Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

Only later would it emerge that a Kinyarwanda interpreter used in interviews by Judge Bruguière, a man at the heart of his investigation, was Fabien Singaye. This man had operated a European spy ring for President Habyarimana and had occupied the post of first secretary at the Rwandan embassy in Bern, Switzerland. Some of his secret reports were discovered in the abandoned presidential villa.30 His father-in-law was Félicien Kabuga, the businessman who provided large sums to finance the genocide and who remains a fugitive to this day. Singaye was thrown out of Switzerland in August 1994, and found a safe haven living comfortably in France.

The most senior French officer in Camp Kanombe, Major Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, was an adviser to Major Aloys Ntabakuze, head of the para-commando battalion at Kanombe. The French officer was a tall and imposing figure who eventually commanded a brigade with the French army in Senegal and later in 2013 commander of French forces in Mali. He is today head of special operations.

Saint-Quentin, in his interview with the judge, told Bruguière that the Rwandan forces did not have surface to air missiles.36 Perhaps he was unaware of them. Human Rights Watch believed that when the Rwandan army retreated it took fifty SA-7 missiles and fifteen Mistral missiles into exile.37 An army would not keep such an arsenal if it did not know how to use it. While France officially denied giving French-made Mistral missiles to Rwanda, this did not mean the Rwandan army did not have any.

Whole sections of this fascinating eleven-page CIA cable remain classified, and the US was clearly well informed.39 The carefully planned operation to escort all the US citizens from the country on 9 April ensured they went by road. From Paris, information continued to arrive from the ambassador, Pamela Harriman, who told Washington at the end of April 1994 that her informant said the accusations of RPF involvement in the assassination were not credible, since the site from which the attack took place was near the president’s residence and was secured by forces loyal to Habyarimana. The death of the president was a signal for a preplanned ethnic massacre to begin. The RPF offensive towards Kigali began only after the massacres of Tutsi had started.

The US satellite imagery was such that burning tyres and bodies were visible at the roadblocks.

In a book published in 2010 that bolstered the earlier Bruguière conclusion of RPF guilt, a Parisian academic, André Guichaoua of the Pantheon-Sorbonne University, dismissed the murder of the political opposition on Thursday, 7 April, as evidence of a coup and called it a ‘recalibrated political transition’, simply part of ‘political infighting’. In this theory, the RPF downed the jet and deliberately sacrificed the Tutsi population. No plan had existed to exterminate Tutsi. Not until 12 April and the new Interim Government had been installed was a genocide policy adopted and a genocide begun.

In his book published four years after the Bruguière report, Guichaoua expressed his belief that the genocide had been a desperate reaction by the most extremist faction in the face of a military advance by the RPF. Guichaoua categorised the killings as a crime against humanity committed by a government against a part of its population. Guichaoua wrote the preface for the book by Abdul Ruzibiza, the star witness used by Judge Bruguière, and indeed had first introduced the witness to the judge and had persuaded Ruzibiza to write a book.

Another member of this school of thought is the acknowledged expert René Lemarchand, a French-American political scientist known for his work on Rwanda and Burundi and professor emeritus at the University of Florida. Lemarchand insisted the RPF downed the plane. He disparaged the Mutsinzi report and noted in 2018 that ‘all facts pointing to Kagame’s responsibility were conveniently ignored’. He failed to specify which particular facts he meant.

Reyntjens, emeritus professor of law and politics at the University of Antwerp, remained an advocate for the Bruguière report and wrote about the existence of a ‘whole heap of indications’ that showed the RPF was responsible for the assassination. In an account of events published in 2017, Reyntjens omitted any mention of scientific reports about how missiles came from Kanombe military camp, which was inaccessible to the RPF.

With little fanfare, on 24 December 2018, French magistrates in Paris dropped the case brought against the nine senior RPF leaders suspected of the assassination of President Habyarimana and for whom there had been international arrest warrants issued. The twenty-year investigation had ensured the real culprits escaped scrutiny.

After 1994, forty high-ranking alleged génocidaires were found to be working in France, living comfortable lives and integrated into society. Of the forty Rwandan suspects identified, thirty-three cases were in the hands of French investigating magistrates and some of these were left pending for more than twenty years.

The Paris court found Simbikangwa guilty of genocide on 14 March 2014, and he received a twenty-five-year sentence, confirmed on appeal two years later.

When first broadcast, ‘Rwanda’s Untold Story’ prompted public demonstrations, including some by genocide survivors in front of the BBC offices in Portland Place, London, and in Kigali outside the UK High Commission offices. The BBC faced accusations of promoting genocide denial. The Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA) indefinitely suspended the BBC Kinyarwanda service that broadcast to an estimated 2 million people in the Great Lakes region, and had been established for twenty years.

Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, who had conducted ‘exhaustive fieldwork up and down Rwanda’ and ‘found a different side to the story’.14 The academics said research showed more Hutu died at the hands of the RPF in 1994 than Tutsi. The academics said they discovered a ‘totally new understanding of what had taken place’.

The statistics were nothing new. Twelve years earlier, attending an academic conference in Kigali in December 2003, Stam and Davenport had mentioned their statistics to fellow scholars. There was general ‘astonishment and disbelief’, wrote Alison Des Forges from Human Rights Watch. Later, Des Forges emailed prosecution lawyers at the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania, and warned them to treat this new research with scepticism.

The Stam and Davenport figures relied on a 1991 census that, they claim, calculates that there were approximately 600,000 Tutsi in the country when the killing started. The 1991 government population statistics, therefore, show a pre-genocide figure for Tutsi of 8.4 per cent of the population. A more widely agreed figure is 14 per cent, confirmed in the 1992 Europa World Year Book and in an article in the Africa South of the Sahara 1994: Regional Surveys of the World, by the Belgian academic Filip Reyntjens.

In sharp contrast, the Rwanda Ministry of Local Government in December 2001 published a preliminary report endorsed by the national government, and the figure of just over 1 million was cited. This figure was based on a census carried out six years after the genocide in July 2000, during which the names of 951,018 victims were established. The report recommended further investigation, saying that the census encountered ‘constraints that mean it is not perfect’. It cited, for example, ‘the lack of reliable information in some regions where entire families were wiped out; omissions due to memory lapse; refusal to talk for fear of being arrested; or, in certain urban areas, the indifference of the population’. This was why the eventual figure was thought to be more than a million.

Most victims were killed by machetes (37.9 per cent), followed by clubs (16.8 per cent) and firearms (14.8 per cent). Some 0.5 per cent of the victims were women raped or cut open, others were forced to commit suicide, beaten to death, thrown into rivers or lakes or burned alive, infants and babies thrown against walls or crushed to death.

The BBC decision on the case came in a seventeen-page rejection published on the BBC website. An Editorial Standards Committee declared the programme had performed ‘a valuable public service’.

Ntamabyaliro waited ten years for her trial and was eventually sentenced in 2009 to a life term for genocide and crimes against humanity, confirmed on appeal. She was the only minister of the Interim Government to stand trial in a Rwandan courtroom.

The Anglo-Saxon plot never existed, according to Herman Cohen, the assistant secretary of state for African Affairs (1989–1993). In testimony to a French inquiry established by the National Assembly, Cohen said that US aid to the RPF was nonexistent. Appearing on 7 July 1998, Cohen said the only link was a dozen officers on courses in military colleges in the US, as part of cooperation with Uganda. ‘We never gave arms to either Uganda or the RPF,’ Cohen said. He found the idea of a plot decidedly regrettable as it prevented any real dialogue during the crisis.15 The French inquiry later concluded that no US plot ever existed. The priority for the US was to restrict the role of the UN, for political and budgetary reasons.

Rusesabagina explained that Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire worked secretly for the RPF, and UNAMIR helped to smuggle soldiers into Kigali. The RPF carried out a coup and had been rewarded and protected for its trouble.

In contrast to the Hotel Rwanda story, the force commander the UN Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, placed a group of Tunisian peacekeepers and an armoured personnel carrier at the entrance to the hotel, and he believed it was these troops who were ultimately responsible for deterring the killers. These UN peacekeepers were to report immediately any attempts by the militia or troops to enter.

The importance the Interim Government attached to the hotel became clear only later when, in his ICTR confession, Jean Kambanda, the prime minister in the Interim Government, admitted that the military and civilian authorities discussed the situation in cabinet meetings. The hotel, with its 550 refugees, was ‘unfortunate’. These people were ‘in full view’ of the world’s media, UN peacekeepers, medical teams from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the ICRC.

Claeys was a military information officer (MIO), a Belgian soldier and member of Dallaire’s headquarters staff. Claeys met Jean-Pierre on the night he came forward and kept in contact with him until he disappeared from view on 15 March.

Claeys told the court another MIO who worked for Lieutenant General Dallaire, Captain Amadou Deme, had his own informer and he had confirmed some of the information provided by Jean-Pierre. Deme wrote a longhand report about this and filed it in the archives of the Military Information Office, and it was produced in court.

