Ten
years ago, on 6 April 1994, a plane carrying the presidents of two
Central African states, Rwanda and Burundi, was blown out of the sky by
a surface-to-air missile. Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira had
made an ill-fated last-minute request to board the plane, and was
simply on the wrong plane at the wrong time. The target was Rwandan
President Juvénal Habyarimana, and his assassination was conducted at a
time when political and social tensions inside his country had never
been higher.
| Politically
motivated violence erupted in Rwanda upon the news that the president
had been killed. The war between Rwandan government forces and the
rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) resumed, in violation of a peace
accord signed a few months earlier. Massacres of civilians also began,
at first gradually and then with a speed and intensity unprecedented in
Rwanda's history. The targets were ethnic Tutsis, assumed to be
sympathisers of the predominantly Tutsi rebels by virtue of their
ethnicity, and also Hutus suspected of being RPF sympathisers. The RPF
also killed civilians, though not on the same scale. By the end of July
1994, the RPF had defeated the government forces and taken power.
Estimates of the civilian death toll vary, from 500,000 to one million.
| UN
secretary-general Kofi Annan has called for a minute's silence around
the world at 12.00 hours GMT on 7 April 2004, in memory of the victims
on the tenth anniversary of the start of the conflict. In Rwanda's
capital Kigali, heads of state have been invited to attend a memorial
ceremony at the same time. Today, the Rwandan conflict is widely
understood as a blind killing spree of Tutsis by Hutus - and, most
importantly, that it was the West's failure to intervene that consigned
the Tutsis to their fate. Both Bill Clinton, American president during
the Rwandan conflict, and UN leaders have apologised for not
intervening to stop the genocide.
| This
points to a rewriting of what took place in Rwanda; it was Western
intervention, by the French, Belgian, American and British, rather than
a lack of it, which provoked and intensified the Rwandan war.
| Many
are gathering to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the war this
week. According to a Rwandan government minister, Western donors have
contributed seven million US dollars towards the building of genocide
memorials in Rwanda (1). Yet many Rwandans - both Hutu and Tutsi - feel
uneasy about the memorials. Public displays of human remains are deeply
offensive to Rwandan sensibilities. Their dead are normally disposed of
in dignified ceremonies; many believe that failure to bury loved ones
properly angers the ancestors and thereby brings more misfortune. But
today's memorials are not simply about commemorating Rwanda's darkest
hour - they also serve to endorse a particular account of what took
place and thereby legitimise vested political interests.
| The widely held account of the genocide in Rwanda is that a clique within President Habyarimana's ruling circle, known as the Akazu,
conspired to destroy the negotiated power-sharing settlement known as
the Arusha Accords, by planning the extermination of every ethnic Tutsi
and everyone else suspected of sympathising with the RPF. This 'final
solution' would secure their political control of the country and
remove once and for all the threat of opposition from the Tutsis.
| According
to this account, Habyarimana had been part of the conspiracy but had
allowed his hands to become tied during the Arusha negotiations; he was
outmanoeuvred and had ceded too much to the RPF. So, it is claimed,
with Habyarimana's wife, Agathe, and the elite military unit called the
Presidential Guard playing pivotal roles, the Akazu trained militia groups to kill civilians, established a private radio station called Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) to broadcast the propaganda of the genocidaires, and began to prepare lists of people targeted for extermination.
| This account also holds that the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane was the work of Akazu
(even though the identity of those responsible remains unproven), and
that this act was designed as a signal for the genocide plan to move
into action. Thus, prominent moderate Hutus were murdered in Kigali,
and then the wider population responded to the radio exhortations and
commenced the slaughter of their Tutsi and moderate Hutu neighbours.
Spurred in to action by the massacres, the RPF renewed the offensive.
