Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

Dallaire’s official reaction was delivered in a twenty-four-page cable to headquarters on 20 July in which he described the French plan as a ‘covert attempt to restore the other side’.12 The commander of UNAMIR believed that the French hoped to prevent the RPA destroying the RGF and bringing the membership of the Interim Government to justice.

The British ambassador, David Hannay, thought the idea ‘crazy’ but the views of the British would be made known privately to the French and because of her bilateral relationship with France the British eventually expressed approval in the Council. The US thought it a disastrous policy and diplomats concluded that the French were aiming to maximise influence in Francophone Africa and had a ‘desire to be perceived as a great power’.14 The US agreed to vote in the Security Council to give UN authority to the mission as long as the French bore the financial burden.

As the vote in the Security Council approached, the UK ambassador, Sir David Hannay, was increasingly critical of the secretary-general. ‘The French, with the assistance of Boutros-Ghali, will be going into high gear to massage the resistance and isolate those, such as New Zealand and Canada, who have the strongest objections.’ It was astonishing, he cabled London, ‘that the Secretary-General should be turning a deaf ear to the misgivings of his Force Commander’.

Dallaire wrote later, ‘I would never have guessed at the time the extent to which the Interim Government, the RGF, Boutros-Ghali, France and even the RPF were already working together behind my back to secure a French intervention … under the guise of humanitarian relief.’

Taken into exile was a bus full of documents removed from the Ministry of Defence. Nevertheless, in their haste, the génocidaires left a mass of evidence in government ministries.

The archives of the security services, the Service Central de Renseignements (SCR), attached to the office of the president, were found to be intact, including detailed and substantial files on 44,000 citizens. This archive revealed the full horror of a quota system used to restrict the participation of Tutsi in public life and discriminate against them. Here were the reports of the state employees who had conducted investigations to find out if people were ‘pure Hutu’ or whether they were secretly Tutsi and faking their identity.

Rwanda’s state records, its national archive, containing millions of pages of documents, photographs and sound recordings, had largely survived the civil war, including paperwork neatly filed in the Kigali offices of President Juvénal Habyarimana.

The last Hutu Power strongholds in Rwanda fell over the next two weeks: first, the northern town of Ruhengeri on 14 July, and then Gisenyi three days later. Over the course of the next five days 1 million people crossed into the North Kivu province of Zaire. The UN department in the British Foreign Office estimated this was the fastest and largest refugee flow in history. It was later described as a ‘politically-ordered evacuation’ that was targeted at the Hutu population.

The creation by French troops of the zone, announced on 1 July, was a departure from the original mandate but gained the full support of the UN secretary-general, who argued that with a tide of refugees fleeing the RPF advance it was France’s only option. The zone would protect people fleeing ‘the fighting’. In fact, the force protected the fleeing génocidaires. The French zone occupied an area comprising some 20 per cent of the country and was considered illegal under international law, particularly when French commanders announced that they would exclude the RPA.

Thanks to their safe retreat, the high command of the RGF gathered together for a week of meetings in Goma starting on 2 September.30 A detailed typed account of the discussions held by these twenty-eight officers and their commander, Major General Augustin Bizimungu, was later found in an archive abandoned in three buses in a refugee camp.

The Paschke report arrived in February 1997. It immediately resulted in two resignations: the tribunal’s Kenyan chief administrator, Andronico Adede, and the deputy prosecutor, Honoré Rakotomanana of Madagascar.4 Paschke had concluded that since its inception, not a single administrative area at the ICTR functioned effectively. There was no accounting system established.

The single most important failure was within the Office of the Prosecutor, where no prosecution strategy existed.

There remains a widespread belief that there was a lack of documentary evidence because Hutu Power leaders had taken much of the paper evidence with them when they fled. As a result, the ICTR had largely relied on eyewitness evidence.

In fact, there was a large amount of documentary evidence. Most of the National Archives of Rwanda survived the civil war. It was a prodigious amount of paper and a legacy of Belgian colonial rule, the remnants of a vast bureaucracy created by the colonisers. The system required multiple copies of every decision in every institution of state, and daily reports written to the office of the president on the decisions made in all government offices. The archives included documents, sound recordings and photographs, classified secret and confidential intelligence reports, government memoranda, letters, faxes, invoices and diplomatic cables. The archive included the transcripts of interrogations and of listening devices and telephone intercepts. Written in business French, these were perfectly typed records of state.

