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Kwibuka28: Who exactly failed the Rwandan people in 1994?
That
the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda was allowed to proceed in the face of
near universal indifference will remain one of the greatest scandals of the
20th century. The failure to act to protect human life, a decision taken
by the UN Security Council at the outset, has defined for a generation the cost
of inaction in the face of massive human rights abuses.
In
the years since, the enquiries and reports have shown that the genocide of the Tutsi
could have been entirely prevented, and once allowed to start could have been
significantly impeded by decisive action. No warnings were heeded and once the
massacres of civilians began, all that had been required was a reasonably sized
militarized force with a strong mandate and sufficient means.
Even
a modest show of force by the Security Council at an early stage would have
prevented the terror from spreading. Nothing of the kind was
authorized. Had the Council acted early, the génocidaires may have
calculated differently.
Genocide
is not a sudden and an abominable aberration. It does not begin with mass
killings but with racism, with atrocity speech, and hate propaganda and careful
planning. It requires the demonisation of the target group. It requires fear
and terror. The genocidaires had even practised how to kill large numbers of
people at speed and based on early reactions to these ‘rehearsals’ they knew
they would get away with the crime.
A deliberately
weakened UN peacekeeping mission on the ground, the UN Assistance Mission for
Rwanda (UNAMIR), proved to the racist ideologues of Hutu Power, that they had
nothing to fear from the outside world. The genocide against the Tutsi, a
deliberate government policy, a planned political operation, with the intent of
eliminating a minority people, resulted in a death toll of one million people.
As
those days unfolded in 1994, and as more evidence emerged, the more reluctant
Western politicians and their officials were to acknowledge a genocide was
underway and that they should officially recognize it. Instead, their failure
undermined every one of the founding principles of the United Nations, rendered
useless the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1948 Genocide
Convention. It is right to recall the indifference that existed twenty-eight
years ago.
Ignorance
was no excuse, said Kofi Annan afterwards. He was then the UN
under-secretary-general, and head of the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping
Operations (DPKO) and he said no one should have a clear conscience. “If
the pictures of tens of thousands of human bodies rotting and gnawed on by dogs
… do not wake us up out of our apathy, I don’t know what will.’
Annan
said it was difficult to accept that member states on the Security Council with
more intelligence-gathering capabilities than the UN did not know what was
happening. Was it really a lack of understanding of something so totally
unbelievable? He thought that everyone involved would be harshly judged by
history – something that has clearly yet to happen.
While
in the intervening twenty-eight years whole bureaucracies and systems have been
condemned for inaction, the blame has simply slipped away from the individuals
who made the decisions. The UK ambassador, Lord David Hannay, who in an
interview with me, explained how unsighted the UK was without an embassy in
Kigali. After all, Rwanda was in the “French sphere”.
Hannay
said Rwanda had been an ‘orphan of the international community’ and he could
not recall any Foreign Office reports on Rwanda at all. When arguing to
withdraw the bulk of the peacekeeping mission from Rwanda, Hannay had argued
that there was no magic keeping troops in Rwanda ‘if there is nothing useful
that they can do.’
The
French ambassador, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, whose government was intimate with the
genocidaires, and who represented a country with the most complete information
of anyone, did not share what it knew. France had its own agenda.
There
was doubt cast afterwards by the US ambassador Madeleine Albright on the very
idea of robust military action. In any event, “it had been difficult to get
critical information about the grave risks of genocide or mass atrocities to
key decision-makers before they were full blown”. The official US records show
a different story. Declassified government documents reveal significant
intelligence in the US at all levels concerning a huge civilian death toll.
Not
one government called on the perpetrators, the génocidaires, to stop the
genocide. Not one UN member state severed diplomatic ties with Rwanda and
expelled Rwandan ambassadors. Not one government called for the representative
of Rwanda’s genocidal Interim Government, with a non-permanent seat in the
council, to be suspended from the chamber. For three months, the Council
recognised as legitimate a government who was busy exterminating a part of its
population.
Only
in July was the decision made to eject the Rwandan representative from the
council. Only after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had successfully driven
the genocidal army and its militia out of the country, and only after
Washington closed the Rwandan embassy and expelled the ambassador for
representing a ‘genocidal regime’. The Security Council’s negligence and
inexcusable apathy was never more apparent than in allowing a representative of
this government to remain at the famous horseshoe table.
What
a stroke of luck that this Council seat was for the génocidaires. As their
crime got under way in April it proved an ideal location to launch their information
war, their strategic use of disinformation to cover-up their extermination
program. The foundation stones of the genocide denial campaign that we
see today first emerged in the false claims first outlined to the Council in
1994. The idea of “spontaneous slaughter” can be found in UN documents, in the
transcripts of speeches to the Council, in the diplomatic language of cables
and letters. It can be verified in UN archives open to the public.
In
1994, the Interim Government had wasted no time using the Council for its own
ends and its UN ambassador, Jean-Damascène Bizimana had sat in all the
Council’s daily informal and secret discussions. He carefully explained to his
colleagues that the large civilian death toll resulted from the ‘spontaneous’ action
of the population and ‘general insecurity’. The Interim Government was
‘giving hope to the people’ and was profoundly committed to peace. Bizimana
told them there were two sides in this civil war, and each one as guilty
as the other. By all accounts, he was a dutiful and a constant presence.
Their
greatest diplomatic coup came in May with the appearance of Rwanda’s Foreign
Minister, Jérôme Bicamumpaka, who, while addressing the council denied to the
world that genocide was taking place and spoke one falsehood after another. He
spouted the racist ideology of the Hutu Power movement, claimed Rwanda was
seeing ‘hatred on display’ that was forged over four centuries of cruel and
ruthless domination of ‘the Hutu majority’. Bicamumpaka said events in Rwanda
were ‘complex and difficult to grasp’. An ‘inter-ethnic war’ of unbelievable
cruelty was underway. No one seemed persuaded. The New Zealand Ambassador,
Colin Keating described Bicamumpaka as odious, the mouthpiece of a faction who
provided a shameful distortion of the truth.
In
their later trials for the crime of genocide at the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) the perpetrators blamed the population of Rwanda for
the ‘spontaneous killing’. They told the courts they were the true victims, as
though the defenceless families they killed had somehow threatened their
existence. The killing was self-defence and there had been mutual
violence. Oblivious to the devastation they caused, and once serving their
prison sentences they promoted their delusional thoughts in books and articles,
still seeking to alter history, spreading falsehoods.
The
facts that they seek to challenge are capable of immediate verification.
There is overwhelming evidence the extermination of the Tutsi had been
premeditated and planned well in advance. The official story of the
genocide of the Tutsi rests today on a mass of official evidence and
documentation. Most important are the memories of survivors, those
crucial witnesses who show the intent behind the lies, and their accounts are
the rocks upon which the lies of the deniers will flounder.
The blueprint for this campaign of genocide denial is to be found in UN documents, for the Security Council was central to the plans of the génocidaires. In 1994 they used the Council to promote denial of their crime even as it was underway as Rwandan diplomats in New York spread disinformation among diplomats, promoting fake news about what was really happening.
Source: www.newtimes.co.rw