While the international community received information that a genocide
was unfolding, it chose not to intervene and instead ordered the United
Nations force out of Rwanda. The RPF was left alone to end the
genocide, which it did by defeating the Rwandan army and seizing power
in July.
| In
this widely accepted account, blame falls squarely upon Hutu
'extremists' in positions of authority, and upon ordinary Hutus who
obediently transformed themselves into crazed killing machines at the
behest of their leaders and the militia. Western powers had apparently
done everything right, at least in the early part of the conflict: they
had pressurised Habyarimana into ceding democratic reforms, and then
supported a peace process that resulted in an accord which would end
the war, establish a new national army in which the old national army
and RPF forces would be integrated and form a transitional government
that would oversee scheduled elections for a peaceful and democratic
Rwanda.
| But,
the story goes, all these good intentions were destroyed by the
genocide - and the shameful episode of Western non-intervention that
followed meant that the genocidaires
came close to achieving their goal. Since the RPF had stopped the
genocide, and the 'moderate' Hutus were either dead or in exile, there
was nobody beside the RPF ready and able to run the country. In this
way, Rwanda has been rewritten as a morality play of our times - with
Hutu extremist bad guys, Tutsi and moderate Hutu victims, guerrilla
Tutsi good guys, and, most importantly of all, a salutary lesson for
the West on why it should do more to resolve conflicts around the world.
| A
more dispassionate political analysis would indicate that all is not
quite how it seemed. The moral (not to mention racist) caricature of
Rwandan Hutus as 'extremists', 'moderates' and peasants who had a
'culturally embedded' disposition to obey and commit mass murder, tells
us very little about the internal and external factors that gave rise
to the war.
| For
example, very few accounts show that some of the democratic reforms
instituted by Habyarimana, whose regime certainly had a bad human
rights record, were fairly genuine (2). He instituted a programme of
political liberalisation, which resulted in a democratic constitution
being written into law in June 1991. Rwanda now had a multi-party
system with scheduled elections. All exiled Rwandans had the right of
return. It was by no means certain that the ruling party would win this
election - the opposition Movement Démocratique Républicain
(MDR) was confident that it would win - and yet there were no signs of
an 'extremist' backlash against this challenge to the president's party.
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its part, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had waged war since 1
October 1990, claiming that only armed force would enable exiled
Rwandan Tutsis to return home, and only they could ensure that the
persecution of Tutsis (an occasional but recurrent feature of Rwanda
since independence in 1961) would end. The process of political
liberalisation meant that, had they wanted to, the RPF could have come
home and operated like the other legalised parties, including the
predominantly Tutsi Liberal Party (PL). There was certainly no case for
the continuation of war by mid-1991. The RPF, backed by governments in
the West, was out to seize power.
| With
each of its military offensives, the RPF displaced huge populations
from their homes. No attempt was made to win domestic support in the
way that many African national liberation armies had done previously.
By the time of their largest offensive before Habyarimana's
assassination, in February 1993, over a million Rwandans had been
displaced; many had been displaced several times. In the late 1980s,
the RPF won support from President Museveni's government in
neighbouring Uganda, which acted as an Anglo-American proxy in the
region; even after the USA became aware that Museveni was behind the
RPF, Uganda continued to receive relatively high levels of aid,
including military aid, from America (3).
| Rwandans
serving in the Ugandan military received training from British forces
at their base in Jinja, Uganda, while the Americans began schooling the
RPF leadership. RPF leader, and current president of Rwanda Paul
Kagame, had previously been Museveni's director of military
intelligence. He had received training in a Command and Staff course at
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, just prior to his forces' invasion of Rwanda.
