alarming rise in Africa's external debt...which shot up from about US$50 billion in 1980 to about US$257 billion by the end of 1989.”
11.9. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had responded to Africa's economic crises with their Structural Adjustment Programmes. Rwanda, as we have seen, was among the many countries that negotiated such a programme with these institutions. It did not take long before this development raised alarm bells with the OAU, as its Head of States made abundantly clear. “Most of our countries have entered into structural adjustment programs with the international financial and monetary institutions,” the 1990 Addis Ababa declaration said, “mostly at heavy political and social cost....We are very much concerned that... there is an increasing tendency to impose conditionalities of a political nature for assistance to Africa.” So far as Africa's leaders were concerned, the Structural Adjustment Programmes were at least in part responsible for triggering many of the serious internal conflicts that have racked Africa since the 1980s. As this report has argued, Rwanda deserves to be on that list.
11.10. The Addis Ababa Declaration noted two important conditions emerging in Africa in the early 1990s. First was the “marginalization” of the continent by the rest of the world, a result of the new forces and conditions developing in thepost-Cold War era. Second was the alarming rise of internal conflicts in African countries. In a tactful understatement, the Declaration pointed out that “an atmosphere of lasting peace and stability does not prevail in Africa today.” But in the face of these developments, the Heads of State were committed to facilitate the process of socio-economic transformation and integration in African countries. For this purpose they made three very important commitments:
1. We... renew our determination to work together towards the peaceful and speedy resolution of all the conflicts on our continent.
2. We... assert that democracy and development should go together and should be mutually reinforcing...It is necessary to promote popular participation of our people in the process of government and development.
3. We are equally determined to make renewed efforts to eradicate the root causes of the refugee problem.[3]
11.11. This was a major development. For the first time since 1963, and without changing the OAU Charter, the Heads of States had extended the scope of the OAU to intervening in internal conflicts of countries, even if only with the consent of a government and its protagonists. No less significant was the acknowledgment that refugees were at the source of many of the conflicts raging in the continent. This set the stage for the construction of a new framework for dealing with such conflicts, and Rwanda soon demonstrated the need.
11.12. When the OAU jumped into that crisis, it soon discovered that, as a senior knowledgeable OAU official pointed out, “We did not have the expertise, and we did not have the resources to handle the conflict. And perhaps one of the unintended effects of our involvement in Rwanda was to strive, as an organization, more energetically towards the establishment of a mechanism for conflict prevention, management, and resolution, because by that time there was nothing like a conflict mechanism.” In 1993, the Heads of State duly agreed to establish, within the OAU, a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution. The Mechanism, built around a Central Organ with the Secretary-General and the Secretariat as its operational arm, is guided by the following principles:
1. The Mechanism will be guided by the OAU Charter; in particular, the sovereign equality of Member States, non-interference in the internal affairs of States...It will function on the basis of the consent and the cooperation of the parties to a conflict...
2. The Mechanism will have as a primary objective the anticipation and prevention of conflicts.
3. Where conflicts have occurred, it will undertake a peace making and peace keeping function... civilian and military missions of observations and monitoring of limited scope and duration may be mounted and deployed.
4.Where conflicts degenerate to the extent of requiring collective international intervention and policing, the assistance of, and where appropriate the services of the United Nations will be sought under the general terms of its Charter.
11.13. However, even before the Mechanism was established in 1993, the OAU was already deeply involved in the Rwandan crisis.
The role of the OAU before the genocide
11.14. Although no formal conflict resolution mechanism existed when the OAU became involved in the Rwandan crisis in October 1990, its intervention was guided by its past experience as well as the recent Addis Ababa Declaration. Nevertheless, the methods common to such interventions were well known and were immediately introduced: a cease-fire agreement followed by observation, consultation, mediation and conciliation at the level of regional Heads of State. Moreover, the three elements that had to be dealt with in Rwanda were exactly those foreseen in the Addis Declaration: an armed conflict between the government and the invading RPF; the fact that the rebels were themselves refugee-warriors demanding a resolution of the refugee problem; and the RPF's demand for power sharing and democracy. What these elements also reflected was the important truth that refugees are far more than just a humanitarian problem. They are at least as much a political problem, and it is probably more difficult to deal with the second than with the first.
11.15. The OAU and the Heads of State of the Great Lakes Region involved themselves in Rwanda on the very day of the RPF invasion of Rwanda, on October 1, 1990. From the outset, the OAU Secretary-General saw his role as determining how best the OAU institutionally and its members could contribute to bringing about a swift and peaceful political resolution to the crisis.
11.16. The situation, however, was immediately complicated by two facts. First, despite clear guidelines set down in the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa,[4] the OAU had done nothing in the years prior to the invasion to help resolve the festering problem of Rwanda's refugees; “it had been of marginal concern...until it assumed civil war proportions.”[5] As a result, the OAU felt it lacked the moral authority to condemn the RPF invasion, although at the same time it quite appreciated the outrage that the invasion caused the Habyarimana government.
11.17. Secondly, the OAU chair at the time was held by Uganda's president Museveni, whom Habyarimana always saw as the power behind the RPF. As far as Habyarimana was concerned, his country had been invaded by Uganda. Moreover, these invaders were Ugandans like Museveni, from the Hima ethnic group, considered to be related to the Tutsi. Even after the OAU chairmanship passed out of Uganda's hands, Museveni remained an active participant in regional initiatives concerning Rwanda, a fact that grated on Habyarimana until literally the last day of his life.
11.18. This sense that key actors were hardly neutral participants was not the monopoly of one side. A comparable mistrust of Zaire's Mobutu was harboured by the RPF leadership, who fully understood the close and supportive relationship that existed between him and Habyarimana. Mobutu shared Habyarimana's conviction that the RPF was a Museveni creation, and Habyarimana was in the habit of seeking Mobutu's advice before important meetings.[6] But as doyen of Africa's Heads of States, Mobutu chaired the regional organization of Great Lakes states. While all these leaders and their representatives worked together over the next several years to settle the civil war resulting from the invasion, it was unfortunate that institutional protocol and geographical ties apparently demanded the central involvement of actors who were far from impartial in their interests.
11.19. From the perspective of peacemaking, much of the history of the 1990s is the story of well-meant initiatives, endless consultations, incessant meetings, commitments made, and commitments broken. These frenetic activities reflected the real world of the OAU Secretariat, which has no capacity to make decisions independent of its members, to force any parties to do its bidding, or to punish anyone for ignoring its wishes. What the OAU can do is call meetings, hope the invited attend, facilitate agreements, and hope that the participants abide by their word.
11.20. The Rwanda pattern was set in the very first days after the invasion, when consultations by the OAU Secretary-General with the heads of Uganda and Rwanda led him to dispatch a mission to both countries on two separate trips in October. In the same period, then President Mwinyi of Tanzania convened a regional summit with his fellow Heads of State from Uganda and Rwanda, where significant progress towards peace seemed to have been achieved.
11.21. Habyarimana appeared conciliatory on all the outstanding issues. The Rwandan government agreed to a cease-fire in the incipient civil war, to negotiate with its opponents, and to take the refugee question seriously. Meeting with Habyarimana's special envoy on October 20, the OAU Secretary-General took care to demonstrate an appreciation of Habyarimana's long-standing position on refugees. “We do understand the complexity of the problem in view of the limited resources and economic difficulties of Rwanda.” So while the OAU was on the one hand determined to deal with the Rwandan crisis in an African context, the OAU Secretary-General acknowledged that “The mobilization of the international community is therefore required.”[7]
11.22. Only days later, another summit of the Heads of Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire, convened by Mobutu, took place in Gbadolite, his hometown. The Presidents agreed on the need for mediation between the Kigali government and the RPF, a responsibility they assigned to Mobutu. They also agreed on the need for a regional conference to find a lasting solution to the region's refugee problems. Large numbers of Rwandan and Burundian refugees could be found in each others' countries, while Tanzania and Zaire was home to refugees from both. Less than a month later, at yet another summit held in Zaire, this time in Goma, agreement was once again reached on the need “to take urgent measures for the convening of the said Conference.”
11.23. After several postponements, as well as meetings both of experts and of government ministers, consultations with UNHCR, and even a mini-summit in Zanzibar, the regional conference was finally assembled in Dar Es Salaam in February 1991, attended by the five regional Heads of State – Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire – as well as the Secretary-General for the OAU and a representative of UNHCR. There, a Declaration was adopted calling for a plan of action to be worked out by the OAU and UNHCR reflecting the widespread understanding that resolving regional refugee issues was no simple task. The plan of action was to take into account the impact of returning refugees on the social and economic infrastructure of the country of origin as well as the needs of local integration and naturalization of those not returning to their country of origin. In the end, this potentially productive initiative failed to get off the ground and was overtaken by the events of April 6, 1994.
11.24. The OAU had immediately understood that political and security issues had to be resolved if refugee and other humanitarian problems were to be dealt with in a serious way. The OAU Secretary-General was able to facilitate a cease-fire agreement in March 1991, to be monitored by a neutral military observer team under the supervision of the OAU Secretary-General as a prelude to the deployment of a full-blown African peacekeeping force. But from the beginning this auspicious initiative ran into difficulties. First, the observer team was to include officers from Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi, as well as from the Rwandan government and the RPF. But as the OAU Secretary-General candidly acknowledged to the Panel, and as surely must have been obvious at the time, all three outside governments were mistrusted by one or the other of the Rwandan combatants; and it was a serious mistake to have chosen them for a neutral mission.
11.25. Beyond that, the Habyarimana government, in a pattern that it was to repeat regularly until April 1994, reneged on solemn commitments it had made. The RPF military observers were refused entry into Rwanda with the rest of the observer team and remained in Zaire, at Goma, near the Rwandan border. Then Habyarimana refused to allow the observer team to set up its headquarters in Kigali. Instead, it was sent to Byumba in the north of the country and a war zone. This forced the OAU representatives to undertake, almost on a daily basis, risky and circuitous missions to Goma and back to Byumba in order to consult with the RPF. Given both the widespread scepticism about the military observers' neutrality and the bad faith of the Habyarimana government, it was perhaps not surprising when a spate of violations put paid to the cease-fire agreement.
11.26. But peace for Rwanda remained a priority on the African agenda. Yet another regional summit was convened by Mobutu at Gbadolite in September 1991, with the then-chair of the OAU, former President Babangida of Nigeria, in attendance. It was decided to reconstitute the military observer team with less partisan observers such as Nigeria – although Zaire was also to provide men, even though Mobutu remained an ardent backer of Habyarimana in his war with the RPF. But once again, a series of almost daily cease-fire violations nullified whatever little work the new team was able to accomplish. These setbacks also directly undermined attempts to deal with the refugee crisis, even while the civil war created more refugees and internally displaced persons. Through 1992, as the OAU Secretary-General renewed his efforts to revive the twice-shattered peace process, the OAU and UNHCR met on three separate occasions to discuss the plan of action for refugees called for in the Dar Es Salaam Declaration of February 1991. Finally, at a meeting in August, the two organizations concluded that until and unless political and security issues were resolved, no plan could be adequately prepared or implemented.
11.27. Still consultations continued involving the OAU Secretary-General, regional leaders (especially former Tanzanian President Mwinyi) and the two Rwandan combatants. In July 1992, a meeting was convened in Arusha, Tanzania, co-ordinated by the OAU Secretary-General and chaired by a representative of President Mwinyi, who was the facilitator of the process. From the first, the meeting was extraordinary for its cast of characters. They included the RPF and the Rwanda government, observers from the OAU and Rwanda's four neighbours (Uganda, Zaire, Burundi, and Tanzania), a representative of the then-current OAU chair, Senegal's President Diouf, as well as representatives from Belgium, France, the US, and the UN. A new cease-fire was swiftly agreed to, and the various actors soon returned to Arusha to begin negotiations with the goal of reaching a comprehensive political settlement in Rwanda. The commitment was to deal with the root causes of the crisis, and the lengthy process did indeed deal with five fundamental issues: democracy, power sharing, transitional government, the integration of the armed forces, and the return and rehabilitation of refugees.
11.28. We have discussed earlier in this report the agreement reached at Arusha after a full year of hard bargaining and the subsequent calamitous failure to implement that agreement; we attributed that failure to both Rwandan ethnic radicalism and the indifference of the international community. We also argued that the accord was always precarious. The priority of the mediators was to stop the civil war and forge agreements that would bring key players together. That way, they reasonably assumed, the uncivil war against the Tutsi would also end. As a result, no direct action was taken against those conducting the anti-Tutsi pogroms with the support of the inner circle around President Habyarimana. Perhaps no action was in fact possible. But the result was an excellent agreement that had little chance of being implemented.
11.29. Both the OAU representatives and the regional leaders at Arusha put all their energies into the process, which is perhaps why they ignored or downplayed the warning signs that were already so evident. Habyarimana had already dismissed one of the early cease-fire agreements reached at Arusha as a mere “scrap of paper.” In January 1993, after a lengthy impasse, a deal was finally hammered out on power sharing between the government and the opposition parties. But the government was palpably unhappy about being pressured into this agreement. In Kigali, demonstrations against this protocol were staged by Habyarimana's party and the radical Hutu CDR, which the OAU considered an ally of the MRND.[8] Concerned, the OAU Secretary-General sent a special representative who was dismayed to hear Habyarimana state that as President of the nation he accepted the deal on power sharing, but that as president of the MRND he had reservations. Nevertheless, as President of Rwanda he gave his word that he supported the Arusha process. Yet not even such double-talk by the key figure in the entire process was sufficient to dampen the hopes of many of the actors.
11.30. The Rwandan army was another huge problem. The Panel met with a senior participant at Arusha who was especially familiar with the military negotiations. The RPF demanded remarkable concessions, which the government representatives accepted only under great pressure. To our source, it was always evident that “deep down in their hearts, none of the government delegation, or none of the army men from the government side” supported the agreement to give the RPF virtual parity in military matters. “It was something they were against, but events, I think, pushed them to agree and sign. And whilst the process was going on, you could see the resentment of members of the armed forces, from the government side, who were present during the negotiations. There were many telephone calls that were made and you could hear along the corridors, disagreements on the side of the government. You could see the frustrations on the side of the government; you could feel that they did not think they signed a fair deal.” Observers witnessing this reaction were quite certain the commanders would do all in their power to undermine the deal.
11.31. The final Arusha Peace Agreement was signed in August 1993 by the Habyarimana government, the RPF, the President of Tanzania, the OAU Secretary-General, and representative of the UN Secretary-General. All regional leaders were either personally present or were represented at that historic occasion. In the words of a senior, knowledgeable OAU official to the Panel, “The signing was greeted with a sigh of relief across all Africa.” An excess of optimism and misplaced faith in the Rwandan leadership had won the day.
11.32. But could it have been otherwise? How was it possible to believe that Habyarimana could agree to the accords in the presence of observers from the major western countries unless he was sincere? Senior OAU officials assumed that the negotiators actually represented the various Rwandan interests; in fact, no one spoke for the powerful Akazu or any of those segments of Rwandan society that would never accept accommodation with the Tutsi. African leaders were convinced that Habyarimana would, in the end, do the right thing. They hoped that Arusha would strengthen and legitimize the forces of peace and reason in Rwanda against the forces of destruction and irrationality, which they knew to be significant. They also persuaded themselves that the MRND ruling party as a whole was genuinely committed to the process and the final agreements, obviously not fully grasping the capacity of the Hutu radicals to bring the entire house of cards crashing down. “They sabotaged the agreement,” as one senior OAU official told us. But OAU leaders had good reason to anticipate such sabotage. In the end, they made the same significant errors of judgement as the observers from outside the continent.
11.33. Then there was the role of the international community, which we have already analyzed in detail. The agreement included a call for a peacekeeping force to help ensure its implementation. Although the OAU had successfully overseen the agreement, it was the UN that would play the peacekeeper role. The UN Secretary-General made it clear that the Security Council would not fund an operation its members did not command and control. The government of Rwanda itself insisted on the UN. Perhaps the high spirits that initially prevailed persuaded African leaders that the peacekeeping operation would be a relatively uncomplicated task. Perhaps there was still faith that the world would do what was necessary to make sure peace reigned in Rwanda.
11.34. In the end, the negotiating parties joined in identifying the UN as the main external implementing agency for the agreement. So the important step was taken in shifting the lead in conflict management from continental and sub-regional actors to the UN.
11.35. In Africa, post-Arusha optimism was short-lived. African leaders knew full well the extent of Rwanda's increasing instability in the months after the Arusha accords were signed and any number of meetings were held trying to get the agreement implemented. It was well known that arms were proliferating and that troublemakers were arming. The hope remained that implementing the peace process was the solution to the threat from the Hutu radicals. Nor did Africa's leaders contemplate anything like the genocide. Killings certainly, possibly even massacres. But as a senior, knowledgeable OAU official has said, “We never thought it was part of a grand conspiracy to actually decimate a whole population.”
11.36. It is not even clear that the RPF itself anticipated the future accurately; like everyone else, it may have been simply inconceivable to think in genocidal terms. Early in March, a meeting was held in Rwanda between the ambassadors of Belgium, France, Germany, Tanzania, the US, and the representatives of the OAU, the UN, and RPF. An RPF speaking note summarized their concerns:
On numerous occasions we have warned that President Habyarimana is building a militia based on MRND-CDR-[HUTU] POWER. Events of the months of January and February in Kigali amply demonstrate both the objective of such a force and its potential for wreaking havoc on the whole peace process... The militia is now spread out all across the country and buying and distribution of arms continues unabated. The RPF appeals... as it has done before, to the international community, particularly to those who have followed and supported us in our negotiations, to resist the obstinacy of President Habyarimana and his insensitivity to the serious problems facing our country: famine, economic collapse, paralysis of the administrative and judiciary system, and state sponsored terrorism have all created social chaos, which is inexorably leading the country to catastrophe... While thanking you all for the efforts you have deployed in favour of peace and democracy in Rwanda, we appeal to you to understand that failure to implement the Peace Agreement means that our country remains trapped in a vicious cycle of violence.
11.37. This meeting took place in Rwanda exactly one month before the start of the genocide. The assessment of the existing situation was dead on. But even the prediction of “catastrophe” was far from envisioning genocide. It seems that no one, including the RPF, predicted that Hutu Power's Final Solution would begin within a month.
11.38. Frustrated especially by Habyarimana's endless stalling tactics and privy to the information about escalating violence and death lists, President Mwinyi of Tanzania, as a last resort [9] and after consultation with the OAU Secretary-General, convened another regional summit on April 6, 1994. This meeting in Dar Es Salaam has, of course, found a special place in the history books. After assuring his peers yet again of his determination to implement Arusha,[10] President Habyarimana flew home to his death, and the genocide began.
BEFORE THE GENOCIDE: THE ROLE OF THE OAU
Background
11.1. No analysis of the Rwandan tragedy would be complete if it failed to highlight the role played throughout the last decade by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). From the moment of the RPF invasion in 1990 through the Arusha negotiations, the creation of UNAMIR, of Opération Turquoise, and the subsequent wars of central Africa and the Great Lakes Region, the OAU has been an active, vocal, and key actor. Its consistent goal has been to resolve the series of conflicts with as much dispatch and as little violence as possible. As we know only too well, its initiatives in Rwanda were ultimately unsuccessful. But there are lessons to be learned from this decade of involvement, above all the OAU's need for the capacity and the resources to back up its diplomatic ventures.
11.2. In the process, the OAU's role reflected the dramatic changes that were occurring across the continent. On the one hand, the organization was responding to these changes in an attempt to remain relevant; on the other, the Rwanda experience helped shape the approach of the OAU to conflict management and resolution. Significantly, its efforts began to address the root causes of the internal conflicts it was facing, and its methods of consultation, mediation, and the involvement of regional leaders became stronger and more sophisticated. These characteristics were well demonstrated in its intercession in the Rwandan tragedy, and if its efforts failed to prevent disaster, it was not for want of effort. We know now that only serious threats of military intervention or economic retaliation by the international community could have prevented the genocide, which indeed the OAU pressed for without success.
11.3. The OAU, like the UN, is an intergovernmental organization. However unlike the UN where important decisions are taken by the Security Council dominated by its five permanent members, the OAU's important decisions are taken by its Assembly of 52 Heads of States, based on recommendations made to them by the Council of Ministers. This procedure is no doubt cumbersome, but it is also distinctly more egalitarian than that of the UN. Like the UN, the OAU, also has a Secretariat headed by a Secretary-General. Compared to the UN, the OAU Secretariat works with far fewer resources and even greater constraints. The powers of the Secretary-General are substantially circumscribed by the unwieldy decision-making process and the need to work in concert with the member states, especially with regards to the ultra-sensitive political process of conflict management and resolution.
11.4. The OAU Charter is categorical about the sovereignty of member states and about non-interference in their internal affairs. Attempts to deal with disputes and conflicts between states are complicated by the need to work within these strict guidelines. During the founding of the organization in 1963, the Assembly established a Commission of Mediation, Conciliation, and Arbitration. Alas, it was stillborn and has never worked. “As is known, it is the only permanent institutional framework provided for in the OAU Charter for the settlement of conflicts. However, it has remained dormant from the first day of its establishment because member states have shown a strong preference for political process of conflict resolution rather than for judicial means of settlement.[1]
11.5. Compared to other forms of conflict resolution such as military intervention or arbitration, mediation and conciliation have their drawbacks. This process needs the agreement of both parties to the conflict, often difficult to achieve quickly; and the process is generally lengthy and complicated. More fundamentally, it often achieves only a temporary modus vivendi rather than a permanent resolution to the conflict “because the political approach often steers clear of delving into the whys and wherefores and the decisions are not binding.”[2]
11.6. Over the decades, both the Assembly and its Council of Ministers set up any number of ad hoc commissions and committees to handle disputes. Overwhelmingly these disputes have been between states. Before Rwanda, the OAU was involved in only two important intra-state conflicts – successfully in the case of the 1964 Army Mutiny in Tanganyika, and less successfully in the case of the 1979 conflict in Chad between the government and Chadian rebels.
11.7. During the last 10 years the OAU has attempted to adapt to the changing socio-economic and political conditions of the African continent. The Rwandan crisis and its regional aftermath have been one of these new challenges, and it is useful to examine the role of the OAU in Rwanda within this wider context.
11.8. During the 1980s, Africa endured serious economic and political problems. Accordingly, in Addis Ababa in 1990, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government issued its unprecedented Declaration on the Political and Socio-Economic Situation in Africa and the Fundamental Changes Taking Place in the World. It pointed out that “throughout the decade of the 1980s, most of our productive and infra-structural facilities continued to deteriorate. The per capita incomes of our peoples fell drastically. There has been a sharp decline in the quality of life in our countries... and this contrasted sharply with the alarming rise in Africa's external debt...which shot up from about US$50 billion in 1980 to about US$257 billion by the end of 1989.”
11.9. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had responded to Africa's economic crises with their Structural Adjustment Programmes. Rwanda, as we have seen, was among the many countries that negotiated such a programme with these institutions. It did not take long before this development raised alarm bells with the OAU, as its Head of States made abundantly clear. “Most of our countries have entered into structural adjustment programs with the international financial and monetary institutions,” the 1990 Addis Ababa declaration said, “mostly at heavy political and social cost....We are very much concerned that... there is an increasing tendency to impose conditionalities of a political nature for assistance to Africa.” So far as Africa's leaders were concerned, the Structural Adjustment Programmes were at least in part responsible for triggering many of the serious internal conflicts that have racked Africa since the 1980s. As this report has argued, Rwanda deserves to be on that list.
11.10. The Addis Ababa Declaration noted two important conditions emerging in Africa in the early 1990s. First was the “marginalization” of the continent by the rest of the world, a result of the new forces and conditions developing in thepost-Cold War era. Second was the alarming rise of internal conflicts in African countries. In a tactful understatement, the Declaration pointed out that “an atmosphere of lasting peace and stability does not prevail in Africa today.” But in the face of these developments, the Heads of State were committed to facilitate the process of socio-economic transformation and integration in African countries. For this purpose they made three very important commitments:
1. We... renew our determination to work together towards the peaceful and speedy resolution of all the conflicts on our continent.
2. We... assert that democracy and development should go together and should be mutually reinforcing...It is necessary to promote popular participation of our people in the process of government and development.
3. We are equally determined to make renewed efforts to eradicate the root causes of the refugee problem.[3]
11.11. This was a major development. For the first time since 1963, and without changing the OAU Charter, the Heads of States had extended the scope of the OAU to intervening in internal conflicts of countries, even if only with the consent of a government and its protagonists. No less significant was the acknowledgment that refugees were at the source of many of the conflicts raging in the continent. This set the stage for the construction of a new framework for dealing with such conflicts, and Rwanda soon demonstrated the need.
11.12. When the OAU jumped into that crisis, it soon discovered that, as a senior knowledgeable OAU official pointed out, “We did not have the expertise, and we did not have the resources to handle the conflict. And perhaps one of the unintended effects of our involvement in Rwanda was to strive, as an organization, more energetically towards the establishment of a mechanism for conflict prevention, management, and resolution, because by that time there was nothing like a conflict mechanism.” In 1993, the Heads of State duly agreed to establish, within the OAU, a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution. The Mechanism, built around a Central Organ with the Secretary-General and the Secretariat as its operational arm, is guided by the following principles:
1. The Mechanism will be guided by the OAU Charter; in particular, the sovereign equality of Member States, non-interference in the internal affairs of States...It will function on the basis of the consent and the cooperation of the parties to a conflict...
2. The Mechanism will have as a primary objective the anticipation and prevention of conflicts.
3. Where conflicts have occurred, it will undertake a peace making and peace keeping function... civilian and military missions of observations and monitoring of limited scope and duration may be mounted and deployed.
4.Where conflicts degenerate to the extent of requiring collective international intervention and policing, the assistance of, and where appropriate the services of the United Nations will be sought under the general terms of its Charter.
11.13. However, even before the Mechanism was established in 1993, the OAU was already deeply involved in the Rwandan crisis.
The role of the OAU before the genocide
11.14. Although no formal conflict resolution mechanism existed when the OAU became involved in the Rwandan crisis in October 1990, its intervention was guided by its past experience as well as the recent Addis Ababa Declaration. Nevertheless, the methods common to such interventions were well known and were immediately introduced: a cease-fire agreement followed by observation, consultation, mediation and conciliation at the level of regional Heads of State. Moreover, the three elements that had to be dealt with in Rwanda were exactly those foreseen in the Addis Declaration: an armed conflict between the government and the invading RPF; the fact that the rebels were themselves refugee-warriors demanding a resolution of the refugee problem; and the RPF's demand for power sharing and democracy. What these elements also reflected was the important truth that refugees are far more than just a humanitarian problem. They are at least as much a political problem, and it is probably more difficult to deal with the second than with the first.
11.15. The OAU and the Heads of State of the Great Lakes Region involved themselves in Rwanda on the very day of the RPF invasion of Rwanda, on October 1, 1990. From the outset, the OAU Secretary-General saw his role as determining how best the OAU institutionally and its members could contribute to bringing about a swift and peaceful political resolution to the crisis.
11.16. The situation, however, was immediately complicated by two facts. First, despite clear guidelines set down in the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa,[4] the OAU had done nothing in the years prior to the invasion to help resolve the festering problem of Rwanda's refugees; “it had been of marginal concern...until it assumed civil war proportions.”[5] As a result, the OAU felt it lacked the moral authority to condemn the RPF invasion, although at the same time it quite appreciated the outrage that the invasion caused the Habyarimana government.
11.17. Secondly, the OAU chair at the time was held by Uganda's president Museveni, whom Habyarimana always saw as the power behind the RPF. As far as Habyarimana was concerned, his country had been invaded by Uganda. Moreover, these invaders were Ugandans like Museveni, from the Hima ethnic group, considered to be related to the Tutsi. Even after the OAU chairmanship passed out of Uganda's hands, Museveni remained an active participant in regional initiatives concerning Rwanda, a fact that grated on Habyarimana until literally the last day of his life.
11.18. This sense that key actors were hardly neutral participants was not the monopoly of one side. A comparable mistrust of Zaire's Mobutu was harboured by the RPF leadership, who fully understood the close and supportive relationship that existed between him and Habyarimana. Mobutu shared Habyarimana's conviction that the RPF was a Museveni creation, and Habyarimana was in the habit of seeking Mobutu's advice before important meetings.[6] But as doyen of Africa's Heads of States, Mobutu chaired the regional organization of Great Lakes states. While all these leaders and their representatives worked together over the next several years to settle the civil war resulting from the invasion, it was unfortunate that institutional protocol and geographical ties apparently demanded the central involvement of actors who were far from impartial in their interests.
11.19. From the perspective of peacemaking, much of the history of the 1990s is the story of well-meant initiatives, endless consultations, incessant meetings, commitments made, and commitments broken. These frenetic activities reflected the real world of the OAU Secretariat, which has no capacity to make decisions independent of its members, to force any parties to do its bidding, or to punish anyone for ignoring its wishes. What the OAU can do is call meetings, hope the invited attend, facilitate agreements, and hope that the participants abide by their word.
11.20. The Rwanda pattern was set in the very first days after the invasion, when consultations by the OAU Secretary-General with the heads of Uganda and Rwanda led him to dispatch a mission to both countries on two separate trips in October. In the same period, then President Mwinyi of Tanzania convened a regional summit with his fellow Heads of State from Uganda and Rwanda, where significant progress towards peace seemed to have been achieved.
11.21. Habyarimana appeared conciliatory on all the outstanding issues. The Rwandan government agreed to a cease-fire in the incipient civil war, to negotiate with its opponents, and to take the refugee question seriously. Meeting with Habyarimana's special envoy on October 20, the OAU Secretary-General took care to demonstrate an appreciation of Habyarimana's long-standing position on refugees. “We do understand the complexity of the problem in view of the limited resources and economic difficulties of Rwanda.” So while the OAU was on the one hand determined to deal with the Rwandan crisis in an African context, the OAU Secretary-General acknowledged that “The mobilization of the international community is therefore required.”[7]
11.22. Only days later, another summit of the Heads of Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire, convened by Mobutu, took place in Gbadolite, his hometown. The Presidents agreed on the need for mediation between the Kigali government and the RPF, a responsibility they assigned to Mobutu. They also agreed on the need for a regional conference to find a lasting solution to the region's refugee problems. Large numbers of Rwandan and Burundian refugees could be found in each others' countries, while Tanzania and Zaire was home to refugees from both. Less than a month later, at yet another summit held in Zaire, this time in Goma, agreement was once again reached on the need “to take urgent measures for the convening of the said Conference.”
