webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2010
All rights reserved
From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sun Sep 05 2010 - 17:49:56 EDT
<http://turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/03/did_ban_ki_moon_s_advis
ors_try_to_spare_rwanda_from_genocide_charge> Did Ban Ki-moon's advisors try
to spare Rwanda from genocide charge?
Posted By <http://turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com/blog/16159> Colum Lynch
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_meta_block.gif September 5, 2010
- 4:17 PM
http://foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/100903_0_Kagame.jpg
A draft U.N. report on war crimes in Congo has raised the possibility that
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the former rebel leader who is widely
credited with ending the Rwandan genocide, bore responsibility for war
crimes and genocide that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Hutu
civilians during the late 1990s and were allegedly committed by troops under
his command.
But did U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seek to remove any mention of
genocide in the report in response to a threat by Kagame's government to
withdraw Rwanda's peacekeepers from U.N. missions? Ban is said to fear that
such a move by Rwanda would doom the mission and cripple U.N. efforts to
protect civilians in Darfur, according to senior U.N. officials
The U.N's sweeping, 545-page "mapping exercise," initiated in 2005 during
the tenure of Ban's predecessor, Kofi Annan, in 2005, details more than 600
mass killings committed in Congo, formerly known as Zaire, from 1993 to 2003
and claims that the "systematic and widespread attacks described in this
report reveal a number of damning elements that, if proven, could be
classified as crimes of genocide." The report's preliminary findings have
prompted Rwanda, which is identified as a key alleged perpetrator, to
threaten to withdraw its troops from five U.N. peacekeeping missions,
including the mission in Darfur.
Ban's press office and a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human
Rights, Navi Pillay, have denied an <http://bit.ly/bJY7ad> article in Le
Monde alleging that Ban pressured Pillay to scrub the word genocide form the
report. "I want to make this crystal clear: This is absolutely untrue," said
Rupert Colville, Pillay's spokesman. "Up to this point the secretary general
has never put pressure on the high commissioner to alter the text."
But officials tell Turtle Bay that while Ban's top advisors never directly
asked Pillay to remove the word genocide from the report, they voiced strong
concern about its inclusion in the document and asked her to conduct a legal
review to ensure she had the basis to back up the charge.
According to U.N. officials, Ban's chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, voiced
misgivings to Pillay in a phone conversation late last month about the legal
basis for the genocide assertion in the report, noting that the Rwandan
government arranged for the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic
Hutu refugees, the victims of the alleged genocide. Nambiar appealed to
Pillay to have her lawyers revisit the issue to make sure that they could
support such a serious charge. But he apparently made no direct request for
her to remove the word "genocide" from the report, the officials said.
The U.N.'s top peacekeeping officials, including Under Secretary-General
Alain Le Roy, also voiced concern to Pillay and her advisors in a series of
meetings about the impact the findings would have on their efforts to ensure
Rwanda maintains its involvement in Sudan as the country faces a politically
sensitive referendum next year to determine whether the autonomous south
will declare its independence. But they said they were essentially resigned
to face the consequences of the Congo report.
A final version of the report -- whose release has been delayed till Oct. 1
to give Rwanda and other governments accused time to respond -- will
continue to raise the possibility that Rwanda and several other countries,
including Uganda, Burundi, and their Congolese allies, committed war crimes
and possibly genocide in the 1990s, according to three U.N. officials
familiar with the report.
But it will also make it clear that a final judgment can only be made by a
court, and note that there is also evidence to suggest that a genocide did
not occur, including Rwanda's repatriation of Hutus.
The final version had been revised to "tighten" some of the legal reasoning
surrounding the genocide claim, but that there has been no "deliberate
effort to excise or expunge certain phrases or words," according to a senior
U.N. official. "We may have put it little more bluntly [in the original
draft]. Now it's more specific. More nuanced."
The crisis erupted at a time when Ban has been seeking to repair the U.N.'s
troubled relationship with Rwanda. Despite advance knowledge of the war
crimes findings against Rwanda, Ban appointed Kagame, along with Spanish
President Jose Luis Zapatero, as co-chairs of a special advisory group to
promote the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which call on governments
to sharply reduce poverty and combat other social problems by 2015.
The controversial appointment has triggered protests in Spain, where about
40 Rwandan military officials have been indicted for war crimes allegedly
perpetrated in Rwanda in the 1990s. Bowing to the criticism, in July,
Zapatero <http://bit.ly/aHtESW> declined to attend his first scheduled
meeting with Kagame in Madrid to discuss efforts to promote the millennium
goals. He met only with Ban.
It remains unclear whether Zapatero will boycott a second meeting later this
month on the sidelines of a major U.N. summit on the MDGs. "We knew it was
coming," a senior U.N. official said of the Congo report's findings. "We
didn't feel it would go so far and become such a controversy. We looked upon
this in terms of Rwanda's record on the MDGs."
"Rwanda has displayed extraordinary commitment to the MDGs and is among the
few countries in Africa that have made the most progress towards the goals,"
said Farhan Haq, Ban's deputy spokesman. "There have been commendable
declines in both child and maternal mortality there. The country has also
made remarkable progress in reducing the number of reported malaria cases
and deaths and has the highest proportion of women parliamentarians in the
world."
Ban is also considering Rwanda's foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, to
head a new U.N. super agency dealing with women's issues. Mushikiwabo
vigorously defended Rwanda's human rights record in a letter to Ban,
describing the U.N.'s inquiry into Rwanda's role in war crimes as
"apocryphal," "fatally flawed" and an "embarrassment to the United Nations."
She said it was "patently absurd for the U.N., which deliberately turned its
back on the Rwandan people during the 1994 genocide, to accuse the army that
stopped the genocide of committing atrocities in the Democratic Republic of
Congo."
Mushikiwabo has saved her sharpest criticism for former Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, who was a senior U.N. peacekeeping official during the Rwandan
genocide. The mapping exercise into war crimes in Congo was launched under
Annan's tenure. "I want to say that his as far as Rwanda and the genocide
[is concerned] is pitiful," she said at a recent press conference this week.
He "has never taken his responsibility" for failing to confront the
perpetrators of genocide. In contrast, Mushikiwabo praised Ban in her letter
for leading the United Nations with "honesty, integrity and transparency."
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----