In America, Kagame learned 'organisation, tactics, strategy, building
human resources, psy-ops (psychological operations), information,
psychology and communications among the troops' (4).
| By
mid-1990, Uganda was preparing the RPF's invasion of Rwanda. Confident
of Ugandan, and therefore American, backing, and with a better public
relations capacity than the Rwandan government, the RPF was able to
make a convincing case to journalists and Western governments that it
was motivated more by considerations for human rights than anything
else. The Rwandan government was no match for them in what proved to be
a more crucial arena for winning hearts and minds than the hills of
Rwanda - the international community.
| The
RPF justified its major offensive of February 1993 as a response to
massacres of Tutsi civilians. The RPF was fortunate in that an
influential human rights report, conducted by Human Rights Watch and
others, was produced the following month. It blamed President
Habyarimana and his immediate entourage for massacres between October
1990 and January 1993. This report was widely distributed among Western
donor nations (5).
| But
the real motivation behind the RPF's offensive was to increase its
bargaining power in the negotiations being held in Arusha in
neighbouring Tanzania. Having demonstrated its capacity to drive back
the Rwandan army and depopulate a large swathe of Rwanda, the RPF was
able to win extraordinary concessions at the negotiating table. At the
crucial discussion on the composition of the proposed integrated army,
the RPF won a half share of the military leadership; on the discussion
of the composition of the transitional government, the RPF won key
cabinet posts while Habyarimana's position as president was stripped of
political power and relegated to a largely ceremonial office.
| This
'peace process' was conducted under the auspices of the Organisation of
African Unity, whose president at the time was, conveniently for the
RPF, President Museveni of Uganda. The subsequent Arusha Accords,
signed in August 1993, had translated RPF prowess on the battlefield
into a position that was arguably the most powerful of all the parties
involved. As Herman Cohen put it, 'Such an arrangement could give the
Tutsis an equal role in the power structure: their position of equality
in the military would effectively neutralize Hutu majority political
power' (6).
| This
created an untenable situation. It was unrealistic to expect a
Western-backed guerrilla army that had fought its way to a position of
pre-eminence to succumb to the will of the Rwandan electorate in the
forthcoming elections (the previous scheduled elections had been
abandoned as a result of the escalation of conflict) and accept a
downsizing to the status of a minority party, which was widely expected
to be the outcome of the elections. Rather, the RPF had the capacity to
take over Rwanda militarily. And again, the intervention of outside
powers played a key role in paving the way for the RPF's final
offensive. While America and Britain backed the RPF, Belgium and France
supported Habyarimana's government. During the course of the war,
Belgium withdrew support for Habyarimana and shifted towards the RPF,
allowing it to set up offices in Brussels. This left France as
Habyarimana's sole Western supporter. With the departure of French
forces in 1994, the way was clear for an all-out RPF takeover.
| Rwanda's
domestic opposition parties were thrown into disarray by the
strengthening of the RPF, and by the positions it attained in the
Western-backed Arusha Accords. Having previously tactically sided with
the RPF in order to weaken the hand of Habyarimana, many of the leading
opposition members began to regard the RPF as a greater threat to
democracy than Habyarimana. As a consequence, they began to fragment
into pro- and anti-RPF factions, a political division that mirrored a
polarisation that was taking place throughout Rwanda. The recently
opened democratic space was closing, overcome by fear and mistrust of
the RPF. This has been crudely portrayed as an extremist-moderate
division, with the extremists said to be coalescing into a 'Hutu Power'
faction that was to embrace genocide.
| The
ensuing political turmoil meant that the institutions provided for by
the Accords showed little sign of coming into being. The situation was
further complicated by the refusal of the RPF to have another party,
the 'extremist' Coalition pour la Défence de la République
(CDR), included in the transitional government. This was despite the
fact that all the other parties, and all the observing Western
diplomats, had argued that it would be in the interests of stability to
have this party on the inside rather than on the outside of the
transitional government.