11.23. After several postponements, as well as meetings both of experts and of government ministers, consultations with UNHCR, and even a mini-summit in Zanzibar, the regional conference was finally assembled in Dar Es Salaam in February 1991, attended by the five regional Heads of State – Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire – as well as the Secretary-General for the OAU and a representative of UNHCR. There, a Declaration was adopted calling for a plan of action to be worked out by the OAU and UNHCR reflecting the widespread understanding that resolving regional refugee issues was no simple task. The plan of action was to take into account the impact of returning refugees on the social and economic infrastructure of the country of origin as well as the needs of local integration and naturalization of those not returning to their country of origin. In the end, this potentially productive initiative failed to get off the ground and was overtaken by the events of April 6, 1994.
11.24. The OAU had immediately understood that political and security issues had to be resolved if refugee and other humanitarian problems were to be dealt with in a serious way. The OAU Secretary-General was able to facilitate a cease-fire agreement in March 1991, to be monitored by a neutral military observer team under the supervision of the OAU Secretary-General as a prelude to the deployment of a full-blown African peacekeeping force. But from the beginning this auspicious initiative ran into difficulties. First, the observer team was to include officers from Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi, as well as from the Rwandan government and the RPF. But as the OAU Secretary-General candidly acknowledged to the Panel, and as surely must have been obvious at the time, all three outside governments were mistrusted by one or the other of the Rwandan combatants; and it was a serious mistake to have chosen them for a neutral mission.
11.25. Beyond that, the Habyarimana government, in a pattern that it was to repeat regularly until April 1994, reneged on solemn commitments it had made. The RPF military observers were refused entry into Rwanda with the rest of the observer team and remained in Zaire, at Goma, near the Rwandan border. Then Habyarimana refused to allow the observer team to set up its headquarters in Kigali. Instead, it was sent to Byumba in the north of the country and a war zone. This forced the OAU representatives to undertake, almost on a daily basis, risky and circuitous missions to Goma and back to Byumba in order to consult with the RPF. Given both the widespread scepticism about the military observers' neutrality and the bad faith of the Habyarimana government, it was perhaps not surprising when a spate of violations put paid to the cease-fire agreement.
11.26. But peace for Rwanda remained a priority on the African agenda. Yet another regional summit was convened by Mobutu at Gbadolite in September 1991, with the then-chair of the OAU, former President Babangida of Nigeria, in attendance. It was decided to reconstitute the military observer team with less partisan observers such as Nigeria – although Zaire was also to provide men, even though Mobutu remained an ardent backer of Habyarimana in his war with the RPF. But once again, a series of almost daily cease-fire violations nullified whatever little work the new team was able to accomplish. These setbacks also directly undermined attempts to deal with the refugee crisis, even while the civil war created more refugees and internally displaced persons. Through 1992, as the OAU Secretary-General renewed his efforts to revive the twice-shattered peace process, the OAU and UNHCR met on three separate occasions to discuss the plan of action for refugees called for in the Dar Es Salaam Declaration of February 1991. Finally, at a meeting in August, the two organizations concluded that until and unless political and security issues were resolved, no plan could be adequately prepared or implemented.
11.27. Still consultations continued involving the OAU Secretary-General, regional leaders (especially former Tanzanian President Mwinyi) and the two Rwandan combatants. In July 1992, a meeting was convened in Arusha, Tanzania, co-ordinated by the OAU Secretary-General and chaired by a representative of President Mwinyi, who was the facilitator of the process. From the first, the meeting was extraordinary for its cast of characters. They included the RPF and the Rwanda government, observers from the OAU and Rwanda's four neighbours (Uganda, Zaire, Burundi, and Tanzania), a representative of the then-current OAU chair, Senegal's President Diouf, as well as representatives from Belgium, France, the US, and the UN. A new cease-fire was swiftly agreed to, and the various actors soon returned to Arusha to begin negotiations with the goal of reaching a comprehensive political settlement in Rwanda. The commitment was to deal with the root causes of the crisis, and the lengthy process did indeed deal with five fundamental issues: democracy, power sharing, transitional government, the integration of the armed forces, and the return and rehabilitation of refugees.
11.28. We have discussed earlier in this report the agreement reached at Arusha after a full year of hard bargaining and the subsequent calamitous failure to implement that agreement; we attributed that failure to both Rwandan ethnic radicalism and the indifference of the international community. We also argued that the accord was always precarious. The priority of the mediators was to stop the civil war and forge agreements that would bring key players together. That way, they reasonably assumed, the uncivil war against the Tutsi would also end. As a result, no direct action was taken against those conducting the anti-Tutsi pogroms with the support of the inner circle around President Habyarimana. Perhaps no action was in fact possible. But the result was an excellent agreement that had little chance of being implemented.
11.29. Both the OAU representatives and the regional leaders at Arusha put all their energies into the process, which is perhaps why they ignored or downplayed the warning signs that were already so evident. Habyarimana had already dismissed one of the early cease-fire agreements reached at Arusha as a mere “scrap of paper.” In January 1993, after a lengthy impasse, a deal was finally hammered out on power sharing between the government and the opposition parties. But the government was palpably unhappy about being pressured into this agreement. In Kigali, demonstrations against this protocol were staged by Habyarimana's party and the radical Hutu CDR, which the OAU considered an ally of the MRND.[8] Concerned, the OAU Secretary-General sent a special representative who was dismayed to hear Habyarimana state that as President of the nation he accepted the deal on power sharing, but that as president of the MRND he had reservations. Nevertheless, as President of Rwanda he gave his word that he supported the Arusha process. Yet not even such double-talk by the key figure in the entire process was sufficient to dampen the hopes of many of the actors.
11.30. The Rwandan army was another huge problem. The Panel met with a senior participant at Arusha who was especially familiar with the military negotiations. The RPF demanded remarkable concessions, which the government representatives accepted only under great pressure. To our source, it was always evident that “deep down in their hearts, none of the government delegation, or none of the army men from the government side” supported the agreement to give the RPF virtual parity in military matters. “It was something they were against, but events, I think, pushed them to agree and sign. And whilst the process was going on, you could see the resentment of members of the armed forces, from the government side, who were present during the negotiations. There were many telephone calls that were made and you could hear along the corridors, disagreements on the side of the government. You could see the frustrations on the side of the government; you could feel that they did not think they signed a fair deal.” Observers witnessing this reaction were quite certain the commanders would do all in their power to undermine the deal.
11.31. The final Arusha Peace Agreement was signed in August 1993 by the Habyarimana government, the RPF, the President of Tanzania, the OAU Secretary-General, and representative of the UN Secretary-General. All regional leaders were either personally present or were represented at that historic occasion. In the words of a senior, knowledgeable OAU official to the Panel, “The signing was greeted with a sigh of relief across all Africa.” An excess of optimism and misplaced faith in the Rwandan leadership had won the day.
11.32. But could it have been otherwise? How was it possible to believe that Habyarimana could agree to the accords in the presence of observers from the major western countries unless he was sincere? Senior OAU officials assumed that the negotiators actually represented the various Rwandan interests; in fact, no one spoke for the powerful Akazu or any of those segments of Rwandan society that would never accept accommodation with the Tutsi. African leaders were convinced that Habyarimana would, in the end, do the right thing. They hoped that Arusha would strengthen and legitimize the forces of peace and reason in Rwanda against the forces of destruction and irrationality, which they knew to be significant. They also persuaded themselves that the MRND ruling party as a whole was genuinely committed to the process and the final agreements, obviously not fully grasping the capacity of the Hutu radicals to bring the entire house of cards crashing down. “They sabotaged the agreement,” as one senior OAU official told us. But OAU leaders had good reason to anticipate such sabotage. In the end, they made the same significant errors of judgement as the observers from outside the continent.
11.33. Then there was the role of the international community, which we have already analyzed in detail. The agreement included a call for a peacekeeping force to help ensure its implementation. Although the OAU had successfully overseen the agreement, it was the UN that would play the peacekeeper role. The UN Secretary-General made it clear that the Security Council would not fund an operation its members did not command and control. The government of Rwanda itself insisted on the UN. Perhaps the high spirits that initially prevailed persuaded African leaders that the peacekeeping operation would be a relatively uncomplicated task. Perhaps there was still faith that the world would do what was necessary to make sure peace reigned in Rwanda.
11.34. In the end, the negotiating parties joined in identifying the UN as the main external implementing agency for the agreement. So the important step was taken in shifting the lead in conflict management from continental and sub-regional actors to the UN.
11.35. In Africa, post-Arusha optimism was short-lived. African leaders knew full well the extent of Rwanda's increasing instability in the months after the Arusha accords were signed and any number of meetings were held trying to get the agreement implemented. It was well known that arms were proliferating and that troublemakers were arming. The hope remained that implementing the peace process was the solution to the threat from the Hutu radicals. Nor did Africa's leaders contemplate anything like the genocide. Killings certainly, possibly even massacres. But as a senior, knowledgeable OAU official has said, “We never thought it was part of a grand conspiracy to actually decimate a whole population.”
11.36. It is not even clear that the RPF itself anticipated the future accurately; like everyone else, it may have been simply inconceivable to think in genocidal terms. Early in March, a meeting was held in Rwanda between the ambassadors of Belgium, France, Germany, Tanzania, the US, and the representatives of the OAU, the UN, and RPF. An RPF speaking note summarized their concerns:
On numerous occasions we have warned that President Habyarimana is building a militia based on MRND-CDR-[HUTU] POWER. Events of the months of January and February in Kigali amply demonstrate both the objective of such a force and its potential for wreaking havoc on the whole peace process... The militia is now spread out all across the country and buying and distribution of arms continues unabated. The RPF appeals... as it has done before, to the international community, particularly to those who have followed and supported us in our negotiations, to resist the obstinacy of President Habyarimana and his insensitivity to the serious problems facing our country: famine, economic collapse, paralysis of the administrative and judiciary system, and state sponsored terrorism have all created social chaos, which is inexorably leading the country to catastrophe... While thanking you all for the efforts you have deployed in favour of peace and democracy in Rwanda, we appeal to you to understand that failure to implement the Peace Agreement means that our country remains trapped in a vicious cycle of violence.
11.37. This meeting took place in Rwanda exactly one month before the start of the genocide. The assessment of the existing situation was dead on. But even the prediction of “catastrophe” was far from envisioning genocide. It seems that no one, including the RPF, predicted that Hutu Power's Final Solution would begin within a month.
11.38. Frustrated especially by Habyarimana's endless stalling tactics and privy to the information about escalating violence and death lists, President Mwinyi of Tanzania, as a last resort [9] and after consultation with the OAU Secretary-General, convened another regional summit on April 6, 1994. This meeting in Dar Es Salaam has, of course, found a special place in the history books. After assuring his peers yet again of his determination to implement Arusha,[10] President Habyarimana flew home to his death, and the genocide began.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 12
BEFORE THE GENOCIDE: FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
12.1. Throughout the 20th century, the outside world has played a pivotal role in Rwandan society. It helped shape its economy, its social relations, its power structure, its public discourse. As much as any country, Rwanda's destiny has been carved out through the interplay between internal forces and external actors. Yet when it came to averting the great tragedy to which history seemed to be leading, the international community proved to be no community at all. At best, it failed utterly to prevent the genocide. At worst, it co-operated with the conspirators, implicitly sanctioning their activities and convincing them they could get away with anything.
12.2. We have advanced in previous chapters three key propositions: that the key western members of the UN Security Council knew that a major catastrophe was imminent in Rwanda; that with a relatively modest military effort that catastrophe could very possibly have been averted entirely; and that once the genocide began, it was still possible to minimize the appalling destruction. Why did the UN and its key members fail so completely to take the obvious steps necessary either to deter the calamity or to stop it once it began?
12.3. Beyond Rwanda, , the main actors were the OAU, the international civil servants in the UN Secretariat, the members of the Security Council collectively, and France, the US, and Belgium in particular. We will deal with the role of each of them chronologically,: first before the genocide and then during the genocide. Since the US and France were permanent members of the Security Council, and since in the end the Secretariat largely reflected the will of the Security Council, we begin the discussion with the two nations that are permanent members of the Council. Of these, France was far and away the most influential power in Rwanda itself. The US played a major role for a few months only, but these were the months just prior to and during the genocide, where its influence was decisive.
France
12.4. Although we have discussed the subject only briefly until now, Rwanda in the past decade in fact cannot be understood without France. Virtually from the moment of the RPF invasion in 1990 to the end of the genocide almost four years later, the French were the Rwandan government's closest ally militarily, politically, and diplomatically.[1] There is little disagreement on this point. But the exact nature of the French role is a matter of great controversy. There has always been a vast gulf between the official French account of that role and the interpretation preferred by most disinterested observers; so far as we can determine, few experts in the field accept the official French version.[2]
12.5. By 1998, four years after the genocide, both the heads of the UN and the US had acknowledged some blame for the catastrophe and apologized accordingly.[3] Belgium followed two years later. These initiatives have made more conspicuous the decision of the French government not to take a similar step. Indeed, until this moment, there has from official France been no apology, no hint of responsibility, barely even any questioning of its quite public backing of the Rwandan Hutu regime before, during, and after the tragedy. On the contrary, when the Prime Minister at the time of the genocide, Edouard Balladur, backed by three other prominent Cabinet ministers, appeared before a parliamentary inquiry “bristling with indignation,”[4] he asserted that France was “the only country in the international community that tried to act to stop the genocide.”[5]
12.6. But there had always been many critics of the French-Rwandan relationship, both national and international, and their voices continued to grow. Dismissing or ignoring these critics became increasingly awkward, especially after tough, investigative articles in two leading French daily newspapers. Finally, the French establishment agreed in 1998 to set up an unprecedented parliamentary committee to inquire into the Rwandan tragedy.[6]
12.7. The committee's four-volume, 1,800-page report proved to be an unexpectedly impeccable representation of the controversy that preceded it. The committee's own conclusions conceded that France made certain errors of judgement around Rwanda and failed to view developments there with a sufficiently critical eye. But it concluded that the country bore not the slightest responsibility for any aspect of the genocide.[7] In the succinct statement of its chair, National Assembly Member Paul Quiles, “France is neither responsible nor guilty.” [8] The international community, on the other hand – meaning the US and Belgium above all – was to blame for the scale of the genocide.[9] Within Rwanda itself, the committee found that even the Catholic church was more culpable than France.[10]
12.8. The problem with this conclusion, as with the official French government position through these years, was that it was contradicted by most of the available facts, many of them contained in the parliamentary committee's report itself and simply ignored. The report's evidence and the report's findings seemed unrelated. These contradictions were blatant, and politicians and journalists were quick to point them out. “There is a huge discrepancy,” opposition members observed, “between the report's edifying factual chapters and some of its conclusions.”[11] Quoting several passages from the report that explicitly incriminated the French government, one reporter noted that, “These are just some of the examples of information in the report that contradicts its main conclusion absolving Paris...”[12]
12.9. Beside the wealth of information contained in the official report, there is an extensive literature analyzing French policy in Africa, some of it focussing specifically on Rwanda. Interestingly enough, there is substantial consensus among analysts regarding France's African foreign policy, much of which has been quite transparent and has been openly embraced by most of the French establishment irrespective of party. In fact the considerations that drove French policy towards Rwanda are all on the public record, the French establishment never having felt any embarrassment about its African interests and role.
12.10. From the perspective of Paris, the main elements were clear enough: France's unilateral insistence that its former African colonies constituted its indivisible sphere of influence in Africa; the conviction that it had a special relationship with francophone Africa; the understanding that its role in Africa gave France much of its international status; a general attitude that France had to be permanently vigilant against a perceived “anglo-saxon,” (i.e., American), conspiracy to oust France from Africa; the close links between the elites in France and francophone Africa, which in Rwanda notably included the two Presidents as well as their sons; and finally, France's need to protect its economic interests in Africa, although Rwanda as such was not a great economic prize.[13]
12.11. No one, not even official French representatives, disagrees that these various considerations were, to one extent or another, the main driving force behind French policy in Rwanda.[14] No doubt they help explain French behaviour. But to understand is not to condone. What matters is what France did – not why – and how its actions affected Rwanda and eventually all of central Africa. As with French motives, the facts here are very clear; many of them are contained in the French parliamentary committee's own report. We begin with a description of France's role before the genocide actually began. Its critical involvement during the genocide itself will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter.
12.12. In the years after independence, at the same time as it was vying with the US to increase its influence with neighbouring Zaire, France had edged out Belgium as Rwanda's closest western ally; both were French-speaking states. Over the years, various co-operation agreements, both military and civilian, established a solid permanent French presence in Rwanda,[15] France becoming one of Rwanda's foremost creditors and arms suppliers. Relations between representatives of the two governments were unusually close at the personal as well as official levels.[16]
12.13. In 1975, a military assistance agreement strictly limited the role of French troops in Rwanda to that of instructors. The main goal of the arrangement was to offer technical assistance in the development of a national police force; one clause explicitly prohibited French involvement in military and police affairs. In 1983, the agreement was revised, this key clause being removed.[17]
12.14. Much has been made of this change, since the revised agreement later provided the legal justification for direct French military assistance to the Rwandan army after the 1990 RPF invasion. But this was an incorrect interpretation; the agreement still stipulated that training and technical assistance was to be provided to the “gendarmerie Rwandaise,” not the army. In truth, it was not until August 1992 that the wording was changed to allow assistance to FAR, the Rwandan Armed Forces.[18] In any event, however, the simple fact is that French forces were in Rwanda in 1990 because the Rwandan government had invited them.
12.15. Immediately upon the RPF invasion from Uganda into Rwanda in October 1990, the French government committed itself to defend and support the Habyarimana regime. Among the usual variety of French motives, francophonie unquestionably played a key role. Mitterrand himself, Admiral Jacques Lanxade told the parliamentary inquiry “considered that the RPF aggression was a determined action against a francophone zone.”[19] “In the eyes of the Mitterrand regime,” concluded one scholar, “Ugandan support assumed the dimensions of an anglophone conspiracy to take over part of francophone Africa, and the defence of Habyarimana... became part of the more general defence of francophonie and the French role in Africa, to the extent that to an anglophone observer seems quite bizarre.”[20] In his appearance before the parliamentary committee four years later, former Prime Minister Balladur claimed that the 1990 RPF invaders had been trained inthe US. “Isn't this clear enough?” he asked rhetorically.[21]
12.16. French officials have always acknowledged that their objective was to prevent an RPF military or political victory.[22] The French government often supported the Rwandan government in international forums, urging support for an innocent government under siege by a foreign army and generally dismissing the ever-increasing stories of serious human rights abuses perpetrated by that government. French officials have not stated publicly that Rwanda was immersed in a civil war, which would have complicated its intervention on Habyarimana's behalf. The parliamentary report reproduced a telegram from the French ambassador in Kigali emphasizing the necessity of presenting the RPF as an external threat for that precise reason.[23] The report chose to describe this as a simple error of judgement.[24]
12.17. As our own report shows, everyone in Kigali's tiny diplomatic enclave, where secrets were immediately shared,[25] was well aware that violations of human rights by Habyarimana and his followers were becoming commonplace. Even warnings of possible genocide were heard, some of them documented in the French parliamentary report itself. Yet the French government rarely ever failed to play its chosen role as the government's unfailing champion, however self-contradictory its arguments became: The viciousness of the civil war justified the widespread human rights abuses. Habyarimana must be supported since he was trying to keep the Hutu extremists in check. The Habyarimana regime was rather respectful of human rights..[26] Reports of massacres were “just rumours.”[27] The RPF was responsible for the massacres.[28]
12.18. The importance of this role can hardly be overestimated. Even while pushing Habyarimana into the Arusha negotiations, France's public support constituted a major disincentive for the radical Akazu faction in his entourage to make concessions or to think in terms of compromise. The French government chose not to use its singular influence at the highest echelons of Rwandan society to demand an end to government-initiated violence, a decision that sent its own obvious message. President Mitterrand may have made speeches about democracy and human rights, but on the ground in Kigali, the French government's real priorities were unmistakable. It was impossible to be unaware of the real situation in Rwanda, and it was in the face of this knowledge that France chose to maintain its support for the Habyarimana regime.[29]
12.19. Indeed, after a ghastly massacre in the south in early 1992, French Ambassador Georges Martres refused to join a delegation of European diplomats in Kigali who met with Habyarimana to express their concern.[30] But this was hardly unexpected behaviour for Martres, who was sarcastically referred to in Kigali's tight little diplomatic world as the Rwandan ambassador to France. Even the parliamentary committee felt it necessary to criticise “France's unconditional military and diplomatic support” for the Habyarimana government “taking into account the little progress [it] had made in terms of democracy.” France should have pushed Habyarimana harder “to democratize a regime that practised repetitive human rights abuses.”[31]
12.20. In fact the French government did precisely the opposite. In February 1993, the French Minister for Co-operation arrived in Kigali. The situation was bad and growing worse. New massacres of Tutsi had recently taken place, the ethnic climate was growing ever more tense, violence was becoming an everyday occurrence, and the Hutu radicals were already actively organizing their dress rehearsals and compiling their death lists. It was under these circumstances that the French Minister appeared to personally and publicly ask the opposition parties to “make a common front” with President Habyarimana against the RPF.[32]
12.21. France consistently imposed different standards on the RPF and the government. When the RPF broke the cease-fire in February 1993, ostensibly in response to the slaughter of Tutsi referred to above, France was quick to denounce their transgression. But in the same month, the International Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuse in Rwanda, a coalition of four international non-governmental organizations committed to human rights, published the results of an investigation it had undertaken. It documented extensive massacres of Tutsi by Hutu, many of them with obvious government connections. In France, the story was carried prominently. The following month, commission members took the report to Paris and Brussels where they held press conferences. In Paris, they met and discussed the report with senior government members in the President's office and in the Foreign Ministry. The officials agreed there were some abuses, which was unfortunate. But, they told their visitors, “You had to expect such things in Africa.”[33] The abuses of human rights by France's Rwandan friends exposed in the commission report were never seriously condemned.[34]
12.22. It is true that France respected the military prowess of the RPF and believed the Rwandan army (FAR) incapable of defeating them militarily; that is why it backed negotiations at the same time as it continued to upgrade FAR's capacities.[35] But French officials never overcame their deep-seated antagonism to the RPF as just another “anglo-saxon” Trojan horse in their African preserve. RFP leader, Paul Kagame, had been in military training in the US when the invasion was launched, enough evidence, apparently, for then-Prime Minister Balladur to accuse “outside forces” of playing a malevolent role in Rwanda.[36] France also reinforced the official Rwandan position that President Museveni of English-speaking Uganda was, in fact, the real power behind the insurgents.[37]
12.23. The moral legitimation France offered was powerfully reinforced in practical ways. Immediately after the RPF invasion of October 1990, France launched Operation Noroît, dispatching to Rwanda a contingent of soldiers who probably rescued Habyarimana from military defeat.[38] French forces were to remain for the next three turbulent years. France did all it could to prevent the victory of the RPF by shoring up Habyarimana. Throughout these years, French officials worked intimately with senior Rwandan government officials, while French officers became an integral part of the military hierarchy, involved in virtually every aspect of the civil war. In 1992, a French officer became Habyarimana's military advisor. He advised the Rwandan chief of staff in such tasks as drawing up daily battle plans, accompanied him around the country, and participated in daily meetings of the general staff.[39]
12.24. French troops assisted in the expansion of the Rwandan army from about 6,000 on the eve of the invasion to some 35,000 three years later. French troops interrogated military prisoners, engaged in counter-insurgency, provided military intelligence, advised FAR officers, and offered indispensable training to the Presidential Guard and other troops, many of whom became leading genocidaires.[40] Throughout this period, the French army worked closely with Rwandans widely known to be associated with, if not guilty of, murder and other human rights abuses. The French parliamentary report stated explicitly that French officers and diplomats became so caught up in Rwandan affairs, they ended up “holding conversations, discussions, with a criminal government.”[41]
12.25. Indeed, even the French parliamentary committee seemed taken aback by the level of French army involvement in the most elementary workings of the Rwandan state. “How could France have become so strongly committed,” the parliamentarians felt obliged to ask, “that one French army officer got it into his head that...he was leading and indirectly commanding an army, in this case the army of a foreign state?”[42] But they failed to answer their own question.
12.26. In 1993, with anti-Tutsi violence greatly escalating, another large-scale RPF attack on FAR troops led to a further expansion of French support. More troops, arms, and ammunition flowed in. This time they were actively involved in the fighting, actually assisting the Rwandan army to monitor RPF positions. French soldiers were deployed, manning checkpoints and scrutinizing identity cards far from where any French citizens were known to be living, but very close to the RPF zone of control.[43] A Dutch physician working in Rwanda for Doctors without Borders, often found French soldiers manning checkpoints in the countryside: “There, in the middle of Africa, French military would ask you for your passport.”[44]
12.27. During these years, France was also one of Rwanda's major sources of military supplies. We must underline that France was by no means alone in this effort. According to the latest research, arms were received from an international network that also included Britain, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Israel, the Seychelles, and Zaire.[45]
12.28. Nevertheless, the French role was central. Besides providing supplies directly, France secretly made funds available for arms to be shipped by Egypt as well. South Africa also supplied arms through a deal that was facilitated by French agents and that violated a UN resolution to prohibit arms imports from the apartheid state.[46] In 1993, French military aid totalled US$15 million,[47] even while the Rwandan forces were routinely linked to anti-Tutsi violence. Officially, France imposed an arms embargo on April 8, 1994, two days after the plane crash, and then-Prime Minister Balladur told the parliamentary inquiry that “in the present state of my knowledge,” no more deliveries were made after that date. However his own Minister for Overseas Co-operation, Bernard Debré, told reporters outside the same committee hearing room that France continued to deliver arms for at least another week longer.[48] In fact, as we will document in a subsequent chapter, the facts indicate that France provided arms or permitted them to be provided to the Rwandan forces right through until June, the third month of the genocide.
12.29. What conclusions are fair to draw from this narrative? Judgements about France's role range from one end of the continuum to the other. French officials, as we have seen, stand at one extreme, denying all responsibility. At the opposite end, one scholar categorically asserts that nothing France does in the future “can diminish its place in history as the principal villain in the Rwanda apocalypse.”[49] The French parliamentary report, as we noted, states that French officers and diplomats became so committed to supporting the Habyarimana government that they ended up “holding conversations, discussions, with a criminal government.”[50] Médecins Sans Frontières describes the French government's role in the genocide as “shameful,” and makes the indisputable point that “France supported the regime of President Habyarimana even though racism was the pillar of all the policies of his government.”[51]
12.30. As for this Panel, the indisputable facts of the case lead us to several irresistible conclusions. First, until the genocide began, the French government was the closest foreign ally of a Rwandan government that was guilty of massive human rights abuses. Secondly, as a matter of deliberate policy, it failed to use its undoubted influence to end such behaviour. Thirdly, we find it impossible to justify most of the actions of the French government that we have just described. Fourthly, the position of the French government that it was in no way responsible for the genocide in Rwanda is entirely unacceptable to this Panel.
12.31. France again played a significant and controversial role in Rwandan affairs in the period both during and after the genocide. This included the questions of arms transfers to the genocidaire government, Opération Turquoise, its attitude towards the new RPF government, and its renewed relationship with Zaire's Mobutu. To these issues we will return in a subsequent chapter.
The United States
12.32. The US has long been involved in central Africa and the Great Lakes Region, its unstinting support for Zaire's Mobutu and (together with apartheid South Africa) UNITA, the rebel movement that is the sworn enemy of the Angolan government, being the best-known examples. As for the American role in the Rwandan genocide specifically, it was brief, powerful, and inglorious. There is very little controversy about this. Not only do authorities on the subject agree with this statement, so now does the American president who was responsible for the policies he belatedly finds so reprehensible. Unlike France, America has formally apologized for its failure to prevent the genocide, although President Clinton insists that his failure was a function of ignorance.[52] It was, however, a function of domestic politics and geopolitical indifference. In the words of one American scholar, it was simply “the fear of domestic political backlash..”[53]
12.33. The politics were simple enough. In October 1993, at the precise moment Rwanda appeared on the agenda of the Security Council, the US lost 18 soldiers in Somalia. That made it politically awkward for the US to immediately become involved again in with another peacekeeping mission.The Republicans in Congress were hostile to almost any UN initiative regardless of the purpose, and the Somalia debacle simply reinforced their prejudices.[54] But it is also true that the Clinton Administration,like every western government, knew full well that a terrible calamity was looming in Rwanda. On this the evidence is not controvertible.[55] The problem was not that the Americans were ignorant about Rwanda. The problem was that nothing was at stake for the US in Rwanda. There were no interests toguard. There were no powerful lobbies on behalf of Rwandan Tutsi. But there were political interests at home to cater to.
12.34. Even before the Somalia debacle, Rwanda's problems were invisible in Washington. Each year the Administration was obligated to report to Congress justifying its military aid programs;President George Bush's last report in 1992 described the relations betweenRwanda and the US as “excellent” and stated that “there is no evidence of any systematic human rights abuses by the military or any other element of the government of Rwanda.”[56]
12.35. In the spring of 1993, soon after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, “each foreign policy region within the Pentagon [was] asked todevelop lists of what we thought would be serious crises this Administration might face.” According to James Woods,who had been Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs since 1986, “I put Rwanda-Burundi on the list. I won't go into personalities, but I received guidance from higher authorities. ‘Look, if something happens in Rwanda-Burundi, we don't care. Take it off the list. US national interest is not involved and we can't put all these silly humanitarian issues on lists, like important problems like the Middle East, North Korea, and so on. Just make it go away.’ And it was pretty clear to me, given the fiasco of the end of our involvement with Somalia [a few months later], that we probably wouldn't react [to Rwanda].”[57] American policy under Clinton remained essentially as it had been before Clinton: a modest interest in encouraging conventional reforms – the Arusha process, democratization and “liberal” economic reforms – but little interest in human rights, ethnic cleavages, or massacres.[58]
12.36. Low expectations were thoroughly fulfilled, as was quickly seen in the establishment by the Security Council of UNAMIR, the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda. Rwandan Tutsi, already victimized at home, now became the tragic victims of terrible timing and tawdry scapegoating abroad. The murder of the 18 American soldiers in Somalia indeed traumatized the US government. The Rangers died on October 3. The resolution on UNAMIR came before the Security Council on October 5. The following day the American army left Somalia. This coincidence of timing proved disastrous for Rwanda. From then on, an unholy alliance of a Republican Congress and a Democratic President dictated most Security Council decisions on peacekeeping missions. The Clinton Administration immediately began to set out stringent conditions for any future UN peacekeeping operations. Presidential Decree Directive 25 (PDD25) effectively ruled out any serious peace enforcement whatever by the UN for the foreseeable future. This American initiative in turn deterredthe UN Secretariat from advocating stronger measures to protect Rwandan citizens.[59] Washington's domestic politicalconsiderations would take priority over catastrophes abroad – unless thevictims were lucky enough to make the television news.
