- A book by General Romeo Dallaire, the French-Canadian head of UN peace-keeping forces in Rwanda at the time of the genocide:
Dallaire, R. 2003. Shake hands with the devil. The failure of humanity in Rwanda. Carroll & Graf Publishers: New York. 562p.
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Gourevitch, P. 1998. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. Stories from Rwanda. Farrar Straus and Giroux: New York. 356p.
What governments and the media present as facts and the truth are often far from the truth!
Regards Andre
Melvern Guarian UK Jan 10 2012 Rwanda at last we know the truth + Interesting Comments Containing References
Rwanda: at last we know the truth
A new report reveals who was behind the assassination which led to genocide. But it leaves France with many questions to answer
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- Linda Melvern
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 January 2012 15.18 EST
- Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/10/rwanda-at-last-we-know-truth
The wreckage of the plane that was shot down killing Rwanda's president Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994. Photograph: AP/Jean Marc Boujou
Few events have been the subject of as many rumours and lies as the assassination on 6 April 1994 of Rwanda's President Juvénal Habyarimana. We may never know the identity of the assassins who fired the two missiles that blew his jet apart as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport; yet this one key event signalled the targeted elimination of Rwanda's political opposition, and triggered the genocide of the Tutsi people.
Since that night there has been a ceaseless propaganda war, with each side blaming the other for what happened. One version is that the rebel Tutsi RPF assassinated the Hutu president in a cynical bid to oust his regime; another version blames Hutu extremists who, faced with the possibility of power-sharing with the Tutsi minority, carried out a coup d'etat in order to create a "pure Hutu" state.
This is why the publication of an expert investigation into the aircraft crash in Paris today will have such tremendous repercussions. After 18 years it has essentially settled the central question of who was morally responsible for triggering the genocide.
In some 400 detailed pages, including the conclusions of six experts who visited the crash site in 2010, the report has provided scientific proof that, as the plane made a final approach, the assassins were waiting in the confines of Kanombe military camp – the highly fortified home of Rwanda's French-trained elite unit known as the Presidential Guard, and which is directly under the flight path. This secure military barracks would have been inaccessible to RPF rebels, a point made some years ago in a report on the crash produced by the Rwandan government. The government will feel vindicated, but it will be keen nonetheless to consign this episode to the history books: its priority remains to create a united society.
In France the report is likely to cause considerable embarrassment – certainly and most immediately for Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, an investigating magistrate who first looked at the assassination in 1997 and was convinced the missiles were fired by an RPF hit-squad from a farm near the airport. In his own report he named current Rwandan government officials, including the head of Rwanda's army, as being responsible, and in 2006, amid worldwide publicity, he issued nine international warrants for their arrest. There was a storm of outrage in Kigali and diplomatic ties with France were broken, although there has since been a rapprochement.
But the Bruguière report did not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. He had relied on the testimony of former RPF soldiers who claimed firsthand knowledge but who eventually retracted their testimony. A new investigation by Judge Marc Trévidic and his colleague Nathalie Poux began in 2007. Trévidic's reputation was as a fiercely independent investigator: Paris Match called him a "judge who defies state power".
It is ironic, given the murky past of France in Rwandan affairs – and France was the staunchest of allies to the Hutu regime in Kigali – that the truth of the assassination seems to now reside in the hands of French lawyers. There are certainly implications for those French military officials and politicians who were involved in the foreign policy towards Rwanda in 1994, and the report will do nothing for the reputation of President François Mitterrand, who ran the secretive Africa unit at the Elysée Palace and who steadfastly supported the Hutu regime. France's policy towards Rwanda has for years remained unaccountable to either parliament or the press.
This week's report will certainly give pause for thought for defence teams at the international criminal court for Rwanda, where the Bruguière report has become the cornerstone in many cases. Rwandans facing genocide charges have for years accused the RPF of the assassination, claiming the Tutsis were killed not as the result of a conspiracy to murder but in spontaneous revenge attacks by Hutus devastated at their president's murder by Tutsis.
In spite of the new information, there remain some difficult questions. On the night of the crash there were senior French military officers living in the Kanombe camp embedded with the Rwandan elite units. As UN peacekeepers were prevented from getting to the wreckage these French officers are said to have taken away the cockpit voice recorder and black box.