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resulting stalemate and non-implementation of the Accords denoted an
increasingly dangerous state of affairs. Western intelligence officials
noted that tensions had risen to the point where any kind of shock
could lead to an outbreak of mass violence. When he left office in
April 1993, Herman Cohen's 'analysis of the Rwandan conundrum was less
concerned about possible extremist action by the Hutu-dominated regime
than by a slow and insidious return of minority Tutsi control, in a
throwback to pre-independence days. I was mesmerised by the skilful way
the RPF was manipulating the Hutu opposition in Arusha. Thinking in
terms of the Arusha agreement moving forward, I did not consider a
non-implementation scenario' (7).
| So,
back to the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane on 6 April 1994. New
revelations about it are threatening to undermine the belief that it
was the work of the Akazu,
as a signal for genocide. In a public statement in April 2000, former
RPF officer Jean-Pierre Mugabe alleged that after signing the Arusha
Accords, RPF general Paul Kagame 'started visiting our unit commands
and the areas controlled by the RPF. He told army soldiers not to
believe at all in the Accords: "Be ready with your military equipment,
we are going to fight for the final war against the Kigali
government."' (8).
| Mugabe
gives a detailed account of the military training and preparation for
this 'final war', naming individual officers in charge of secret
operations to infiltrate men and arms into the capital. His statement
is supported by the accounts of two further RPF defectors who, along
with Mugabe, in February 1997 submitted to James Lyons, the local head
of UN investigations for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR). Lyons, a former FBI agent seconded to the ICTR by the US State
Department, led a 20-member team investigating, among other issues, who
was responsible for shooting down Habyarimana's plane on 6 April 1994.
According to Lyons, the RPF defectors gave credible and highly detailed
testimony regarding the planning and execution of the rocket attack.
| They
claimed that Kagame formed a commando-type group known as the
'network', and that he and his senior advisers put into effect a plan
to shoot down the presidential aircraft as it approached Kigali
airport. Michael Hourigan, Lyons's team leader, briefed the ICTR chief
prosecutor, Louise Arbour, on the matter, and was invited to The Hague
in order to discuss it further. At the meeting, however, Arbour
unexpectedly ordered the investigation to be shut down, claiming the
attack on the president's plane was outside the tribunal's jurisdiction
(9). Former French Minister of Cooperation Bernard Debri gives
additional circumstantial evidence of the RPF's responsibility for the
assassination, claiming that records of RPF communications prove its
soldiers were ordered to begin advancing toward Kigali on the morning
of 6 April (10). This author has two other independent accounts of RPF
troop movements on that morning.
| In
a recent report, BBC regional analyst Martin Plaut provided a statement
by a former RPF captain Josue Abdul Ruzibiza. According to this
statement, Ruzibiza said that he had entered Kigali in December 1993 as
part of the battalion sent to the capital to guard the RPF's MPs and
ministers. He had been ordered to secure an area close to Kigali
airport, in order to provide security as missiles were fired at the
plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. Two missiles were
brought from Parliament House, where the battalion was being housed. As
the plane came in to land, the first of two missiles was fired. 'The
missile didn't hit the engine and so didn't cause the plane to roll
over. It was the second missile that that hit the engine. The first one
hit the wing, and the plane could still land. But the second one
finished the plane off', said Captain Ruzibiza.
| His
account comes after the result of a French judicial inquiry was leaked
in early April 2004, blaming the downing of the plane on President Paul
Kagame, then the leader of the RPF. The report has been dismissed by
the Rwandan authorities, but it fits with Ruzibiza's testimony, who
says the two men who fired the missiles are now senior officers in the
Rwandan presidential guard and military (11). Many have noted that at
the time the plane was shot down, the French were still supporting
Habyarimana's government. If the accusations of RPF responsibility for
assassinating President Habyarimana prove to be true, the conventional
account of what occurred - that Akazu shot the plane down in order to instigate the Hutu genocide - needs to be questioned.
| As
does the accepted wisdom that it was a lack of Western intervention
that allowed the genocide to occur. On the contrary - the war in Rwanda
was provoked and inflamed by Western meddling in Central African
affairs. Direct American support for the RPF, as well as through
Uganda, emboldened the RPF to choose war over the proposed 'democratic
reforms'; the shifting of Belgian support to the RPF, and French
support for the Arusha Accords and subsequent military departure from
Rwanda, cleared the way for the RPF's takeover. Given the deep tension
and instability inside Rwanda, such intervention triggered a brutal
life-and-death struggle.