12.37. What makes this episode even more disturbing is the way it was distorted by virtually the entire American establishment in both political parties. The tactic, simply, was to blame the UN for what had in fact been a purely American disaster. Perfectly unfairly, the canard circulated that the UN Secretary-General had dragged America into Somalia, that he had kept American troops there longer than was necessary, and that the US had undertaken responsibilities that were properly the place of the UN.[60]
12.38. The American mass media reinforced this impression simply by broadcasting, over and over and over again, footage of a dead USRanger being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by jubilant,Yankee-bashing Somalians. Only a few Americans ever learned the truth. American commandos in Mogadishu engaged in an operation in which 18 Rangers and between 500 and 1,000 Somalians were killed. The United Nations played no role whatsoever. The New York Times agreed: “The US could not blame the United Nations for last Sunday's attack since the raid that led to it was carried out purely on American orders,”[61]and the American troops had no contact with the UN.
12.39. But that was precisely what the Americans did. As The Economist pointed out with appropriate cynicism, “Too many Americans have been killed in the course of [the mission]; somebody has to be blamed; so finger the UN... With a chutzpah [brazenness] level high even by Americanstandards, Congressman and columnists are busy rewriting history with the discovery that America was diverted from its pure humanitarian purpose inSomalia by the UN....”[62] The consequences for Rwanda were devastating. As one American senator put it, “Multilateralism is dead, killed... in the alleys of Mogadishu."[63] One Pentagon insider ironically characterized the new policy as, “We'll only go where we're not needed.”[64] Boutros-Ghali was exactly right in claiming that “the new rules were so tightly drawn as to scope, mission, duration,resources,and risk, that only the cheapest, easiest, and safest peacekeeping operations could be approved under them.” [65] Even a mission that sought no American troops was unacceptable, since in any operation “there was always the risk that ... US personnel might, over time, be dragged into it.”[66]
12.40. Significantly enough, almost the only debate amongAmerican experts is the extent to which the US was responsible for the Rwandan genocide. We know of no authorities who argue anything less. One believes that, “The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force [UNAMIR] was Hutu Power's greatest diplomatic victory and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the UnitedStates.”[67] Another comes to a similar conclusion: “The United States almost single-handedly blocked international action in Rwanda six weeks prior to the genocide, which might have prevented the bloodbath altogether.”[68] A third agrees that the US played a significant role in preventing action from being taken to stop or mitigate the genocide, but insists that America was not “almost single-handedly” responsible, that others share the blame.[69]
12.41. Since we have already made clear our view that several nations, organizations, and institutions directly or otherwise contributed to the genocide, we can hardly blame the catastrophe solely on theUS. On the other hand, it is indisputably true that no nation did more than the US to undermine the effectiveness of UNAMIR.Terrified Rwandans looked to UNAMIR for protection, yet with the exception of Great Britain, the United States stood out as exceptionally insensitive tosuch hopes.[70]
12.42. Even in the midst of the genocide itself, Rwandan lives received no priority in American policy. When 10 Belgian Blue Helmets were killed by government forces the day afterHabyarimana's plane went down, a panic-stricken Belgian government swiftly withdrew its entire contingent from Rwanda. Embarrassed, Belgium began lobbying for the entire UNAMIR mission to be withdrawn.[71]
US Ambassador Madeleine Albright was quick to exploit this proposal. Perhaps failing to see the real significance of her own words, she suggested that a small, skeletal operation be left in Kigali “to show the will of the international community.” “Later,” she added, “the [Security] Council might see what could be done about giving it an effective mandate.” In fact, this was exactly what transpired as the Security Council, in the midst of the genocide, dramatically reduced UNAMIR to a token level of 270 people and restricted its mandate to mediation and humanitarian aid.[72] This decision was taken despite strong protests to the contrary from the OAU and African governments.
12.43. Boutros-Ghali and the US clashed bitterly during his tenure, and his memoir is far harsher towards the Americans than toward the French, whose negative role in Rwanda we have discussed at length. In the next chapter, we also ask serious questions about his own role in Rwanda for at least the first month or so of the genocide. Nevertheless, we are persuaded by corroborating evidence that Boutros-Ghali's description of US policy during this period is essentially accurate:
It was one thing for the United States to place conditions on its own participation in UN peacekeeping. It was something else entirely for the US to attempt to impose its conditions on other countries. Yet that is what Madeleine Albright did. With the publication of PDD 25, she argued with members of the Security Council for the new Clinton conditions to apply before Resolution 918 of May 17, 1994, which increased the strength and expanded the mandate of UNAMIR, was carried out. For example, a cease-fire should be in place; the parties should agree to a UN presence; UNAMIR should not engage in peace enforcement unless what was happening in Rwanda was a significant threat to international peace and security. Were the troops, funds and equipment available? What was the ‘exit strategy’?[73]
12.44. On May 9, an informal proposal raised the possibility of a UN force of some 4,000 soldiers. The American response was presented by Albright: “We have serious reservations about proposals to establish a large peace-enforcement mission which would operate throughout Rwanda with a mandate to end the fighting, restore law and order, and pacify the population...It is unclear what the peace-enforcement mission would be or when it would end.” This was a shocking statement, since it was perfectly obvious the purpose was to stop the genocide. But since the Clinton Administration would take any steps to avoid acknowledging that a genocide was in fact taking place, its spokespeople were forced right into June to resort publicly to weasel words about “acts of genocide” that made them look ridiculous to the rest of the world – except, of course, to peers on the Security Council who had adopted the same shameful position.[74]
12.45. But looking ridiculous seemed preferable to the alternative. One senior official who participated in Administration discussions of this matter later explained that “if we acknowledged it was genocide, that was mandated in international law that the US had to do something....If we acknowledged it was genocide and didn't do anything...what [would be] the impact on US foreign policy relations with the rest of the world following inaction after admitting it's genocide...”[75]
12.46. But there was yet another consideration as well, as Tony Marley, Political Military Adviser to the US State Department, later revealed. At one of the series of meetings Marley attended where the Clinton policy was being thrashed out, “One Administration official asked...what possible impact there might be on the Congressional elections scheduled for later that year were the government to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Rwanda and yet the Administration be seen as doing nothing about it. The concern seemed to be that this might cost the President's political party votes in the election and therefore should be factored into the consideration as to whether or not ‘genocide’ could be used as a term....[This] indicated to me that the calculation was based on whether or not there was popular pressure to take action rather than taking action because it was the right thing to do.”[76]
12.47. Finally, the Security Council did approve UNAMIR II with 5,500 troops and an expanded mandate. But, Boutros-Ghali tells us, “Albright employed the requirements of PDD 25 to pressure the other Security Council members to delay the deployment of the full 5,500-man contingent to Rwanda until I could satisfy her that all of the many US conditions had been met... The US effort to prevent the effective deployment of a UN force for Rwanda succeeded, with the strong support of [the Thatcher government in] Britain....The international community did little or nothing as the killing in Rwanda continued.”[77] Let us say that this Panel considers it beyond belief, a scandal of the most shocking kind, that the genocide was ended before a single Blue Helmet representing UNAMIR II ever materialized.
12.48. Boutros-Ghali goes out of his way in his memoir to show that Madeleine Albright was simply being a good Clinton team player throughout this period of betrayed opportunities. She would not have taken her obstructionist positions, “I felt sure, without clear authorization from the White House. As the Rwandan genocide continued, she was apparently just following orders.”[78] But of course that was exactly the point. As the Clinton Cabinet member directly responsible for the UN, Albright chose to follow orders, even if the consequences for hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were fatal, as it was certain they would be. So far as we can determine, not a single member of any government or any institution most directly responsible for letting the genocide happen has ever resigned on principle..
12.49. In May 1994, five weeks into the slaughter, an influential American journal acknowledged that what was happening in Rwanda was indeed a genocide, a catastrophe far beyond that of Bosnia, which was then at the top of the international agenda. But there would be no US intervention, it accurately predicted, since Rwanda's “chaos may trigger a parallel disaster in ...Burundi, but nowhere else,” while American neutrality in the Balkans might destabilize “strategically vital parts of the world.”[79]
12.50. With negligible American interests to consider, Clinton was left with the choice between pandering to local political advantage or trying to save an untold number of lives in Rwanda.
12.51. No amount of evidence ever changed the American position. As we will soon see, throughout the genocide, American machinations at the Security Council repeatedly undermined all attempts to strengthen the UN military presence in Rwanda; in the end, not a single additional soldier or piece of military hardware reached the country before the genocide ended.[80] Looking at the record, an American chronicler of the Rwandan genocide bitterly concludes that, “Anybody who believes the words ‘never again’ is deluding themselves dangerously about future holocausts.[81] In early 2000, as this report was being written, the leading Republican presidential candidate was asked by a television interviewer what he would do as President “if, God forbid, another Rwanda should take place.” George W. Bush replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interest. I would not send the United States troops into Rwanda.”[82]
BEFORE THE GENOCIDE: FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
12.1. Throughout the 20th century, the outside world has played a pivotal role in Rwandan society. It helped shape its economy, its social relations, its power structure, its public discourse. As much as any country, Rwanda's destiny has been carved out through the interplay between internal forces and external actors. Yet when it came to averting the great tragedy to which history seemed to be leading, the international community proved to be no community at all. At best, it failed utterly to prevent the genocide. At worst, it co-operated with the conspirators, implicitly sanctioning their activities and convincing them they could get away with anything.
12.2. We have advanced in previous chapters three key propositions: that the key western members of the UN Security Council knew that a major catastrophe was imminent in Rwanda; that with a relatively modest military effort that catastrophe could very possibly have been averted entirely; and that once the genocide began, it was still possible to minimize the appalling destruction. Why did the UN and its key members fail so completely to take the obvious steps necessary either to deter the calamity or to stop it once it began?
12.3. Beyond Rwanda, , the main actors were the OAU, the international civil servants in the UN Secretariat, the members of the Security Council collectively, and France, the US, and Belgium in particular. We will deal with the role of each of them chronologically,: first before the genocide and then during the genocide. Since the US and France were permanent members of the Security Council, and since in the end the Secretariat largely reflected the will of the Security Council, we begin the discussion with the two nations that are permanent members of the Council. Of these, France was far and away the most influential power in Rwanda itself. The US played a major role for a few months only, but these were the months just prior to and during the genocide, where its influence was decisive.
France
12.4. Although we have discussed the subject only briefly until now, Rwanda in the past decade in fact cannot be understood without France. Virtually from the moment of the RPF invasion in 1990 to the end of the genocide almost four years later, the French were the Rwandan government's closest ally militarily, politically, and diplomatically.[1] There is little disagreement on this point. But the exact nature of the French role is a matter of great controversy. There has always been a vast gulf between the official French account of that role and the interpretation preferred by most disinterested observers; so far as we can determine, few experts in the field accept the official French version.[2]
12.5. By 1998, four years after the genocide, both the heads of the UN and the US had acknowledged some blame for the catastrophe and apologized accordingly.[3] Belgium followed two years later. These initiatives have made more conspicuous the decision of the French government not to take a similar step. Indeed, until this moment, there has from official France been no apology, no hint of responsibility, barely even any questioning of its quite public backing of the Rwandan Hutu regime before, during, and after the tragedy. On the contrary, when the Prime Minister at the time of the genocide, Edouard Balladur, backed by three other prominent Cabinet ministers, appeared before a parliamentary inquiry “bristling with indignation,”[4] he asserted that France was “the only country in the international community that tried to act to stop the genocide.”[5]
12.6. But there had always been many critics of the French-Rwandan relationship, both national and international, and their voices continued to grow. Dismissing or ignoring these critics became increasingly awkward, especially after tough, investigative articles in two leading French daily newspapers. Finally, the French establishment agreed in 1998 to set up an unprecedented parliamentary committee to inquire into the Rwandan tragedy.[6]
12.7. The committee's four-volume, 1,800-page report proved to be an unexpectedly impeccable representation of the controversy that preceded it. The committee's own conclusions conceded that France made certain errors of judgement around Rwanda and failed to view developments there with a sufficiently critical eye. But it concluded that the country bore not the slightest responsibility for any aspect of the genocide.[7] In the succinct statement of its chair, National Assembly Member Paul Quiles, “France is neither responsible nor guilty.” [8] The international community, on the other hand – meaning the US and Belgium above all – was to blame for the scale of the genocide.[9] Within Rwanda itself, the committee found that even the Catholic church was more culpable than France.[10]
12.8. The problem with this conclusion, as with the official French government position through these years, was that it was contradicted by most of the available facts, many of them contained in the parliamentary committee's report itself and simply ignored. The report's evidence and the report's findings seemed unrelated. These contradictions were blatant, and politicians and journalists were quick to point them out. “There is a huge discrepancy,” opposition members observed, “between the report's edifying factual chapters and some of its conclusions.”[11] Quoting several passages from the report that explicitly incriminated the French government, one reporter noted that, “These are just some of the examples of information in the report that contradicts its main conclusion absolving Paris...”[12]
12.9. Beside the wealth of information contained in the official report, there is an extensive literature analyzing French policy in Africa, some of it focussing specifically on Rwanda. Interestingly enough, there is substantial consensus among analysts regarding France's African foreign policy, much of which has been quite transparent and has been openly embraced by most of the French establishment irrespective of party. In fact the considerations that drove French policy towards Rwanda are all on the public record, the French establishment never having felt any embarrassment about its African interests and role.
12.10. From the perspective of Paris, the main elements were clear enough: France's unilateral insistence that its former African colonies constituted its indivisible sphere of influence in Africa; the conviction that it had a special relationship with francophone Africa; the understanding that its role in Africa gave France much of its international status; a general attitude that France had to be permanently vigilant against a perceived “anglo-saxon,” (i.e., American), conspiracy to oust France from Africa; the close links between the elites in France and francophone Africa, which in Rwanda notably included the two Presidents as well as their sons; and finally, France's need to protect its economic interests in Africa, although Rwanda as such was not a great economic prize.[13]
12.11. No one, not even official French representatives, disagrees that these various considerations were, to one extent or another, the main driving force behind French policy in Rwanda.[14] No doubt they help explain French behaviour. But to understand is not to condone. What matters is what France did – not why – and how its actions affected Rwanda and eventually all of central Africa. As with French motives, the facts here are very clear; many of them are contained in the French parliamentary committee's own report. We begin with a description of France's role before the genocide actually began. Its critical involvement during the genocide itself will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter.
12.12. In the years after independence, at the same time as it was vying with the US to increase its influence with neighbouring Zaire, France had edged out Belgium as Rwanda's closest western ally; both were French-speaking states. Over the years, various co-operation agreements, both military and civilian, established a solid permanent French presence in Rwanda,[15] France becoming one of Rwanda's foremost creditors and arms suppliers. Relations between representatives of the two governments were unusually close at the personal as well as official levels.[16]
12.13. In 1975, a military assistance agreement strictly limited the role of French troops in Rwanda to that of instructors. The main goal of the arrangement was to offer technical assistance in the development of a national police force; one clause explicitly prohibited French involvement in military and police affairs. In 1983, the agreement was revised, this key clause being removed.[17]
12.14. Much has been made of this change, since the revised agreement later provided the legal justification for direct French military assistance to the Rwandan army after the 1990 RPF invasion. But this was an incorrect interpretation; the agreement still stipulated that training and technical assistance was to be provided to the “gendarmerie Rwandaise,” not the army. In truth, it was not until August 1992 that the wording was changed to allow assistance to FAR, the Rwandan Armed Forces.[18] In any event, however, the simple fact is that French forces were in Rwanda in 1990 because the Rwandan government had invited them.
12.15. Immediately upon the RPF invasion from Uganda into Rwanda in October 1990, the French government committed itself to defend and support the Habyarimana regime. Among the usual variety of French motives, francophonie unquestionably played a key role. Mitterrand himself, Admiral Jacques Lanxade told the parliamentary inquiry “considered that the RPF aggression was a determined action against a francophone zone.”[19] “In the eyes of the Mitterrand regime,” concluded one scholar, “Ugandan support assumed the dimensions of an anglophone conspiracy to take over part of francophone Africa, and the defence of Habyarimana... became part of the more general defence of francophonie and the French role in Africa, to the extent that to an anglophone observer seems quite bizarre.”[20] In his appearance before the parliamentary committee four years later, former Prime Minister Balladur claimed that the 1990 RPF invaders had been trained inthe US. “Isn't this clear enough?” he asked rhetorically.[21]
12.16. French officials have always acknowledged that their objective was to prevent an RPF military or political victory.[22] The French government often supported the Rwandan government in international forums, urging support for an innocent government under siege by a foreign army and generally dismissing the ever-increasing stories of serious human rights abuses perpetrated by that government. French officials have not stated publicly that Rwanda was immersed in a civil war, which would have complicated its intervention on Habyarimana's behalf. The parliamentary report reproduced a telegram from the French ambassador in Kigali emphasizing the necessity of presenting the RPF as an external threat for that precise reason.[23] The report chose to describe this as a simple error of judgement.[24]
12.17. As our own report shows, everyone in Kigali's tiny diplomatic enclave, where secrets were immediately shared,[25] was well aware that violations of human rights by Habyarimana and his followers were becoming commonplace. Even warnings of possible genocide were heard, some of them documented in the French parliamentary report itself. Yet the French government rarely ever failed to play its chosen role as the government's unfailing champion, however self-contradictory its arguments became: The viciousness of the civil war justified the widespread human rights abuses. Habyarimana must be supported since he was trying to keep the Hutu extremists in check. The Habyarimana regime was rather respectful of human rights..[26] Reports of massacres were “just rumours.”[27] The RPF was responsible for the massacres.[28]
12.18. The importance of this role can hardly be overestimated. Even while pushing Habyarimana into the Arusha negotiations, France's public support constituted a major disincentive for the radical Akazu faction in his entourage to make concessions or to think in terms of compromise. The French government chose not to use its singular influence at the highest echelons of Rwandan society to demand an end to government-initiated violence, a decision that sent its own obvious message. President Mitterrand may have made speeches about democracy and human rights, but on the ground in Kigali, the French government's real priorities were unmistakable. It was impossible to be unaware of the real situation in Rwanda, and it was in the face of this knowledge that France chose to maintain its support for the Habyarimana regime.[29]
12.19. Indeed, after a ghastly massacre in the south in early 1992, French Ambassador Georges Martres refused to join a delegation of European diplomats in Kigali who met with Habyarimana to express their concern.[30] But this was hardly unexpected behaviour for Martres, who was sarcastically referred to in Kigali's tight little diplomatic world as the Rwandan ambassador to France. Even the parliamentary committee felt it necessary to criticise “France's unconditional military and diplomatic support” for the Habyarimana government “taking into account the little progress [it] had made in terms of democracy.” France should have pushed Habyarimana harder “to democratize a regime that practised repetitive human rights abuses.”[31]
12.20. In fact the French government did precisely the opposite. In February 1993, the French Minister for Co-operation arrived in Kigali. The situation was bad and growing worse. New massacres of Tutsi had recently taken place, the ethnic climate was growing ever more tense, violence was becoming an everyday occurrence, and the Hutu radicals were already actively organizing their dress rehearsals and compiling their death lists. It was under these circumstances that the French Minister appeared to personally and publicly ask the opposition parties to “make a common front” with President Habyarimana against the RPF.[32]
12.21. France consistently imposed different standards on the RPF and the government. When the RPF broke the cease-fire in February 1993, ostensibly in response to the slaughter of Tutsi referred to above, France was quick to denounce their transgression. But in the same month, the International Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuse in Rwanda, a coalition of four international non-governmental organizations committed to human rights, published the results of an investigation it had undertaken. It documented extensive massacres of Tutsi by Hutu, many of them with obvious government connections. In France, the story was carried prominently. The following month, commission members took the report to Paris and Brussels where they held press conferences. In Paris, they met and discussed the report with senior government members in the President's office and in the Foreign Ministry. The officials agreed there were some abuses, which was unfortunate. But, they told their visitors, “You had to expect such things in Africa.”[33] The abuses of human rights by France's Rwandan friends exposed in the commission report were never seriously condemned.[34]
12.22. It is true that France respected the military prowess of the RPF and believed the Rwandan army (FAR) incapable of defeating them militarily; that is why it backed negotiations at the same time as it continued to upgrade FAR's capacities.[35] But French officials never overcame their deep-seated antagonism to the RPF as just another “anglo-saxon” Trojan horse in their African preserve. RFP leader, Paul Kagame, had been in military training in the US when the invasion was launched, enough evidence, apparently, for then-Prime Minister Balladur to accuse “outside forces” of playing a malevolent role in Rwanda.[36] France also reinforced the official Rwandan position that President Museveni of English-speaking Uganda was, in fact, the real power behind the insurgents.[37]
12.23. The moral legitimation France offered was powerfully reinforced in practical ways. Immediately after the RPF invasion of October 1990, France launched Operation Noroît, dispatching to Rwanda a contingent of soldiers who probably rescued Habyarimana from military defeat.[38] French forces were to remain for the next three turbulent years. France did all it could to prevent the victory of the RPF by shoring up Habyarimana. Throughout these years, French officials worked intimately with senior Rwandan government officials, while French officers became an integral part of the military hierarchy, involved in virtually every aspect of the civil war. In 1992, a French officer became Habyarimana's military advisor. He advised the Rwandan chief of staff in such tasks as drawing up daily battle plans, accompanied him around the country, and participated in daily meetings of the general staff.[39]
12.24. French troops assisted in the expansion of the Rwandan army from about 6,000 on the eve of the invasion to some 35,000 three years later. French troops interrogated military prisoners, engaged in counter-insurgency, provided military intelligence, advised FAR officers, and offered indispensable training to the Presidential Guard and other troops, many of whom became leading genocidaires.[40] Throughout this period, the French army worked closely with Rwandans widely known to be associated with, if not guilty of, murder and other human rights abuses. The French parliamentary report stated explicitly that French officers and diplomats became so caught up in Rwandan affairs, they ended up “holding conversations, discussions, with a criminal government.”[41]
12.25. Indeed, even the French parliamentary committee seemed taken aback by the level of French army involvement in the most elementary workings of the Rwandan state. “How could France have become so strongly committed,” the parliamentarians felt obliged to ask, “that one French army officer got it into his head that...he was leading and indirectly commanding an army, in this case the army of a foreign state?”[42] But they failed to answer their own question.
12.26. In 1993, with anti-Tutsi violence greatly escalating, another large-scale RPF attack on FAR troops led to a further expansion of French support. More troops, arms, and ammunition flowed in. This time they were actively involved in the fighting, actually assisting the Rwandan army to monitor RPF positions. French soldiers were deployed, manning checkpoints and scrutinizing identity cards far from where any French citizens were known to be living, but very close to the RPF zone of control.[43] A Dutch physician working in Rwanda for Doctors without Borders, often found French soldiers manning checkpoints in the countryside: “There, in the middle of Africa, French military would ask you for your passport.”[44]
12.27. During these years, France was also one of Rwanda's major sources of military supplies. We must underline that France was by no means alone in this effort. According to the latest research, arms were received from an international network that also included Britain, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Israel, the Seychelles, and Zaire.[45]
12.28. Nevertheless, the French role was central. Besides providing supplies directly, France secretly made funds available for arms to be shipped by Egypt as well. South Africa also supplied arms through a deal that was facilitated by French agents and that violated a UN resolution to prohibit arms imports from the apartheid state.[46] In 1993, French military aid totalled US$15 million,[47] even while the Rwandan forces were routinely linked to anti-Tutsi violence. Officially, France imposed an arms embargo on April 8, 1994, two days after the plane crash, and then-Prime Minister Balladur told the parliamentary inquiry that “in the present state of my knowledge,” no more deliveries were made after that date. However his own Minister for Overseas Co-operation, Bernard Debré, told reporters outside the same committee hearing room that France continued to deliver arms for at least another week longer.[48] In fact, as we will document in a subsequent chapter, the facts indicate that France provided arms or permitted them to be provided to the Rwandan forces right through until June, the third month of the genocide.
12.29. What conclusions are fair to draw from this narrative? Judgements about France's role range from one end of the continuum to the other. French officials, as we have seen, stand at one extreme, denying all responsibility. At the opposite end, one scholar categorically asserts that nothing France does in the future “can diminish its place in history as the principal villain in the Rwanda apocalypse.”[49] The French parliamentary report, as we noted, states that French officers and diplomats became so committed to supporting the Habyarimana government that they ended up “holding conversations, discussions, with a criminal government.”[50] Médecins Sans Frontières describes the French government's role in the genocide as “shameful,” and makes the indisputable point that “France supported the regime of President Habyarimana even though racism was the pillar of all the policies of his government.”[51]
12.30. As for this Panel, the indisputable facts of the case lead us to several irresistible conclusions. First, until the genocide began, the French government was the closest foreign ally of a Rwandan government that was guilty of massive human rights abuses. Secondly, as a matter of deliberate policy, it failed to use its undoubted influence to end such behaviour. Thirdly, we find it impossible to justify most of the actions of the French government that we have just described. Fourthly, the position of the French government that it was in no way responsible for the genocide in Rwanda is entirely unacceptable to this Panel.
12.31. France again played a significant and controversial role in Rwandan affairs in the period both during and after the genocide. This included the questions of arms transfers to the genocidaire government, Opération Turquoise, its attitude towards the new RPF government, and its renewed relationship with Zaire's Mobutu. To these issues we will return in a subsequent chapter.
The United States
12.32. The US has long been involved in central Africa and the Great Lakes Region, its unstinting support for Zaire's Mobutu and (together with apartheid South Africa) UNITA, the rebel movement that is the sworn enemy of the Angolan government, being the best-known examples. As for the American role in the Rwandan genocide specifically, it was brief, powerful, and inglorious. There is very little controversy about this. Not only do authorities on the subject agree with this statement, so now does the American president who was responsible for the policies he belatedly finds so reprehensible. Unlike France, America has formally apologized for its failure to prevent the genocide, although President Clinton insists that his failure was a function of ignorance.[52] It was, however, a function of domestic politics and geopolitical indifference. In the words of one American scholar, it was simply “the fear of domestic political backlash..”[53]
12.33. The politics were simple enough. In October 1993, at the precise moment Rwanda appeared on the agenda of the Security Council, the US lost 18 soldiers in Somalia. That made it politically awkward for the US to immediately become involved again in with another peacekeeping mission.The Republicans in Congress were hostile to almost any UN initiative regardless of the purpose, and the Somalia debacle simply reinforced their prejudices.[54] But it is also true that the Clinton Administration,like every western government, knew full well that a terrible calamity was looming in Rwanda. On this the evidence is not controvertible.[55] The problem was not that the Americans were ignorant about Rwanda. The problem was that nothing was at stake for the US in Rwanda. There were no interests toguard. There were no powerful lobbies on behalf of Rwandan Tutsi. But there were political interests at home to cater to.
12.34. Even before the Somalia debacle, Rwanda's problems were invisible in Washington. Each year the Administration was obligated to report to Congress justifying its military aid programs;President George Bush's last report in 1992 described the relations betweenRwanda and the US as “excellent” and stated that “there is no evidence of any systematic human rights abuses by the military or any other element of the government of Rwanda.”[56]
12.35. In the spring of 1993, soon after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, “each foreign policy region within the Pentagon [was] asked todevelop lists of what we thought would be serious crises this Administration might face.” According to James Woods,who had been Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs since 1986, “I put Rwanda-Burundi on the list. I won't go into personalities, but I received guidance from higher authorities. ‘Look, if something happens in Rwanda-Burundi, we don't care. Take it off the list. US national interest is not involved and we can't put all these silly humanitarian issues on lists, like important problems like the Middle East, North Korea, and so on. Just make it go away.’ And it was pretty clear to me, given the fiasco of the end of our involvement with Somalia [a few months later], that we probably wouldn't react [to Rwanda].”[57] American policy under Clinton remained essentially as it had been before Clinton: a modest interest in encouraging conventional reforms – the Arusha process, democratization and “liberal” economic reforms – but little interest in human rights, ethnic cleavages, or massacres.[58]
12.36. Low expectations were thoroughly fulfilled, as was quickly seen in the establishment by the Security Council of UNAMIR, the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda. Rwandan Tutsi, already victimized at home, now became the tragic victims of terrible timing and tawdry scapegoating abroad. The murder of the 18 American soldiers in Somalia indeed traumatized the US government. The Rangers died on October 3. The resolution on UNAMIR came before the Security Council on October 5. The following day the American army left Somalia. This coincidence of timing proved disastrous for Rwanda. From then on, an unholy alliance of a Republican Congress and a Democratic President dictated most Security Council decisions on peacekeeping missions. The Clinton Administration immediately began to set out stringent conditions for any future UN peacekeeping operations. Presidential Decree Directive 25 (PDD25) effectively ruled out any serious peace enforcement whatever by the UN for the foreseeable future. This American initiative in turn deterredthe UN Secretariat from advocating stronger measures to protect Rwandan citizens.[59] Washington's domestic politicalconsiderations would take priority over catastrophes abroad – unless thevictims were lucky enough to make the television news.
