Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

The génocidaires continue to maintain that the mass murder of Tutsi resulted from a ‘spontaneous uprising’ by an angry population. They argue there was no genocide of the Tutsi. With no planning or preparation, they argue the intent to destroy a human group was lacking, and so with no intent, the 1948 Genocide Convention does not apply.

In the trials of the génocidaires at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), there has been no shortage of scholars, regional experts, journalists and military officers to appear in court in their defence.

In the aftermath of the genocide of the Tutsi, the plans for a campaign of genocide denial devised in the refugee camps in the DRC were found in documents abandoned by the génocidaires, along with evidence of efforts to counter the ‘false UN claims of genocide’. A collection of documents from the National Archives of Rwanda revealed the disinformation strategies used at the UN and diplomatic instructions to further that denial issued by Hutu Power’s so-called Interim Government.

Their anonymity did not last. On 25 July 1995, a Yaoundé biweekly newspaper, La Nouvelle Expression, named forty-four Rwandan ‘genocide suspects’ hiding out in Cameroon. The list served as a who’s who of the most powerful figures of the Hutu Power movement, with a catalogue of criminal charges including genocide and crimes against humanity, murder, extermination, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts.5 The newspaper then accused Paul Biya, president of Cameroon, of harbouring international criminals.

In addition, the newspaper named Hutu Power lawyer Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, creator of the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), an overtly crypto-fascist gang of middle-class professionals that resembled the Ku Klux Klan. The chief ideologue of Hutu Power, Ferdinand Nahimana, was also listed as being in Cameroon.

The ‘Goebbels of Rwanda’, Nahimana was a proven expert in fake news and disinformation, using the airwaves to spread fear and terror among the population.

Indeed, Bagosora’s version of history – that a ‘spontaneous uprising’ caused ‘excessive massacres’ – later formed the basis of his defence during his legal trial.

Hutu Power had promised utopian national salvation. Yet, in August 1994, a description of post-genocide Rwanda was relayed to Washington from US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor John Shattuck, who wrote of a ‘country devoid of human life, depopulated by machete … the equivalent of a neutron bomb’.

It was recommended by the Commission of Experts that the Security Council take all necessary and effective action to ensure that those responsible for the 1994 Tutsi genocide were brought to justice.15 The Security Council responded by creating the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on 8 November 1994, the second such tribunal in history after the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, established 25 May 1993).

The first anniversary of the start of the genocide took place on 7 April 1995, and along came public speeches promising the arrest of the perpetrators, yet there were no arrests. Not one legal action against any Rwandan fugitive in any country in the world, under any jurisdiction, had taken place.

The task of putting the perpetrators on trial was huge, with an initial list of four hundred category-one suspects produced by the ICTR in January 1995. These were the main perpetrators: those who planned the killing and were in command positions before and during the genocide; those who incited or directed others to take part; those in positions of power both locally and nationally, who sought to gain personal advantage.

The US State Department determined France to be a ‘key player’ on the issue of Rwanda. In a declassified cable dated 12 July 1994, it was speculated that France ‘may have the most complete information of any Western government on war crimes in Rwanda and access to witnesses, evidence and even perpetrators’.

It was surprising, nonetheless, that on Sunday, 10 March 1996, gendarmes in Cameroon detained Bagosora trying to cash American Express travellers’ cheques previously stolen from the Rwandan Treasury.

President Paul Biya finally signed extradition papers the following year and Bagosora, Nahimana, André Ntagerura and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva were flown in handcuffs to Arusha, Tanzania, on 23 January 1997 and locked inside a UN detention facility.

We can only speculate on the reports sent back to Kigali by Rwanda’s UN ambassador, Jean-Damascène Bizimana, who sat in all the Council’s daily informal and secret discussions. He fled New York afterwards, taking his documents with him. By all accounts he was a dutiful and a constant presence.