The information provided by the informer about the stockpiled weapons was of the utmost concern. The commander of UNAMIR’s Kigali battalion of Belgian troops, Colonel Luc Marchal, was responsible for ensuring a Kigali Weapons-Secure Area (KWSA) in which all armaments were subject to monitoring by UN personnel. Until the meeting with Jean-Pierre, Marchal had reported that the only weapons the Interahamwe possessed were traditional spears, clubs and machetes.14 Dallaire did not know at the time that Marchal kept his own intelligence network which he outlined in a statement to ICTR investigators in 1997. Marchal admitted that his Kigali battalion had paid informers, and he handed over a list of their names. He said that he got the list from Lieutenant Mark Nees, who ran this secret network for him.

In a television interview ten years later, Marchal spoke about the meeting: ‘Jean-Pierre gave me a very good and clear description about the Interahamwe organisation. He described the cells, the armaments, the training, and he told me that everybody was suspected … and then the reaction will follow immediately, and the reaction was to kill a maximum of Tutsis. And each family, each house, was located in Kigali, so everything was being prepared … And [based] on what Jean-Pierre told me of the Interahamwe organisation, I felt it was a real killing machine because the objective was very clear for everybody – kill, kill and kill.’

Jean-Pierre later took Deme to see smaller caches of arms hidden in bushes and undergrowth at strategic crossroads in Kigali. Marchal sent military observers to a demonstration held outside the Nyamirambo stadium and they watched as the informer, with his Motorola radio, acted in a leadership role and directed the activities of groups of Interahamwe militia.

Dallaire met the ambassadors from the US, France and Belgium, the papal nuncio, Monsignor Giuseppe Bertello, and the dean of the diplomatic corps to tell them what Jean-Pierre had said. The three ambassadors expressed serious concern about the information and promised to consult their capitals. At a further meeting with the ambassadors on 13 January, Dallaire presented a letter from Jean-Pierre with more information. The next day the three ambassadors met with President Habyarimana to express their own concern.

For two months, until 15 March, Claeys continued to meet the informer, continued to gather the information that Jean-Pierre was still willing to provide.

The informer told Claeys that UNAMIR was infiltrated by the extremists, and Ngirumpatse was aware of every high-level decision UNAMIR made: a Hutu Power mole existed on the staff of Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, the UN secretary-general’s special representative in Rwanda. Jean-Pierre claimed to have listened to tape recordings of the mole, a non-Rwandese African who spoke French, as he gave his latest report.

Major Hock, a member of his staff, an analyst in charge of Central Africa, had evaluated Jean-Pierre and reported that he had a poor reputation and was a deserter. Hock told the Belgian commission that people regularly offered their services for financial advantage or hoped to obtain the status of applying for political asylum. In the commission report, the Belgian senators criticised Hock and the SGRS for not paying enough attention to Jean-Pierre and declining his requests for asylum. Some years later, Colonel Luc Marchal changed his mind. In April 2006, Marchal testified for the defence in the trial of General Gratien Kabiligi at the ICTR in Arusha. He visited the former head of the national gendarmerie, Major General Ndindiliyimana, who was on trial there, and Marchal became convinced this man was innocent. Marchal now believed the RPF allowed the genocide to happen because ‘it was convenient’. At the end of the year, Marchal gave a wide-ranging interview to the Flemish weekly news magazine Knack, in which he expressed his belief that Jean-Pierre was a double agent sent from the RPF to discredit President Juvénal Habyarimana. ‘We were manipulated,’ he said.

In an article posted on a denial website, his wife told investigators, ‘I do not know how he died and where’. His wife apparently claimed ‘Kagame’s team’ killed Jean-Pierre.22 The author thought it certain that Jean-Pierre joined the ‘Tutsi-led rebel group’.

Dobbs claimed Jean-Pierre had fallen out with party leaders who suspected him of selling arms to rebels in Burundi, and some witnesses accused Jean-Pierre of having been an agent of the RPF assigned to penetrate the Interahamwe. Dobbs claimed these connections caused French and Belgian analysts to suspect that Jean-Pierre might be spreading ‘disinformation’.

It was with anger in his voice, at an address at the UN in New York for the twentieth anniversary, that Lieutenant General Dallaire, aware of the doubts raised in the material posted by the museum, made a point of saying: ‘It was a deliberate, well-planned, well-executed plan to exterminate an ethnic group and we saw it coming.’ The predictions of Jean-Pierre came horribly true. It was too easy to forget that the Jean-Pierre affair was only one of literally hundreds of pieces of available evidence demonstrating that a conspiracy to eliminate the Tutsi was in place. Indeed, it was precisely because of Lieutenant General Dallaire’s keen awareness of these countless ominous signs that he was prepared to take Jean-Pierre’s information seriously.