12.37. What makes this episode even more disturbing is the way it was distorted by virtually the entire American establishment in both political parties. The tactic, simply, was to blame the UN for what had in fact been a purely American disaster. Perfectly unfairly, the canard circulated that the UN Secretary-General had dragged America into Somalia, that he had kept American troops there longer than was necessary, and that the US had undertaken responsibilities that were properly the place of the UN.[60]
12.38. The American mass media reinforced this impression simply by broadcasting, over and over and over again, footage of a dead USRanger being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by jubilant,Yankee-bashing Somalians. Only a few Americans ever learned the truth. American commandos in Mogadishu engaged in an operation in which 18 Rangers and between 500 and 1,000 Somalians were killed. The United Nations played no role whatsoever. The New York Times agreed: “The US could not blame the United Nations for last Sunday's attack since the raid that led to it was carried out purely on American orders,”[61]and the American troops had no contact with the UN.
12.39. But that was precisely what the Americans did. As The Economist pointed out with appropriate cynicism, “Too many Americans have been killed in the course of [the mission]; somebody has to be blamed; so finger the UN... With a chutzpah [brazenness] level high even by Americanstandards, Congressman and columnists are busy rewriting history with the discovery that America was diverted from its pure humanitarian purpose inSomalia by the UN....”[62] The consequences for Rwanda were devastating. As one American senator put it, “Multilateralism is dead, killed... in the alleys of Mogadishu."[63] One Pentagon insider ironically characterized the new policy as, “We'll only go where we're not needed.”[64] Boutros-Ghali was exactly right in claiming that “the new rules were so tightly drawn as to scope, mission, duration,resources,and risk, that only the cheapest, easiest, and safest peacekeeping operations could be approved under them.” [65] Even a mission that sought no American troops was unacceptable, since in any operation “there was always the risk that ... US personnel might, over time, be dragged into it.”[66]
12.40. Significantly enough, almost the only debate amongAmerican experts is the extent to which the US was responsible for the Rwandan genocide. We know of no authorities who argue anything less. One believes that, “The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force [UNAMIR] was Hutu Power's greatest diplomatic victory and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the UnitedStates.”[67] Another comes to a similar conclusion: “The United States almost single-handedly blocked international action in Rwanda six weeks prior to the genocide, which might have prevented the bloodbath altogether.”[68] A third agrees that the US played a significant role in preventing action from being taken to stop or mitigate the genocide, but insists that America was not “almost single-handedly” responsible, that others share the blame.[69]
12.41. Since we have already made clear our view that several nations, organizations, and institutions directly or otherwise contributed to the genocide, we can hardly blame the catastrophe solely on theUS. On the other hand, it is indisputably true that no nation did more than the US to undermine the effectiveness of UNAMIR.Terrified Rwandans looked to UNAMIR for protection, yet with the exception of Great Britain, the United States stood out as exceptionally insensitive tosuch hopes.[70]
12.42. Even in the midst of the genocide itself, Rwandan lives received no priority in American policy. When 10 Belgian Blue Helmets were killed by government forces the day afterHabyarimana's plane went down, a panic-stricken Belgian government swiftly withdrew its entire contingent from Rwanda. Embarrassed, Belgium began lobbying for the entire UNAMIR mission to be withdrawn.[71]
US Ambassador Madeleine Albright was quick to exploit this proposal. Perhaps failing to see the real significance of her own words, she suggested that a small, skeletal operation be left in Kigali “to show the will of the international community.” “Later,” she added, “the [Security] Council might see what could be done about giving it an effective mandate.” In fact, this was exactly what transpired as the Security Council, in the midst of the genocide, dramatically reduced UNAMIR to a token level of 270 people and restricted its mandate to mediation and humanitarian aid.[72] This decision was taken despite strong protests to the contrary from the OAU and African governments.
12.43. Boutros-Ghali and the US clashed bitterly during his tenure, and his memoir is far harsher towards the Americans than toward the French, whose negative role in Rwanda we have discussed at length. In the next chapter, we also ask serious questions about his own role in Rwanda for at least the first month or so of the genocide. Nevertheless, we are persuaded by corroborating evidence that Boutros-Ghali's description of US policy during this period is essentially accurate:
It was one thing for the United States to place conditions on its own participation in UN peacekeeping. It was something else entirely for the US to attempt to impose its conditions on other countries. Yet that is what Madeleine Albright did. With the publication of PDD 25, she argued with members of the Security Council for the new Clinton conditions to apply before Resolution 918 of May 17, 1994, which increased the strength and expanded the mandate of UNAMIR, was carried out. For example, a cease-fire should be in place; the parties should agree to a UN presence; UNAMIR should not engage in peace enforcement unless what was happening in Rwanda was a significant threat to international peace and security. Were the troops, funds and equipment available? What was the ‘exit strategy’?[73]
12.44. On May 9, an informal proposal raised the possibility of a UN force of some 4,000 soldiers. The American response was presented by Albright: “We have serious reservations about proposals to establish a large peace-enforcement mission which would operate throughout Rwanda with a mandate to end the fighting, restore law and order, and pacify the population...It is unclear what the peace-enforcement mission would be or when it would end.” This was a shocking statement, since it was perfectly obvious the purpose was to stop the genocide. But since the Clinton Administration would take any steps to avoid acknowledging that a genocide was in fact taking place, its spokespeople were forced right into June to resort publicly to weasel words about “acts of genocide” that made them look ridiculous to the rest of the world – except, of course, to peers on the Security Council who had adopted the same shameful position.[74]
12.45. But looking ridiculous seemed preferable to the alternative. One senior official who participated in Administration discussions of this matter later explained that “if we acknowledged it was genocide, that was mandated in international law that the US had to do something....If we acknowledged it was genocide and didn't do anything...what [would be] the impact on US foreign policy relations with the rest of the world following inaction after admitting it's genocide...”[75]
12.46. But there was yet another consideration as well, as Tony Marley, Political Military Adviser to the US State Department, later revealed. At one of the series of meetings Marley attended where the Clinton policy was being thrashed out, “One Administration official asked...what possible impact there might be on the Congressional elections scheduled for later that year were the government to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Rwanda and yet the Administration be seen as doing nothing about it. The concern seemed to be that this might cost the President's political party votes in the election and therefore should be factored into the consideration as to whether or not ‘genocide’ could be used as a term....[This] indicated to me that the calculation was based on whether or not there was popular pressure to take action rather than taking action because it was the right thing to do.”[76]
12.47. Finally, the Security Council did approve UNAMIR II with 5,500 troops and an expanded mandate. But, Boutros-Ghali tells us, “Albright employed the requirements of PDD 25 to pressure the other Security Council members to delay the deployment of the full 5,500-man contingent to Rwanda until I could satisfy her that all of the many US conditions had been met... The US effort to prevent the effective deployment of a UN force for Rwanda succeeded, with the strong support of [the Thatcher government in] Britain....The international community did little or nothing as the killing in Rwanda continued.”[77] Let us say that this Panel considers it beyond belief, a scandal of the most shocking kind, that the genocide was ended before a single Blue Helmet representing UNAMIR II ever materialized.
12.48. Boutros-Ghali goes out of his way in his memoir to show that Madeleine Albright was simply being a good Clinton team player throughout this period of betrayed opportunities. She would not have taken her obstructionist positions, “I felt sure, without clear authorization from the White House. As the Rwandan genocide continued, she was apparently just following orders.”[78] But of course that was exactly the point. As the Clinton Cabinet member directly responsible for the UN, Albright chose to follow orders, even if the consequences for hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were fatal, as it was certain they would be. So far as we can determine, not a single member of any government or any institution most directly responsible for letting the genocide happen has ever resigned on principle..
12.49. In May 1994, five weeks into the slaughter, an influential American journal acknowledged that what was happening in Rwanda was indeed a genocide, a catastrophe far beyond that of Bosnia, which was then at the top of the international agenda. But there would be no US intervention, it accurately predicted, since Rwanda's “chaos may trigger a parallel disaster in ...Burundi, but nowhere else,” while American neutrality in the Balkans might destabilize “strategically vital parts of the world.”[79]
12.50. With negligible American interests to consider, Clinton was left with the choice between pandering to local political advantage or trying to save an untold number of lives in Rwanda.
12.51. No amount of evidence ever changed the American position. As we will soon see, throughout the genocide, American machinations at the Security Council repeatedly undermined all attempts to strengthen the UN military presence in Rwanda; in the end, not a single additional soldier or piece of military hardware reached the country before the genocide ended.[80] Looking at the record, an American chronicler of the Rwandan genocide bitterly concludes that, “Anybody who believes the words ‘never again’ is deluding themselves dangerously about future holocausts.[81] In early 2000, as this report was being written, the leading Republican presidential candidate was asked by a television interviewer what he would do as President “if, God forbid, another Rwanda should take place.” George W. Bush replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interest. I would not send the United States troops into Rwanda.”[82]
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 13
BEFORE THE GENOCIDE: THE ROLE OF THE UNITED NATIONS
13.1. In the previous chapter, we attempted to explain why each of the two nations with the most power to effect the genocide had, in its own way, callously abandoned Rwandans to their grim fate. In this chapter, we will look more directly at the role of the United Nations in the months leading up to and during the tragedy. In this task, we are fortunate to be able to build on the work recently completed by the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (also called the “Carlsson Inquiry, ” after the Inquiry's chairperson). We have already shown that the members of the Security Council consciously chose to abdicate their responsibility for Rwanda. The Carlsson Inquiry's report focusses particularly on the sorry record of the UN Secretariat. Together, these draw a bleak picture of the so-called international community at work.
13.2. Let us say at the outset that, on the basis of our own research, we unequivocally endorse the major findings of the Carlsson Inquiry report:
The failure of the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole. There was a persistent lack of political will by member states to act, or to act with enough assertiveness....[1] The United Nations failed the people of Rwanda....[2]
The overriding failure...can be summarized as a lack of resources and lack of will to take on the commitment which would have been necessary to prevent or to stop the genocide...the fundamental capacity problems of UNAMIR [the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda] led to the terrible and humiliating situation of a UN peacekeeping force almost paralyzed in the face of some of the worst brutality humankind has seen in this century....[3]
The instinctive reaction within the Secretariat seems to have been to question the feasibility of an effective United Nations response, rather than actively investigating the possibility of strengthening the [UNAMIR] operation to deal with the new challenges on the ground....[4]
It has been stated repeatedly during the course of the interviews conducted by the Inquiry that Rwanda was not of strategic interest to third countries and that the international community exercised double standards when faced with the risk of a catastrophe there compared to action taken elsewhere.[5]
13.3. It is apparent that the members of the Inquiry were deeply distressed by their findings. They describe the delay in identifying as a genocide the events in Rwanda as “a failure by the Security Council....motivated by a lack of will to act, which is deplorable.”[6] They go on to make a critical point that our own report has already emphasized: “It is important to add the following: the imperative for international action is not limited to cases of genocide. The United Nations and its member states must also be prepared to mobilize political will to act in face of gross violations of human rights which have not reached the ultimate level of a genocide.” [7] In other words, as we have amply documented, the enormity of what was known about Rwanda was more than sufficient to demand a determined response by the UN.
13.4. The problem here had nothing whatsoever to do with lack of early warnings or inadequate information. We fully concur with the Carlsson Inquiry's harsh conclusions: “UNAMIR presented a series of deeply worrying reports which together amounted to considerable warnings that the situation in Rwanda could explode into ethnic violence. In sum, information was available – to UNAMIR, United Nations headquarters, and to key governments – about a strategy and threat to exterminate Tutsi, recurrent ethnic and political killings of an organized nature, death lists, persistent reports of the import and distribution of weapons to the population, and hate propaganda. That more was not done to follow up on this information and respond to it at an early stage was a costly failure: by United Nations Headquarters and UNAMIR, but also by the governments which were kept informed by UNAMIR, in particular those of Belgium, France, and the United States. The lack of determined action to deal with the Dallaire cable is only part of this wider picture of failed response to early warning.”[8]
13.5. That these countries had no doubt about the potential for real disaster looming in Rwanda was made abundantly clear. “Immediately upon receipt of the information about the crash [of Habyarimana's plane]... France, Belgium, the US, and Italy evidently believed the situation to be so volatile as to warrant immediate evacuation of their nationals.”[9] Indeed, France dispatched its planes to Kigali within two days of the plane going down.[10] For this Panel, that episode exposed four realities that have characterized many of the operations of the international community. First, when they are motivated, western powers can mobilize troops in a matter of days rather than weeks or months. Secondly, western powers are motivated when they feel that their direct self-interests are at stake. Thirdly, the UN instructed General Dallaire in the midst of the genocide to assign his troops to help France to evacuate foreign nationals, authorizing him to “exercise your discretion” about acting beyond UNAMIR's mandate, if it was necessary for him to do so for this purpose.[11] It is difficult not to conclude that this instruction was emblematic of a larger pernicious reality: the lives of Africans were considered less valuable to the world community than the lives of citizens of western nations. Fourthly, the familiar concepts of war are more comfortable for many nations to deal with and to take seriously than issues of human rights. As one senior diplomat told the Panel, his world did not give serious consideration to the warnings of ominous and massive human rights abuses in Rwanda that human rights NGOs consistently reported.[12]
13.6. The Carlsson Inquiry report speaks strongly about this serious failing. “Information about human rights must be a natural part of the basis for decision making on peacekeeping operations, within the Secretariat and by the Security Council. Reports by the Secretary-General to the Security Council should include an analysis of the human rights situation in the conflict concerned. Human rights information must be brought to bear in the internal deliberations of the Secretariat on early warning, preventive action, and peacekeeping. And increased efforts need to be made to ensure that the necessary human rights competence exists as part of the staff of UN missions in the field.”[13]
13.7. UNAMIR was authorized by the Security Council at the request of the belligerents themselves. The UN was already involved in the region at the request of the governments of both Uganda and Rwanda for a neutral force positioned on their joint border to verify Uganda's claim that it was not supporting the RPF rebels. In June 1993, the Security Council created the UN Observer Mission in Uganda/Rwanda (UNOMUR) under Canadian General, Romeo Dallaire. The Arusha Peace Agreement, which had finally been signed two months later, included a call for a peacekeeping force to help ensure its implementation. Arusha had given rise to a minor competition between the UN and the OAU, both of which made proposals to play the peacekeeper role.[14] UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, however, made it clear that Security Council members would not fund an operation they did not command and control. The government of Rwanda itself strongly insisted on the UN. As for the OAU, without external resources, it knew it lacked the capacity to play a major role in the peacekeeping operation.
13.8. In the end, the negotiating parties identified the UN as the main implementing agency for the Arusha agreement – an important step that shifted lead responsibility for conflict management from continental and sub-regional actors to the UN. Thus began the highly controversial saga of the ill-fated UNAMIR. Given the subsequent disastrous and humiliating role played by the UN in Rwanda, the decision to assign it a leadership role may well have been a major error.
13.9. The profound mistrust of the UN harboured to this day by the present rulers of Rwanda stems from this decision. Just about every mistake that could be made was made. First, when it was established, UNAMIR was not treated as a particularly difficult mission; the Security Council approved a force substantially weaker than the one the Arusha negotiators deemed necessary to implement the accords. Secondly, its mandate was wholly inadequate for the task at hand, denying the force the capacity to function effectively. Thirdly, even though the reality of the situation in Rwanda was repeatedly driven home to the world, no expansion of mandate or capacity was approved until five weeks into the genocide, and by the time the genocide ended, not one of the new soldiers assigned had arrived. Finally, the UN's insistent and utterly wrong-headed neutrality regarding the genocidaires and the RPF compromised its integrity and led it to concentrate on mediating an end to the civil war rather than saving the lives of innocent Rwandans.
13.10. Given that the international community had pressured both sides to agree to the Arusha accords, there was a natural assumption that it would then actively support the means to implement them. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tutsi of Rwanda were the tragic victims of an endless series of international failures, when any single serious intervention almost certainly could have saved many lives.
13.11. The UN Security Council was still smarting from the failure of its peacekeeping efforts in Somalia when the request for a Rwandan force was put forward during the autumn of 1993. As discussed earlier, the US was particularly traumatized because 18 of its soldiers in Somalia had been killed on October 3. The resolution calling for UNAMIR came before the Security Council on October 5; the following day, the American army left Somalia. This coincidence of timing proved disastrous for Rwanda, as domestic political considerations took priority over little-known catastrophes abroad.
13.12. With the exception, therefore, of France (and Rwanda itself, which by sheer chance began a temporary term on the Security Council on January 1, 1993), the members of the Council were simply not very interested in the problems of Rwanda. If the OAU or a sub-regional grouping of states had retained carriage of the accords after Arusha, at least Rwanda would have remained a central concern. From the perspective of those deliberating in New York, Rwanda was a tiny central African country about which the Security Council knew little, except the fact that the country was marginal to any apparent economic or political concerns known to anyone but the French. “The world can't take care of everything,” as one academic put it. “The UN is a small organization and can't take care of everything. We would have to be selective. If Nigeria collapses, it would be a catastrophe. If Egypt or Pakistan collapses, it would be a catastrophe. But Rwanda can be dispensed with.”[15] In other words, the Tutsi had two strikes against them at the UN before the crisis even began.
13.13. Nothing related to the protection of Rwandan citizens happened expeditiously over the next year. Despite the warning by the Secretary-General that such a delay would “seriously jeopardize”[16] the agreement, it took the Security Council eight weeks from the signing of the accord even to pass the resolution creating UNAMIR. Another two months passed before a substantial number of peacekeepers had been assembled in Rwanda – although, when they chose to, Security Council members were able to move their armed forces all over the world in matter of days. Both the French and the Americans soon did exactly that in Rwanda and eastern Zaire, but not, we regret to say, to save the targets of the genocide.
13.14. Not only did the UN dawdle, but the effort it made was begrudging and miserly. In this, the role of the US was decisive and destructive. The Clinton Administration, represented forthrightly at the UN by Ambassador Madeleine Albright, was determined to minimize the costs of any Rwandan operations, which meant limiting the size of the force. General Romeo Dallaire, who moved from commander of UNOMUR to commander of UNAMIR, asked for 4,500 soldiers because he did not believe he could get more. The US initially proposed 500; the total finally agreed was 2,548.[17] Contributing countries were so lax in providing the troops and equipment, however, that the full force was not deployed until months later, shortly before the genocide began. “To further complicate matters,” Dallaire later wrote, “when some of the contingents did finally arrive in Rwanda.... they did not have even the minimum scale of equipment needed” to accomplish their tasks.[18] Further, the UNAMIR budget was not formally approved until April 4, 1994, two days before the genocide. Because of this delay in funding, combined with other administrative problems, the force never received essential equipment and supplies, from armed personnel carriers to ammunition to food and medicine. For its entire difficult existence, UNAMIR operated on a “shoe-string.” [19]
13.15. From the outset, Dallaire understood that his mission was not being taken seriously. “In New York,” he told the Panel, “it was made obvious to us, in fact right from the beginning and verbally before we left that the contributing nations had had their fill of peacekeeping missions. This was because at that time there were 16 other UN missions going on, and ours was nothing but a little mission that was supposed to be a classic Chapter VI [peacekeeping] mission – an easy programme that was not to cost money in any significant terms. Really, nobody was interested in that.” [20]
13.16. Dallaire was a professional soldier with 30 years in the Canadian armed forces, but he had never been to Rwanda before the UNOMUR mission and knew little of its history. “I, the least experienced UN member on this UN team, was appointed to lead this mission,” Dallaire wrote after it was all over.[21] He was sent off with no briefing about what lay before him, and without being made aware of a report by the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, published only weeks earlier, indicating that a genocide could not be ruled out.[22] An official from the UN Secretariat's political wing, the Department of Political Affairs, had monitored the negotiations at Arusha for many months but had produced only a two-page synopsis that contained no analysis. Dallaire recalled that the Department “provided us with nothing on Arusha and Rwanda.” The American, French, and Belgian diplomats in Kigali all had excellent sources of information, but they did not share any of it with UNAMIR. In all discussions with them, Dallaire would , if anything, get conflicting information or advice, as when the French military attaché advised Dallaire that 500 unarmed observers would be sufficient to handle the situation in Rwanda.[23]
13.17. In the field, Dallaire quickly discovered that the title of Force Commander was substantially titular. The two dominant Force contingents were the Belgians and the Bangladeshi, constituting respectively 424 and 564 of UNAMIR's 1,260 total military personnel, and they responded only to orders from their own officers.[24] The commander also had little capacity to handle confidential matters discreetly. There was no secure phone for months, and when his inscription capability finally arrived, about the time the war broke out, he reports, “it was busted.” There were no translators attached to the mission, causing him to rely for translation on locally recruited staff. The danger of that solution was soon proven when a radio station broadcast clips of conversations Dallaire had held with government officials at UNAMIR headquarters. “So we knew the whole headquarters was infiltrated by local staff who were either being threatened or paid by one of the camps to provide internal information on the state of affairs within my office. We had no security capability of consequence. We didn't even have a safe, and we could not be sure that we could plug leaks of sensitive information.”[25]
13.18. The truth is that the Security Council, led by the US, utterly ignored the situation on the ground in Rwanda when they formulated the UNAMIR mandate. As we have seen, some genuinely believed that Arusha was the beginning of a bright new day for Rwanda. Others, recognizing the role of Hutu Power and hearing Rwandan officers in Arusha openly vowing never to let the accord go ahead, believed implementation would prove highly problematic. It was convenient for the Security Council to adopt the former position and disregard completely the latter. That way, they could be seen to authorize a UN mission, but could give it so little capacity that it could not invite the kind of mayhem that occurred in Somalia. This would be an appropriately simple mission for a simple assignment.
13.19. The premise was that all of Rwanda's troubles had been settled at Arch; and Rwanda's leaders would now implement those agreements in good faith, with UNAMIR as the world's witness. UNAMIR, apparently, would face no enemies who were likely to be furious at its very presence. There were, from this myopic vantage point, no malevolent forces planning a vast, murderous conspiracy against the Tutsi population. Yet in truth, even the most idealistic of optimists knew the future was precarious at best – which is precisely why the Arusha agreement called for a strong military mission. After all, as everyone on the Security Council surely should have known, only a week after the signing of the agreement the UN published a report by Waly Bacre Ndiaye, the UN Commission on Human Rights' Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, that painted an ominous picture of the Rwandan situation.
13.20. Ndiaye substantially confirmed the analysis that had been published and widely publicized earlier in 1993 by the NGO community's International Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuse in Rwanda. Without question, massacres and other serious human rights violations were taking place in Rwanda. Ndiaye also went dramatically further. The targeting of the Tutsi population led him to raise the possibility that the term genocide might be applicable – a notion broached in the NGOs press release but omitted from the final version of his report. He stated that he could not pass judgement at that stage, but, citing the Genocide Convention, he believed that the cases of “intercommunal violence” that had been brought to his attention indicated “very clearly that the victims of the attacks, Tutsi in the overwhelming majority of cases, have been targeted solely because of their membership in a certain ethnic group and for no other objective reason.”[26] The Carlsson Inquiry report comments: “Although Ndiaye – in addition to pointing out the serious risk of genocide in Rwanda – recommended a series of steps to prevent further massacres and other abuses, his report seems to have been largely ignored by the key actors within the United Nations system.”[27]
13.21. That members of the Security Council were either ignorant of or turned a blind eye to the possibility of genocide was truly remarkable. Yet this is exactly what happened when they authorized UNAMIR: They chose to disregard explicit early warnings of the potential perils that such a mission would inevitably face. UNAMIR's mandate, like its capacity, was constructed on a foundation of palpably false assumptions.
13.22. Significantly, UNAMIR was constituted as a Chapter VI peacekeeping mission instead of a Chapter VII peace enforcement operation. As a peacekeeping mission it was, essentially, a group of soldier-observers who could only use force to protect themselves. It would categorically not be a peacemaking mission, which has the right to impose peace by force.[28] This flew in the face of what the Arusha negotiators believed was required if their agreement was to be implemented. Where the accords had asked for troops to “guarantee overall security” in the country, the Security Council provided a force that would “contribute” to security, and then only in Kigali, the capital.[29] A provision of the accords that called on Blue Helmets to “assist in tracking arms caches and neutralization of armed gangs” was completely eliminated. Instead of charging the peacekeepers with the critical function of providing security for civilians, they were mandated to “investigate and report on”certain incidents.[30] It was only too evident that the Security Council had no interest in a serious military mission.
13.23. In a subsequent assessment, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operation's Lessons Learned Unit was scathing in its criticisms. “The mandates for UNAMIR,” it said bluntly, “were a product of the international political environment in which they were formulated, and tended to reflect concerns and imperatives of certain member states that had little to do with the situation in Rwanda. A fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict also contributed to false political assumptions and military assessments.”[31] In fact, “the nature of the conflict” was perfectly well understood by many, including General Dallaire, who had quickly grasped the true nature of the situation, But time after time, members of both the UN Security Council and the Secretariat chose to heed those voices who told them only what they already wanted to hear.
13.24. In Kigali, Dallaire was determined to interpret his mandate as flexibly as possible. He drew up draft rules of engagement that translated the mission's mandate into detailed regulations that would govern the conduct of his troops. The key provision was his Paragraph 17, which spelled out its intentions in the clearest possible terms: “UNAMIR will take the necessary action to prevent any crime against humanity ... There may also be ethnically or politically motivated criminal acts committed during this mandate which will morally and legally require UNAMIR to use all available means to halt them. Examples are executions, attacks on displaced persons or refugees.”[32]
13.25. Dallaire sent his draft rules to New York for the approval of the UN Secretariat in late November. By this time, the situation in Rwanda was already rapidly deteriorating. The ferocious violence unleashed by the assassination of Burundi's President Ndadaye a month earlier had sent hundreds of thousands of virulently anti-Tutsi Hutu fleeing into Rwanda, while Hutu radicals in Rwanda exploited the upheaval. Dallaire's Paragraph 17 was an attempt to prepare his puny command to deal more effectively with the situation that was already developing. New York never formally responded to his request for approval of his draft rules. But on every single subsequent occasion when he asked for more flexibility, he was firmly commanded, in no uncertain terms, to interpret his mandate in the most narrow and restricted way possible.
13.26. Never was this clearer than in New York's response to a cable from Dallaire dated January 11, 1994, which one writer rather melodramatically labelled the “genocide fax.”[33] (Although it is perhaps the best-known cable-fax of recent times, it only became public when it was leaked to a journalist in November 1995. Unaccountably, a copy was not included in the official UN record published in 1996 by the UN Department of Public Information, The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993-1996). The previous day, Colonel Luc Marchal, the Belgian officer who was commander of UNAMIR's Kigali sector, had met in great secrecy with an informant referred to only as Jean-Pierre, apparently a senior member of the feared interahamwe militia. Jean-Pierre Twatsinze, as he was later known to be, told Marchal that he had no objection to war against the RPF, but that his “mission now was to prepare the killing of civilians and Tutsi people, to make lists of Tutsi people, where they lived, to be able at a certain code name to kill them. Kigali city, he said, was divided in a certain number of areas, and each area was manned by... 10 or maybe more people. Some were armed with firearms, some with machetes, and the mission of those persons was just to kill the Tutsi... Jean-Pierre gave... a very good and clear description about the interahamwe organization. He described the cells, the armaments, the training, and he told me that everybody was suspected....[The goal] was to kill a maximum of Tutsi... I felt it was a real killing machine because the objective was very clear for everybody – kill, kill, and kill...just Tutsi must be killed.” [34]
13.27. Dallaire immediately relayed to New York the main points conveyed by Jean-Pierre. They contained the information that a deliberate strategy had been planned to provoke the killing of Belgian soldiers, an event that could be expected to result in the withdrawal of the entire Belgian contingent from Rwanda. The interahamwe was said to have trained 1,700 men who were scattered in groups of 40 throughout Kigali. The informant had been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali, and he suspected it was for their extermination. He said that his militia men were now able to kill up to 1,000 Tutsi in 20 minutes. Finally, the informant reported the existence of a weapons cache with at least 135 weapons – not a huge number, but according to the Arusha agreement Kigali was to be a weapons-free zone. Jean-Pierre was prepared to show UNAMIR the location of the weapons, if his family could be given protection.[35]
13.28. Dallaire sent this cable to General Maurice Baril, Military Adviser to the UN Secretary-General. As was usual, Baril shared the fax with select other senior officials in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), including Kofi Annan, then the Under-Secretary-General responsible for the Department, and his second-in-command, Assistant Secretary-General Iqbal Riza. The Carlsson Inquiry report faults Dallaire for failing to send his cable to others in DPKO,[36] which seems to us unwarranted; he was, after all, an officer following the chain-of-command and reporting to his immediate superior. In any event, it was widely known that the top bureaucrats in DPKO routinely shared information among themselves.[37]
13.29. The DPKO team clearly understood the full explosive implications of Dallaire's information. A response was sent immediately (under Kofi Annan's name, as was standard, but signed by Iqbal Riza, which was also standard and frequent practice). The reply was sent to Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General for Rwanda. Booh-Booh and Dallaire did not get along, often analyzing the local situation differently, and the two had different sets of informants in an intensely polarized society.[38] Booh-Booh was widely seen as close to the government camp, which alienated the RPF, while Dallaire was seen as close to the RPF, which made him suspect in government eyes. Critics of Booh-Booh believed he was blinded by his ties to the President's circle, while Dallaire was simply called “the Tutsi.” It was suggested to the Panel that Booh-Booh believed that maintaining a good personal relationship with Habyarimana would facilitate implementation of Arusha.[39] As a result, he often took a less pessimistic and less apocalyptic view than Dallaire, and DPKO was anxious to have Booh-Booh's assessment of both the informant and his information.
13.30. It seems that Booh-Booh often gave the benefit of the doubt to Habyarimana and his people. This time, however, he supported Dallaire all the way. He vouched for the informant, and explained that Dallaire was “prepared to pursue the operation in accordance with military doctrine with reconnaissance, rehearsal, and implementation using overwhelming force.”[40] Annan's response, again signed by Riza, flatly vetoed any such operation on the grounds that it went well beyond UNAMIR's mandate. He proposed an alternative that seems, under the circumstances, simply unfathomable to have suggested.