The resulting civil war between the RPA and the Rwandan Government Army (RGF) of President Habyarimana was a disaster. The RGF did manage initially to defeat the RPA but only because of substantial help from France, including the dispatch of French forces. With French help, Rwanda’s army rapidly increased in size and in the next two years grew in all ranks from 5,000 to 28,000 and, thanks to France, Egypt and South Africa, was equipped with modern weaponry. Rwanda, one of the poorest of the world’s countries, became the third-largest importer of weapons on the African continent, partly by using money siphoned from loans from the IMF.

With continued help from the Ugandan military, the RPA was transformed into a 15,000-strong disciplined light infantry army that relied on resupply by foot. The army also had extraordinary endurance levels and was highly motivated.

The fighting in February 1993 between the RPA and government forces ended once again with a last-ditch military intervention by the French. The offensive had given the RPA significant military advantage on the ground, which then aided ongoing peace negotiations. According to a UK declassified cable, the RPF asked for a guarantee of an end to the ‘genocide’ of the Tutsi and wanted the replacement of local officials where killings of Tutsi had happened. They were horrified at what was happening in Rwanda but did not want to lose all that had been achieved in the peace talks, resulting in the Arusha Accords.

That Easter weekend in New York, the more Keating read about Rwanda, the worse he realised the situation was. The reports provided by the UN Secretariat were of poor quality, offering little analysis on the implication of events, and UN officials seemed overly eager to present good news. It was far too simple to categorise this as a civil war – rather, ethnic violence was a central feature of Rwandan politics. As a result, the reports provided by officials in the UN Secretariat significantly underestimated the ethnic complexity of the situation.

When he looked back twenty years later, Keating described how the officials in the UN Secretariat portrayed the Arusha Accords as an ‘unvarnished success story that would put an end to a highly destructive civil war’. The agreement was presented ‘as though it were gold’, Keating said.

In August 1993, an investigation into allegations of grave and massive violations of the right to life in Rwanda was undertaken by the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions for the Commission on Human Rights, Bacre Waly Ndiaye.

In addition to this brief, six more crucial human rights reports were not mentioned.8 These documented the impunity that accompanied massacres of Tutsi carried out in 1959, in 1963, in 1973, in 1991 and in 1992. In each case no one was brought to justice.

The conclusion of the international coalition was that those who held power in Rwanda had organised the killing of some 2,000 Tutsi. ‘If we had known what we now know’, Keating said of the UN mission, ‘I am sure we would have all come to the conclusion that a Chapter VI mandate and 2,600 soldiers was simply not good enough for the job.’

Keating said later, ‘We only dimly perceived the steady deterioration. The deeper and more dangerous problem of a monumental threat to human life was ignored.’13 With better information, the Council might have proceeded quite differently, he said. Instead, it proceeded on the assumption that the various parties in Rwanda really wanted peace. Keating added, ‘But now we know that the opposite was the case. The hard-line Hutu did not want peace and they had access to a privileged insider’s view of the discussions in the Council.’

By the time the UN peacekeepers arrived in Rwanda at the end of 1993, it was probably too late for peacekeeping. The Hutu Power extremists had their own plans, beginning a policy of denigration of the Arusha Accords, encouraging violence against Tutsi and their murder, seeking a slide back into conflict. The extremists around Habyarimana saw the power-sharing concessions in the Accords as a sellout. Habyarimana, who had held power on behalf of the Akazu, the northern mafia, for twenty years, had been forced into political multiparty recognition and political reforms, and power-sharing with the RPF, but was looking for a way out.

At 3:06 that afternoon a UNAMIR message log records that the RPA implored UNAMIR to save threatened people; and at 4:40 p.m. a company size of RPF soldiers left their barracks in Kigali and engaged Presidential Guards who had goaded them, bringing Tutsi to their front gates and killing them in full view of the RPF. Later in the evening of 7 April, Dallaire found the bodies of ten UN peacekeepers in a hospital morgue. They were the Belgian soldiers sent to protect the prime minister early that morning.

