[continued from previous message]

plane, but it may have wanted to ignite a war in order to abrogate the
August accord, which called for elections twenty-two months after implementation. The RPF, dominated by the unpopular minority Tutsis
and widely hated for its militancy, including by many internal Tutsis,
would certainly have lost.


The RPF began advancing almost as soon as the plane hit the ground,
and even before the genocide of the Tutsis had begun. According to
Rever, the rebels actually made the situation worse. While Hutus were massacring innocent Tutsis, the RPF was further inciting ethnic hatred
by massacring innocent Hutus. In mid-April RPF officers assembled some
three thousand Hutu villagers in a stadium in Byumba and slaughtered
virtually all of them. In June RPF soldiers attacked a seminary in
Gitarama, killing several Hutu priests, and then, according to a four-hundred-page report compiled by a respected priest and
human-rights activist named André Sibomana, proceeded to massacre
roughly 18,000 others in the prefecture.

RPF defectors told Rever that the purpose of these mass killings was
to strike fear in the Hutu population and provoke them to escalate the
genocide into such a horrific crime that no political compromise with
the former leaders would ever be possible. The August 1993 peace
accord would then be irrelevant, and the population would have no
choice but to accept an RPF takeover.

Some RPF operatives told Rever that they had even infiltrated Hutu
militia groups to stoke ethnic anger and incite ever more
indiscriminate reprisals against Tutsis. Again, this seems plausible
to me. Kagame and other RPF commanders may have learned such
strategies in Uganda while fighting alongside Museveni, whose rebel
army reportedly committed similar “false flag” operations in the
1980s. After the genocide, war broke out in neighboring Zaire, as
Congo was then known. When assailants killed hundreds of Congolese
Tutsi refugees inside Rwanda in December 1997, US officials, Amnesty International, and The New York Times all blamed Hutu insurgents, but RPF sources told Rever that they themselves had done it. “Everyone
knew that the RPF staged that attack. It was common knowledge in
intelligence circles,” a former RPF officer told Rever.

It was a “brilliant and cruel display of military theater,” said
another. Dallaire, the commander of the peacekeepers, remained in
Rwanda during the genocide. In his harrowing memoir, Shake Hands with
the Devil, he expresses puzzlement about the RPF’s troop movements.
Rather than heading south, where most of the killings of Tutsis were
taking place, the RPF circled around Kigali. When Dallaire met Kagame
at the latter’s headquarters, he asked him why. “He knew full well
that every day of fighting on the periphery meant certain death for
Tutsis still behind [Rwandan government] lines,” Dallaire writes.
Kagame “ignored the implications of my question.” By the time the RPF reached the capital weeks later, most of the Tutsis there were
dead.

In May 1994, while supplies continued to flow to the RPF from Uganda,
the UN placed the Rwandan government army, some of whose soldiers had participated in massacres of the Tutsis, under an arms embargo. By the
end of July, the much stronger RPF had taken control of nearly all of
the now ruined country. As it advanced, some two million Hutus fled,
either to the giant Kibeho camp in southwestern Rwanda or to camps
over the border in Tanzania and Zaire. Some Hutus returned home in the
fall of 1994, but according to a UN report prepared by the human
rights investigator Robert Gersony, many of them were killed by
the RPF, either on suspicion of sympathy with revanchist Hutu
militants or simply to terrify others.* These killings stopped during
the run-up to a donor meeting in Geneva in January 1995, but then
resumed after $530 million in aid was pledged. Hutus once again fled
to Kibeho, where they thought they would be protected by UN
peacekeepers. But in April 1995 the RPF fired on the camp and then
stormed it while helpless aid workers and UN troops, under orders to
obey the RPF, stood by. At least four thousand Hutus, probably more,
were killed, including numerous women and children. Thomas Odom, a
retired US army colonel stationed at the embassy in Kigali, blamed the
killings on Hutu instigators within the refugee population who, he
says, stirred up the crowds, provoking panicked RPF soldiers to shoot. Several eyewitnesses dispute this.

