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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sat Sep 04 2010 - 06:01:54 EDT
Judgment Day for Rwanda
Paul Kagame is proving to be a pliant Western ally. But a shocking new U.N.
report shows why the Rwandan president can no longer claim to be a victim --
and it's time to hold him accountable.
BY JAMES TRAUB |
SEPTEMBER 4, 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/paul1.jpg
In the middle of the explosive U.N. report on human rights abuses in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo that was
<http://www.lemonde.fr/depeches/2010/08/26/un-rapport-de-l-onu-parlerait-de-
genocide-en-rdc_3208_38_43249407.html> leaked to the French press last week,
the reader finds a map of that vast country with red arrows branching from
east to west. The arrows trace the twisting path taken by tens of thousands
of starving Hutu refugees across the immense, trackless jungle as they fled
before Rwandan troops and their local surrogates, who kept catching up to
them and killing as many as possible. The idea of a relentless campaign of
murder carried out by Rwanda's Tutsi government, which came to power in the
aftermath of the 1994 Hutu-led genocide, is both sickening and shocking. But
the <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11111578> report, whose formal
publication Rwanda has succeeded in postponing until Oct. 1, is unequivocal:
"The massacres in Mbandaka and Wendji, committed on 13 May 1997 in Équateur
Province, over 2,000 kilometres west of Rwanda, were the final stage in the
hunt for Hutu refugees that had begun in eastern Zaire, in North and South
Kivu, in October 1996." "Hunt" is a terrible word when applied to humans.
Whether or not that seven-month killing spree constitutes genocide will, as
the authors note, be a matter for competent courts to decide -- though they
present a plausible case that it does. Even if some future tribunal
concludes that the dreadful acts amount "only" to crimes against humanity,
this meticulous document offers a powerful rebuke both to Rwandan President
Paul Kagame, who has adroitly and cynically used his country's suffering as
a shield behind which to advance its regional interests, and to his backers
in Washington and London, who have unquestioningly accepted the country's
unique victim status.
Of course that assumes that the report is accurate. Israel and its
supporters denounced the United Nations' Goldstone report, on the 2009 war
in Gaza, as a hatchet job. Rwandan officials have responded with, if
anything, greater fury, threatening to withdraw all the country's
peacekeeping troops from U.N. missions should the document be published.
Rwanda, like Israel, also has advocates whose credibility is not to be
lightly dismissed. Journalist Philip Gourevitch has
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/rwanda-united-nation
s.html> derisively noted that the investigative team "consisted of
thirty-three people, only half of whom worked, for half a year, in the
provinces where the crimes were committed." Gourevitch also threw an elbow
at former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had supported the project.
Since Annan's failure to sound the alarm on the Rwandan genocide deeply
harmed his reputation, Gourevitch infers, "his interest in blaming others is
hardly surprising."
The fact that so exacting a student of genocide -- Gourevitch wrote the
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312243359?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as
2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0312243359> book on the Rwandan
tragedy -- can offer up such feeble defenses is a sign of the powerful hold
Rwanda continues to exercise over the sympathy and moral imagination of its
defenders. I spoke to three regional experts who had read the report, and
all praise its professionalism, care, and balance. And Annan approved, but
in no way initiated, the "mapping exercise," as it is formally called. The
study, which covers the period from 1993 to 2003, documents acts of mass
murder, torture, gang-rape, plunder, and even cannibalism by the Congolese
Army, Angolan and Ugandan forces, local warlords, state officials, and
ethnic and tribal groups. In this carnival of killing, the Rwandan Popular
Front (RPF) and its local allies constituted the best organized, most
mobile, and most persistent force.
The RPF was also hunting a legitimate target -- the genocidaires who had
fled across the border, reconstituted themselves as the ex-FAR/Interahamwe,
mingled with refugees in the giant, ill-governed camps of eastern Congo, and
found fresh recruits among them. But the report finds that each time they
routed the genocidaires, the soldiers turned on civilians. In one typical
episode, after killing a number of ex-FAR in the vast northeastern province
of Orientale, RPF forces kidnapped refugees, many of them women and
children, and brought them to a camp, allegedly under the pretext of
returning them to Rwanda. The refugees were then brought out in small
groups. From the report: "They were bound and their throats were cut or they
were killed by hammer blows to the head. Their bodies were then thrown into
pits or doused with petrol and burned. The operation was carried out in a
methodical manner and lasted at least one month."