13.31. A few facts serve to place DPKO's response in context: Habyarimana's record of frustrating the implementation of the Arusha agreement was universally known, and UN officials had confronted him on it, personally and directly, several times. In December 1993, James Jonah, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, “warned the President that he had information that killings of the opposition were being planned and that the United Nations would not stand for this.”[41] Only a week before Dallaire sent his January 11 cable, he had raised with Habyarimana the issue of arms distributions to the regime's supporters; the President had said that he was unaware of the distribution, but would instruct his supporters to desist if Dallaire's information was correct.
13.32. In spite of these facts, Iqbal Riza, writing under the name of his chief, Kofi Annan, but without consulting Annan,[42] and apparently without consulting the Security Council,[43] firmly denied Dallaire authorization to confiscate the illegal arms caches. The informant was not to be afforded the protection he sought for himself and his family, and he disappeared from UNAMIR's ken. Booh-Booh and Dallaire were instructed to share with Habyarimana the new information and the threat it obviously represented to the peace process. They were told to assume that the President was not aware of the activities the informant had described. They were to insist that the President immediately look into the matter, take necessary action, and ensure that the subversive activities were stopped. The President was to inform UNAMIR within 48 hours of the steps he had taken, including the recovery of arms. The ambassadors of Belgium, France, and the US were also to be informed of the entire situation (the cable was, in any case, almost immediately common knowledge in their capitals),[44] and were to be asked to make similar representations to Habyarimana. Unaccountably, however, Riza chose not to instruct his Kigali people to inform the OAU or the Tanzanian ambassador; both of whom were monitoring Rwanda closely.[45]
13.33. The cable from DPKO ended with a statement that neatly encapsulated the priority of the US, Britain, and the UN Secretariat: “The overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.”[46]
13.34. The meeting of Dallaire and Booh-Booh with Habyarimana was swiftly arranged. The President denied any knowledge of the activities of the militia and promised to investigate. Forty-eight hours passed, then many more. The security situation in the country continued to deteriorate significantly. Finally, on February 2, three weeks after Dallaire's original urgent message, Booh-Booh cabled Annan to point out that Habyarimana had not informed UNAMIR of how his investigation had gone. The President never did follow up, and the UN let the subject drop. UNAMIR was profoundly demoralized; Colonel Luc Marchal, Dallaire's second-in-command, believed the mission had lost its credibility “because everybody in Kigali knows that there are arms caches, and everybody expected UNAMIR will do something to seize those armed caches ... for us it was the worst thing, just to stay and watch without reaction.”[47] As the Carlsson Inquiry understood, this “gave the signal to the interahamwe and other extremists that UNAMIR was not going to take assertive action to deal with such [arm] caches ”[48] – or anything else.
13.35. UN people in Kigali continued to inform the Secretariat of their concerns, however, about the distribution of arms, the activities of the militias, the killings, and the increased ethnic tension that continued throughout the early months of 1994. Wholly unanticipated problems did not help ease the tension felt by the UN mission. On January 22, a planeload of arms from France intended for Habyarimana's forces was confiscated by UNAMIR at Kigali airport. The delivery was in violation of the cease-fire agreement of the Arusha accords, which prohibited the introduction of arms into the area during the transition period. Formally recognizing this point, the French government argued that the delivery stemmed from an old contract and so was technically legal.[49]
13.36. On February 2, Booh-Booh wrote that the security situation was deteriorating on a daily basis. There were “increasingly violent demonstrations, nightly grenade attacks, assassination attempts, political and ethnic killings, and we are receiving more and more reliable and confirmed information that the armed militias of the parties are stockpiling and may possibly be preparing to distribute arms to their supporters ... If this distribution takes place, it will worsen the security situation even further and create a significant danger to the safety and security of UN military and civilian personnel and the population at large.”[50]
13.37. Booh-Booh also cited indications that the Rwandan army was preparing for a conflict, stockpiling ammunition, and attempting to reinforce positions in Kigali. The implications were ominous: “Should the present Kigali defensive concentration posture of UNAMIR be maintained, the security situation will deteriorate even further. We can expect more frequent and more violent demonstrations, more grenade and armed attacks on ethnic and political groups, more assassinations and, quite possibly, outright attacks on UNAMIR installations and personnel, as was done on the home of the SRSG [ Special Representative to the Secretary-General].” [51] To use a phrase that became commonplace after the genocide, the failure of the international community to stand up to Hutu Power reinforced the culture of impunity that further empowered the radicals. In a terrible irony, as UNAMIR's commanders perfectly well understood, the very feebleness of the UN's intervention emboldened the Hutu radicals, persuading them that they had nothing to fear from the outside world regardless of what they did.[52] This assessment, of course, proved to be accurate.
13.38. In Kigali, at least, the implications were clear: UNAMIR would have to find and confiscate some of the arms caches. Dallaire joined Booh-Booh in pressing for permission to take a more active role in such operations, but both were sharply rebuffed. It seems as if Dallaire's immediate superior, General Maurice Baril, was becoming impatient with Dallaire's grim predictions and incessant demands for greater action. Although both were Canadians and even former classmates, Baril considered his subordinate something of a “cowboy,” someone who leaped before thinking. Baril felt – and others in the Secretariat evidently agreed – that Dallaire had to be kept on a “leash.”[53]
13.39. The Secretariat held to the rigid interpretation of the mandate that they had given in their replies to Dallaire's January 11 cable and to all other comparable pleas from the field. Public security, Annan emphasized, was the responsibility of the Rwandan authorities and must remain so – even if Rwandan public security was becoming a cruel oxymoron. In the end, the warnings from the field – including the warning supplied by Dallaire's informant about the possible extermination of all the Tutsi in Kigali – somehow served to confirm the Secretariat's pre-existing bias.[54]
13.40. Western nations, as we have repeatedly emphasized, were fully cognizant of the situation. Some even reacted appropriately. Belgian diplomats in Kigali had better sources than most and knew exactly how close the country was to a violent explosion. In mid-February, Belgian Foreign Minister Willy Claes wrote to the Secretary-General advocating “a firmer stance on the part of the UNAMIR with respect to security.” [55] “Unfortunately,” comments the Carlsson Inquiry report, “this proposal does not appear to have been given serious attention within the Secretariat or among other interested countries.”[56]
13.41. In fact, it appears that no matter what they knew, the countries with influence were merely paying lip service to Rwanda's turmoil. On February 17, the Security Council expressed deep concern about the deterioration in the Rwandan security situation, particularly in Kigali, and reminded parties of their obligation to respect the weapons embargo. But such empty rhetoric, backed by a continuing refusal to contemplate the expansion of UNAMIR's mandate and resources, served merely as a goad to even more brazen behaviour by Hutu Power leaders. Indeed, now that Rwanda had duly taken its seat as a temporary member of the Security Council, Habyarimana and the Akazu had a direct pipeline to the inner corridors of UN power, and they knew that the US would never support a more effective intervention.
13.42. Six days after the Council expressed its deep concern, Michel Moussali, Special Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, warned of a possible “bloodbath of unparalleled proportions” in Rwanda.[57] The following day, Dallaire reported that information abounded regarding weapons distribution, death squad target lists,the planning of civil unrest and demonstrations. All this information was widely shared. Diplomats in Rwanda had received two lists of Tutsi who had been targeted by death squads from a deeply troubled Papal Nuncio, who was confident that these lists had become common knowledge by February.[58] “Time does seem to be running out for political discussions,” Dallaire commented, “as any spark on the security side could have catastrophic consequences.”[59] A short time later, a UNAMIR intelligence report quoted an informant who asserted that plans had been prepared at the headquarters of the MRND, the President's political party, for the extermination of all Tutsi in the event of a resumption of the war with the RPF.[60]
13.43. On March 30, the Secretary-General recommended that the Security Council extend UNAMIR's mandate by six months. Remarkably enough, despite everything that had transpired since UNAMIR was first approved the previous October, no expansion of mandate or upgrading of resources was now considered. Even so, key members of the Security Council were reluctant to accept an extension of this length, and on April 5 – coincidentally, the day before Habyarimana's plane would be shot down – a resolution was adopted that extended the mandate by slightly less than four months, with the possibility of a review after six weeks, if progress continued to be lacking. The resolution also requested, not for the first time, that the Secretary-General monitor the size and cost of UNAMIR “to seek economies”[61] – a consistently high priority among some Security Council members.
13.44. This resolution incorporated a perverse dogma that had somehow taken hold in the Security Council and Secretariat during these months. It was widely understood that the Hutu Power leaders were conspiring to drive UNAMIR out of Rwanda. That was, after all, the explicit goal of the plot to kill Belgian Blue Helmets that Dallaire's informant had revealed, and this information had been transmitted by Dallaire and Booh-Booh to the American, French, Belgian, and Tanzanian ambassadors in Kigali. Nevertheless, the Security Council insisted that continued support for the mission be contingent on implementation of the Arusha peace agreement.
13.45. The UN was virtually guaranteeing Hutu Power that the international community would leave the country wholly unprotected rather than bolster UNAMIR and give it more capacity to intervene if conditions in the country worsened. In a history teeming with incomprehensible decisions and events, this action by the Security Council seems to us to rank among the most irresponsible. Frankly, we can still hardly believe it happened, except for two facts. First, the same “threat” was repeated several times in subsequent months, even when the genocide was at its peak. Secondly, it has re-emerged again this year as a precondition for the new UN mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[62] The mission is authorized only if all the warring parties in the DRC agree to a cease-fire and to co-operate in future negotiations. But if they do so, as OAU spokespeople ask, why is the UN needed? Barely two months earlier Secretary-General Kofi Annan had fully accepted[63] the conclusions of the Carlsson Inquiry report which pointedly criticizes the position as wholly illogical. The lesson learned was surely obvious: The time a robust UN force is most required is precisely when there is no agreement and no good faith among the parties. Yet in the DRC, as we will see in more detail below, the Security Council has again bowed to the dogma that had been so completely discredited in Rwanda.
13.46. It seems somehow symbolically appropriate that the resolution of April 5 was the final act of the UN before President Habyarimana's plane was shot down the following evening.
BEFORE THE GENOCIDE: THE ROLE OF THE UNITED NATIONS
13.1. In the previous chapter, we attempted to explain why each of the two nations with the most power to effect the genocide had, in its own way, callously abandoned Rwandans to their grim fate. In this chapter, we will look more directly at the role of the United Nations in the months leading up to and during the tragedy. In this task, we are fortunate to be able to build on the work recently completed by the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (also called the “Carlsson Inquiry, ” after the Inquiry's chairperson). We have already shown that the members of the Security Council consciously chose to abdicate their responsibility for Rwanda. The Carlsson Inquiry's report focusses particularly on the sorry record of the UN Secretariat. Together, these draw a bleak picture of the so-called international community at work.
13.2. Let us say at the outset that, on the basis of our own research, we unequivocally endorse the major findings of the Carlsson Inquiry report:
The failure of the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole. There was a persistent lack of political will by member states to act, or to act with enough assertiveness....[1] The United Nations failed the people of Rwanda....[2]
The overriding failure...can be summarized as a lack of resources and lack of will to take on the commitment which would have been necessary to prevent or to stop the genocide...the fundamental capacity problems of UNAMIR [the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda] led to the terrible and humiliating situation of a UN peacekeeping force almost paralyzed in the face of some of the worst brutality humankind has seen in this century....[3]
The instinctive reaction within the Secretariat seems to have been to question the feasibility of an effective United Nations response, rather than actively investigating the possibility of strengthening the [UNAMIR] operation to deal with the new challenges on the ground....[4]
It has been stated repeatedly during the course of the interviews conducted by the Inquiry that Rwanda was not of strategic interest to third countries and that the international community exercised double standards when faced with the risk of a catastrophe there compared to action taken elsewhere.[5]
13.3. It is apparent that the members of the Inquiry were deeply distressed by their findings. They describe the delay in identifying as a genocide the events in Rwanda as “a failure by the Security Council....motivated by a lack of will to act, which is deplorable.”[6] They go on to make a critical point that our own report has already emphasized: “It is important to add the following: the imperative for international action is not limited to cases of genocide. The United Nations and its member states must also be prepared to mobilize political will to act in face of gross violations of human rights which have not reached the ultimate level of a genocide.” [7] In other words, as we have amply documented, the enormity of what was known about Rwanda was more than sufficient to demand a determined response by the UN.
13.4. The problem here had nothing whatsoever to do with lack of early warnings or inadequate information. We fully concur with the Carlsson Inquiry's harsh conclusions: “UNAMIR presented a series of deeply worrying reports which together amounted to considerable warnings that the situation in Rwanda could explode into ethnic violence. In sum, information was available – to UNAMIR, United Nations headquarters, and to key governments – about a strategy and threat to exterminate Tutsi, recurrent ethnic and political killings of an organized nature, death lists, persistent reports of the import and distribution of weapons to the population, and hate propaganda. That more was not done to follow up on this information and respond to it at an early stage was a costly failure: by United Nations Headquarters and UNAMIR, but also by the governments which were kept informed by UNAMIR, in particular those of Belgium, France, and the United States. The lack of determined action to deal with the Dallaire cable is only part of this wider picture of failed response to early warning.”[8]
13.5. That these countries had no doubt about the potential for real disaster looming in Rwanda was made abundantly clear. “Immediately upon receipt of the information about the crash [of Habyarimana's plane]... France, Belgium, the US, and Italy evidently believed the situation to be so volatile as to warrant immediate evacuation of their nationals.”[9] Indeed, France dispatched its planes to Kigali within two days of the plane going down.[10] For this Panel, that episode exposed four realities that have characterized many of the operations of the international community. First, when they are motivated, western powers can mobilize troops in a matter of days rather than weeks or months. Secondly, western powers are motivated when they feel that their direct self-interests are at stake. Thirdly, the UN instructed General Dallaire in the midst of the genocide to assign his troops to help France to evacuate foreign nationals, authorizing him to “exercise your discretion” about acting beyond UNAMIR's mandate, if it was necessary for him to do so for this purpose.[11] It is difficult not to conclude that this instruction was emblematic of a larger pernicious reality: the lives of Africans were considered less valuable to the world community than the lives of citizens of western nations. Fourthly, the familiar concepts of war are more comfortable for many nations to deal with and to take seriously than issues of human rights. As one senior diplomat told the Panel, his world did not give serious consideration to the warnings of ominous and massive human rights abuses in Rwanda that human rights NGOs consistently reported.[12]
13.6. The Carlsson Inquiry report speaks strongly about this serious failing. “Information about human rights must be a natural part of the basis for decision making on peacekeeping operations, within the Secretariat and by the Security Council. Reports by the Secretary-General to the Security Council should include an analysis of the human rights situation in the conflict concerned. Human rights information must be brought to bear in the internal deliberations of the Secretariat on early warning, preventive action, and peacekeeping. And increased efforts need to be made to ensure that the necessary human rights competence exists as part of the staff of UN missions in the field.”[13]
13.7. UNAMIR was authorized by the Security Council at the request of the belligerents themselves. The UN was already involved in the region at the request of the governments of both Uganda and Rwanda for a neutral force positioned on their joint border to verify Uganda's claim that it was not supporting the RPF rebels. In June 1993, the Security Council created the UN Observer Mission in Uganda/Rwanda (UNOMUR) under Canadian General, Romeo Dallaire. The Arusha Peace Agreement, which had finally been signed two months later, included a call for a peacekeeping force to help ensure its implementation. Arusha had given rise to a minor competition between the UN and the OAU, both of which made proposals to play the peacekeeper role.[14] UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, however, made it clear that Security Council members would not fund an operation they did not command and control. The government of Rwanda itself strongly insisted on the UN. As for the OAU, without external resources, it knew it lacked the capacity to play a major role in the peacekeeping operation.
13.8. In the end, the negotiating parties identified the UN as the main implementing agency for the Arusha agreement – an important step that shifted lead responsibility for conflict management from continental and sub-regional actors to the UN. Thus began the highly controversial saga of the ill-fated UNAMIR. Given the subsequent disastrous and humiliating role played by the UN in Rwanda, the decision to assign it a leadership role may well have been a major error.
13.9. The profound mistrust of the UN harboured to this day by the present rulers of Rwanda stems from this decision. Just about every mistake that could be made was made. First, when it was established, UNAMIR was not treated as a particularly difficult mission; the Security Council approved a force substantially weaker than the one the Arusha negotiators deemed necessary to implement the accords. Secondly, its mandate was wholly inadequate for the task at hand, denying the force the capacity to function effectively. Thirdly, even though the reality of the situation in Rwanda was repeatedly driven home to the world, no expansion of mandate or capacity was approved until five weeks into the genocide, and by the time the genocide ended, not one of the new soldiers assigned had arrived. Finally, the UN's insistent and utterly wrong-headed neutrality regarding the genocidaires and the RPF compromised its integrity and led it to concentrate on mediating an end to the civil war rather than saving the lives of innocent Rwandans.
13.10. Given that the international community had pressured both sides to agree to the Arusha accords, there was a natural assumption that it would then actively support the means to implement them. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tutsi of Rwanda were the tragic victims of an endless series of international failures, when any single serious intervention almost certainly could have saved many lives.
13.11. The UN Security Council was still smarting from the failure of its peacekeeping efforts in Somalia when the request for a Rwandan force was put forward during the autumn of 1993. As discussed earlier, the US was particularly traumatized because 18 of its soldiers in Somalia had been killed on October 3. The resolution calling for UNAMIR came before the Security Council on October 5; the following day, the American army left Somalia. This coincidence of timing proved disastrous for Rwanda, as domestic political considerations took priority over little-known catastrophes abroad.
13.12. With the exception, therefore, of France (and Rwanda itself, which by sheer chance began a temporary term on the Security Council on January 1, 1993), the members of the Council were simply not very interested in the problems of Rwanda. If the OAU or a sub-regional grouping of states had retained carriage of the accords after Arusha, at least Rwanda would have remained a central concern. From the perspective of those deliberating in New York, Rwanda was a tiny central African country about which the Security Council knew little, except the fact that the country was marginal to any apparent economic or political concerns known to anyone but the French. “The world can't take care of everything,” as one academic put it. “The UN is a small organization and can't take care of everything. We would have to be selective. If Nigeria collapses, it would be a catastrophe. If Egypt or Pakistan collapses, it would be a catastrophe. But Rwanda can be dispensed with.”[15] In other words, the Tutsi had two strikes against them at the UN before the crisis even began.
13.13. Nothing related to the protection of Rwandan citizens happened expeditiously over the next year. Despite the warning by the Secretary-General that such a delay would “seriously jeopardize”[16] the agreement, it took the Security Council eight weeks from the signing of the accord even to pass the resolution creating UNAMIR. Another two months passed before a substantial number of peacekeepers had been assembled in Rwanda – although, when they chose to, Security Council members were able to move their armed forces all over the world in matter of days. Both the French and the Americans soon did exactly that in Rwanda and eastern Zaire, but not, we regret to say, to save the targets of the genocide.
13.14. Not only did the UN dawdle, but the effort it made was begrudging and miserly. In this, the role of the US was decisive and destructive. The Clinton Administration, represented forthrightly at the UN by Ambassador Madeleine Albright, was determined to minimize the costs of any Rwandan operations, which meant limiting the size of the force. General Romeo Dallaire, who moved from commander of UNOMUR to commander of UNAMIR, asked for 4,500 soldiers because he did not believe he could get more. The US initially proposed 500; the total finally agreed was 2,548.[17] Contributing countries were so lax in providing the troops and equipment, however, that the full force was not deployed until months later, shortly before the genocide began. “To further complicate matters,” Dallaire later wrote, “when some of the contingents did finally arrive in Rwanda.... they did not have even the minimum scale of equipment needed” to accomplish their tasks.[18] Further, the UNAMIR budget was not formally approved until April 4, 1994, two days before the genocide. Because of this delay in funding, combined with other administrative problems, the force never received essential equipment and supplies, from armed personnel carriers to ammunition to food and medicine. For its entire difficult existence, UNAMIR operated on a “shoe-string.” [19]
13.15. From the outset, Dallaire understood that his mission was not being taken seriously. “In New York,” he told the Panel, “it was made obvious to us, in fact right from the beginning and verbally before we left that the contributing nations had had their fill of peacekeeping missions. This was because at that time there were 16 other UN missions going on, and ours was nothing but a little mission that was supposed to be a classic Chapter VI [peacekeeping] mission – an easy programme that was not to cost money in any significant terms. Really, nobody was interested in that.” [20]
13.16. Dallaire was a professional soldier with 30 years in the Canadian armed forces, but he had never been to Rwanda before the UNOMUR mission and knew little of its history. “I, the least experienced UN member on this UN team, was appointed to lead this mission,” Dallaire wrote after it was all over.[21] He was sent off with no briefing about what lay before him, and without being made aware of a report by the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, published only weeks earlier, indicating that a genocide could not be ruled out.[22] An official from the UN Secretariat's political wing, the Department of Political Affairs, had monitored the negotiations at Arusha for many months but had produced only a two-page synopsis that contained no analysis. Dallaire recalled that the Department “provided us with nothing on Arusha and Rwanda.” The American, French, and Belgian diplomats in Kigali all had excellent sources of information, but they did not share any of it with UNAMIR. In all discussions with them, Dallaire would , if anything, get conflicting information or advice, as when the French military attaché advised Dallaire that 500 unarmed observers would be sufficient to handle the situation in Rwanda.[23]
13.17. In the field, Dallaire quickly discovered that the title of Force Commander was substantially titular. The two dominant Force contingents were the Belgians and the Bangladeshi, constituting respectively 424 and 564 of UNAMIR's 1,260 total military personnel, and they responded only to orders from their own officers.[24] The commander also had little capacity to handle confidential matters discreetly. There was no secure phone for months, and when his inscription capability finally arrived, about the time the war broke out, he reports, “it was busted.” There were no translators attached to the mission, causing him to rely for translation on locally recruited staff. The danger of that solution was soon proven when a radio station broadcast clips of conversations Dallaire had held with government officials at UNAMIR headquarters. “So we knew the whole headquarters was infiltrated by local staff who were either being threatened or paid by one of the camps to provide internal information on the state of affairs within my office. We had no security capability of consequence. We didn't even have a safe, and we could not be sure that we could plug leaks of sensitive information.”[25]
13.18. The truth is that the Security Council, led by the US, utterly ignored the situation on the ground in Rwanda when they formulated the UNAMIR mandate. As we have seen, some genuinely believed that Arusha was the beginning of a bright new day for Rwanda. Others, recognizing the role of Hutu Power and hearing Rwandan officers in Arusha openly vowing never to let the accord go ahead, believed implementation would prove highly problematic. It was convenient for the Security Council to adopt the former position and disregard completely the latter. That way, they could be seen to authorize a UN mission, but could give it so little capacity that it could not invite the kind of mayhem that occurred in Somalia. This would be an appropriately simple mission for a simple assignment.
13.19. The premise was that all of Rwanda's troubles had been settled at Arch; and Rwanda's leaders would now implement those agreements in good faith, with UNAMIR as the world's witness. UNAMIR, apparently, would face no enemies who were likely to be furious at its very presence. There were, from this myopic vantage point, no malevolent forces planning a vast, murderous conspiracy against the Tutsi population. Yet in truth, even the most idealistic of optimists knew the future was precarious at best – which is precisely why the Arusha agreement called for a strong military mission. After all, as everyone on the Security Council surely should have known, only a week after the signing of the agreement the UN published a report by Waly Bacre Ndiaye, the UN Commission on Human Rights' Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, that painted an ominous picture of the Rwandan situation.
13.20. Ndiaye substantially confirmed the analysis that had been published and widely publicized earlier in 1993 by the NGO community's International Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuse in Rwanda. Without question, massacres and other serious human rights violations were taking place in Rwanda. Ndiaye also went dramatically further. The targeting of the Tutsi population led him to raise the possibility that the term genocide might be applicable – a notion broached in the NGOs press release but omitted from the final version of his report. He stated that he could not pass judgement at that stage, but, citing the Genocide Convention, he believed that the cases of “intercommunal violence” that had been brought to his attention indicated “very clearly that the victims of the attacks, Tutsi in the overwhelming majority of cases, have been targeted solely because of their membership in a certain ethnic group and for no other objective reason.”[26] The Carlsson Inquiry report comments: “Although Ndiaye – in addition to pointing out the serious risk of genocide in Rwanda – recommended a series of steps to prevent further massacres and other abuses, his report seems to have been largely ignored by the key actors within the United Nations system.”[27]
13.21. That members of the Security Council were either ignorant of or turned a blind eye to the possibility of genocide was truly remarkable. Yet this is exactly what happened when they authorized UNAMIR: They chose to disregard explicit early warnings of the potential perils that such a mission would inevitably face. UNAMIR's mandate, like its capacity, was constructed on a foundation of palpably false assumptions.
13.22. Significantly, UNAMIR was constituted as a Chapter VI peacekeeping mission instead of a Chapter VII peace enforcement operation. As a peacekeeping mission it was, essentially, a group of soldier-observers who could only use force to protect themselves. It would categorically not be a peacemaking mission, which has the right to impose peace by force.[28] This flew in the face of what the Arusha negotiators believed was required if their agreement was to be implemented. Where the accords had asked for troops to “guarantee overall security” in the country, the Security Council provided a force that would “contribute” to security, and then only in Kigali, the capital.[29] A provision of the accords that called on Blue Helmets to “assist in tracking arms caches and neutralization of armed gangs” was completely eliminated. Instead of charging the peacekeepers with the critical function of providing security for civilians, they were mandated to “investigate and report on”certain incidents.[30] It was only too evident that the Security Council had no interest in a serious military mission.
13.23. In a subsequent assessment, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operation's Lessons Learned Unit was scathing in its criticisms. “The mandates for UNAMIR,” it said bluntly, “were a product of the international political environment in which they were formulated, and tended to reflect concerns and imperatives of certain member states that had little to do with the situation in Rwanda. A fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict also contributed to false political assumptions and military assessments.”[31] In fact, “the nature of the conflict” was perfectly well understood by many, including General Dallaire, who had quickly grasped the true nature of the situation, But time after time, members of both the UN Security Council and the Secretariat chose to heed those voices who told them only what they already wanted to hear.
13.24. In Kigali, Dallaire was determined to interpret his mandate as flexibly as possible. He drew up draft rules of engagement that translated the mission's mandate into detailed regulations that would govern the conduct of his troops. The key provision was his Paragraph 17, which spelled out its intentions in the clearest possible terms: “UNAMIR will take the necessary action to prevent any crime against humanity ... There may also be ethnically or politically motivated criminal acts committed during this mandate which will morally and legally require UNAMIR to use all available means to halt them. Examples are executions, attacks on displaced persons or refugees.”[32]
13.25. Dallaire sent his draft rules to New York for the approval of the UN Secretariat in late November. By this time, the situation in Rwanda was already rapidly deteriorating. The ferocious violence unleashed by the assassination of Burundi's President Ndadaye a month earlier had sent hundreds of thousands of virulently anti-Tutsi Hutu fleeing into Rwanda, while Hutu radicals in Rwanda exploited the upheaval. Dallaire's Paragraph 17 was an attempt to prepare his puny command to deal more effectively with the situation that was already developing. New York never formally responded to his request for approval of his draft rules. But on every single subsequent occasion when he asked for more flexibility, he was firmly commanded, in no uncertain terms, to interpret his mandate in the most narrow and restricted way possible.
13.26. Never was this clearer than in New York's response to a cable from Dallaire dated January 11, 1994, which one writer rather melodramatically labelled the “genocide fax.”[33] (Although it is perhaps the best-known cable-fax of recent times, it only became public when it was leaked to a journalist in November 1995. Unaccountably, a copy was not included in the official UN record published in 1996 by the UN Department of Public Information, The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993-1996). The previous day, Colonel Luc Marchal, the Belgian officer who was commander of UNAMIR's Kigali sector, had met in great secrecy with an informant referred to only as Jean-Pierre, apparently a senior member of the feared interahamwe militia. Jean-Pierre Twatsinze, as he was later known to be, told Marchal that he had no objection to war against the RPF, but that his “mission now was to prepare the killing of civilians and Tutsi people, to make lists of Tutsi people, where they lived, to be able at a certain code name to kill them. Kigali city, he said, was divided in a certain number of areas, and each area was manned by... 10 or maybe more people. Some were armed with firearms, some with machetes, and the mission of those persons was just to kill the Tutsi... Jean-Pierre gave... a very good and clear description about the interahamwe organization. He described the cells, the armaments, the training, and he told me that everybody was suspected....[The goal] was to kill a maximum of Tutsi... I felt it was a real killing machine because the objective was very clear for everybody – kill, kill, and kill...just Tutsi must be killed.” [34]
13.27. Dallaire immediately relayed to New York the main points conveyed by Jean-Pierre. They contained the information that a deliberate strategy had been planned to provoke the killing of Belgian soldiers, an event that could be expected to result in the withdrawal of the entire Belgian contingent from Rwanda. The interahamwe was said to have trained 1,700 men who were scattered in groups of 40 throughout Kigali. The informant had been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali, and he suspected it was for their extermination. He said that his militia men were now able to kill up to 1,000 Tutsi in 20 minutes. Finally, the informant reported the existence of a weapons cache with at least 135 weapons – not a huge number, but according to the Arusha agreement Kigali was to be a weapons-free zone. Jean-Pierre was prepared to show UNAMIR the location of the weapons, if his family could be given protection.[35]
13.28. Dallaire sent this cable to General Maurice Baril, Military Adviser to the UN Secretary-General. As was usual, Baril shared the fax with select other senior officials in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), including Kofi Annan, then the Under-Secretary-General responsible for the Department, and his second-in-command, Assistant Secretary-General Iqbal Riza. The Carlsson Inquiry report faults Dallaire for failing to send his cable to others in DPKO,[36] which seems to us unwarranted; he was, after all, an officer following the chain-of-command and reporting to his immediate superior. In any event, it was widely known that the top bureaucrats in DPKO routinely shared information among themselves.[37]
13.29. The DPKO team clearly understood the full explosive implications of Dallaire's information. A response was sent immediately (under Kofi Annan's name, as was standard, but signed by Iqbal Riza, which was also standard and frequent practice). The reply was sent to Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General for Rwanda. Booh-Booh and Dallaire did not get along, often analyzing the local situation differently, and the two had different sets of informants in an intensely polarized society.[38] Booh-Booh was widely seen as close to the government camp, which alienated the RPF, while Dallaire was seen as close to the RPF, which made him suspect in government eyes. Critics of Booh-Booh believed he was blinded by his ties to the President's circle, while Dallaire was simply called “the Tutsi.” It was suggested to the Panel that Booh-Booh believed that maintaining a good personal relationship with Habyarimana would facilitate implementation of Arusha.[39] As a result, he often took a less pessimistic and less apocalyptic view than Dallaire, and DPKO was anxious to have Booh-Booh's assessment of both the informant and his information.
