Africa, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights

U.N.-RWANDA: A Measure of Catharsis 10 Years After

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Apr 7 2004 (IPS) - The United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledge the "collective failure" of the international community 10 years ago to prevent the genocide in which some groups say as many as one million Rwandans were killed – most were ethnic minority Tutsi.

The U.N., Annan himself – who at the time served as undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations – and the governments of France, United States and Britain have been criticised harshly for failing to take action even when faced with evidence of the tragedy.

Annan admitted, "Such crimes cannot be reversed. Such failures cannot be repaired. The dead cannot be brought back to life."

What the international community can do is try to prevent similar massacres from occurring, and he described a set of measures to that effect.

In an address Wednesday before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, he announced the creation of a new post – special adviser on the prevention of genocide, defined as the systematic and planned extermination of a national, racial or ethnic group.

The adviser, who will report to the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights, will also take up cases of massive assassinations and other large-scale human rights violations, such as ethnic cleansing.

Annan also announced the launch of an Action Plan to Prevent Genocide, which is to involve the entire U.N. system.

The first objective of the plan is to prevent armed conflict, because genocide "almost always occurs during war," he said.

In this aspect, the international community should also pay greater attention to "environmental problems and tensions related to competition over natural resources," he advised.

The plan stresses protection for civilians in armed conflicts because, said Annan, "Wherever civilians are deliberately targeted because they belong to a particular community, we are in the presence of potential, if not actual, genocide."

He cited the case of Ituri province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where ethnic conflicts have the potential of escalating into genocide.

According to international reports, at least 1,000 people have died in ethnic violence in that northeastern region of the African country.

Another aim of the anti-genocide plan is to put an end to impunity.

The secretary-general mentioned the merits of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and issued an appeal for wider ratification of the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court for handling cases of crimes against humanity.

The U.N. plan includes mechanisms for "early and clear warning" of signals pointing to potential genocide.

"One of the reasons for our failure in Rwanda was that beforehand we did not face the fact that genocide was a real possibility," said Annan.

"And once it started, for too long we could not bring ourselves to recognise it, or call it by its name," he admitted.

In fact, the Tutsis were targeted in numerous attacks since 1990. But the Hutu majority, which controlled the army and the armed militias, began the massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus on Apr. 7, 1994, the day after Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarmina, of Hutu origins, died in a plane crash.

The carnage lasted for about 100 days. In that time, governments and the U.N. itself avoided referring to the killings as genocide, and did not send forces to stop it.

The Hutus killed some 800,000 people in three months, according to U.N. estimates. But Rwanda’s minister of culture, Robert Bayugamba, said last week that the bodies of 937,000 massacre victims had been counted, and that more were expected to be found.

A year before the genocide began, Senegalese attorney Bacre Waly Ndiaye, Commission on Human Rights special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, had warned the international community about the conditions simmering in Rwanda.

"Alas, no one paid attention," said Annan.

Roger Julien Menga, representing the African group before the Commission on Human Rights, reminded Annan that in Ndiaye’s visit to Rwanda from Apr. 8 to 17, 1993, he observed that in the cases of inter-community violence, most of the victims were attacked because they were Tutsis.

Ndiaye, a former vice-president of Amnesty International’s executive committee, served as special rapporteur from 1992 to 1998, when then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, designated him as her representative in New York.

Annan’s plan against genocide calls for swift and decisive action when, "despite all our efforts, we learn that genocide is happening, or about to happen."

In this sense, the U.N. chief said he shares "the grave concern expressed last week by eight independent experts appointed by this Commission at the scale of reported human rights abuses and at the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Darfur, Sudan."

The experts expressed alarm about the forced and long-term displacement of certain communities, and referred to the phenomenon as "ethnic cleansing".

The U.N. will send a high-level team to Darfur to seek and understanding of the situation and "to seek improved access to those in need of assistance and protection."

The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), an independent human rights institution based in Geneva, applauded Annan’s decision and stressed its concern about human rights violations that "may amount to a policy of ethnic cleansing in which the government of Sudan is complicit."

The OMCT received information Wednesday about the aerial bombardment of the village of Mahajrea, located east of Nyala in the southern state of Darfur.

Two helicopter gunships and an Antonov military aircraft attacked the village on Apr. 4, killing at least four people, including two 15-year-olds.

On Tuesday, the non-governmental organisation had denounced the "mass extra-judicial executions, torture and arrests of 168 persons belonging to the Fur tribe in the region of Darfur."