Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

A forensic examination of the bodies by the entomologist established the killing took place from mid- to late April, during the period when Hutu Power was in control of the area as the genocide of the Tutsi progressed. In the days to follow the intelligence team visited every site Gersony mentioned and failed to corroborate any of his claims. Many places had seen large numbers of killings, but of Tutsi. The intelligence officers concluded that Gersony and his colleagues were duped by people in the refugee camps in Zaire. It was apparent to them that the génocidaires were trying to pin the blame on the RPF while hiding from justice in the camps, knowing exactly where in Rwanda dead bodies were located. Some doubted Gersony set foot in Rwanda, believing that he relied entirely on information gleaned in the camps. To this day, the reports written by members of this unique intelligence mission remain hidden in government archives.

As a result of the numerous investigations that had been conducted by various teams and officials, the senior UN officials on the ground, Major General Tousignant and UN Special Representative Shaharyar Khan, along with the US ambassador David Rawson and others, eventually dismissed the Gersony allegations.

In 1999, the Gersony figures were published in the work of Alison Des Forges after he had given her a personal briefing.26 She described the figures as the ‘first convincing evidence’ of widespread, systematic killings by the RPF and claimed that the UN suppressed ‘the Gersony report’ by claiming it did not exist.27 Des Forges described how Gersony had spoken to a wider number and variety of witnesses than any other foreigner working in Rwanda during this period. She somehow forgot the UN MILOBS and the peacekeepers of UNAMIR, present in Rwanda in some cases since October 1993, some of whom had thoroughly investigated Gersony’s claims and had dismissed them as not credible.

It did not end there. In a sensationalist book published in 2018 called In Praise of Blood, a Canadian journalist, Judi Rever, claimed genocide of the Hutu took place and that the methods used resembled those of the Nazis. According to her account the RPF had established death camps and cremation pits and, Rever further alleged, hundreds of thousands of Hutu had been killed, burned or dissolved in acid, their ashes dispersed with bulldozers. Rever claimed that the Hutu genocide was carried out in total secrecy, the mass murder leaving barely a trace, and that the Western allies lent a hand in the cover-up.

Rever thanked Professor Filip Reyntjens for his help. After the publication of the Rever book, he was jubilant and claimed her book was proof at last of a ‘double genocide’. Reyntjens was arguably the most vocal proponent of moral equivalence in the circumstances of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi. Reyntjens liked to explain that the story was not the politically correct one of good guys and bad guys. ‘It was a story of bad guys, period,’ he said.

While he was in Rwanda, however, Reyntjens had been keen for a personal role in politics. In 1978, at the request of President Habyarimana, Reyntjens had helped draft a constitution for the Second Republic that had institutionalised the quota system in society, whereby a certain percentage of Tutsi had places in higher education and state employment. Reyntjens once told an interviewer he did not believe the quota system was rigorously enforced, that it was informal. He claimed the proportion of Tutsi in public, parastatal and private sector employment greatly exceeded the government quota.

Reyntjens was seeking influence again in October 1990 when, as he notes in his memoir, he offered his services to President Habyarimana following mass arrests of Tutsi and political opponents in the wake of the RPA invasion from Uganda. ‘I could help them manage a disastrous situation from the point of view of public relations,’ he wrote. At this time, he started to cooperate with a former colleague, the Rwandan historian Ferdinand Nahimana.

William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University and an internationally recognised expert on genocide law, responded to Reyntjens’ claim of ‘victor’s justice’. Schabas had visited Nuremberg a year earlier and told the symposium that he had not heard Germans saying the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis were defective, that they inhibited reconciliation because they only prosecuted one side. He wondered what balanced justice at the end of World War II might have looked like.

Nor was the ICTR intended as an inquiry commission, said Caribbean judge and former ICTR president from 2004 to 2011 Sir Charles Michael Dennis Byron. Judges were not historians. The purpose of a criminal trial was to establish individual guilt, not to establish the historical truth of conflict.

The killings of the clergy at Kabgayi is today more widely known than the death camp bearing the same name located nearby. In June, BBC reporter Mark Doyle recounts, newsrooms around the Western world seized on the story of the RPF murders of the twelve clergy ‘with undisguised glee’. It was proof at last that the ‘other side’ was just as evil. Doyle wrote, ‘The problem was that this was not the proof of moral equivalence that could make the world feel okay about dismissing the whole Rwandan business as African chaos. This was not the balancing item that would make it okay to forget about the genocide.’ The prominence it got was misleading.

In September 2016, the chief propagandist of Hutu Power, Ferdinand Nahimana, walked free from prison, having served twenty years and six months in international custody.

The Rwandan minister of justice, Johnston Busingye, called for the removal of the US judge responsible, Theodor Meron. In coming to his decision, Meron had held no hearings, had taken no account of the views of the survivors, and had given no say to the government of Rwanda. His decision was secret and unaccountable. No appeal was possible. A brief official explanation came in the form of a short, redacted report that provided basic background information.

From this special compound, the chief propagandist, Ferdinand Nahimana, had two books on sale on Amazon (in France), and the author described himself as a political prisoner.