13.30. It seems that Booh-Booh often gave the benefit of the doubt to Habyarimana and his people. This time, however, he supported Dallaire all the way. He vouched for the informant, and explained that Dallaire was “prepared to pursue the operation in accordance with military doctrine with reconnaissance, rehearsal, and implementation using overwhelming force.”[40] Annan's response, again signed by Riza, flatly vetoed any such operation on the grounds that it went well beyond UNAMIR's mandate. He proposed an alternative that seems, under the circumstances, simply unfathomable to have suggested.
13.31. A few facts serve to place DPKO's response in context: Habyarimana's record of frustrating the implementation of the Arusha agreement was universally known, and UN officials had confronted him on it, personally and directly, several times. In December 1993, James Jonah, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, “warned the President that he had information that killings of the opposition were being planned and that the United Nations would not stand for this.”[41] Only a week before Dallaire sent his January 11 cable, he had raised with Habyarimana the issue of arms distributions to the regime's supporters; the President had said that he was unaware of the distribution, but would instruct his supporters to desist if Dallaire's information was correct.
13.32. In spite of these facts, Iqbal Riza, writing under the name of his chief, Kofi Annan, but without consulting Annan,[42] and apparently without consulting the Security Council,[43] firmly denied Dallaire authorization to confiscate the illegal arms caches. The informant was not to be afforded the protection he sought for himself and his family, and he disappeared from UNAMIR's ken. Booh-Booh and Dallaire were instructed to share with Habyarimana the new information and the threat it obviously represented to the peace process. They were told to assume that the President was not aware of the activities the informant had described. They were to insist that the President immediately look into the matter, take necessary action, and ensure that the subversive activities were stopped. The President was to inform UNAMIR within 48 hours of the steps he had taken, including the recovery of arms. The ambassadors of Belgium, France, and the US were also to be informed of the entire situation (the cable was, in any case, almost immediately common knowledge in their capitals),[44] and were to be asked to make similar representations to Habyarimana. Unaccountably, however, Riza chose not to instruct his Kigali people to inform the OAU or the Tanzanian ambassador; both of whom were monitoring Rwanda closely.[45]
13.33. The cable from DPKO ended with a statement that neatly encapsulated the priority of the US, Britain, and the UN Secretariat: “The overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.”[46]
13.34. The meeting of Dallaire and Booh-Booh with Habyarimana was swiftly arranged. The President denied any knowledge of the activities of the militia and promised to investigate. Forty-eight hours passed, then many more. The security situation in the country continued to deteriorate significantly. Finally, on February 2, three weeks after Dallaire's original urgent message, Booh-Booh cabled Annan to point out that Habyarimana had not informed UNAMIR of how his investigation had gone. The President never did follow up, and the UN let the subject drop. UNAMIR was profoundly demoralized; Colonel Luc Marchal, Dallaire's second-in-command, believed the mission had lost its credibility “because everybody in Kigali knows that there are arms caches, and everybody expected UNAMIR will do something to seize those armed caches ... for us it was the worst thing, just to stay and watch without reaction.”[47] As the Carlsson Inquiry understood, this “gave the signal to the interahamwe and other extremists that UNAMIR was not going to take assertive action to deal with such [arm] caches ”[48] – or anything else.
13.35. UN people in Kigali continued to inform the Secretariat of their concerns, however, about the distribution of arms, the activities of the militias, the killings, and the increased ethnic tension that continued throughout the early months of 1994. Wholly unanticipated problems did not help ease the tension felt by the UN mission. On January 22, a planeload of arms from France intended for Habyarimana's forces was confiscated by UNAMIR at Kigali airport. The delivery was in violation of the cease-fire agreement of the Arusha accords, which prohibited the introduction of arms into the area during the transition period. Formally recognizing this point, the French government argued that the delivery stemmed from an old contract and so was technically legal.[49]
13.36. On February 2, Booh-Booh wrote that the security situation was deteriorating on a daily basis. There were “increasingly violent demonstrations, nightly grenade attacks, assassination attempts, political and ethnic killings, and we are receiving more and more reliable and confirmed information that the armed militias of the parties are stockpiling and may possibly be preparing to distribute arms to their supporters ... If this distribution takes place, it will worsen the security situation even further and create a significant danger to the safety and security of UN military and civilian personnel and the population at large.”[50]
13.37. Booh-Booh also cited indications that the Rwandan army was preparing for a conflict, stockpiling ammunition, and attempting to reinforce positions in Kigali. The implications were ominous: “Should the present Kigali defensive concentration posture of UNAMIR be maintained, the security situation will deteriorate even further. We can expect more frequent and more violent demonstrations, more grenade and armed attacks on ethnic and political groups, more assassinations and, quite possibly, outright attacks on UNAMIR installations and personnel, as was done on the home of the SRSG [ Special Representative to the Secretary-General].” [51] To use a phrase that became commonplace after the genocide, the failure of the international community to stand up to Hutu Power reinforced the culture of impunity that further empowered the radicals. In a terrible irony, as UNAMIR's commanders perfectly well understood, the very feebleness of the UN's intervention emboldened the Hutu radicals, persuading them that they had nothing to fear from the outside world regardless of what they did.[52] This assessment, of course, proved to be accurate.
13.38. In Kigali, at least, the implications were clear: UNAMIR would have to find and confiscate some of the arms caches. Dallaire joined Booh-Booh in pressing for permission to take a more active role in such operations, but both were sharply rebuffed. It seems as if Dallaire's immediate superior, General Maurice Baril, was becoming impatient with Dallaire's grim predictions and incessant demands for greater action. Although both were Canadians and even former classmates, Baril considered his subordinate something of a “cowboy,” someone who leaped before thinking. Baril felt – and others in the Secretariat evidently agreed – that Dallaire had to be kept on a “leash.”[53]
13.39. The Secretariat held to the rigid interpretation of the mandate that they had given in their replies to Dallaire's January 11 cable and to all other comparable pleas from the field. Public security, Annan emphasized, was the responsibility of the Rwandan authorities and must remain so – even if Rwandan public security was becoming a cruel oxymoron. In the end, the warnings from the field – including the warning supplied by Dallaire's informant about the possible extermination of all the Tutsi in Kigali – somehow served to confirm the Secretariat's pre-existing bias.[54]
13.40. Western nations, as we have repeatedly emphasized, were fully cognizant of the situation. Some even reacted appropriately. Belgian diplomats in Kigali had better sources than most and knew exactly how close the country was to a violent explosion. In mid-February, Belgian Foreign Minister Willy Claes wrote to the Secretary-General advocating “a firmer stance on the part of the UNAMIR with respect to security.” [55] “Unfortunately,” comments the Carlsson Inquiry report, “this proposal does not appear to have been given serious attention within the Secretariat or among other interested countries.”[56]
13.41. In fact, it appears that no matter what they knew, the countries with influence were merely paying lip service to Rwanda's turmoil. On February 17, the Security Council expressed deep concern about the deterioration in the Rwandan security situation, particularly in Kigali, and reminded parties of their obligation to respect the weapons embargo. But such empty rhetoric, backed by a continuing refusal to contemplate the expansion of UNAMIR's mandate and resources, served merely as a goad to even more brazen behaviour by Hutu Power leaders. Indeed, now that Rwanda had duly taken its seat as a temporary member of the Security Council, Habyarimana and the Akazu had a direct pipeline to the inner corridors of UN power, and they knew that the US would never support a more effective intervention.
13.42. Six days after the Council expressed its deep concern, Michel Moussali, Special Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, warned of a possible “bloodbath of unparalleled proportions” in Rwanda.[57] The following day, Dallaire reported that information abounded regarding weapons distribution, death squad target lists,the planning of civil unrest and demonstrations. All this information was widely shared. Diplomats in Rwanda had received two lists of Tutsi who had been targeted by death squads from a deeply troubled Papal Nuncio, who was confident that these lists had become common knowledge by February.[58] “Time does seem to be running out for political discussions,” Dallaire commented, “as any spark on the security side could have catastrophic consequences.”[59] A short time later, a UNAMIR intelligence report quoted an informant who asserted that plans had been prepared at the headquarters of the MRND, the President's political party, for the extermination of all Tutsi in the event of a resumption of the war with the RPF.[60]
13.43. On March 30, the Secretary-General recommended that the Security Council extend UNAMIR's mandate by six months. Remarkably enough, despite everything that had transpired since UNAMIR was first approved the previous October, no expansion of mandate or upgrading of resources was now considered. Even so, key members of the Security Council were reluctant to accept an extension of this length, and on April 5 – coincidentally, the day before Habyarimana's plane would be shot down – a resolution was adopted that extended the mandate by slightly less than four months, with the possibility of a review after six weeks, if progress continued to be lacking. The resolution also requested, not for the first time, that the Secretary-General monitor the size and cost of UNAMIR “to seek economies”[61] – a consistently high priority among some Security Council members.
13.44. This resolution incorporated a perverse dogma that had somehow taken hold in the Security Council and Secretariat during these months. It was widely understood that the Hutu Power leaders were conspiring to drive UNAMIR out of Rwanda. That was, after all, the explicit goal of the plot to kill Belgian Blue Helmets that Dallaire's informant had revealed, and this information had been transmitted by Dallaire and Booh-Booh to the American, French, Belgian, and Tanzanian ambassadors in Kigali. Nevertheless, the Security Council insisted that continued support for the mission be contingent on implementation of the Arusha peace agreement.
13.45. The UN was virtually guaranteeing Hutu Power that the international community would leave the country wholly unprotected rather than bolster UNAMIR and give it more capacity to intervene if conditions in the country worsened. In a history teeming with incomprehensible decisions and events, this action by the Security Council seems to us to rank among the most irresponsible. Frankly, we can still hardly believe it happened, except for two facts. First, the same “threat” was repeated several times in subsequent months, even when the genocide was at its peak. Secondly, it has re-emerged again this year as a precondition for the new UN mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[62] The mission is authorized only if all the warring parties in the DRC agree to a cease-fire and to co-operate in future negotiations. But if they do so, as OAU spokespeople ask, why is the UN needed? Barely two months earlier Secretary-General Kofi Annan had fully accepted[63] the conclusions of the Carlsson Inquiry report which pointedly criticizes the position as wholly illogical. The lesson learned was surely obvious: The time a robust UN force is most required is precisely when there is no agreement and no good faith among the parties. Yet in the DRC, as we will see in more detail below, the Security Council has again bowed to the dogma that had been so completely discredited in Rwanda.
13.46. It seems somehow symbolically appropriate that the resolution of April 5 was the final act of the UN before President Habyarimana's plane was shot down the following evening.
Re: Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
CHAPTER 14
THE GENOCIDE
14.1. At 8:30 on the evening of April 6. 1994, the Mystère Falcon jet carrying the President of Rwanda was shot down as it was returning to Kigali airport. The plane crashed into the grounds of the Presidential palace. All aboard were killed, including Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira, the French air crew, and several senior members of Habyarimana's staff.[1]
14.2. The crash quickly triggered one of the great tragedies of our age. When it ended little more than 100 days later, at least one-half million – and more likely, 800,000 – women, children and men, the vast majority of them Tutsi, lay dead. Thousands more were raped, tortured, and maimed for life. Millions, mostly Hutu, were displaced internally or fled as refugees to neighbouring countries. This was a tragedy that never had to happen. The Rwandan genocide did not occur by chance. It demanded an overall strategy, scrupulous planning and organization, control of the levers of government, highly motivated killers, the means to butcher vast numbers of people, the capacity to identify and kill the victims, and tight control of the media to disseminate the right messages both inside and outside the country. This diabolical machine had been created piecemeal in the years after the 1990 invasion, accelerating in the second half of 1993 with the signing of the Arusha accords and the assassination in Burundi by Tutsi soldiers of its democratically-elected Hutu President. In theory at least, everything was ready and waiting when the President's plane went down.
14.3. But whether Hutu Power deliberately shot down the plane in order to trigger the genocide is unknown. Did the radicals create this opportunity, or did they exploit it once it happened? On present evidence, it is impossible to say. Nor did the events immediately after the crash necessarily indicate that the plotters had been waiting for this exact moment to strike. There was considerable confusion within the Hutu elite for almost two days. A new government was not formed until April 8. It took almost 12 hours after the crash before the murders began of Hutu moderates and those Tutsi whose names had been included on the death lists circulating in Kigali. The real genocide – the exclusive concentration on the mass elimination of all Tutsi – really began on April 12. It is even arguable that a coup by the radicals against the coalition government, not genocide, was the original aim in the immediate wake of the crash. It therefore appears that, notwithstanding the efficient killing machine that had been constructed, when the time came the conspirators had to resort to consider improvisation as they went along, and indeed that there were different levels of preparedness around the country, depending on local attitudes to Tutsi. In the north-west, for example, where many of the Akazu had their roots, there was an immediate predisposition to turn against local Tutsi; in Butare, the slaughter could not go ahead until the radicals replaced local administrators with their own people.
14.4. Once Hutu Power was in control everywhere, the kind of awesome efficiency for which Rwanda had become well known made itself manifest. Nor can there be the slightest doubt about the goal, as Jean Kambanda, the Prime Minister during these months, confessed at his trial four years later when he pleaded guilty to genocide. Not only had it been planned in advance, he admitted that “there was in Rwanda in 1994 a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Tutsi, the purpose of which was to exterminate them. Mass killings of hundreds of thousands occurred in Rwanda, including women and children, old and young, who were pursued and killed at places where they sought refuge: prefectures, commune offices, schools, churches, and stadiums.”[2]
14.5. Kambanda agreed that during the genocide, he chaired Cabinet meetings “where the course of massacres were actively followed, but no action was taken to stop them.”[3] He participated in the dismissal of the prefect of Butare “because the latter had opposed the massacres and the appointment of a new prefect to ensure the spread of massacres of Tutsi in Butare.”[4] He issued a directive on June 8 that “encouraged and reinforced the interahamwe who were committing the mass killings of the Tutsi civilian population....[By] this directive the government assumed the responsibility for the actions of the interahamwe.[5] In fact his government distributed arms and ammunition to these groups.”[6]
14.6. Kambanda confessed that he had appeared on radio station RTLMC on June 21, when he encouraged the station to “continue to incite the massacres of the Tutsi civilian population, specifically stating that this radio station was an indispensable weapon in the fight against the enemy.” [7] During the genocide, the trial judges noted, he incited prefects and burgomasters to commit massacres and killing of civilians, and visited a number of prefectures “to incite and encourage the population to commit these massacres, including congratulating the people who had committed these killings.”[8] The judges also noted that, “[Kambanda] acknowledges uttering the incendiary phrase which was subsequently repeatedly broadcast, ‘You refuse to give your blood to your country and the dogs drink it for nothing.’”[9] Once he was personally asked to take steps to protect children who had survived the massacre at a hospital and he did not respond. On the same day, after the meeting, the children were killed.[10]
14.7. Finally, Kambanda admitted that “he ordered the setting up of roadblocks with the knowledge that these roadblocks were used to identify Tutsi for elimination, and that as Prime Minister he participated in the distribution of arms and ammunition to members of political parties, militias, and the population, knowing that these weapons would be used in the perpetration of massacres of civilian Tutsi.”[11] He himself was “an eyewitness to the massacres of Tutsi and had knowledge of them from regular reports of prefects and Cabinet discussions.”[12]
14.8. Although Kambanda has since withdrawn his guilty plea in somewhat mysterious circumstances, we know a great deal about the course of the genocide that corroborates his original confession. This chapter will attempt to reconstruct the unfolding of those 100 days.
The first steps
14.9. Twenty minutes after the crash Rwandan soldiers were ordered to block the airport; not even UNAMIR troops could get through. At nine p.m., half an hour after the crash, station RTLMC announced the news; shortly after that, it announced the death of the President.[13] The Presidential Guard soon blockaded the home of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and began to evacuate MRND politicians and their families to a military camp. At the same time, they ordered leading politicians from the opposition parties to stay in their homes. The Prime Minister telephoned General Dallaire at 10 p.m. to say that, while her moderate ministers were at home terrified, all her extremist ministers had disappeared and could not be contacted.[14] Early the next morning, the interahamwe were called out to patrol the streets of Kigali while the military set up barricades through the centre of the city.
14.10. From the start, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, head of administration at the Ministry of Defence and the man most authorities point to as the leader of the genocide, attempted to take charge. He made it clear from the start that the military would control the situation until some sort of political structure could come into place, but UNAMIR Ccommander General Dallaire and UN Special Representative Jacques Roger Booh-Booh both recommended strongly that a legitimate civilian authority should continue to govern.[15] Bagosora, the military and the MRND all agreed that they would no longer deal with Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, but there was strong disagreement about a civilian government. Bagosora continued to press hard for a military authority, presumably one with him in charge, but opposition was so serious that fighting broke out between a faction of the military and the gendarmerie on one side, and Bagosora's allies in the Presidential Guard on the other.
14.11. On April 7, Presidential Guards killed the two candidates for the presidency of the transitional assembly, one of whom would have replaced Habyarimana.[16] They also killed the president of the Constitutional Court and the Minister of Information, both of whom were moderate Hutu members of the coalition government and supporters of the Arusha agreement; their murders would more easily allow the radicals to form a government fully committed to Hutu Power. On the same day, government soldiers murdered Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana and attacked the heads of opposition political parties, killing them or forcing them to flee.
14.12. After making one last, unsuccessful effort to get agreement to install a military regime, early on the morning of April 8, Colonel Bagosora put together an interim civilian government made up of 12 MRND ministers and eight opposition party members, all sympathetic to Hutu Power.[17] Colonel Gatsinzi was appointed chief of military staff, Dr. Théodore Sindikubwabo became President and Jean Kambanda was Prime Minister. In a direct response to the domination of north-westerners in the Habyarimana government, many of the existing and newly appointed ministers were from southern Rwanda – an attempt to confer legitimacy on and establish a broader regional base for the government. While Bagosora and his clique may not have achieved the personal dominance they sought, the new government was as committed to the genocide as they were.
14.13. One final hope remained to prevent a catastrophe that seemed all but inexorable. There were moderate officers in the Rwandan army who were strongly opposed to Hutu Power, but as so often had happened in Rwanda history, they were easily marginalized. RPF Commander Paul Kagame contacted Dallaire on the evening of April 7 and offered to work together with these moderates if they could organize themselves into a fighting force. He told Dallaire that he was “willing to negotiate and build up a capability with them, but they have got to prove that they are willing to take risks and also prove they are something more than weak, ineffective officers.” Tragically for their country, they could do neither. Dallaire discovered that they “were never able to coalesce because every unit they had under command had been totally infiltrated...[and] they would not risk their lives and the lives of their families. And so they never coalesced within the first few days to build moderate capability to overrun the extremists.”[18]
14.14. Ten days after the start of the genocide, the leadership began to contend with the opposition in earnest. The interim government replaced Gatsinzi with Bagosora's first choice, Augustin Bizimungu. On the orders of the government, the Presidential Guards killed two prominent prefects who had opposed the genocide in their regions and dismissed several dozen other administrators. Local authorities were encouraged to do the same “cleaning up” within their own local administrations.
14.15. By April 12, under increasing military threat from the RPF in Kigali, the interim government left the capital and settled in Murambi, in the prefecture of Gitarama. They brought with them the political, military, and administrative leaders of the genocide, who travelled throughout the prefecture, preaching and teaching genocide. Gitamara was typical. The combined pressure by political authorities and the militias effectively destroyed any open opposition to the interim government and its programme of genocide.
The murder of the Prime Minister, Cabinet Ministers and Hutu moderates
14.16. As soon as Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana understood that her authority would no longer be recognized, she asked for military protection and an escort to Radio Rwanda so that she might speak to Rwandans as their Prime Minister. When the UNAMIR troops arrived at her home early in the morning of April 7, they were fired upon and their vehicles were disabled.[19] For several hours, soldiers of the Presidential Guard searched for the Prime Minister; shortly before noon, they found and killed her and her husband. Her five children narrowly escaped and were eventually brought to safety.
14.17. This was all part of a deliberate policy to kill anyone likely to criticize the new regime or the genocide. As such, the targets included Prime Minister-designate Faustin Twagiramungu, other prominent Hutu politicians, administrators (both Tutsi and Hutu), wealthy Tutsi businesspeople, human rights activists, and the remaining leadership of the opposition parties. Military officers in Kigali dispatched soldiers and militia to implement the policy in prefectures all across Rwanda.
14.18. The centre and southern regions of the country, where Tutsi were more integrated and numerous, proved initially resistant to the idea of Hutu Power and genocide. As a result, the leaders of the genocide held meetings in these areas to push local administrators into collaboration. In the end, despite their initial misgivings, the prefects and burgomasters were persuaded or forced to co-operate.
14.19. On April 16, the interim government reinforced its support by recalling to active duty officers loyal to Bagosora. But there was still a continuing threat from soldiers who would not participate in the genocide. Again, the interim government moved quickly. Dissenting military officers were removed one way or another – ousted from office, transferred into the field, driven into hiding, or killed.[20]
The first slaughter of Tutsi
14.20. In the early morning following the day of the plane crash, on April 7, approximately 1,500 to 2,000 elite forces of the Rwandan army and 2,000 partisan militia began to kill Tutsi and Hutu in Kigali who had been on the death lists prepared in advance.[21] Troops of the RPF, who had been based in Kigali post-Arusha to protect their delegates to the transitional government, came to their defence, thereby renewing the war with the government and army. But the RPF's efforts were insufficient at this stage to halt the attacks in the city or elsewhere. All at once, the country was engulfed by both a genocide and a civil war.
14.21. The resumption of armed hostilities between the Rwandan army and the RPF was exploited by the interim government to justify its assaults on Tutsi and moderate Hutu, labelling them RPF accomplices and allies. In the first few days, attackers systematically killed Tutsi and Hutu political opponents in their own neighbourhoods using curfews, barriers, and patrols to control the population.
14.22. The roadblocks and barriers were staffed by soldiers and gendarmerie on the main roads, while communal police, civil self-defence forces, and volunteers guarded others. Together, they successfully stemmed the flight of victims who tried to escape the genocide. Anyone who tried to hide was tracked down by search patrols that scoured the neighbourhoods, checking in ceilings, cupboards, latrines, fields, under beds, in car trunks, under dead bodies, in bushes, swamps, forests, rivers, and islands. By April 11, after barely five days, the Rwandan army, interahamwe, and party militias had killed 20,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.[22]
14.23. On April 12, the government shifted its attack and focussed on killing only Tutsi. All the preconditions were now firmly in place; it can be said that the full-blown genocide now definitively began. Government and political leaders used both Radio Rwanda and the radio station RTLMC to declare that there was only one enemy: the Tutsi. Ordinary Hutu were instructed to get involved in the war against the Tutsi, fight the enemy, and finish the “work”. Officials also moved to stem the tide of Tutsi fleeing Rwanda. Prefects were ordered not to authorize any departures, and Tutsi were killed as they attempted to cross the borders.
14.24. From that point on, the overwhelming number of Tutsi killed in Rwanda died in large-scale massacres. Thousands sought sanctuary in public sites such as churches, schools, hospitals, or offices. Others were ordered by Hutu administrators to assemble in large public areas. In both cases, this left the Tutsi even more vulnerable to Hutu soldiers and civilian forces, who were ordered to kill en masse. For three weeks in April, the party militias, the Presidential Guards, interahamwe, and FAR soldiers killed many thousands of Tutsi every day.
14.25. A pattern of slaughter emerged. First, the interahamwe surrounded the building to ensure that no one escaped. Then, the military fired tear gas or fragmentation grenades to kill and disorient intended victims. Those who fled the building were immediately killed. Soldiers, police, militias, and civil self-defence forces then entered the building and killed all the remaining occupants. To ensure that no one escaped, search parties would inspect the rooms and all the surrounding areas outside. The following day, the interahamwe returned to kill any wounded who were still alive.
14.26. The following means of killing were identified by Physicians for Human Rights: machetes, massues (clubs studded with nails), small axes, knives, grenades, guns, and fragmentation grenades. The genocidaires beat people to death, amputated limbs, buried victims alive, drowned, or raped and killed later. Many victims had both their Achilles tendons cut with machetes in order to immobilize them so they could be finished off at another time.[23]
14.27. Victims were treated with sadistic cruelty and suffered unimaginable agony. Tutsi were buried alive in graves they had dug themselves. Pregnant women had their wombs slashed open, so the foetuses could be killed. Internal organs were removed from living people. Family members were ordered to kill others in the family or be killed themselves. People were thrown alive into pit latrines. Those who hid in the attic had the house burned down around them. Children were forced to watch the hideous murders of their parents. Lucky victims were those who could bribe their killers to use a bullet for a quick death.
14.28. Through all this, some Tutsi managed to escape, but the militias had clear instructions to track down and kill any men, women and children who had fled to the rivers, swamps, bushes, and mountains. Tens of thousands more Tutsi died in this fashion.
14.29. For three weeks, the conspirators attempted to hide the rural genocide from the outside world. Shrewd manipulators of the media, the Hutu Power leaders blamed the carnage on the civil war, which confused foreign correspondents who knew little about the real situation. Most foreign nationals, including most journalists, were airlifted out early in the genocide. Eventually, however, the magnitude of the butchery drew international notice and condemnation, making it no longer solely the concern of those human rights activists and humanitarian organizations that had repeatedly reported on the killings.
14.30. On April 22, Anthony Lake, National Security Advisor to President Clinton, issued a statement from the White House calling on the government and the military to halt the slaughter.. On April 30, the UN Security Council issued a warning to Rwandan leaders about their personal responsibility for destroying an ethnic group. On May 3, the Pope issued a strong condemnation of the genocide, and the next day, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated that there was a real genocide in Rwanda.[24]
14.31. As a result, the interim government changed strategies for a third time. The interahamwe, the party militias, and the civilian self-defence forces were ordered to track down all remaining Tutsi and kill them in a more discreet and disciplined fashion.[25] No survivors were to be left to tell the story. The clean-up operation was much different than the large-scale killings; victims now knew their killers as neighbours, colleagues, or one-time friends.
14.32. During the last days of April and through the month of May, the RPF made dramatic advances throughout the country. In response, the interim government re-launched its large-scale attacks against Tutsi. In some communities women, children, infants, and the elderly had been spared during the first assaults; they now were targeted.
14.33. In late May, the RPF took the airport and the major military camp in Kigali, and on May 27, the militia leaders fled the capital.[26] By mid-June, the interim government was on the run. On July 4, the RPF took Kigali. On July 18, the RPF announced that the war was over. The following day, the new President and Prime Minister were sworn in. Because the RPF had won the war, the genocide, too, now came to an end.
The attack on civil society
14.34. On the morning after Habyarimana's death, the Presidential Guard began to spread across Kigali, gathering up people who had been targeted for execution. Hutu Power radicals had always had a sophisticated understanding of the need to manage public opinion, both in Rwanda and abroad. That goal helped guide their lists of priority targets. Radio station RTLMC and Radio Rwanda became direct arms of the genocide, broadcasting the names and hiding places of intended victims. In this way, the army and militias tracked people down wherever they were, from one end of Rwanda to the other.
14.35. The attacks had many targets. First, the interim government focussed its attention on killing government and opposition members, both national and local, who might prove to be obstacles to the smooth course of the genocide. A second target was to eliminate Hutu moderates who had influence and so were deemed a threat. Third, the government attacked critics such as journalists and human rights activists who had failed to be silenced by other means.
14.36. Professionals, too, came under attack. Some lawyers were killed because they had defended political opponents or were associated with controversial causes. Other lawyers were killed solely because they were Tutsi. In the first days of the genocide, some officials tried to use the judicial system to protect threatened colleagues, but to no avail. Burgomasters released any genocidaire who was detained, and prosecutors simply gave up trying to bring killers, rapists, or arsonists to trial.
14.37. Tutsi who were aid workers or employees of international organizations and government companies were also singled out for killing, along with a large number of teachers and school administrators. Many of these people were leaders in their communities and had been active in political parties opposed to the government.
14.38. The Hutu militias also killed priests, nuns and other clergy, especially those who were Tutsi or who sheltered intended victims. In addition, priests were killed if they were known to be independent thinkers who could influence opinion, including foreign opinion.
The murder of the Belgian UNAMIR soldiers
14.39. Radio Station RTLMC immediately had blamed the Belgian Blue Helmets for the downing of the President's plane. There can hardly be a question that the genocidaires' plan called for an attack on these soldiers, precisely as General Dallaire's informant had warned four months earlier. It took less than a day for the plan to be consummated.
14.40. The military escort requested by Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana for the morning following Habyarimana's death finally brought UNAMIR peacekeepers to her home, but when they arrived, they came under fire from Rwandan soldiers.
14.41. The soldiers took the 15 peacekeepers to a military camp in Kigali, where they carefully separated the Ghanaian from the Belgian troops.[27] The Ghanaians were led away to safety, but the 10 Belgians were brutally beaten and shot to death by a group of Hutu soldiers. This incident had exactly the effect that the cynical genocidaires had shrewdly foreseen, as the Dallaire cable of January 11 had indicated.[28] The Belgians withdrew the remainder of their troops and led a nearly successful movement to end the UN intervention in Rwanda. Total withdrawal seemed politically unacceptable, however, even to the leading members of the Security Council. As a result, the world witnessed the unprecedented phenomenon of a UN peacekeeping mission actually sharply reducing its forces in the midst of a genocide.
The key internal actors: Akazu, government, politicians, intellectuals, military and militia leaders, the media
14.42. For decades, Rwanda had been renowned for its efficiency, its administrative competence, its highly structured system of public administration, its top-down authority system, and its genius for imposing discipline and deference on its population. All of these attributes were brought to bear in organizing the genocide by a calculating elite who understood only too well how to operate this awesomely efficient machine. The names of most of the masterminds are known – the individuals who planned the genocide, managed its implementation and watched it unfold through the months of April, May, and June and into July.