In the enormous refugee camps in Zaire, Hutu militants—many of whom
had participated in the genocide—began mobilizing to retake the
country and launched sporadic attacks inside Rwanda. The RPF’s
reaction was fierce, swift, and cruel. Hutu villagers who had nothing
to do with the militants were invited to peace-and-reconciliation
meetings, then shot point-blank or beaten to death with garden hoes.

In 1997, thousands of Hutus fleeing indiscriminate RPF reprisals
sought refuge in caves near the Virunga Mountains, where they were
trapped and killed by RPF soldiers. Thousands more were killed in the environs of the town of Mahoko around the same time.

In order to neutralize the mounting threat from the Zairean refugee
camps, the RPFcrossed the border in 1996, invaded them, and herded
most of the refugees home. But hundreds of thousands refused to return
to Rwanda and fled deeper into Zaire. Some were ex-génocidaires and
other Hutu militants, but most were ordinary Hutus understandably
terrified of the RPF. Kagame’s commandos, who had by then received
training from US Special Forces, tracked them down in towns and
villages across the country and killed them. Hundreds of thousands
remain unaccounted for.

To hunt down fleeing Hutus, RPF spies deployed satellite equipment
provided by the US. The RPF also infiltrated the UN refugee agency and
used its vehicles and communications equipment. US officials insisted
that all the fleeing refugees were Hutu génocidaires and downplayed
the number of genuine refugees identified by their own aerial studies,
but in 1997 Rever, then a young reporter for Radio France
Internationale, trekked through the forest and found vast encampments
of malnourished women and children. She interviewed a woman who had
seen her entire family shot dead by Kagame’s soldiers, a boy whose
father had drowned while fleeing the RPF, and aid workers who told her
they had seen mass graves that were too dangerous to visit because
they were being guarded by Kagame’s soldiers.

Versions of Rever’s story have been told by others. While all contain convincing evidence against the RPF, some are marred by a tendency to understate the crimes of the Hutu génocidaires or overstate the RPF’s crimes. But some, including the work of Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian
professor of law and politics, have been both measured and soundly
researched. Kagame’s regime and its defenders have dismissed them all
as propaganda spouted by defeated Hutu génocidaires and genocide
deniers.

But Rever’s account will prove difficult to challenge. She has been
writing about Central Africa for more than twenty years, and her book
draws on the reports of UN experts and human rights investigators,
leaked documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
and hundreds of interviews with eyewitnesses, including victims, RPF defectors, priests, aid workers, and officials from the
UN and Western governments. Her sources are too numerous and their
observations too consistent for her findings to be a fabrication.

The official UN definition of genocide is not restricted to attempts
to eradicate a particular ethnic group. It includes “killings…with the intent to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group” (my emphasis). The RPF’s operations against the
Hutus in the Byumba stadium, in Gitarama, Kibeho, the caves near
Virunga, around Mahoko, and in the forests of Zaire do seem to fit
that description. The RPF’s aim was, presumably, not to eradicate the
Hutus but to frighten them into submission.

And yet in January, the UN officially recognized April 7 as an
International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide Against the
Tutsis—only the Tutsis. That is how the conflagration in Rwanda is
generally viewed. And while the French army has been accused of
supplying the Rwandan government with weapons during the genocide, US
officials have faced no scrutiny for lavishing aid on Uganda’s
Museveni while he armed the RPF in violation of international treaties
and the August 1993 peace accord. Why have international observers
overlooked the other side of this story for so long? And why are
the RPF’s crimes so little known outside of specialist circles? That
will be the subject of the second part of this article.

- *
After the genocide, numerous human rights reports described the
ongoing killing of Hutus inside Rwanda. Gersony’s concluded that after
the genocide officially ended, the RPF killed over 25,000 civilians,
most of them Hutus, inside Rwanda, as well as two Canadian priests,
two Spanish priests, a Croatian priest, three Spanish NGO volunteers,
and a Belgian school director who attempted to report
on RPF atrocities. Gersony submitted his report to UN High
Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, who passed it on to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, who decided to
delay its release. Timothy Wirth, then US undersecretary of state for
global affairs, met Gersony in Kigali and said the findings were “compelling.” But at a briefing back in Washington, he downplayed the report, claiming the author had been misled by his informants. Wirth
admitted the RPF had killed people, but said it wasn’t “systematic.” ?

*****

--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)