In a later inquiry conducted by the French National Assembly, both Marlaud and the deputy defence attaché at the French embassy, Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Jacques Maurin, admitted that they tried to persuade Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the chef de cabinet in the Ministry of Defence, to take control of the situation. It later transpired that the membership of the Interim Government had been decided at the embassy of France.

The Security Council’s negligence and inexcusable apathy over Rwanda was never more apparent than in allowing a representative of a genocidal government to remain at the horseshoe table. No one bothered to explain why the hastily created Interim Government, betraying every principle for which the UN stood, was legitimised in this way. In the course of three months, this government implemented a policy to eliminate the minority Tutsi. In a terrible irony and typical of a constant distortion of reality, they called their government in Kinyarwanda the Gouvernement y’Abatabazi, or the Government of Saviours.

It was estimated that when the genocide of the Tutsi began, an estimated 6,350 military and paramilitary forces were stationed in Kigali.

In the early hours of Thursday, 7 April, the gates were opened at the main prison in Kigali, known as 1930, for the year of its construction by Belgium. Among the hundreds of prisoners set free were some of the country’s most violent criminals. They joined the ranks of the Interahamwe on the roadblocks.

This was the first large-scale killing of Tutsi discovered by peacekeepers from UNAMIR. The sadistic brutality of the killers was duly noted by unarmed Polish UN Military Observers present at the scene, held against a wall by Interahamwe and forced to watch.

In Gikondo on Saturday afternoon, Gaillard told Ceppi that a genocide of the Tutsi was under way and given its speed it would soon be over. The next day Gaillard estimated that 10,000 Tutsis had been killed in the capital city in the last three days. Ceppi published a story on Monday, 11 April, in which he wrote about the genocide of the Tutsi.

Journalist fra Liberation

Prudence Bushnell, who was responsible for the Rwanda portfolio as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of African Affairs of the US State Department, recalled, ‘Boy oh boy, did the shooting down of the [presidential] plane and the withdrawal of the Belgians give us the excuse we needed to pull the plug. It was an unfortunate period in my government’s history. I regret it greatly, as I think all of us do.’

Two weeks after the genocide of the Tutsi began, in a report on 20 April, the UN secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, reflected the views of the Interim Government and blamed ‘unruly’ members of the Presidential Guard. He insisted that the most urgent task was a ceasefire and that both sides were equally responsible for killing. The secretary-general remained determined to pursue a ceasefire, and three weeks after the genocide began, on 29 April, he continued to blame the massacres on uncontrolled military personnel and groups of civilians taking advantage of the breakdown of law and order. There was continual reference to the Arusha Accords as the only basis for peace.

On the ground Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire was instructed to talk to both sides. But the RPF refused to have anything to do with the Interim Government, whom it dismissed as ‘a clique of killers’.

In the midst of the stalemate the Council decided on 21 April to draw down its force to a symbolic level. This retreat ensured that the Tutsi population was alone, with no protection from anyone. Within hours of the vote which, in the words of UK Ambassador David Hannay, left a ‘token force to appease public opinion’, the genocide spread south.

Nevertheless, for the last three months not one government had called for the expulsion of the representative of Rwanda’s Interim Government from the chamber. From the beginning of the genocide until its end, all UN governments and official bodies continued to recognise as legitimate the Interim Government, knowing its one overriding policy was the extermination of a part of the population. Not one government called on the perpetrators to stop the genocide. The génocidaires remained safe in the knowledge that outside interference was never likely.

A later inquiry into these events by the Belgian Senate showed that an extensive anti-Belgian campaign waged over the airwaves on RTLM had started in January 1994, and Belgian military intelligence described how the radio station ‘stigmatised’ both the Belgian contingent and UNAMIR.

Some months earlier, in December 1993, predictions that Belgian UN peacekeepers would be murdered had been made to the Belgian journalist and expert on the Great Lakes region, Colette Braeckman. Braeckman, who was in Kigali on the night of the presidential assassination, heard that the wife of one of the three French crew members on the presidential Falcon jet who telephoned the French embassy for information was told that Belgians were responsible for the attack on the plane. It was an accusation levelled at the ten Belgian peacekeepers by their killers as they hopelessly fought for their lives in a six-hour battle in a military camp in central Kigali on the morning of 7 April.