14.43. The Akazu was the special inner circle of advisors to Habyarimana, most of whom came from his north-western prefecture or were relatives of his wife. Their close personal ties to the President made them the centre of political, economic, social, and military power in Rwanda. The Akazu, which included one of Madame Habyarimana's brothers, bankrolled the interahamwe (theMRND militia) and death squads known as Network Zero and Amasasu, (Bullets), bothof which had carried out political killings prior to April 6 and during thegenocide. Madame Habyarimana herself would have been involved in some of the initial political decisions made before April 9, whenshe was among the first to be evacuated to Paris by the French.[29]
14.44. The government, the military, and the politicians worked virtually as one. Colonel Bagosora of the Rwandan Armed Forces effectively guided the genocide and operated as head of the army. He was assisted, militarily, by the commanders of the Presidential Guard, elite units and other senior military leaders. The army played a key organizational role and lent its skills and weaponry to every large-scale attack and operation. The army also provided important logistical help with military vehicles and communications systems, which was vital to the effectiveness of the genocide.
14.45. For a short time, the military chief of staff, Gatsinzi, along with the head of the national police,General Ndindiliyimana, tried to wrest power from Bagosora.[30] But the Presidential Guards and elite forces stood outside the military hierarchy and were loyal only to Bagosora. Their superior training and weaponry put them almost beyond military challenge. Moreover, by the afternoon of April 7, the RPF had left their headquarters to halt the killing of Tutsi civilians in Kigali. Once war was renewed, senior officers could not bring themselves to desert the army or change the government's course.
14.46. Politically, the leaders of the MRND put together the interim government at the request of Colonel Bagosora. Cabinet ministers came from the pro-Hutu Power factions of their party. Together and separately, they constituted a valuable pool of information, motivation, ideology, and practical support. They mobilized party militias, local party members, and ordinary Hutu to take part in the genocide. Many spread out to the countryside or got on the radio to speak about the need for total Hutu solidarity in the war against the outsiders.
14.47. National administrators were important conduits for the interim government. They directed the population to obey orders from the military and exhorted the Hutu to “work with,” “assist,” and “support” the army. But it was at the local level that administrators played the most vital roles. Local civilian authorities were responsible for calling up hundreds of people to carry out killings at public sites, and it was their job to arrange for a stable cadre of civilians to operate barriers, form search parties and track survivors. Just as important, they acted as informants to their superiors about developments in their area.
14.48. The party militias were a powerful base of support, especially when their numbers increased once the genocide began. Organizationally, they were accountable to various political parties, but at the centre and on the ground, the militias soon assumed a leadership position in planning, organizing and implementing the genocide. Because they came from neighbourhoods all across the country, they knew their neighbours personally. This knowledge proved indispensable in the systematic, house-by-house killing that took place over many weeks. The militias were directed from one location to another, a clear indication that their deployment was a national concern and priority. Once there, they followed the orders of the soldiers on the spot.
14.49. Within a week of the launch, the interim government and the army moved to organize a formal structure for mobilizing civilians and putting them under the control and training of retired soldiers. Once they were properly trained and engaged, the civil self-defence forces, as they were known, expanded the militias' range of activities and operated with considerable, if grisly,efficiency. The two civilian forces operated barriers together, went on patrol and into combat together and even had an elaborate organizational structure. In creating this system, the interim government effectively added a fourth chain of command to the military, political, and administrative components.
14.50. Behind the more obvious presence of the politicians, soldiers and administrators was a wealthy and powerful group of business people, some of them former members of the Akazu. They were pulled together by Félicien Kabuga, who had helped organize radio station RTLMC.[31] The group retired to the safety of a lakeshore town from which they advised the interim government on finance and foreign affairs. For example, after evidence of the genocide began to leak out of the country, the group urged the government to send delegations abroad to give their version of events – advice the government gratefully took. Kabukialso announced a fund to support the war effort and called on all Rwandans living abroad to contribute. Nearly US$140,000 was collected and distributed “to help civilians fight the enemy.” [32]
14.51. The interim government also enjoyed support from directors of the public utilities; government companies; and the transportation, hospital and communications services. These long-time cronies of President Habyarimana depended on the government for their positions and affluence. Some helped to finance the militias and actively promoted the genocide among their employees.[33] Others provided transport to the militias and themselves killed Tutsi colleagues. Whether out of fear, opportunism, conviction, or some combination, the private sector responded to the genocide campaign by contributing money, transport, weapons,alcohol, petrol, and other needed goods.
14.52. Bagosora and the government also knew they could count on the intellectual elite and especially the professors at the National University in Butare, who had already played a significant role in dressing up primitive racist hate propaganda in academic terms to give it a certain respectability.[34] The faculty was overwhelmingly Hutu. A large number were from Habyarimana's home region and had benefited from the special access this provided to university education and study abroad. While some academics merely refrained from criticizing, many actively participated in writing, speaking, and broadcasting about the genocide. A group of faculty calling themselves the “intellectuals of Butare” issued a press release laying out a justification for the genocide, a document that the government flaunted, as did delegations that went abroad seeking support. At a meeting arranged by the university vice-rector, interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda thanked the assembled faculty for their ideas and support.[35]
14.53. Radio was used extensively to communicate orders to the party militia and interahamwe, especially after telephone lines were cut in Kigali. Both radio station RTLMC and Radio Rwanda passed on instructions to the forces about where to set up barriers and carry out searches. They named persons to be targeted and areas to be attacked. Always, the language underlined the image of a country under siege, calling for the Hutu to exercise “self-defence” by using their “tools” to do their “work” against “enemy accomplices.” [36] Most rural residents obtained their news exclusively from the radio. The constant inducement to kill Tutsi and the persistent claims that the government was winning the war helped create an atmosphere that convinced many ordinary Hutu to participate in the genocide.
14.54. Radio messages to theHutu, carefully designed to engage their hearts, minds, and energy, were a shrewd combination of the truth, the half-true, the irrelevant, and the outright lie. The Tutsi had – once long ago – ruthlessly lorded it over the Hutu for generations. The Hutu were far and away the larger ethnic group. Burundi demonstrated the consequences for Hutu of Tutsi rule. The Tutsi had invaded Rwanda in 1990 and had begun a terrible civil war. Some Tutsi still felt superior to the Hutu and treated them with disdain. The RPF did intend to overthrow and replace the interim government. They would demand the return of a great deal of land and property held by Hutu for generations.[37] Many Hutu were genuinely terrified by the RPF and enraged at the trouble they had caused. All this was undoubtedly true, and we should bear in mind that Hutu Power propaganda had a solid base of credibility to build on.
14.55. And build they did,with complete indifference to the truth: saying that the RPF and their Tutsi accomplices had assassinated the President and planned toexterminate all Hutu and that the violence against the Tutsi was the product of spontaneous Hutu rage at the assassinationof President Habyarimana and justifiable defence during a time of war against Tutsi armed aggression. Journalists broadcast news reports about weapon caches held by the Tutsi and foreign invasions by the diabolical Belgians, Ugandans, and Burundian Tutsi government. Repeatedly,Tutsi were charged with extreme cruelty and cannibalism. Hutu were cautioned against infiltrators and asked to close ranks and to use their usual “tools” to defend themselves. Unless all the Tutsi were annihilated, including women and children, they would rise up again to dominate and brutalize the Hutu as they had done before and had never stopped plotting to do again.
14.56. Radio station RTLMC had been clever from the start in appealing to its audience first with pop songs and cool announcers, then adding its racist propaganda once listeners were caught by the trendy entertainment.[38] During the genocide, RTLMC brought the Hutu Power version of the war into people's living rooms. Because of its popular appeal, it was a potent channel for justifying the genocide, passing on orders from the top, and inciting ordinary Hutu listeners to scorn moderation and get out and fight for Hutu survival. The station also learned to combine art and politics, as it featured writers, poets, and singers pumping out the anti-Tutsi hatred. One of the irregulars was poet and songwriter Simon Bikindi, best known for a piece of doggerel entitled “I Hate the Hutu,” which ferociously attacked Hutu who protected and collaborated with the Tutsi.[39]
The chain of command from the top down
14.57. It was a mark of the instigators' organizational skills that, notwithstanding massive disruption to transportation andcommunications, the government's chain-of-command functioned remarkably well. Hutu Power was in control of the leadership of every structureand at every level in the country – military, political, and administrative.
14.58. Colonel Bagosora planned and carried out the genocide with assistance from the highest ranks of the military, including the Chief of Staff (AugustinBizumungu), Minister of Defence (AugustinBizimana), and the head of the Presidential Guard (Protais Mpiranya). Military leaders directed the communal police throughout the countryside and deployed the interahamwe and party militias in the most efficient manner. Retired or former soldiers trained, armed,and then led civil self-defence forces during their attacks.
14.59. Hutu Power political leaders were also at the centre of the genocide, participating in meetings and decisions at every level. They used their authority to assemble their party militias, distribute weapons to them, and direct them around the country as needed. It did not take long for the various militias, led by MRND's interahamwe and CDR's impuzamugambi, to set aside their party loyalties and “work” together to carry out the government's campaign of genocide. Prior to April 6, the militias, both trained and untrained, numbered some 2,000 men, based mainly in Kigali.[40] Once the genocide began, their numbers swelled to between 20,000 and 30,000 throughout the country. At the local level, party members were expected to be a role model for their Hutu neighbours, identifying Tutsi and local Hutu moderates, operating barricades, and participating directly in the killing.
14.60. The elaborate governing structure in Rwanda implemented the genocide with remarkable efficiency. The government passed on orders to the prefects, who relayed them to the burgomasters, who in turn called cell heads and councillors to local meetings throughout the communes. These persons then delivered their instructions to the population. The burgomasters had the main responsibility of mobilizing hundreds and thousands of ordinary people to search, find, kill, and then bury bodies. Others were needed to operate the roadblocks and carry out patrols to find intended victims. Local leaders, hesitant at first, were threatened with sanctions or removed from office, and ordinary Hutu were offered powerful incentives of cash, food, drink, looted property, and land – highly appealing lures to very poor people. As one radio broadcast said, this “war” had to become everyone's responsibility.
The killers: the Presidential Guard, the military, local elites
14.61. The members of the Presidential Guard were recruited almost exclusively from the home district of President Habyarimana and his wife. Years before the President was assassinated, the Guard had been implicated in killings of prominent Tutsi and opposition leaders. In the first few hours after Habyarimana's death, the Presidential Guard headed up the killing in every neighbourhood of Kigali.
14.62. The Rwandan Armed Forces (RAF) were also key players in the genocide. Soldiers operated the barricades and checkpoints on main roads, trained the interahamwe and party militias, and participated directly in the genocide, especially in urban areas. The military also organized all the large-scale massacres elsewhere in the country. The sequence of killing was repeated throughout. First, troops fired grenades, tear gas and machine guns into Tutsi homes or public places of refuge. Then the interahamwe, local militia, and civil self-defence forces moved in for the kill, using machetes and other weapons. Finally, troops and militia formed search parties to track down and kill any survivors.[41]
14.63. Local politicians and administrators were very powerful in their own right. They targeted Hutu moderates, assembled Tutsi in public sites, involved ordinary Hutu in the killing, distributed arms to the party militias, imposed curfews, set up barriers, co-ordinated militias across communes, and generally did whatever was necessary to implement the genocide. They also had control of population records and were empowered to verify the ethnic identity of people in their communes. Sometimes, this meant the difference between life and death for Tutsi who had acquired false papers and tried to flee the killing.
14.64. It is important to recall that some Hutu military officials and administrators courageously refused to participate in the genocide. For example, the prefects of Butare and Gitarama and many burgomasters under their jurisdiction arrested the assailants in order to stop the killing. Under the circumstances, such acts were nothing short of heroic. But by mid-April, the government was determined to end any opposition to the genocide and either killed the dissenters, bullied them into compliance, or bypassed their authority.
The churches
14.65. Within the first 24 hours, it became clear that Tutsi clergy, priests, and nuns would not be exempt from the slaughter, nor would churches be treated as sanctuaries. On the contrary, these became primary killing sites. Many churches became graveyards. The very first massacre on the morning of April 7 took place at the Centre Christus in Kigali. The victims were Rwandan priests, seminarians, visitors, and staff. It was a portent of things to come, since as many as one-quarter of the Catholic clergy died in the genocide.[42] As one missionary put it, “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.”[43] It was one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the genocide that large numbers of these devils were devout, church-going Christians who slaughtered fellow devout Christians.
14.66. Despite the massacre at Centre Christus, the Hutu leadership of the Catholic and Anglican churches did not abandon their traditional close relationship with the Hutu establishment. They were anything but neutral in their sympathies. It is not too much to say they were at the very least indirectly complicit in the genocide for failing over the years – and even during the genocide itself – to dissociate themselves categorically from race hatred, to condemn ethnic manipulation, and to denounce publicly human rights violations. Some believe, as a staff member with the All-Africa Conference of Churches has written, that, “Church pulpits could have provided an opportunity for almost the entire population to hear a strong message that could have prevented the genocide. Instead, the leaders remained silent.”[44] The churches were the clearest embodiment of moral authority in the communities; their silence was easily interpreted by ordinary Christians as an implicit endorsement of the killings. Indeed, one scholar goes so far as to say that “the close association of church leaders with the leaders of the genocide [was interpreted] as a message that genocide was consistent with church teachings.” [45]
14.67. As we recorded earlier, the Hutu Catholic archbishop of Kigali was a strong supporter of Hutu Power and had long served on the MRND central committee until forced by Rome to resign. The church leaders did nothing to discourage the killings. At a press conference as late as June, two months into the genocide, the Anglican archbishop refused to denounce the interim government in unequivocal terms.[46] When that government fled from Kigali to a temporary new capital, the Catholic archbishop moved with them. As a report published by the World Council of Churches put it, the statements of church leaders often sounded as if they had been written by a public relations person for the interim government.[47]
14.68. Many priests and pastors committed heinous acts of betrayal, some under coercion, others not. Significant numbers of prominent Christians were involved in the killings, sometimes slaughtering their own church leaders. Priests turned fellow priests over to the butchers. Pastors witnessed the slaughter of their own families by those they had baptized.
14.69. There were strange variations on the nature of the involvement. Some clergy refused to help Tutsi out of sheer terror for their lives. Others protected the majority of Tutsi who came for sanctuary, but allowed militia members to remove and execute selected individuals. Many pastors and priests just ran away from their congregations.
14.70. Over 60 per cent of Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi, belonged to the Catholic church, yet all through Rwanda, churches were desecrated by the violence and carnage.[48] Often the killing was committed by members of the congregation: 20,000 people died in Cyahinda Parish; at least 35,000 were killed in the Parish of Karama.[49] Anglican, Protestant, Adventist, and Islamic places of worship were also the scenes of mass killings. Many churches have been memorialized by the present government, with rows upon rows of skulls, bones, and rags left as witness to what some Christians did to other Christians. Rwanda's small Muslim community alone refused to partake in the madness.
14.71. Not even the Pope's demand for an end to the killings swayed his representatives in Rwanda. It was five weeks into the genocide before four Catholic bishops, together with Protestant leaders, produced anything remotely like a conciliatory document, and even then they could bring themselves to do no more than blame each side equally and call on both to stop the massacres.[50] The word “genocide” was never mentioned.[51]
14.72. But we must not end this section without pointing to the impressive number of individual church leaders who heroically risked their lives to protect their people and were killed. We want to recognize them and their extraordinary courage in hellish circumstances. They knew the penalty for their efforts, and most paid it. Hundreds of nuns, pastors and priests, both Rwandans and foreign, hid the hunted and the vulnerable, tended the wounded, reassured the terrified, fed the hungry, took in abandoned children, confronted the authorities, and provided solace and comfort to the exhausted and the heart-broken.[52]
14.73. History must recognizse these remarkable individuals. One particular example is Father Boudoin Busungu of the Parish Nkanka in Cyangugu, who became known for his great kindness to refugees who took shelter at his church. As a testament to the emotional chaos unleashed by the genocide, Busungu's own father, Michel, was an interahamwe leader; his courageous son ended up fleeing to Zaire.[53] Father Oscar Nkundayezo, a priest in Cyangugu, and brother Felicien Bahizi, a trainee priest in the Grand Seminary in Kigali, also hid as many people as they could, provided food and medical care and set up a sophisticated network that aided a substantial number of refugees to flee to safety.[54]
14.74. André Sibomana was another remarkable priest as well as a human rights activist whose name should stand with those honoured German clerics who defied the Nazis. He was editor of the newspaper Kinyamateka and created the human rights group, Association Rwandaise pour la Défense des Droits de la Personne et des Libertés Publiques (ADL). Using both these forums, he denounced the regime and its abuses of power, breaking with the archbishop and others in the hierarchy who continued to give Habyarimana largely unquestioning support.[55]
Teachers and doctors
14.75. A substantial number of teachers, school inspectors, and directors of schools participated directly in the genocide. In some cases, teachers murdered their own students. In many other cases, they betrayed their Tutsi students to militias, who dragged them out of school and killed them with guns and machetes in full view of their friends. On other occasions, they refused to shelter them, effectively dooming them to death.
14.76. Whatever few rules of warfare the world recognizes to make inherently uncivilized behaviour less uncivilized, the genocidaires cavalierly flouted. Hospitals and patients generally share a protected status in a conflict, but the interahamwe, soldiers, and armed villagers ignored medical neutrality. Knowing that wounded Tutsi would seek medical attention, hospitals and health centres became targets for attack. The armed militias killed the wounded along with Tutsi doctors, nurses, medical assistants, and the Red Cross workers who staffed these facilities.
14.77. In their own way, senior medical and hospital staff often assisted the attackers by preventing people from using the hospital as a refuge. Hutu doctors discharged Tutsi patients early or declined to treat them altogether. Since armed militia surrounded the medical facility, patients forced to leave would face certain death. If patients refused to leave, hospital administrators readily allowed the militias inside to haul the sick out of their beds during the night or kill them right in their hospital rooms.
Ordinary Hutu
14.78. In the end, the politicians, administrators, intellectuals and media all “did their jobs” – to use a favoured genocidaire euphemism. Initially, only the interahamwe and soldiers killed the Tutsi, but soon enough they used their authority to compel ordinary Hutu to kill as well. When the national government called for the Hutu to rise up and wipe out the Tutsi, tens of thousands of ordinary people did just that. Many were young men, unemployed, poor, and displaced. Others were fiercely anti-Tutsi refugees from Burundi. There were MRND partisans from the north-west. Many ordinary Hutu participated in the killing only after their lives were threatened, or because they were obeying the unified voices of their leaders, who urged them to participate in the genocide. Large numbers were attracted by the prospect of land or cattle or possessions that were dangled before them. Whatever the reason, Hutu Power turned huge numbers of people, in some cases entire communities, into accomplices in genocide.
14.79. The question of taking responsibility for the killings haunts Rwanda to this day. Is an accomplice guilty to the same degree as an interahamwe? Someone who killed under duress, or as part of mob, or was just following orders, or killed only once, or did not kill but did nothing to stop killings – is such a person guilty of crimes against humanity? There were about six million Hutu, and we know that many soldiers and militias killed far more than one fellow citizen each. That means that millions of Hutu never killed anyone, although many may have helped on roadblocks or in burying bodies or carrying out other work. All these highly complex and sensitive questions have raised major dilemmas for Rwanda and the world since 1994, in the quest to come to grips with issues of justice and reconciliation. These are very important matters to this Panel, and we will return to this central issue presently.
How many were killed
14.80. In the nature of the event, it has always been difficult to establish the numbers killed in the genocide. Serious authorities disagree by hundreds of thousands of deaths – a quite remarkable variation. The highest persuasive figure for Tutsi killed seems to be 800,000, the very lowest, 500,000. Unfortunate as it is, the truth is that we have no way of being certain. The fact is that even if the most conservative figure is used, it still means that over three-quarters of the entire population registered as Tutsi were systematically killed in just over 100 days.[56]
Refugees, widows, and orphans
14.81. Vast numbers of Rwandans, numbering in the millions, found refuge from the genocide in special camps for the internally displaced within the country or fled to become refugees in neighbouring countries. We pointed out in an earlier chapter that conflicts create refugees, but refugees can also create conflicts. This is what was about to happen in shocking fashion in central Africa, with consequences that reverberate still. For that reason, we will deal with this issue in a subsequent chapter.
14.82. As for women and children, we consider their plight of such importance that we devote a separate chapter to discussing their condition after the genocide and in the years beyond. They are the future of Rwanda, and assuring their health and well-being is the prerequisite to a healthy nation.
THE GENOCIDE
14.1. At 8:30 on the evening of April 6. 1994, the Mystère Falcon jet carrying the President of Rwanda was shot down as it was returning to Kigali airport. The plane crashed into the grounds of the Presidential palace. All aboard were killed, including Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira, the French air crew, and several senior members of Habyarimana's staff.[1]
14.2. The crash quickly triggered one of the great tragedies of our age. When it ended little more than 100 days later, at least one-half million – and more likely, 800,000 – women, children and men, the vast majority of them Tutsi, lay dead. Thousands more were raped, tortured, and maimed for life. Millions, mostly Hutu, were displaced internally or fled as refugees to neighbouring countries. This was a tragedy that never had to happen. The Rwandan genocide did not occur by chance. It demanded an overall strategy, scrupulous planning and organization, control of the levers of government, highly motivated killers, the means to butcher vast numbers of people, the capacity to identify and kill the victims, and tight control of the media to disseminate the right messages both inside and outside the country. This diabolical machine had been created piecemeal in the years after the 1990 invasion, accelerating in the second half of 1993 with the signing of the Arusha accords and the assassination in Burundi by Tutsi soldiers of its democratically-elected Hutu President. In theory at least, everything was ready and waiting when the President's plane went down.
14.3. But whether Hutu Power deliberately shot down the plane in order to trigger the genocide is unknown. Did the radicals create this opportunity, or did they exploit it once it happened? On present evidence, it is impossible to say. Nor did the events immediately after the crash necessarily indicate that the plotters had been waiting for this exact moment to strike. There was considerable confusion within the Hutu elite for almost two days. A new government was not formed until April 8. It took almost 12 hours after the crash before the murders began of Hutu moderates and those Tutsi whose names had been included on the death lists circulating in Kigali. The real genocide – the exclusive concentration on the mass elimination of all Tutsi – really began on April 12. It is even arguable that a coup by the radicals against the coalition government, not genocide, was the original aim in the immediate wake of the crash. It therefore appears that, notwithstanding the efficient killing machine that had been constructed, when the time came the conspirators had to resort to consider improvisation as they went along, and indeed that there were different levels of preparedness around the country, depending on local attitudes to Tutsi. In the north-west, for example, where many of the Akazu had their roots, there was an immediate predisposition to turn against local Tutsi; in Butare, the slaughter could not go ahead until the radicals replaced local administrators with their own people.
14.4. Once Hutu Power was in control everywhere, the kind of awesome efficiency for which Rwanda had become well known made itself manifest. Nor can there be the slightest doubt about the goal, as Jean Kambanda, the Prime Minister during these months, confessed at his trial four years later when he pleaded guilty to genocide. Not only had it been planned in advance, he admitted that “there was in Rwanda in 1994 a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Tutsi, the purpose of which was to exterminate them. Mass killings of hundreds of thousands occurred in Rwanda, including women and children, old and young, who were pursued and killed at places where they sought refuge: prefectures, commune offices, schools, churches, and stadiums.”[2]
14.5. Kambanda agreed that during the genocide, he chaired Cabinet meetings “where the course of massacres were actively followed, but no action was taken to stop them.”[3] He participated in the dismissal of the prefect of Butare “because the latter had opposed the massacres and the appointment of a new prefect to ensure the spread of massacres of Tutsi in Butare.”[4] He issued a directive on June 8 that “encouraged and reinforced the interahamwe who were committing the mass killings of the Tutsi civilian population....[By] this directive the government assumed the responsibility for the actions of the interahamwe.[5] In fact his government distributed arms and ammunition to these groups.”[6]
14.6. Kambanda confessed that he had appeared on radio station RTLMC on June 21, when he encouraged the station to “continue to incite the massacres of the Tutsi civilian population, specifically stating that this radio station was an indispensable weapon in the fight against the enemy.” [7] During the genocide, the trial judges noted, he incited prefects and burgomasters to commit massacres and killing of civilians, and visited a number of prefectures “to incite and encourage the population to commit these massacres, including congratulating the people who had committed these killings.”[8] The judges also noted that, “[Kambanda] acknowledges uttering the incendiary phrase which was subsequently repeatedly broadcast, ‘You refuse to give your blood to your country and the dogs drink it for nothing.’”[9] Once he was personally asked to take steps to protect children who had survived the massacre at a hospital and he did not respond. On the same day, after the meeting, the children were killed.[10]
14.7. Finally, Kambanda admitted that “he ordered the setting up of roadblocks with the knowledge that these roadblocks were used to identify Tutsi for elimination, and that as Prime Minister he participated in the distribution of arms and ammunition to members of political parties, militias, and the population, knowing that these weapons would be used in the perpetration of massacres of civilian Tutsi.”[11] He himself was “an eyewitness to the massacres of Tutsi and had knowledge of them from regular reports of prefects and Cabinet discussions.”[12]
14.8. Although Kambanda has since withdrawn his guilty plea in somewhat mysterious circumstances, we know a great deal about the course of the genocide that corroborates his original confession. This chapter will attempt to reconstruct the unfolding of those 100 days.
The first steps
14.9. Twenty minutes after the crash Rwandan soldiers were ordered to block the airport; not even UNAMIR troops could get through. At nine p.m., half an hour after the crash, station RTLMC announced the news; shortly after that, it announced the death of the President.[13] The Presidential Guard soon blockaded the home of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and began to evacuate MRND politicians and their families to a military camp. At the same time, they ordered leading politicians from the opposition parties to stay in their homes. The Prime Minister telephoned General Dallaire at 10 p.m. to say that, while her moderate ministers were at home terrified, all her extremist ministers had disappeared and could not be contacted.[14] Early the next morning, the interahamwe were called out to patrol the streets of Kigali while the military set up barricades through the centre of the city.
14.10. From the start, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, head of administration at the Ministry of Defence and the man most authorities point to as the leader of the genocide, attempted to take charge. He made it clear from the start that the military would control the situation until some sort of political structure could come into place, but UNAMIR Ccommander General Dallaire and UN Special Representative Jacques Roger Booh-Booh both recommended strongly that a legitimate civilian authority should continue to govern.[15] Bagosora, the military and the MRND all agreed that they would no longer deal with Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, but there was strong disagreement about a civilian government. Bagosora continued to press hard for a military authority, presumably one with him in charge, but opposition was so serious that fighting broke out between a faction of the military and the gendarmerie on one side, and Bagosora's allies in the Presidential Guard on the other.
14.11. On April 7, Presidential Guards killed the two candidates for the presidency of the transitional assembly, one of whom would have replaced Habyarimana.[16] They also killed the president of the Constitutional Court and the Minister of Information, both of whom were moderate Hutu members of the coalition government and supporters of the Arusha agreement; their murders would more easily allow the radicals to form a government fully committed to Hutu Power. On the same day, government soldiers murdered Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana and attacked the heads of opposition political parties, killing them or forcing them to flee.
14.12. After making one last, unsuccessful effort to get agreement to install a military regime, early on the morning of April 8, Colonel Bagosora put together an interim civilian government made up of 12 MRND ministers and eight opposition party members, all sympathetic to Hutu Power.[17] Colonel Gatsinzi was appointed chief of military staff, Dr. Théodore Sindikubwabo became President and Jean Kambanda was Prime Minister. In a direct response to the domination of north-westerners in the Habyarimana government, many of the existing and newly appointed ministers were from southern Rwanda – an attempt to confer legitimacy on and establish a broader regional base for the government. While Bagosora and his clique may not have achieved the personal dominance they sought, the new government was as committed to the genocide as they were.
14.13. One final hope remained to prevent a catastrophe that seemed all but inexorable. There were moderate officers in the Rwandan army who were strongly opposed to Hutu Power, but as so often had happened in Rwanda history, they were easily marginalized. RPF Commander Paul Kagame contacted Dallaire on the evening of April 7 and offered to work together with these moderates if they could organize themselves into a fighting force. He told Dallaire that he was “willing to negotiate and build up a capability with them, but they have got to prove that they are willing to take risks and also prove they are something more than weak, ineffective officers.” Tragically for their country, they could do neither. Dallaire discovered that they “were never able to coalesce because every unit they had under command had been totally infiltrated...[and] they would not risk their lives and the lives of their families. And so they never coalesced within the first few days to build moderate capability to overrun the extremists.”[18]
14.14. Ten days after the start of the genocide, the leadership began to contend with the opposition in earnest. The interim government replaced Gatsinzi with Bagosora's first choice, Augustin Bizimungu. On the orders of the government, the Presidential Guards killed two prominent prefects who had opposed the genocide in their regions and dismissed several dozen other administrators. Local authorities were encouraged to do the same “cleaning up” within their own local administrations.
14.15. By April 12, under increasing military threat from the RPF in Kigali, the interim government left the capital and settled in Murambi, in the prefecture of Gitarama. They brought with them the political, military, and administrative leaders of the genocide, who travelled throughout the prefecture, preaching and teaching genocide. Gitamara was typical. The combined pressure by political authorities and the militias effectively destroyed any open opposition to the interim government and its programme of genocide.
The murder of the Prime Minister, Cabinet Ministers and Hutu moderates
14.16. As soon as Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana understood that her authority would no longer be recognized, she asked for military protection and an escort to Radio Rwanda so that she might speak to Rwandans as their Prime Minister. When the UNAMIR troops arrived at her home early in the morning of April 7, they were fired upon and their vehicles were disabled.[19] For several hours, soldiers of the Presidential Guard searched for the Prime Minister; shortly before noon, they found and killed her and her husband. Her five children narrowly escaped and were eventually brought to safety.
14.17. This was all part of a deliberate policy to kill anyone likely to criticize the new regime or the genocide. As such, the targets included Prime Minister-designate Faustin Twagiramungu, other prominent Hutu politicians, administrators (both Tutsi and Hutu), wealthy Tutsi businesspeople, human rights activists, and the remaining leadership of the opposition parties. Military officers in Kigali dispatched soldiers and militia to implement the policy in prefectures all across Rwanda.