And no one has yet identified a group of French military officers who, within hours of the crash, had approached the commander of the UN Mission for Rwanda, offering him a team of French aviation experts to enquire into the crash, an offer Dallaire immediately refused.
Sooner or later the truth will emerge about how the misleading Bruguière report came to be written, and why over so many years so many people were taken in by it. The story is far from over.
COMMENTS
- ? If that can happen, then shouldn't this be left behind too?
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10 January 2012 9:51PM
The question of who was responsible for the genocide has already been settled long ago to the satisfaction of all save the partisan and the usual suspects: the Hutu Power extremists centred around the Akazu. Most pertinently that has been settled in the ICTR tribunals whose case reports - a very sobering read - can be found here:
http://www.unictr.org/Cases/tabid/204/Default.aspx
The genocide was, per the overwhelming evidence adduced in those reports, meticulously planned by them. Against that, the question of who shot down Habyarimana's plane was always relatively peripheral, although the overwhelming likelihood was always that it was the genocidaire's, and that seems to be what is being borne out.
The French angle is likewise peripheral. But I disagree with lansing that the article blames the French for the genocide and is somehow infected with "reverse racism". That's just garbage - a naked smear tactic. Likewise the attempt to discredit the case against France by exaggerating what they are accused of. No one is accusing France of instigating the genocide. But we are still far from know the whole story of France's involvement. Everyone simply has to answer for their own actions and inactions in this utterly, utterly nauseating and appalling story according to where the evidence leads. Even when they are not the central players. And we still seem a long way from getting to the bottom of France's inglorious role in these events
10 January 2012 9:59PM
After 18 years it has essentially settled the central question of who was morally responsible for triggering the genocide.
Who was what? Morally responsible?
It hasn't even identified who was actually responsible.
the report has provided scientific proof that, as the plane made a final approach, the assassins were waiting in the confines of Kanombe military camp
It must be a very large camp. Simple shoulder-launched missiles have a slant range of better than 3 nautical miles, and an operational height in excess of 5000 ft. An aircraft on the approach would be at 3000 ft about 5 nm out, and below 5000ft for some distance before that. The potential launch area is therefore at least 30 sq miles, so unless Kanombe is a very large camp they could well have been fired from outside the boundary. And they leave no subsequent trace of the launch.
these French officers are said to have taken away the cockpit voice recorder and black box.
And these would tell us what exactly? As the missiles would approach from behind the crew would have been totally unaware of what was happening till the first struck, at which point it might just have got as far as recording 'Oh Sh....'
This article is tinfoil hat troofer territory.
10 January 2012 11:18PM
A previous article raises questions for Sarkozy
http://http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/25/rwanda
11 January 2012 10:11AM
We know no such thing! The fog of uncertainty and lies still swirls around the events preceding (and following) the 1994 genocide. Probably the truth about who killed Habyarimana will never be known, though the finger of suspicion will continue to point at the RPF. Any confident attempt to apportion blame is suspect because of the complex motives of all sides involved. All that this most recent enquiry tells us is that France is anxious to repair relations with Kigali, which is itself not uninteresting.
Here's a link to a rather good article from the London Review of Books, in which SW Smith surveys the turbid stew of half-truths and possibilities surrounding the Rwandan genocide.
11 January 2012 10:30AM
I might add that, if the French government has been anxious to cover its own involvement in the genocide and to implicate the RPF in sparking the violence, the British and American authorities have been equally anxious to exonerate the RPF, downpay violence committed against Hutu by the Tutsi militia, and to cosy up to Kagame (Rwanda has adopted English as its national language and joined the Commonwealth, signifying a shift in its geopolitical alignment from the Francophone to the Anglo-sphere).
The great imperial game is being played out between France and L'Anglosaxonie , with Rwanda's recent past as the geopolitical football. If France acted disgracefully in the past, Britain is doing little better now, with its paternalistic willingness to overlook the human rights abuses and political oppression associated with the Kagame regime. And if French hacks like Pierre Pean attempt to defend the actions of France by attacking the RPF, English hacks like Linda Melvern attempt to defend Kagame and Britain by defending it.