Yet there is evidence that points from the very outset on 6 April to a calm resolve. This was certainly the impression of Dallaire. Within hours of the missile fire, he described seeing Presidential Guards and elite units everywhere. The Rwandan government army headquarters was fully mobilised. ‘They knew what the hell was going on,’ said Dallaire.

The idea of a coup d’état was later dismissed by the commander of the Belgian contingent of UNAMIR, Colonel Luc Marchal, who said that on the night of Wednesday, 6 April, it was too quiet.

The US probably knew this. Joyce Leader, the US embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali, had a conversation with a ‘well-placed Rwandan army colonel’ on 12 April. He told her that a secret military-civilian organisation was ordering the atrocities and the president’s death was the provocation needed to put a long-standing plan into effect.32 The moderates were not strong enough to prevent a Hutu Power takeover and in any case received no help.

Although there are interesting snippets in declassified US cables, much information on these events remains unavailable.

Harriman told Washington about the wife of Habyarimana, Agathe Kanziga, who was flown to Paris by the French military from Kigali and now lived in Paris. Harriman wrote that based on information from Rwandans who knew this woman, since the assassination of her husband, the power in Rwanda of her Hutu extremist entourage had grown dramatically. Harriman was told that Agathe and members of her family were extremely hard-line and encouraged some of the most radical Hutu who argued the time had come to end for ever the Tutsi presence in Rwanda.

No scientific or forensic investigation into the missile fire on the presidential jet took place for the next seventeen years, and the wreckage remains to this day where it fell. The downing of the plane continued to be a useful enigma; it left room for the génocidaires to manipulate history and present their own alternative facts. It was a propaganda coup and became their most successful item of fake news.

It was in the Hotel des Diplomates, the hotel in Kigali that served for three months as the headquarters of Hutu Power, that Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire had one last meeting towards the end of June.

A dramatic press campaign was under way in France organised by MSF, the agency having decided to speak out about the genocide. ‘We had a special responsibility, because France has a special responsibility’, said Jean-François Alesandrini, director of communications of MSF-France. Jean-Hervé Bradol, an MSF doctor who had just returned from Kigali, appeared on the French nightly news bulletin (TFI) on 16 May. The huge death toll was not the result of civil war, he explained. The killers were trying to present the catastrophe in Rwanda as the result of tribes slaughtering each other. This was an insult to the victims. Bradol explained that a deliberate, systematic and well-planned extermination was under way. ‘France has a particularly serious role’, he said, and informed viewers that France had funded, trained and armed those carrying out the slaughter, something they kept quiet. It was scandalous that no French authority had explicitly condemned those responsible or called on the killers to stop the slaughter since French officials knew these killers.

By 12 May, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had detailed information on ninety-one such sites with an estimate of displaced people at 756,747, of whom 416,000 were trapped in the zone controlled by the Rwandan Government Forces (RGF). A detailed map was created, showing each site where people were trapped and starving, and sent to New York.

On 17 May, the Council reversed its decision and mandated 5,500 reinforcements for UNAMIR, but nothing came. The resolution was a sham. There were no troops available. Those UN governments who offered troops did so without airlift or equipment or, like the US, offered equipment but wanted money.

It was Bernard Kouchner, during another visit to Kigali on 16 June, who broke the news to Dallaire that the French military was coming back in to ‘sort out the Rwandan government territory and create a safe area’. Dallaire thought that if the French had really wanted to end genocide and support the aims of the UN they should have reinforced UNAMIR; he thought the real intention was to split Rwanda in two, like Cyprus. From now on, and with immediate effect, the concerns of UNAMIR slipped down the Security Council agenda. From mid-June the focus was on the French military mission and what it could achieve as the French sought Council legitimacy for their initiative, called Turquoise.