The National Archives exposed the true nature of the twenty- year rule of President Habyarimana, a man who portrayed himself as modest and religious, someone who cared only for the development of his country. In fact, Habyarimana and his cronies, mostly his wife, Agathe Kanziga, and her relatives, treated the country and its peasant population as a fiefdom, motivated by greed and racial hatred. On taking office in a military coup in 1973 Habyarimana promised to ease ethnic tension, but instead increased discrimination against Tutsi and reinforced the policy called ‘ethnic équilibre’ that was introduced by his predecessor, President Grégoire Kayibanda. Habyarimana further reduced the participation of Tutsi in society.

The enforcement of the system involved investigations into the ‘true ethnicity’ of state employees. For instance, a file with the names of all the professors at the National University of Rwanda listed the ‘verifications’ carried out to see if they were ‘Hutu of pure blood’.

The archive of the SCR revealed Rwanda to have been one of the most monitored countries on earth. The files of this intelligence service had been moved to a basement room in a building on the other side of Kigali. They revealed twenty-four-hour surveillance reports, and records of intercepted telephone calls and listening devices in hotels and embassies. The archive of the SCR contained intercepted mail and family photographs, transcribed interrogations, and the updated addresses of Rwandans living abroad.

Most importantly, contained in the president’s papers were files on auto-défense civile. This was the murderous method used by the perpetrators of massacres of Tutsi to ensure public participation in the killing on as broad a basis as possible, by co-opting everyone. This system first emerged in 1963 in response to an armed and unsuccessful invasion by Tutsi refugees.

In the president’s paper, a history of auto-défense civile, neatly filed, showed how in 1991, préfectures established security committees and each reported directly to the president on the progress and efficiency of the auto-défense civile.

However, despite the weight of this evidence, the National Archives of Rwanda and the offices of the SCR seemed of little consequence to ICTR investigators who were uninterested in the older documents.

Further evidence existed elsewhere in the capital. The vaults in the Banque Nationale du Rwanda (BNR) held the documentary proof of the preparations for the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi.19 For two years, the files and ledgers lay undisturbed until August 1996, when two experts arrived. ‘We found cellars full,’ recalled Pierre Galand. Galand was a former director of Oxfam-Belgium and a Belgian senator, and his colleague, Professor Michel Chossudovsky, was a Canadian economist and expert in international development and finance. Rwanda’s post-genocide government had received a demand to repay the international loans incurred by the country since 1990 and had commissioned an investigation into this massive indebtedness.

Birara had taken the risky step in 1993 of secretly informing Western ambassadors of a US$12 million arms deal concluded with a French company at a time when Rwanda faced an economic abyss.21 In the early weeks of 1994, Birara had seen lists of potential victims in circulation, and he believed the militia in April numbered 50,000 youth.

Working in the bank vaults, Galand and Chossudovsky collected enough evidence to show that the debt built up between 1990 and 1994 had principally financed weaponry for the armed forces and the creation of a civilian militia. They described how the perpetrators financed the ‘young delinquents, products of an impoverished society, enrolled in their thousands in a civilian militia responsible for massacres and genocide’.

The former head of customs at the airport revealed members of the presidential family had their own hangar and ran a parallel customs system and imported anything from fridges to BMW motorcars.

The experts found receipts and invoices for the mass importation of machetes from China by four companies in 1993, none of these companies associated with agriculture. The invoices revealed a total US$725,669 spent on 581,000 machetes, and other invoices for the same companies for quantities of lethal instruments ultimately used in the killing, including hoes, axes, hammers, razor blades, screwdrivers, pickaxes, scythes, sickles, spades and nails. According to bank records, US$4.6 million was spent on this agricultural equipment in 1993 alone.

A significant importer of machetes was the multimillionaire Félicien Kabuga, a genocide suspect who remains at large, one of the most wanted fugitives in the world with a US$5 million reward on his head from the US Rewards for Justice Program. Kabuga also paid large sums to establish the hate radio RTLM. His indictment at the ICTR described a ‘strategy devised by fellow extremists, [which] included several components, carefully worked out by the va...

In a damning conclusion, the experts showed how money to pay for the genocide preparations came from quick disbursing loans from Western donors who entered into agreements with the regime stipulating that funds must be used not for military or paramilitary purposes but for necessary goods such as food and equipment. The experts concluded that the money to pay for the genocide came from loans granted to the regime in June 1991, from the International Development Association (IDA), the African Development Fund (AFD), the European Development Fund and bilateral donors including Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the United States, Belgium and Canada.

Galand believed that the international financial institutions owed reparations to the people of Rwanda as a result of their negligence. Five missions were sent by the World Bank to follow and supervise the Structural Adjustment Programme between June 1991 and October 1993. Only in December 1993 did the World Bank suspend payment of a tranche of money because ‘certain objectives were not met’.