11 January 2012 12:58PM
The story that Africans killed Africans misses out the West's role and particularly the US role is stirring the conflict and arming the rebels
For the other side,please read some of these articles
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21127
http://www.jambonews.net/en/blog/2010/10/08/paul-kagame-%E2%80%9Cour-kind-of-guy%E2%80%9D/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24372
11 January 2012 1:44PM
Response to jono20, 11 January 2012 12:50PM
Rwanda was Belgian, yes, but it was the Mitterand government's stated policy to counter increased Anglophone influence in Central Africa; it's been argued that French support for the Habyarimana government was in part motivated by the fact that the RPF (most of whom were Ugandan-trained and educated) was perceived as being Anglophone, unlike the French-speaking MRND regime. I do agree with your broader point about not reducing complex situations to one-dimensional conspiracies - particularly given that these conspiracies tend to blindly plonk all blame on Western governments, because heaven forbid Africans should be capable of influencing a situation - but it doesn't mean that the role played by other countries' governments should be ignored either.
11 January 2012 3:37PM
Ms. Melvern is wrong. This absurd report will not bother the defence at the ICTR. Unlike Ms. Melvern, the defence can rely on real evidence that she has ignored that it was the RPF (with assistance from its western allies) that shot down the plane and massacred all the Hutus on board including two presidents of Rwandan and Burundi.
Louise Arbour commissioned the first report (Hourigan Report) in 1997 that concluded it was the RPF. Judge Brugiere concluded the same thing after an 8 year investigation. The radio intercept of April from Kagame to his men announcing the murder of Habyarimana was filed as an exhibit in two trials at the ICTR. Abdul Ruzibiza, an RPF officer, testified in the Military I trial that the RPF did it and he was part of the team. Kagame's right hand man Theodore Rudasingwa stated Kagame bragged about it. The latest french report is a travesty. It is known that the launch tubes for the missiles were found at Masaka Hill, not the military camp. The French investigators appear to have been hoodwinked by the RPF. And, like Ms. Melvern, they did not interview anyone from Rwandan government or military of the time who all deny they were involved and point the finger at the RPF. This latest report is just a regurgitation of the discredited RPF Mucyo report. It seems the French value economic interests over truth and justice.
Christopher Black
Lead Defence Counsel
Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal
- 11 January 2012 3:43PM
Response to girondistnyc, 11 January 2012 2:11PM
it's worth noting that an article in Foreign Affairs at the time made an excellent argument that US intervention would have been extraordinarily difficult due to distance from bases, terrain and logistics.
Unfortunately that's simply not true. General Dallaire who we can safely assume was better informed than Foreign Affairs stated that he could contain the violence with 5000 UN troops. Rwanda is a miniscule country with very little forest covering and the army and militias were so poorly armed that even the RPF eventually managed to chase them out with their battered Kalashnikovs. Any modern army could have stopped the genocide irrespective of bases and logistics. The problem was as you rightly point out that they might have lost a few dozen men and the US was not prepared to sacrifice more troops after Mogadishu, but it would have certainly worked.
11 January 2012 4:41PM
Response to lansing, 10 January 2012 8:47PM
Ignorance in the extreme.
Rwanda is firstly a former German colony, until after WW1, when it then became Belgian. The Belgians discovered a society almost unique in Africa - one language (Kinyarwandan) and pretty much unified society. There are three tribes in Rwanda, the two main ones being Hutu and Tutsi. They were not at war or even atangonistic towards one another and lived side by side in harmony. They were in fact barely indestinguishable from one another. When the Belgians came to rule they sought to divide and conquer. They claassified people into the two tribes based on physical characteristics, but they were too similar so made the decision on how many cows a person had!
When the Belgians left they had a created an impoverished society full of hostility and biterness - basically conditions ideal for genocide.
I've been to Rwanda and seen first hand the effects of the genocide. It is truly heartbreaking to see a society still divided. But also heartening. People genuinely want to forgive and move on. Their parliament has a higher proportion of women than any other country in the world (they believe with more women in charge, a genocide is less like to reoccur) and a concerted effort to have a smaller military. One of Africas success stories.
Kagame is starting to worry me though, I'm praying he doesnt turn into another Mugabe... but the country did need a strong leader to take it through the post genocide period. And it seems to have worked... .so far!
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