The consultant, a US national Robert Gersony, had been contracted by UNHCR for sixty days to organise a voluntary repatriation programme for refugees, and he claimed to have acquired information about RPF massacres while conducting a series of interviews over a period of five weeks in a third of Rwandan communes.16 That there had been revenge killing by RPF soldiers was not in dispute; what was shocking was the claim that massacres of Hutu had been systematic, with a death toll of 30,000 people.