Investigators from the ICTR interviewed Galand several times about the discoveries in the BNR. On each occasion, while the investigators changed, the questions remained the same. Galand said no one asked him to testify about his evidence, and no response was forthcoming to his request that he appear before a judge to tell what he knew. He is unsure whether the ICTR ever obtained a copy of their report. The ICTR rejected the photocopies he provided of some of the most crucial documents because they were not original copies.

The first trial at the ICTR was that of a bourgmestre, a local mayor, Jean-Paul Akayesu, a teacher and schools inspector who was sentenced to a life term in July 1998. For his appeal, Akayesu called on a Canadian lawyer, John Philpot,6 who shared his own ideas about events, believing the tribunal to be a product of US imperialism. Philpot argued that Uganda was at the root cause of everything, and had used the RPF to plot against, and seize, a Hutu country.

Kambanda was the first person to enter a plea of guilty for genocide, the first head of a government held accountable for the crime, as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The Bagosora testimony was a study in denial. Repeating claims made familiar in the diplomatic correspondence in 1994, he warned judges that a ‘pro-Tutsi lobby’ was fooling the world. The story of genocide was a propaganda ploy in a campaign expertly orchestrated by the RPF and its allies.

The case itself had been designated ICTR-98-41. Bagosora was on trial with three other senior military officers as the tribunal was obliged to group defendants to try to speed up the judicial process. The other defendants were Major General Gratien Kabiligi, former head of the Rwandan army operations bureau (G3), Major Aloys Ntabakuze, the commander of the elite para-commando battalion, and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, the commander of the northern Gisenyi sector, a former head of army intelligence.

It was Judge Møse who raised the issue of large-scale massacres of Tutsi, and who wanted to know Bagosora’s views on the subject of Kibuye, the préfecture where, pre-1994, the largest Tutsi population lived. During the period of the genocide Kibuye was also where the most widespread killing of Tutsi took place. At the end of April 1994, it was estimated that 200,000 people were murdered in Kibuye, and by the end of June, an estimate of only 8,000 Tutsi remained alive from the total population of a quarter of a million.

In the early hours of Thursday, 7 April, when elite units in the army, including the Presidential Guard, eliminated Rwanda’s pro-democracy politicians, Bagosora had already assumed official and de facto control of political and military affairs.

In effect, the army was decapitated that day. The minister of defence, Augustin Bizimana, and the head of G2 (Military Intelligence), Colonel Aloys Ntiwiragabo, were in Cameroon. The head of army operations (G3), Colonel Gratien Kabiligi, was in Egypt. When first told of the crash of the aircraft, Bagosora said he feared a trap, or that they might be in the middle of a coup d’état.

The prosecution reminded the judges of a decision made by the ICTR Appeals Chamber in the case of a politician, Édouard Karemera, and read it aloud to the court. There is no reasonable basis for anyone to dispute that, during 1994, there was a campaign of mass conscious participation in a nationwide government-organized system killing intended to destroy, in whole or at least in very large part, Rwanda’s Tutsi population, which was a protected group. That campaign was, to a terrible degree, successful.17 No one had contributed more than the four accused to the success of that terrible campaign.

The verdict, eventually announced on 18 December 2008, came after 409 trial days, 242 witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, and 1,600 exhibits, with innumerable pages of pleadings and 300 written decisions.19 It took three judges eighteen months to evaluate the evidence. The courtroom was packed with press while a live feed was in place for international news organisations, with the camera focused on Judge Møse sitting in front of the UN symbol. As Møse read a summary judgement, Bagosora did not move, and only once or twice seemed to have difficulty swallowing, even when sentenced to a life term.

It was probably at paragraph sixteen of the judges’ sentence that the prosecution team must have started to feel queasy, for it was here that the statement expressly admonished them. ‘Several elements underpinning the prosecution case about conspiracy were not supported by sufficiently reliable evidence.’ A crucial accusation against the four military officers was unproven – that they had conspired together to commit genocide. The judges had determined that the evidence submitted for the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide was circumstantial and not sufficiently reliable.

Møse continued: The Chamber has found that some of the accused played a role in the creation, arming and training of civilian militia as well as the maintenance of lists of suspected accomplices of the RPF or others opposed to the ruling regime. However, it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that these efforts were directed at killing Tutsi civilians with the intention to commit genocide. The Chamber accepted that some indications showed evidence of a plan to commit genocide, in particular when viewed in light of the subsequent targeted and speedy killings immediately after the shooting down of the president’s plane. However, the evidence was also consistent with preparations for a political or military power struggle and measures adopted in the context of an ongoing war with the RPF that were used for other purposes from 6 April 1994.