Professor André Guichaoua remains convinced the RPF assassinated the president, and he also denied the existence of genocide planning. Guichaoua, a French sociologist and specialist in the Great Lakes region, and a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, wrote two great tomes on Rwanda. His second book, Rwanda: De la guerre au génocide, published in 2010, is some 600 pages. In the French edition, Guichaoua wrote how the testimony of Jean-Pierre was incoherent, and he noted the absence of any verification of his assertions by UNAMIR intelligence officers and Lieutenant General Dallaire. His own source was an Interahamwe, a protected witness, who in May 2004 told Guichaoua that the informer Jean-Pierre was ‘a traitor’.

RTLM’s programmes were designed to appeal to a largely illiterate and impoverished society. Such coordination must be seen as proof of planning on the part of the Hutu Power movement.

A confidant of President Juvénal Habyarimana, Nahimana often wrote his speeches.20 A skilled propagandist, he eventually gave academic legitimacy to the ideology of Hutu Power.21 It was clear that Nahimana himself had ordered the broadcasts, and the ambassadors insisted he be relieved of the directorship of the Office Rwandais d’Information (ORINFOR).

Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, a northerner, a diplomat and an adept politician, was the chairman of the executive committee of RTLM. He was also director of political affairs in the Rwandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was responsible for Rwanda’s extreme political party, the rabidly anti-Tutsi Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR).

On 17 December 1990, the French ambassador to Rwanda, Georges Martres, reported to Paris on the Kangura article with the words, ‘The radicalisation of the ethnic conflict can only intensify. The newspaper Kangura, mouthpiece of Hutu extremists, just published an issue resurrecting the ancient hatred against Tutsi feudalism: the “Hutu commandments”.’

Subsequent research published in the US in 2010, the work of an economist and public policy professor, David Yanagizawa-Drott, indicated in a statistical study that the murder of Tutsi was 65–77 per cent higher in places that received the full RTLM signal versus those that did not. The radio broadcasts increased militia violence, directly influencing behaviour in isolated communities out on the hills, and increased local participation.

The idea of comparable wrongs quickly took hold. On 13 April 1994, a week after the genocide of the Tutsi began, at a ministerial meeting in Paris, the head of the French armed forces, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, asked by President François Mitterrand about massacres in Rwanda, had replied, ‘They are already considerable. But now it is the Tutsi who are massacring the Hutu in Kigali.’

In June, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, also promoted the notion of moral equivalence, writing in the newspaper Libération, on 16 June, that there needed to be justice for all ‘these genocides’.3 President Mitterrand, later on in the year, said, ‘The genocide or genocides. I don’t know what I should say.’

The idea of two genocides in Rwanda, the first nearly wiping out the Tutsi minority and the second secretly committed by the Tutsi-dominated RPF, would have been a sensational news story, if true. There were numerous rumours. Following the RPF military victory in July, a US journalist, Mark Fritz, spent nearly a month looking but he never found any evidence of the systematic killing of Hutu.7 The UK journalist Mark Huband of the Observer noted only ‘secondhand reports’ from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) from the camps about RPF killings.8 A BBC journalist, Mark Doyle, who reported from Rwanda, wrote a dispatch to London explaining there was no convincing evidence of the RPF massacring civilians.

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.

A partly declassified memorandum from Toby T. Gati to George Moose, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, on 16 May 1994, informed him of the killing of Tutsi behind government lines with systematic executions by government-supported militias. Unlike the government forces, the RPF did not appear to have committed what was called in the cable ‘Geneva Convention-defined genocidal atrocities’.

The news was so disturbing that Kofi Annan, under-secretary- general for peacekeeping operations, was dispatched immediately to Kigali. There he met Gersony, who gave an oral briefing and described how the RPF used ‘subtlety and finesse, covering their tracks with greater dexterity than the militia’ when they carried out their killings. Gersony believed that between 25,000 and 45,000 people had been killed by the RPF, including 5,000 people in August. Listening to these accounts with some disbelief was UN Special Representative Ambassador Khan. He was aware that UN military observers and aid agencies were present in the areas Gersony mentioned. Khan wondered how it was possible to massacre 30,000 people without attracting attention. In any case, the RPF did not travel with hoes and machetes. When he briefed members of the new Rwandan government the following day, Gersony described ‘a mass genocide by the RPA’.

Charles Petrie, deputy director of the UN Rwanda Emergency Office (UNREO), who had also heard rumours about RPF massacres, carried out a careful investigation with aid agencies in the region, and he rejected the idea of preordained massacres. UNAMIR information officers investigated three out of seven cases of alleged RPF abuses, and all three were inaccurate, if not outright fabrications.

The US also wanted to put the Gersony claims to the test. In Kigali, the US military attaché Tom Odom believed that 10,000–15,000 secret killings a month inside a UN-monitored area as small as Rwanda was a startling figure.