14.18. The centre and southern regions of the country, where Tutsi were more integrated and numerous, proved initially resistant to the idea of Hutu Power and genocide. As a result, the leaders of the genocide held meetings in these areas to push local administrators into collaboration. In the end, despite their initial misgivings, the prefects and burgomasters were persuaded or forced to co-operate.
14.19. On April 16, the interim government reinforced its support by recalling to active duty officers loyal to Bagosora. But there was still a continuing threat from soldiers who would not participate in the genocide. Again, the interim government moved quickly. Dissenting military officers were removed one way or another – ousted from office, transferred into the field, driven into hiding, or killed.[20]
The first slaughter of Tutsi
14.20. In the early morning following the day of the plane crash, on April 7, approximately 1,500 to 2,000 elite forces of the Rwandan army and 2,000 partisan militia began to kill Tutsi and Hutu in Kigali who had been on the death lists prepared in advance.[21] Troops of the RPF, who had been based in Kigali post-Arusha to protect their delegates to the transitional government, came to their defence, thereby renewing the war with the government and army. But the RPF's efforts were insufficient at this stage to halt the attacks in the city or elsewhere. All at once, the country was engulfed by both a genocide and a civil war.
14.21. The resumption of armed hostilities between the Rwandan army and the RPF was exploited by the interim government to justify its assaults on Tutsi and moderate Hutu, labelling them RPF accomplices and allies. In the first few days, attackers systematically killed Tutsi and Hutu political opponents in their own neighbourhoods using curfews, barriers, and patrols to control the population.
14.22. The roadblocks and barriers were staffed by soldiers and gendarmerie on the main roads, while communal police, civil self-defence forces, and volunteers guarded others. Together, they successfully stemmed the flight of victims who tried to escape the genocide. Anyone who tried to hide was tracked down by search patrols that scoured the neighbourhoods, checking in ceilings, cupboards, latrines, fields, under beds, in car trunks, under dead bodies, in bushes, swamps, forests, rivers, and islands. By April 11, after barely five days, the Rwandan army, interahamwe, and party militias had killed 20,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.[22]
14.23. On April 12, the government shifted its attack and focussed on killing only Tutsi. All the preconditions were now firmly in place; it can be said that the full-blown genocide now definitively began. Government and political leaders used both Radio Rwanda and the radio station RTLMC to declare that there was only one enemy: the Tutsi. Ordinary Hutu were instructed to get involved in the war against the Tutsi, fight the enemy, and finish the “work”. Officials also moved to stem the tide of Tutsi fleeing Rwanda. Prefects were ordered not to authorize any departures, and Tutsi were killed as they attempted to cross the borders.
14.24. From that point on, the overwhelming number of Tutsi killed in Rwanda died in large-scale massacres. Thousands sought sanctuary in public sites such as churches, schools, hospitals, or offices. Others were ordered by Hutu administrators to assemble in large public areas. In both cases, this left the Tutsi even more vulnerable to Hutu soldiers and civilian forces, who were ordered to kill en masse. For three weeks in April, the party militias, the Presidential Guards, interahamwe, and FAR soldiers killed many thousands of Tutsi every day.
14.25. A pattern of slaughter emerged. First, the interahamwe surrounded the building to ensure that no one escaped. Then, the military fired tear gas or fragmentation grenades to kill and disorient intended victims. Those who fled the building were immediately killed. Soldiers, police, militias, and civil self-defence forces then entered the building and killed all the remaining occupants. To ensure that no one escaped, search parties would inspect the rooms and all the surrounding areas outside. The following day, the interahamwe returned to kill any wounded who were still alive.
14.26. The following means of killing were identified by Physicians for Human Rights: machetes, massues (clubs studded with nails), small axes, knives, grenades, guns, and fragmentation grenades. The genocidaires beat people to death, amputated limbs, buried victims alive, drowned, or raped and killed later. Many victims had both their Achilles tendons cut with machetes in order to immobilize them so they could be finished off at another time.[23]
14.27. Victims were treated with sadistic cruelty and suffered unimaginable agony. Tutsi were buried alive in graves they had dug themselves. Pregnant women had their wombs slashed open, so the foetuses could be killed. Internal organs were removed from living people. Family members were ordered to kill others in the family or be killed themselves. People were thrown alive into pit latrines. Those who hid in the attic had the house burned down around them. Children were forced to watch the hideous murders of their parents. Lucky victims were those who could bribe their killers to use a bullet for a quick death.
14.28. Through all this, some Tutsi managed to escape, but the militias had clear instructions to track down and kill any men, women and children who had fled to the rivers, swamps, bushes, and mountains. Tens of thousands more Tutsi died in this fashion.
14.29. For three weeks, the conspirators attempted to hide the rural genocide from the outside world. Shrewd manipulators of the media, the Hutu Power leaders blamed the carnage on the civil war, which confused foreign correspondents who knew little about the real situation. Most foreign nationals, including most journalists, were airlifted out early in the genocide. Eventually, however, the magnitude of the butchery drew international notice and condemnation, making it no longer solely the concern of those human rights activists and humanitarian organizations that had repeatedly reported on the killings.
14.30. On April 22, Anthony Lake, National Security Advisor to President Clinton, issued a statement from the White House calling on the government and the military to halt the slaughter.. On April 30, the UN Security Council issued a warning to Rwandan leaders about their personal responsibility for destroying an ethnic group. On May 3, the Pope issued a strong condemnation of the genocide, and the next day, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated that there was a real genocide in Rwanda.[24]
14.31. As a result, the interim government changed strategies for a third time. The interahamwe, the party militias, and the civilian self-defence forces were ordered to track down all remaining Tutsi and kill them in a more discreet and disciplined fashion.[25] No survivors were to be left to tell the story. The clean-up operation was much different than the large-scale killings; victims now knew their killers as neighbours, colleagues, or one-time friends.
14.32. During the last days of April and through the month of May, the RPF made dramatic advances throughout the country. In response, the interim government re-launched its large-scale attacks against Tutsi. In some communities women, children, infants, and the elderly had been spared during the first assaults; they now were targeted.
14.33. In late May, the RPF took the airport and the major military camp in Kigali, and on May 27, the militia leaders fled the capital.[26] By mid-June, the interim government was on the run. On July 4, the RPF took Kigali. On July 18, the RPF announced that the war was over. The following day, the new President and Prime Minister were sworn in. Because the RPF had won the war, the genocide, too, now came to an end.
The attack on civil society
14.34. On the morning after Habyarimana's death, the Presidential Guard began to spread across Kigali, gathering up people who had been targeted for execution. Hutu Power radicals had always had a sophisticated understanding of the need to manage public opinion, both in Rwanda and abroad. That goal helped guide their lists of priority targets. Radio station RTLMC and Radio Rwanda became direct arms of the genocide, broadcasting the names and hiding places of intended victims. In this way, the army and militias tracked people down wherever they were, from one end of Rwanda to the other.
14.35. The attacks had many targets. First, the interim government focussed its attention on killing government and opposition members, both national and local, who might prove to be obstacles to the smooth course of the genocide. A second target was to eliminate Hutu moderates who had influence and so were deemed a threat. Third, the government attacked critics such as journalists and human rights activists who had failed to be silenced by other means.
14.36. Professionals, too, came under attack. Some lawyers were killed because they had defended political opponents or were associated with controversial causes. Other lawyers were killed solely because they were Tutsi. In the first days of the genocide, some officials tried to use the judicial system to protect threatened colleagues, but to no avail. Burgomasters released any genocidaire who was detained, and prosecutors simply gave up trying to bring killers, rapists, or arsonists to trial.
14.37. Tutsi who were aid workers or employees of international organizations and government companies were also singled out for killing, along with a large number of teachers and school administrators. Many of these people were leaders in their communities and had been active in political parties opposed to the government.
14.38. The Hutu militias also killed priests, nuns and other clergy, especially those who were Tutsi or who sheltered intended victims. In addition, priests were killed if they were known to be independent thinkers who could influence opinion, including foreign opinion.
The murder of the Belgian UNAMIR soldiers
14.39. Radio Station RTLMC immediately had blamed the Belgian Blue Helmets for the downing of the President's plane. There can hardly be a question that the genocidaires' plan called for an attack on these soldiers, precisely as General Dallaire's informant had warned four months earlier. It took less than a day for the plan to be consummated.
14.40. The military escort requested by Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana for the morning following Habyarimana's death finally brought UNAMIR peacekeepers to her home, but when they arrived, they came under fire from Rwandan soldiers.
14.41. The soldiers took the 15 peacekeepers to a military camp in Kigali, where they carefully separated the Ghanaian from the Belgian troops.[27] The Ghanaians were led away to safety, but the 10 Belgians were brutally beaten and shot to death by a group of Hutu soldiers. This incident had exactly the effect that the cynical genocidaires had shrewdly foreseen, as the Dallaire cable of January 11 had indicated.[28] The Belgians withdrew the remainder of their troops and led a nearly successful movement to end the UN intervention in Rwanda. Total withdrawal seemed politically unacceptable, however, even to the leading members of the Security Council. As a result, the world witnessed the unprecedented phenomenon of a UN peacekeeping mission actually sharply reducing its forces in the midst of a genocide.
The key internal actors: Akazu, government, politicians, intellectuals, military and militia leaders, the media
14.42. For decades, Rwanda had been renowned for its efficiency, its administrative competence, its highly structured system of public administration, its top-down authority system, and its genius for imposing discipline and deference on its population. All of these attributes were brought to bear in organizing the genocide by a calculating elite who understood only too well how to operate this awesomely efficient machine. The names of most of the masterminds are known – the individuals who planned the genocide, managed its implementation and watched it unfold through the months of April, May, and June and into July.
14.43. The Akazu was the special inner circle of advisors to Habyarimana, most of whom came from his north-western prefecture or were relatives of his wife. Their close personal ties to the President made them the centre of political, economic, social, and military power in Rwanda. The Akazu, which included one of Madame Habyarimana's brothers, bankrolled the interahamwe (theMRND militia) and death squads known as Network Zero and Amasasu, (Bullets), bothof which had carried out political killings prior to April 6 and during thegenocide. Madame Habyarimana herself would have been involved in some of the initial political decisions made before April 9, whenshe was among the first to be evacuated to Paris by the French.[29]
14.44. The government, the military, and the politicians worked virtually as one. Colonel Bagosora of the Rwandan Armed Forces effectively guided the genocide and operated as head of the army. He was assisted, militarily, by the commanders of the Presidential Guard, elite units and other senior military leaders. The army played a key organizational role and lent its skills and weaponry to every large-scale attack and operation. The army also provided important logistical help with military vehicles and communications systems, which was vital to the effectiveness of the genocide.
14.45. For a short time, the military chief of staff, Gatsinzi, along with the head of the national police,General Ndindiliyimana, tried to wrest power from Bagosora.[30] But the Presidential Guards and elite forces stood outside the military hierarchy and were loyal only to Bagosora. Their superior training and weaponry put them almost beyond military challenge. Moreover, by the afternoon of April 7, the RPF had left their headquarters to halt the killing of Tutsi civilians in Kigali. Once war was renewed, senior officers could not bring themselves to desert the army or change the government's course.
14.46. Politically, the leaders of the MRND put together the interim government at the request of Colonel Bagosora. Cabinet ministers came from the pro-Hutu Power factions of their party. Together and separately, they constituted a valuable pool of information, motivation, ideology, and practical support. They mobilized party militias, local party members, and ordinary Hutu to take part in the genocide. Many spread out to the countryside or got on the radio to speak about the need for total Hutu solidarity in the war against the outsiders.
14.47. National administrators were important conduits for the interim government. They directed the population to obey orders from the military and exhorted the Hutu to “work with,” “assist,” and “support” the army. But it was at the local level that administrators played the most vital roles. Local civilian authorities were responsible for calling up hundreds of people to carry out killings at public sites, and it was their job to arrange for a stable cadre of civilians to operate barriers, form search parties and track survivors. Just as important, they acted as informants to their superiors about developments in their area.
14.48. The party militias were a powerful base of support, especially when their numbers increased once the genocide began. Organizationally, they were accountable to various political parties, but at the centre and on the ground, the militias soon assumed a leadership position in planning, organizing and implementing the genocide. Because they came from neighbourhoods all across the country, they knew their neighbours personally. This knowledge proved indispensable in the systematic, house-by-house killing that took place over many weeks. The militias were directed from one location to another, a clear indication that their deployment was a national concern and priority. Once there, they followed the orders of the soldiers on the spot.
14.49. Within a week of the launch, the interim government and the army moved to organize a formal structure for mobilizing civilians and putting them under the control and training of retired soldiers. Once they were properly trained and engaged, the civil self-defence forces, as they were known, expanded the militias' range of activities and operated with considerable, if grisly,efficiency. The two civilian forces operated barriers together, went on patrol and into combat together and even had an elaborate organizational structure. In creating this system, the interim government effectively added a fourth chain of command to the military, political, and administrative components.
14.50. Behind the more obvious presence of the politicians, soldiers and administrators was a wealthy and powerful group of business people, some of them former members of the Akazu. They were pulled together by Félicien Kabuga, who had helped organize radio station RTLMC.[31] The group retired to the safety of a lakeshore town from which they advised the interim government on finance and foreign affairs. For example, after evidence of the genocide began to leak out of the country, the group urged the government to send delegations abroad to give their version of events – advice the government gratefully took. Kabukialso announced a fund to support the war effort and called on all Rwandans living abroad to contribute. Nearly US$140,000 was collected and distributed “to help civilians fight the enemy.” [32]
14.51. The interim government also enjoyed support from directors of the public utilities; government companies; and the transportation, hospital and communications services. These long-time cronies of President Habyarimana depended on the government for their positions and affluence. Some helped to finance the militias and actively promoted the genocide among their employees.[33] Others provided transport to the militias and themselves killed Tutsi colleagues. Whether out of fear, opportunism, conviction, or some combination, the private sector responded to the genocide campaign by contributing money, transport, weapons,alcohol, petrol, and other needed goods.
14.52. Bagosora and the government also knew they could count on the intellectual elite and especially the professors at the National University in Butare, who had already played a significant role in dressing up primitive racist hate propaganda in academic terms to give it a certain respectability.[34] The faculty was overwhelmingly Hutu. A large number were from Habyarimana's home region and had benefited from the special access this provided to university education and study abroad. While some academics merely refrained from criticizing, many actively participated in writing, speaking, and broadcasting about the genocide. A group of faculty calling themselves the “intellectuals of Butare” issued a press release laying out a justification for the genocide, a document that the government flaunted, as did delegations that went abroad seeking support. At a meeting arranged by the university vice-rector, interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda thanked the assembled faculty for their ideas and support.[35]
14.53. Radio was used extensively to communicate orders to the party militia and interahamwe, especially after telephone lines were cut in Kigali. Both radio station RTLMC and Radio Rwanda passed on instructions to the forces about where to set up barriers and carry out searches. They named persons to be targeted and areas to be attacked. Always, the language underlined the image of a country under siege, calling for the Hutu to exercise “self-defence” by using their “tools” to do their “work” against “enemy accomplices.” [36] Most rural residents obtained their news exclusively from the radio. The constant inducement to kill Tutsi and the persistent claims that the government was winning the war helped create an atmosphere that convinced many ordinary Hutu to participate in the genocide.
14.54. Radio messages to theHutu, carefully designed to engage their hearts, minds, and energy, were a shrewd combination of the truth, the half-true, the irrelevant, and the outright lie. The Tutsi had – once long ago – ruthlessly lorded it over the Hutu for generations. The Hutu were far and away the larger ethnic group. Burundi demonstrated the consequences for Hutu of Tutsi rule. The Tutsi had invaded Rwanda in 1990 and had begun a terrible civil war. Some Tutsi still felt superior to the Hutu and treated them with disdain. The RPF did intend to overthrow and replace the interim government. They would demand the return of a great deal of land and property held by Hutu for generations.[37] Many Hutu were genuinely terrified by the RPF and enraged at the trouble they had caused. All this was undoubtedly true, and we should bear in mind that Hutu Power propaganda had a solid base of credibility to build on.
14.55. And build they did,with complete indifference to the truth: saying that the RPF and their Tutsi accomplices had assassinated the President and planned toexterminate all Hutu and that the violence against the Tutsi was the product of spontaneous Hutu rage at the assassinationof President Habyarimana and justifiable defence during a time of war against Tutsi armed aggression. Journalists broadcast news reports about weapon caches held by the Tutsi and foreign invasions by the diabolical Belgians, Ugandans, and Burundian Tutsi government. Repeatedly,Tutsi were charged with extreme cruelty and cannibalism. Hutu were cautioned against infiltrators and asked to close ranks and to use their usual “tools” to defend themselves. Unless all the Tutsi were annihilated, including women and children, they would rise up again to dominate and brutalize the Hutu as they had done before and had never stopped plotting to do again.
14.56. Radio station RTLMC had been clever from the start in appealing to its audience first with pop songs and cool announcers, then adding its racist propaganda once listeners were caught by the trendy entertainment.[38] During the genocide, RTLMC brought the Hutu Power version of the war into people's living rooms. Because of its popular appeal, it was a potent channel for justifying the genocide, passing on orders from the top, and inciting ordinary Hutu listeners to scorn moderation and get out and fight for Hutu survival. The station also learned to combine art and politics, as it featured writers, poets, and singers pumping out the anti-Tutsi hatred. One of the irregulars was poet and songwriter Simon Bikindi, best known for a piece of doggerel entitled “I Hate the Hutu,” which ferociously attacked Hutu who protected and collaborated with the Tutsi.[39]
The chain of command from the top down
14.57. It was a mark of the instigators' organizational skills that, notwithstanding massive disruption to transportation andcommunications, the government's chain-of-command functioned remarkably well. Hutu Power was in control of the leadership of every structureand at every level in the country – military, political, and administrative.
14.58. Colonel Bagosora planned and carried out the genocide with assistance from the highest ranks of the military, including the Chief of Staff (AugustinBizumungu), Minister of Defence (AugustinBizimana), and the head of the Presidential Guard (Protais Mpiranya). Military leaders directed the communal police throughout the countryside and deployed the interahamwe and party militias in the most efficient manner. Retired or former soldiers trained, armed,and then led civil self-defence forces during their attacks.
14.59. Hutu Power political leaders were also at the centre of the genocide, participating in meetings and decisions at every level. They used their authority to assemble their party militias, distribute weapons to them, and direct them around the country as needed. It did not take long for the various militias, led by MRND's interahamwe and CDR's impuzamugambi, to set aside their party loyalties and “work” together to carry out the government's campaign of genocide. Prior to April 6, the militias, both trained and untrained, numbered some 2,000 men, based mainly in Kigali.[40] Once the genocide began, their numbers swelled to between 20,000 and 30,000 throughout the country. At the local level, party members were expected to be a role model for their Hutu neighbours, identifying Tutsi and local Hutu moderates, operating barricades, and participating directly in the killing.
14.60. The elaborate governing structure in Rwanda implemented the genocide with remarkable efficiency. The government passed on orders to the prefects, who relayed them to the burgomasters, who in turn called cell heads and councillors to local meetings throughout the communes. These persons then delivered their instructions to the population. The burgomasters had the main responsibility of mobilizing hundreds and thousands of ordinary people to search, find, kill, and then bury bodies. Others were needed to operate the roadblocks and carry out patrols to find intended victims. Local leaders, hesitant at first, were threatened with sanctions or removed from office, and ordinary Hutu were offered powerful incentives of cash, food, drink, looted property, and land – highly appealing lures to very poor people. As one radio broadcast said, this “war” had to become everyone's responsibility.
The killers: the Presidential Guard, the military, local elites
14.61. The members of the Presidential Guard were recruited almost exclusively from the home district of President Habyarimana and his wife. Years before the President was assassinated, the Guard had been implicated in killings of prominent Tutsi and opposition leaders. In the first few hours after Habyarimana's death, the Presidential Guard headed up the killing in every neighbourhood of Kigali.
14.62. The Rwandan Armed Forces (RAF) were also key players in the genocide. Soldiers operated the barricades and checkpoints on main roads, trained the interahamwe and party militias, and participated directly in the genocide, especially in urban areas. The military also organized all the large-scale massacres elsewhere in the country. The sequence of killing was repeated throughout. First, troops fired grenades, tear gas and machine guns into Tutsi homes or public places of refuge. Then the interahamwe, local militia, and civil self-defence forces moved in for the kill, using machetes and other weapons. Finally, troops and militia formed search parties to track down and kill any survivors.[41]
14.63. Local politicians and administrators were very powerful in their own right. They targeted Hutu moderates, assembled Tutsi in public sites, involved ordinary Hutu in the killing, distributed arms to the party militias, imposed curfews, set up barriers, co-ordinated militias across communes, and generally did whatever was necessary to implement the genocide. They also had control of population records and were empowered to verify the ethnic identity of people in their communes. Sometimes, this meant the difference between life and death for Tutsi who had acquired false papers and tried to flee the killing.
14.64. It is important to recall that some Hutu military officials and administrators courageously refused to participate in the genocide. For example, the prefects of Butare and Gitarama and many burgomasters under their jurisdiction arrested the assailants in order to stop the killing. Under the circumstances, such acts were nothing short of heroic. But by mid-April, the government was determined to end any opposition to the genocide and either killed the dissenters, bullied them into compliance, or bypassed their authority.
The churches
14.65. Within the first 24 hours, it became clear that Tutsi clergy, priests, and nuns would not be exempt from the slaughter, nor would churches be treated as sanctuaries. On the contrary, these became primary killing sites. Many churches became graveyards. The very first massacre on the morning of April 7 took place at the Centre Christus in Kigali. The victims were Rwandan priests, seminarians, visitors, and staff. It was a portent of things to come, since as many as one-quarter of the Catholic clergy died in the genocide.[42] As one missionary put it, “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.”[43] It was one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the genocide that large numbers of these devils were devout, church-going Christians who slaughtered fellow devout Christians.
14.66. Despite the massacre at Centre Christus, the Hutu leadership of the Catholic and Anglican churches did not abandon their traditional close relationship with the Hutu establishment. They were anything but neutral in their sympathies. It is not too much to say they were at the very least indirectly complicit in the genocide for failing over the years – and even during the genocide itself – to dissociate themselves categorically from race hatred, to condemn ethnic manipulation, and to denounce publicly human rights violations. Some believe, as a staff member with the All-Africa Conference of Churches has written, that, “Church pulpits could have provided an opportunity for almost the entire population to hear a strong message that could have prevented the genocide. Instead, the leaders remained silent.”[44] The churches were the clearest embodiment of moral authority in the communities; their silence was easily interpreted by ordinary Christians as an implicit endorsement of the killings. Indeed, one scholar goes so far as to say that “the close association of church leaders with the leaders of the genocide [was interpreted] as a message that genocide was consistent with church teachings.” [45]
14.67. As we recorded earlier, the Hutu Catholic archbishop of Kigali was a strong supporter of Hutu Power and had long served on the MRND central committee until forced by Rome to resign. The church leaders did nothing to discourage the killings. At a press conference as late as June, two months into the genocide, the Anglican archbishop refused to denounce the interim government in unequivocal terms.[46] When that government fled from Kigali to a temporary new capital, the Catholic archbishop moved with them. As a report published by the World Council of Churches put it, the statements of church leaders often sounded as if they had been written by a public relations person for the interim government.[47]
14.68. Many priests and pastors committed heinous acts of betrayal, some under coercion, others not. Significant numbers of prominent Christians were involved in the killings, sometimes slaughtering their own church leaders. Priests turned fellow priests over to the butchers. Pastors witnessed the slaughter of their own families by those they had baptized.
14.69. There were strange variations on the nature of the involvement. Some clergy refused to help Tutsi out of sheer terror for their lives. Others protected the majority of Tutsi who came for sanctuary, but allowed militia members to remove and execute selected individuals. Many pastors and priests just ran away from their congregations.
14.70. Over 60 per cent of Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi, belonged to the Catholic church, yet all through Rwanda, churches were desecrated by the violence and carnage.[48] Often the killing was committed by members of the congregation: 20,000 people died in Cyahinda Parish; at least 35,000 were killed in the Parish of Karama.[49] Anglican, Protestant, Adventist, and Islamic places of worship were also the scenes of mass killings. Many churches have been memorialized by the present government, with rows upon rows of skulls, bones, and rags left as witness to what some Christians did to other Christians. Rwanda's small Muslim community alone refused to partake in the madness.
14.71. Not even the Pope's demand for an end to the killings swayed his representatives in Rwanda. It was five weeks into the genocide before four Catholic bishops, together with Protestant leaders, produced anything remotely like a conciliatory document, and even then they could bring themselves to do no more than blame each side equally and call on both to stop the massacres.[50] The word “genocide” was never mentioned.[51]
14.72. But we must not end this section without pointing to the impressive number of individual church leaders who heroically risked their lives to protect their people and were killed. We want to recognize them and their extraordinary courage in hellish circumstances. They knew the penalty for their efforts, and most paid it. Hundreds of nuns, pastors and priests, both Rwandans and foreign, hid the hunted and the vulnerable, tended the wounded, reassured the terrified, fed the hungry, took in abandoned children, confronted the authorities, and provided solace and comfort to the exhausted and the heart-broken.[52]
14.73. History must recognizse these remarkable individuals. One particular example is Father Boudoin Busungu of the Parish Nkanka in Cyangugu, who became known for his great kindness to refugees who took shelter at his church. As a testament to the emotional chaos unleashed by the genocide, Busungu's own father, Michel, was an interahamwe leader; his courageous son ended up fleeing to Zaire.[53] Father Oscar Nkundayezo, a priest in Cyangugu, and brother Felicien Bahizi, a trainee priest in the Grand Seminary in Kigali, also hid as many people as they could, provided food and medical care and set up a sophisticated network that aided a substantial number of refugees to flee to safety.[54]
14.74. André Sibomana was another remarkable priest as well as a human rights activist whose name should stand with those honoured German clerics who defied the Nazis. He was editor of the newspaper Kinyamateka and created the human rights group, Association Rwandaise pour la Défense des Droits de la Personne et des Libertés Publiques (ADL). Using both these forums, he denounced the regime and its abuses of power, breaking with the archbishop and others in the hierarchy who continued to give Habyarimana largely unquestioning support.[55]
Teachers and doctors
14.75. A substantial number of teachers, school inspectors, and directors of schools participated directly in the genocide. In some cases, teachers murdered their own students. In many other cases, they betrayed their Tutsi students to militias, who dragged them out of school and killed them with guns and machetes in full view of their friends. On other occasions, they refused to shelter them, effectively dooming them to death.
14.76. Whatever few rules of warfare the world recognizes to make inherently uncivilized behaviour less uncivilized, the genocidaires cavalierly flouted. Hospitals and patients generally share a protected status in a conflict, but the interahamwe, soldiers, and armed villagers ignored medical neutrality. Knowing that wounded Tutsi would seek medical attention, hospitals and health centres became targets for attack. The armed militias killed the wounded along with Tutsi doctors, nurses, medical assistants, and the Red Cross workers who staffed these facilities.
14.77. In their own way, senior medical and hospital staff often assisted the attackers by preventing people from using the hospital as a refuge. Hutu doctors discharged Tutsi patients early or declined to treat them altogether. Since armed militia surrounded the medical facility, patients forced to leave would face certain death. If patients refused to leave, hospital administrators readily allowed the militias inside to haul the sick out of their beds during the night or kill them right in their hospital rooms.
Ordinary Hutu
14.78. In the end, the politicians, administrators, intellectuals and media all “did their jobs” – to use a favoured genocidaire euphemism. Initially, only the interahamwe and soldiers killed the Tutsi, but soon enough they used their authority to compel ordinary Hutu to kill as well. When the national government called for the Hutu to rise up and wipe out the Tutsi, tens of thousands of ordinary people did just that. Many were young men, unemployed, poor, and displaced. Others were fiercely anti-Tutsi refugees from Burundi. There were MRND partisans from the north-west. Many ordinary Hutu participated in the killing only after their lives were threatened, or because they were obeying the unified voices of their leaders, who urged them to participate in the genocide. Large numbers were attracted by the prospect of land or cattle or possessions that were dangled before them. Whatever the reason, Hutu Power turned huge numbers of people, in some cases entire communities, into accomplices in genocide.
14.79. The question of taking responsibility for the killings haunts Rwanda to this day. Is an accomplice guilty to the same degree as an interahamwe? Someone who killed under duress, or as part of mob, or was just following orders, or killed only once, or did not kill but did nothing to stop killings – is such a person guilty of crimes against humanity? There were about six million Hutu, and we know that many soldiers and militias killed far more than one fellow citizen each. That means that millions of Hutu never killed anyone, although many may have helped on roadblocks or in burying bodies or carrying out other work. All these highly complex and sensitive questions have raised major dilemmas for Rwanda and the world since 1994, in the quest to come to grips with issues of justice and reconciliation. These are very important matters to this Panel, and we will return to this central issue presently.
How many were killed
14.80. In the nature of the event, it has always been difficult to establish the numbers killed in the genocide. Serious authorities disagree by hundreds of thousands of deaths – a quite remarkable variation. The highest persuasive figure for Tutsi killed seems to be 800,000, the very lowest, 500,000. Unfortunate as it is, the truth is that we have no way of being certain. The fact is that even if the most conservative figure is used, it still means that over three-quarters of the entire population registered as Tutsi were systematically killed in just over 100 days.[56]
Refugees, widows, and orphans
14.81. Vast numbers of Rwandans, numbering in the millions, found refuge from the genocide in special camps for the internally displaced within the country or fled to become refugees in neighbouring countries. We pointed out in an earlier chapter that conflicts create refugees, but refugees can also create conflicts. This is what was about to happen in shocking fashion in central Africa, with consequences that reverberate still. For that reason, we will deal with this issue in a subsequent chapter.
14.82. As for women and children, we consider their plight of such importance that we devote a separate chapter to discussing their condition after the genocide and in the years beyond. They are the future of Rwanda, and assuring their health and well-being is the prerequisite to a healthy nation.