A few weeks before the tenth anniversary of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi, in March 2004, a news story on the front page of Le Monde caused a sensation. It claimed to have untied a Gordian knot, and offered new information about who assassinated President Habyarimana on Wednesday, 6 April 1994. The paper announced that after six years of investigation, a French judge determined that the responsibility belonged to the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and that the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, gave the order.

The newspaper quoted a key witness, Abdul Ruzibiza, who explained, ‘Paul Kagame did not care about the Tutsi living in Rwanda, and they had to be eliminated.’ Ruzibiza revealed how he had helped to stake out the location for the assassins at a farm in Masaka some four kilometres from the airport. He saw them arrive in a Toyota, the missiles hidden in the back under rubbish and empty cardboard boxes. Ruzibiza eventually wrote a book which, published in 2005 at over 400 pages, provided a litany of alleged RPF human rights violations.

One claim in the Bruguière report cast doubt on all the others, calling into question the thoroughness of his ongoing investigation. In his report, Judge Bruguière accused the RPF of the earlier assassination in February 1994, only weeks before the genocide of the Tutsi began, of the popular, moderate and conciliatory politician Félicien Gatabazi.

There was no doubt that the Bruguière report was flawed. Another failure of his argument was the lack of forensic work, ballistics or on-the-ground investigation of the crash site. A credibility gap existed in the report’s material evidence that only included five photographs showing parts of missile launchers and some serial numbers. These photographs had already been dismissed in a 1998 French National Assembly report, and could have come from anywhere.

The information on the launchers was given by Colonel Bagosora to a Belgian academic, Filip Reyntjens, who was writing a book about the assassination. By this time, inconveniently, the launchers had apparently been taken abroad and given to a Zairean general, where they had disappeared. According to the Bruguière report, the numbers on these missiles corresponded with missiles that could be traced, and had been ‘sold by Russia to Uganda and then given to the RPF’.

Lieutenant Colonel Walter Balis, the liaison officer between UNAMIR and the RPF, saw the missiles depart and believed it impossible for the RPF to infiltrate Kanombe camp. A Belgian corporal, Mathieu Gerlache, on the viewing platform of a disused air control tower, had a perfect view as the missiles left from the direction of Kanombe, the second scoring a direct hit, when the aircraft exploded.

Trévidic suspended the arrest warrants for the nine Rwandan officials and, with a team of six French scientists and his colleague Nathalie Poux, he visited the crash site. The team included experts in missile technology and aviation, air accident investigators, a geometrician and an explosives expert. They carried out a series of tests on the Falcon 50 jet wreckage that remained where it had fallen sixteen years earlier. The investigation broadened in other ways.

An initial 400-page report published by the French investigating magistrates in January 2012 explained how the first missile missed the plane but the second ignited 3,000 litres of kerosene in the fuel tank.24 The plane, travelling at 222 kilometres an hour and at an altitude of 1,646 metres, became a ball of fire in the night sky and, travelling onwards for some seven seconds, eventually hit the ground, disintegrating as it did so. The plane fell into the garden of the presidential villa, where the president’s wife was preparing a barbecue for her husband. The mangled bodies of the twelve victims were in the wreckage. The missile fire came, in all probability, from a 300-metre radius within the confines of the most secure army camp in the country at Kanombe, adjacent to the airport.

The new report effectively destroyed the Bruguière conclusions that the missiles had been fired from Masaka, a hill four kilometres east of the airport. The judge had relied solely on witness testimony and all of them, including several convicted génocidaires, convinced him that the missiles came from Masaka, where a peasant found the launchers. Bruguière apparently fell for an elaborately staged deception. It was fake news from the start, intended to cause a diversion, propped up with false statements, manufactured evidence, manipulated witnesses and forged testimony.

But the suspicions persisted. A panel discussion on the English-language channel on France 24 included the journalist Stephen Smith, who broke the story in Le Monde in 2004. Now a visiting professor of African & American Studies at Duke University, Smith said that Trévidic provided a new thrust to the investigation, but one should not dismiss the serial number evidence that traced missiles to Uganda. The Trévidic report was, Smith argued, only part of an ‘ongoing discussion’ and was ‘another element’ to take into account. Smith also maintained his position that there was no master plan to commit genocide. ‘The special court … charged with trying genocidal planners and killers, has found no one guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide,’ he claimed in the London Review of Books a year earlier.