RWANDA-POLITICS: Government Rejects Allegations of Massacres

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Jean Baptiste Kayigamba and Moyiga Nduru

KIGALI, Jul 14 1996 (IPS) - If former Rwandan interior minister Seth Sendashonga is to be believed, over 150,000 Hutus have been killed in Rwanda in two years without a hint of the massacres reaching the outside world.

Rwanda’s government views the claim as a mere fabrication aimed at sullying its image and at trivialising the 1994 genocide, Joseph Bideri, media and public relations adviser to Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu, told IPS.

Sendashonga alleged at a press conference on Jul. 10 that the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) had been killing Hutus en masse since April 1995, when the death of then president Juvenal Habyarimana led to three months of civil war and massacres in Rwanda.

“I … submitted a list of 60,000 people killed by the RPA to the Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, two weeks ago,” he said. “The list covers the period between April 1994 to April 1995.”

He added that he would submit this week another 92,000 names of people allegedly killed since April 1995 to the Rapporteur, Ivoirian Rene Degui Seguy.

Sendashonga also had an explanation for the fact that the killings he claims were committed have not been reported by independent sources. He said aid agencies were not allowed to operate in the zone where the massacres were allegedly perpetrated.

However, an official of the Rwandan Ministry of Rehabilitation rejected the allegation. “No NGO workers have been hindered in their movements,” the official told IPS. “There is no restricted zone where people cannot go.”

Sendashonga’s allegations came just over a month after the United Nations upgraded the security situation in Rwanda to category one, i.e. safe enough for U.N. employees to take their families there.

Bideri linked the claims to a campaign by the exiled Hutu opposition to weaken international support for Rwanda’s government following a pledging conference in Geneva at which Rwanda was promised about 617 million U.S. dollars for its 1996-1998 recovery programme.

“The truth is that they tried their best to frustrate the June 20 Geneva Roundtable of donors by tarnishing the image of the government, and failed,” Bideri said. “The international community knew the facts. Therefore, that roundtable was a resounding success and an endorsement of the political programme pursued by the government of Rwanda.”

He added that similar unsubstantiated claims had been made before by former Rwandan Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, who is now co-leader of the Resistance Forces for Democracy (RFD), to which Sendashonga belongs.

“Now, Sendashonga is revising these figures, bringing them to 160,000. This shows but inconsistency and lack of veracity in allegations made by their political organisation,” Bideri pointed out.

The RFD is one of many groups formed by Hutus who left Rwanda in 1994 and 1995. Most comprise extremists who masterminded the April-June 1994 killings in which up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus died. However, the RFD includes politicians like Twagiramungu and Sendashonga who had held posts in the Rwanda Patriotic Front-led government that seized power in July 1994 but who later withdrew from it.

Bideri noted that while Sendashonga claimed the RPA was killing civilians, he said nothing about the murder — reportedly by people who had committed the 1994 massacres — of Tutsi survivors of the genocide, Hutus who witnessed it and local administrators.

These killings have been documented by the U.N. Human Rights Office in Kigali and by international watchdogs such as African Rights.

In a Jul. 4 release, African Rights said about 70 such murders had been perpetrated since it issued a report in early April, which documented 25 killings of survivors and witnesses.

According to Bideri, the fact that Sendashonga said nothing about these murders showed that he and his colleagues were allied to “the same genocidal forces whose terrorist acts have claimed about a hundred lives in recent weeks.”

He said the forces included the People in Arms to Liberate Rwanda (PALIR) — a extremist Hutu organisation which the authorities in Kigali believe to be made up of members of the former Rwandan army (FAR), the interahamwe (Hutu militias who did much of the killing in 1994) and the ousted Rwandan government.

Since PALIR announced its formation in May, it has received the backing of all exiled Hutus groups, including the RFD, Bideri said.

A senior aide to President Pasteur Bizimungu charged that some of the exiles in Nairobi, including Sendashonga, publicly expressed support for PALIR, claiming that the time had come to step up the armed struggle against the RPF-led government.

“By endorsing the existence and the activities of such a terrorist gang, Sendashonga confirmed that he subscribes to their cause,” the aide said. “Now PALIR has come out in its true colours as a clearly terrorist organisation in its recent communique calling on Hutu extremist to kill all American citizens residing in the Great Lakes region.”

According to Bideri, the former interior minister joined the campaign against the RPF-led government because he “could not stomach the arrest of his brother, a former local leader in Rwamatamu commune, Kibuye prefecture, for the killing of more than 30,000 Tutsis.”

“This explains the animosity and virulence against the new government in Rwanda,” Bideri claimed.