What has enraged the Rwandans, of course, is the claim that the victims of
genocide became its perpetrators. The report offers no evidence of political
control, though the Rwandan army is a famously disciplined, top-down force.
But the study does adduce extensive evidence that RPF forces targeted all
Hutus, including the Congolese Hutu known as Banyarwanda. The report notes
that soldiers erected barriers that allowed them to separate Hutus from
other groups, sparing the latter and slaughtering the former. Without in any
way diminishing the unique monstrousness of the 1994 genocide, the report
essentially puts an end to Rwanda's victim status. The Great Lakes region,
comprising Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo, has been engulfed since the 1970s in
a politics of genocide, in which groups seek to gain and retain power by
destroying their rivals. Kagame's RPF, and perhaps Kagame himself, drank
from this poisoned stream.
And this is not, like the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, a matter
of strictly historical significance. Since the 1990s, Rwanda has played a
dangerous game in Congo, backing brutal warlords and helping raise ragtag
armies, siphoning off natural resources, even trying to rearrange borders to
seize Congolese farmland. All of Congo's neighbors have nibbled at this vast
carcass, but Rwanda gets away with it. In the late 1990s, the United States
and Britain blocked efforts, largely by France, to raise the issue of
Rwanda's behavior in the Security Council. Carla Del Ponte writes in her
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590513029?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as
2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1590513029> memoirs
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590513029?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as
2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1590513029> that in 2003, Annan
refused to reappoint her as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda when she outraged Kagame by investigating allegations of
Tutsi crimes against Hutu civilians after the genocide (so much for Annan's
alleged blame-shifting campaign). Kagame has refused to permit the tribunal
to interview Rwandan witnesses.
Anneke Van Woudenberg, an authority on the Great Lakes region with Human
Rights Watch, told me that, thanks to allies like the United States and
Britain, "any attempt to present the information contained in this report
has been blocked, subverted, or really discouraged." And that, in turn, has
emboldened the Rwandans. "The report starkly shows the consequences of a
culture of impunity," she says. "You see the same crimes being committed
again and again. And we're continuing to document those same abuses today.
This is the kind of horrific cycle you get when you bury the truth, when you
don't hold perpetrators to account." For this reason, Van Woudenberg views
the report as a document of "immense historical importance."
It is not simply Rwanda's suffering that has bought it the protection of
powerful states. "They have made themselves indispensable," says Fabienne
Hara, a vice president of the International Crisis Group with long
experience in the region. Washington has come to regard Rwanda as a "little
military machine" to provide peacekeepers throughout the region (thus the
seriousness of Rwanda's threat to withdraw its troops) and as a friendly
"entry point" for intelligence and regional diplomacy -- a Central African
Ethiopia. What's more, Kagame has turned Rwanda into an extraordinary
success story, with a bustling economy, sound finances, and a highly
effective military. And all he has asked in exchange -- like Israel -- is
protection from international judgment as he makes his way in his very
dangerous neighborhood.
There is disagreement among experts about how policymakers should wield the
study. Hara and Van Woudenberg would like to see Washington and London press
Kagame to limit his meddling in eastern Congo. Phil Clark, an Oxford
University researcher and regional scholar, fears that the report's
publication will widen fissures within the ruling elite in Kigali and thus
imperil Kagame's hold on power. Whoever succeeds Kagame is likely to be a
less-stabilizing figure, he argues.
Perhaps the report should have appeared a year from now, or a year ago. What
matters is that the United Nations will place its imprimatur on allegations
that have been circulating for years. Rwanda's friends have allowed the
country, quite literally, to get away with murder. That tidy transaction
must now come to an end. Rwanda is an important U.S. ally -- but allies,
too, need to be held to account.
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