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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Fri Aug 27 2010 - 14:30:46 EDT
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/rwanda-united-nations.html
August 27, 2010
Rwanda Pushes Back Against U.N. Genocide Charges
Posted by Philip Gourevitch
A draft report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights arguing that the Rwandan military may have committed genocide
in Congo in the late nineteen-nineties has been leaked to the press.
Le Monde had the first item on the report yesterday; the Guardian and
the Christian Science Monitor had the longest ones. The U.N. has so
far refused to comment on the leak, except to say that the draft is
not the final version of the report. The Rwandan government has
rejected the report, but not said much more.
But earlier this month in Kigali, top Rwandan officials spoke freely
and on the record about their efforts to have the draft report
quashed. Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame, came to power in 1994 at the
head of a rebel army that brought the extermination of Rwandan Tutsis
by Hutu extremists to a halt. This army today is the chief contributor
of troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur—and last month,
after Rwanda received the draft report, Kagame met with the U.N.
Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, in Madrid, and told him that if the
report came out, Rwanda would withdraw from all of its commitments to
the U.N., starting with Darfur.
“I was in the meeting,” Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda’s Minister of
Foreign Affairs, told me in Kigali a few weeks ago. Mushikiwabo
followed up with Ban by letter (pdf), elaborating her government’s
complaint and reiterating its threat.
In our conversation, she insisted that Rwanda wasn’t bluffing. She
described the draft report as a disgrace, methodologically and
politically, and she told me, “If it is endorsed by the U.N. and it’s
ever published, we used very, very strong words—if the U.N. releases
it as a U.N. report, the moment it’s released, the next day all our
troops are coming home. Not just Darfur, all the five countries where
we have police”—she mentioned Haiti, Liberia, and South
Sudan-“everybody’s coming home.”
The draft report, which is five hundred and forty-five pages long,
describes itself as an attempt to catalog the major atrocities
committed by all parties in the tangle of wars that wracked Congo
(formerly known as Zaire) between 1993 and 2003. The report states
that tens of thousands of people were killed during that decade—a
number far lower than normally cited by international humanitarian and
human-rights groups and the press, which routinely speak of hundreds
of thousands, even millions, killed in a shorter period of time.
The report uses a subtler, more legal conception of genocide than the
one usually found in the press or in the public understanding. In the
Rwandan genocide of 1994, for instance, Hutu extremists set out to
exterminate the Tutsi minority, and close to a million were killed in
a hundred days. But in international law, the crime of genocide is
defined as an attempt to destroy a targeted group “in whole or in
part.” By focussing on the question of intent and the concept of
partial destruction, the draft U.N. report concludes that the accounts
it collected of Rwandan forces and their local allies massacring
thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutus at a time—even as they were
organizing the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of other Rwandan
Hutus—“reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven
before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide.”
Importantly, but less dramatically, the draft report also states that
its findings do not meet the investigative or evidentiary standards
that would be required in such a competent court to prove such crimes.
The size of the report suggests extraordinary documentary
thoroughness, but in a “background note” the U.N. Human Rights
Commission explains that it required no more than two accounts from
self-described witnesses to an incident for it to be included in its
findings. This is a minimum standard in journalism, but beyond
minimalist in international law—and by the background note’s math
there rarely were more than two witnesses per allegation. It says:
“The content of the report itself is based on the analysis of more
than 1500 documents, interviews with about 1280 witnesses in relation
to the 617 cases in the database specifically designed for the
Project, and consultation with approximately 200 local and
international N.G.O.s.” None of these sources are identified by name,
nor are its authors. The U.N.’s own investigative team consisted of
thirty-three people, only half of whom worked, for half a year, in the
provinces where the crimes were committed.
So, at least on first glance, it is difficult to see how this report,
which offers little in the way of detail connecting individually
identified perpetrators and individually identified victims, could
lead to any trials. But that is not likely to matter much in the court
of international opinion. The atrocities the report describes are
ghastly, their cumulative effect is crushing, and the allegation of
genocide, particularly coming from the usually namby-pamby United
Nations, is sensational.
Mushikiwabo, the Rwandan foreign minister, scoffed at the U.N. Human
Rights Commission’s claim that the purpose of the report is to help
the Congolese come to terms with their past. “Give me a break,” she
said. “This is a report that is accusing Rwanda of genocide.” The
report also attributes blame for killings, rapes, and other horrors in
Congo to Congolese factions (including elements in the current
government of Congolese President Joseph Kabila), as well as to
Angolans, Ugandans, Zimbabweans, Burundians, fugitive Rwandan Hutu
genocidaires, and a number of other armed groups. But, as far as
Mushikiwabo was concerned, none of that would matter beside the
accusation of genocide against Rwanda—and on this point, at least, the
Rwandan government and its stiffest critics agree.
The “new” U.N. draft report was actually finished at least a year ago,
and its existence has been an open secret for a long time. In January,
Anneke van Woudenberg, the top Human Rights Watch researcher on Congo,
told me that the report would accuse Rwanda of genocide. Politically,
van Woudenberg said, the report would be a “bombshell” for Rwanda.
And, speaking of politics, she also told me that the former U.N.
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, had been a chief sponsor of the report.
“It was one of the last things Kofi Annan did before leaving office,”
she said, “which was to ensure that the financing was in place for
this study to take place and to happen.” Given that Annan’s reputation
had been irreparably damaged by his gross mishandling of the Rwandan
genocide and its aftermath in Congo, his interest in blaming others is
hardly surprising.
(Strikingly, the leak of the U.N. report comes the same week as news
flashes that Rwandan Hutu rebels in Congo—a group, currently known by
the acronym F.D.L.R., that has been visiting slaughter, rape, and
pillage on the Congolese non-stop for the past sixteen
years—systematically gang-raped close to two hundred women, men, and
small children in an eastern Congo town a few weeks ago, while U.N.
peacekeepers nearby steered clear.)
In her letter to Ban, Mushikiwabo argues that the U.N.’s own record
gives it no standing to accuse the Kagame government of genocide. If
the U.N. is so interested in crimes against humanity in Congo, she
writes, the Secretary-General should remember the largely hushed-up
scandals implicating U.N. peacekeepers in serial sex crimes against
the civilians they were supposed to be protecting. These arguments
won’t persuade anybody in the human-rights movement, which insists
that it is apolitical in its pursuit of justice.
But justice is always selective, and a report like this is, of course,
a political thing—and what’s puzzling is that the Rwandans seemed
unaware that it was in the works until last month. This past spring in
Kigali, everyone I asked in top military or intelligence circles said
they’d never heard of such a project. When they got hold of it last
month, these same officials clearly felt ambushed by the U.N., with
which, despite the anguished past, it had established a close working
relationship. When Kagame met with Ban in Madrid, he was there as the
co-chair of the Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group, an
appointment made in recognition of Rwanda’s remarkable development
under his leadership.
In her letter to the Secretary-General, Mushikiwabo went so far as to
say that Rwanda would quit its U.N. commitments even if the draft of
the report leaked to the press. After all, she told me, “If you’re
going to accuse our army of being a genocidaire army, don’t use us for
peacekeeping.”
At that time, two weeks ago, Mushikiwabo said it was up to the
Secretary-General to decide what to do about the report. Now that it
has been leaked, it will be up to Rwanda as well.
.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/rwanda-united-nations.html#ixzz0xpfnIUss
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