The collection of data to determine instances of rape and sexual violence had been fraught with problems. Today, an accurate number cannot be set. Most experts believe it to be in the region of 250,000 rapes and sexual assaults.18 The sexual violence in Rwanda included sexual slavery, forced incest, deliberate HIV transmission, forced impregnation and genital mutilation.19 The intention of the sexual attacks was to humiliate, demoralise and enslave.

When appointed president of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT) in 2012, known as the Mechanism, Meron had assumed responsibility for the supervision of all international prisoners. Meron was now in charge of making new rules and judgements upon these cases. A Polish-born US citizen and an international lawyer with a stellar career, Meron was a recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur and a Shakespeare scholar. The first president of the Mechanism, Meron served from its creation in 2012 until January 2019.

There were several cases worth consideration. Meron was the presiding judge of five justices on the appeal that reduced the life sentences of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, both originally sentenced to life in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The sentence of Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, the northern commander, former head of army intelligence, reduced to fifteen years, saw him freed with time served taken into account. In November 2009, Meron was the presiding judge in the appeals chamber decision to acquit Protais Zigiranyirazo; he was the notorious brother of Agathe Kanziga, the wife of President Habyarimana, and convicted of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity. Judge Meron said that the original trial erred in its handling of evidence. In 2013, Meron presided over the appeal that acquitted and released Justin Mugenzi and Prosper Mugiraneza, initially sentenced to thirty years for genocide, both ministers in the Interim Government.

In the course of those six months Meron approved the early release of one more unrepentant génocidaire, a former military officer, Aloys Simba, thereby ignoring the strongest objections from the government of Rwanda. Simba had been convicted at the ICTR for the crime of genocide and extermination, arrested while hiding out in Senegal in November 2001. Four years later he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He walked free on 19 January 2019, having served eighteen years in international custody. And so, when international visitors go to Murambi, one of six national genocide memorial sites, they may not realise how their own governments connived in the early release of a man who on 21 April 1994 handed out weapons to militia surrounding the technical college there, how having recruited and trained Interahamwe he directed the massacre of thousands of Tutsi families who had sought shelter. His orders were to get rid of ‘this filth’. At Murambi, there were an estimated 50,000 people murdered.

In setting them free, the Mechanism had enabled their ongoing campaign.36 The harm to survivors was incalculable. The early releases posed a direct threat to their rights and welfare, contributed to their suffering, demonstrated a callous indifference, and devalued the gravity of their experiences and memories. For them, genocide is a crime with no end.

While most governments were loath to share their secrets, at the UN Secretariat I was allowed access by Kofi Annan, then head of the UN Department of Peacekeeping, to the files of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). It was a privilege in 2014 to have been given by Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire his own archive from Kigali – his diaries, cables and sitreps from October 1993, when he arrived in Rwanda until he left in August the following year.

2012 June: The official closure of the Gacaca courts during which 1 million suspects had been put on trial in community courts.

2014 February: France’s first trial of an alleged génocidaire opened in Paris with Pascal Simbikangwa in the dock.

2019 April: President Emmanuel Macron announced a panel to study France’s archives concerning Rwanda, with 15 members chosen by him.

USHMM – The Hague Institute for Global Justice Conference, ‘International Decision-Making in the Age of Genocide: Rwanda 1990–1994’, The Hague, 1–3 June 2014, Jean-Philippe Ceppi.

On 24 July, the UNHCR reported 2.1 million refugees and 1.4 million displaced within the French zone, and 1.2 million displaced in the rest of the country.

Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002, 156.

René Lemarchand, ‘Reconsidering France’s role in the Rwandan genocide’, Africasacountry.com, 13 June 2018.

conservative estimate in one study based on comparing local population data to the census data is that Tutsi were undercounted in the 1991 census by 40 per cent – see Marijke Verpoorten, ‘The Death Toll of the Rwandan Genocide: A Detailed Analysis for Gikongoro Province’, Population, 60:4, 2005, 331–367, available at cairn.info/revue-population-english-2005-4-page-331.htm.

Barrie Collins, Rwanda 1994: The Myth of the Akazu Genocide Conspiracy and Its Consequences, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

To Force Commander from Deme, routing slip, handwritten note, 23 February 1994 (Dallaire Archive).

UNAMIR Outgoing Code Cable, ‘Initiatives undertaken relating to latest security information’, to Annan from Booh-Booh, 13 January 1994 (Dallaire Archive).

Hélène Dumas, ‘Réflexion sur l’ouvrage d’André Guichaoua, Rwanda: De la Guerre au Génocide, Les politiques criminelles au Rwanda (1990–1994)’, Paris: La Découverte, 2010.

Barayagwiza died on 25 April 2010 in a hospital in Porto-Novo in Benin, where he was serving his sentence.

The Gersony team of three people with anonymous Rwandan interpreters claimed to have visited nine UNHCR refugee camps and ninety-one locations in Rwanda, and interviewed more than 200 individuals. There were 14 communes in Rwanda.

US State Department, Rwanda/Burundi Situation Report, 23 September 1994, declassified in full.

Interviews with Dr Phillip Drew, associate professor, Australian National University, College of Law, 2019.

Filip Reytnjens, Trois décennies comme chercheur-acteur au Rwanda et au Burundi, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009, 45.

Solange Nyiramwizce, ‘The Travesty of Human Rights Watch on Rwanda (Richard Johnson)’, medium.com, 21 July 2016.