WEEKLY SELECTION-RWANDA: Genocide Far From Inevitable

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 3 1999 (IPS) - As the world observes the fifth anniversary of the worst act of genocide since the Nazi-inspired Holocaust, two human rights groups are insisting that the mass slaughter in Rwanda could have been stopped by outside powers.

In an 800-page report released Wednesday, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues in Paris argued that policy-makers in France, Belgium and the United States – all with ample warning and knowledge of the extent of the killings – were chiefly responsible for preventing effective action to stop the genocide in Rwanda that started in April 1994.

They also blamed staff at the United Nations headquarters in New York for minimising the extent of violence in their reports to non-permanent members of the UN Security Council who had no other way of assessing what was happening.

In the end, it was the non-permanent members – particularly the Czech Republic, Spain, New Zealand, and Argentina – who recognised the slaughter as genocide (a word the US government ordered its officials not to use publicly until after most of the killing had ended).

They then urged the United Nations to send a new peacekeeping mission urgently to Rwanda.

The current UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, at the time was serving as the top peacekeeping aide to the former UN chief, Boutros Bourtros-Ghali. Last week Annan launched an independent inquiry into the UN’s actions before and during the genocide, which began on April 6, 1994, after a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyaramina was shot down outside Kigali, the capital.

At that moment, Col. Theonaste Bagosora, a senior officer in Habyarmina’s inner circle which had been preparing the organisation and logistics to attack the minority Tutsis since early 1993, moved to take control of the state and transform it into an instrument of genocide, according to the report, entitled ‘Leave None to the Tell the Story.’

Rather than a spontaneous outburst of ethnic violence on a massive scale, however, the subsequent slaughter is really the tale of how a relatively small group of determined men, including Bagosora, implemented their plans by using a combination of threats and incentives in the name of a state which the international community refused to de-legimitise until it was too late.

“The Americans were interested in saving money, the Belgians were interested in saving face, and the French were interested in saving their ally, the genocidal government,” said Alison des Forges, the report’s chief author. “All of that took priority over saving lives.”

The report took more than four years of research by an international team of more than two dozen scholars.

Its publication coincided with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) offensive against Yugoslav forces – who have been accused by western leaders of conducting genocidal sweeps against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Besides Annan’s inquiry into the Rwana genocide, the publication last year of a powerfully written account of the slaughter, ‘We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We will Be Killed With Our Families’ by US author Philip Gourevitch, inspired a BBC documentary shown in Europe and the United States.

The report estimated that at least half-a-million people were killed during the genocide, including some 75 percent of the country’s Tutsi population, who, before the violence, constituted about 8.5 percent of the Rwanda’s total number of inhabitants.

The killing lasted a total of 13 weeks, until the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had been observing an UN- monitored cease-fire when the genocide began, defeated the government forces and drove them out of the country into Zaire.

Nearly all of the killings took place in the first five weeks.

The RPF was also guilty of killings, including of civilians, both during and after its successful campaign, but the number of its victims were at most one-tenth of that of the ‘genocidaires,’ the report concluded.

The report’s main theme is that the genocide was not a case of “a people gone mad” or “another cycle of tribal violence,” as the media and various western governments often described it.

“This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power,” the report declared.

The elite, which included Habyarimina and other extremist Hutus, deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the RPF after it first attacked from Uganda in 1990. Using propaganda and physical attacks, they sought to persuade Hutus that all Tutsis, including those living in Rwanda, were RPF agents.

At the same time, they organised and armed militias, like the infamous Interahamwe, that would be fully activated in 1994.

Nonetheless, many Hutus did not go along with – and some actively resisted – the killings and had to be threatened or coerced to cooperate. The genocide radiated out from Kigali, where it began as the Hutu extremists consolidated their power over a highly centralised state apparatus.

The genocide had three phases, beginning with the house-to- house targeting of specific Tutsi and Hutu leaders opposed to Habyarimana.

The second phase, which began after just a few days, involved driving Tutsis from their homes to community centres, such as schools and churches, where they were later massacred in large- scale operations.

The third phase, “pacification,” was an attempt to curb large- scale killings in the face of the first signs of foreign outrage in late April. This final phase was ordered in Mid-May 1994: the killing of surviving Tutsis, particularly women, children, and other survivors who might be able to testify about the slaughter.

The genocide also depended on the absence of effective foreign action, the report said.

Western governments had ample warning of the plans; indeed, one analyst at the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) predicted in January 1994, that as many as half a million could die.

The commander of the undermanned UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, also warned his bosses what was to come and repeatedly requested a stronger mandate and more troops. But he was turned down, and the bulk of UNAMIR was evacuated by western troops after the execution of 10 Belgian peacekeepers.

Dallaire, as well as other military analysts, have said that either an expanded UNAMIR force, a joint UNAMIR force and the soldiers sent to evacuate it, or a combined force of UNAMIR, the RPF, and Rwandan army officers opposed to the killings could have stopped the genocide in Kigali and prevented it from spreading to the countryside.

The weakness of the international response permitted the new government to consolidate its position and status which in turn bolstered its legitimacy and power within Rwanda’s borders, according to the report. The result was more killing.

The pacification phase, in which the worst excesses of the genocide were curbed, was clearly tied to foreign reaction, according to the report.

“If such small efforts could get results, imagine what a firmer stand taken earlier might have produced,” lamented des Forges.