| One
of the reasons why the USA chose not to intervene, after hearing the
first claims of genocide from Human Rights Watch on 19 April (12), was
because of a statement issued by the RPF 11 days later, on 30 April,
which opposed the idea of an international intervention force: 'The
time for UN intervention is long past. The genocide is almost
completed. Most of the potential victims of the regime have either been
killed or have since fled.' (13) Furthermore, as early as 12 April, a
US intelligence document stated that 'the RPF will probably defeat
regime forces in Kigali…' (14). The USA was prepared for the RPF to
take over. Even if UN forces could have got there in time to save
lives, America probably did not want to mount a risky operation that
would also get in the RPF's way.
| The
RPF's statement reveals much about the political use of the word
genocide. In order to deter an international force from intervening,
the RPF said that the genocide was 'virtually over' by 30 April. That
would mean that the genocide took place over 24 days (starting with the
shooting down of Habyarimana's plane on 6 April). Yet the official view
of the current RPF-dominated government of Rwanda is that it took place
over 100 days while the West simply looked on.
| When
we strip away vested interests, and the simplified versions of the
Rwandan conflict that dominate today, the story of Rwanda's tragedy
offers a salutary lesson: Western intervention into Rwanda's internal
affairs had a profoundly destabilising impact. The war with the RPF was
conditioned by external actors, as was the Arusha 'peace process';
various actors inside Rwanda began to place more importance upon their
relationship with the international community than on the question of
accountability to their own people.
| Herman
Cohen asks somewhat ruefully: 'Looking back to the first day of the
crisis, 1 October 1990, why did we automatically exclude the policy
option of informing Ugandan President Museveni that the invasion of
Rwanda by uniformed members of the Ugandan Army was totally
unacceptable, and that the continuation of good relations between the
USA and Uganda would depend on his getting the RPF back across the
border?' (15). So much for the shameful episode of Western non-intervention.
| Barrie Collins is author of Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question, Perpetuity Press, 1998 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)), and a contributor to Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA))
| (1) Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne), 2 April 2004
(2) For a discussion on claims made in the literature about Rwandan Hutu culture, see Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question, Barrie Collins, Perpetuity Press, 1998
(3) See acknowledgement of this by former US Secretary of State for Africa, Herman Cohen, in Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, HJ Cohen, St Martin's Press, 2000, p164
(4) 'Rwanda: East Africa's "New Breed" leaders and their policy of information warfare', John Githongo, in East African Alternatives, September/October 1998
(5) 'Report of the International Commission of Investigation on Human
Rights Violations in Rwanda since 1 October 1990', Africa Watch, March
1993, cited in Leave None to Tell the Story": Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch, 1999, p93
(6) Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, HJ Cohen, St Martin's Press, 2000, p175
(7) Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, HJ Cohen, St Martin's Press, 2000, p176
(8) 'An eyewitness testimony to the shooting down of the Rwandan
presidential plane', International Strategic Studies Association, 21
April 2000
(9) 'Covert Action in Africa: a Smoking Gun in Washington DC', James
Lyons, Public statement at a conference organised by US Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney, 2001
(10) Leave None to Tell the Story": Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch, 1999, p182
(11) Eyewitness 'confirms' Rwanda attack, Martin Plaut, BBC News, 11 March 2004
(12) See The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda, Alan Kuperman, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, p31
(13) Statement
by the Political Bureau of the Rwandese Patriotic Front on the proposed
deployment of a UN intervention force in Rwanda (.pdf 191 KB), US Department of State, 30 April 1994
(14) Unclassified but decaptioned document (.pdf 63.1 KB), US Department of State, 12 April 1994
(15) Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, HJ Cohen, St Martin's Press, 2000, p177
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