Role of the international community in the Rwandan Genocide
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| Parties involved | |
| Interahamwe militia (Hutu) | |
| Impuzamugambi militia (Hutu) | |
| Rwandan Patriotic Front(Tutsi) | |
| UNAMIR Mission (United Nations) | |
| RTLM Radio | |
| After-effects | |
| International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda | |
| Media adaptations | |
| Hotel Rwanda | |
| Shake Hands with the Devil | |
| Shooting Dogs | |
| Sometimes In April | |
Contents |
[edit] Belgium
Belgium was extremely shocked by the events of 1994. In its capacity as former colonial power it followed with interest the events in the country. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda was mostly composed of Belgian soldiers. The Belgian Information Service knew the genocidal intentions of the Habyarimana regime.
On January 25 1994 a French DC-8 landed secretly at night in Kigali with a load of arms including ninety boxes of sixty mm mortars originally made in Belgium but coming from France. [1]
After the attack of 6 April 1994, the Radio des milles collines spread the rumour that Belgian soldiers from United Nations Mission for Assistance in Rwanda were the source. The Rwandan presidential guard captured and assassinated ten Belgian soldiers. That dramatic episode drove Belgium into a depressive consternation which entailed Belgium's disengagement from UNAMIR. As to justify its decision, Belgium carried the UN along with a spiralling number of countries who were leaving UNAMIR. Those who assassinated the Belgian soldiers did not fail their mission. An informer, known as "Jean-Pierre" by General Dallaire, had announced this plan early in 1994 to UNAMIR to blame the Belgian soldiers in order to make them leave. In a certain way, the massacre of the Belgian soldiers represents the "routine" epilogue of decolonialisation, however different, the last protectors of the Belgians definitively drive off their former colonists.
Starting with 7 April, Belgium demanded an extension from the UN of UNAMIR's mandate in order to evacuate the 1,520 Belgian residents, but not to protect the threatened Rwandans. Rwandan authorities refused to allow an intervention from Belgium, suspected to be the origin of the attack, preferring instead a French intervention. One can read from the report from the Belgian senate the intentions of the Belgian ambassador from 12 April 1996: "We are preoccupied above all with the personnel who have worked for us, of certain people associated with the process of democratisation, with clergymen." The report follows: "Finally, operation 'Silver Back' began on 10 April and will be completed on 15 April, when the last Belgian civilians will have left Rwanda."
After the genocide, Belgium, traumatised, started a parliamentary reflection. The Belgian senate instituted a "Commission d'enquête parlementaire" (English: Parliamentary Inquiry Commission) which enquired and composed a parliamentary report.
6 April 2000, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt attended the ceremony commemorating the sixth anniversary of the genocide in Kigali. He took the occasion to make apologies after six years and to 'take on the responsibility of my country,' according to what we have learnt afterwards 'in the name of my country at of my people, I beg your pardon'" - Extract from chapter 15.52 of the report from the UN
[edit] France
From October 1990 to December 1993, the French army led Opération Noroit, when the president of the French Republic responded to the Rwandan Republic. France openly supported the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana against the FPR rebels: "French presence to the limit of direct engagement" according to the title of a chapter of the report of the French parliamentary mission. This operation allowed the French to organise and train Rwandan troops, who subsequently formed the Interahamwe militias, or even future militiamen.
During this period, France is also accused of having armed and helped the extremist regime which prepared for the genocide and did not hide its genocidal intention in the Rwandan press or French soldiers. French troops have acknowledges to having gone ahead with identity controls on the foundation of the ethnic identity card of the Rwandan Republic which pinpointed if the person was Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. They equally recognised having gone along with interrogations in prisons in Rwanda and to having advised FAR officers in how to combat the FPR. Some witnesses say that French soldiers would have taken part in the fighting.
Oppositely, France, in agreement with the international community, endorsed the peace process of the negotiations of the Arusha accords between the Rwandan government, their opposition, and the exiles of the FPR.
In December 1993, France officially hid in front of the arrival of the UNAMIR, peace mission from the UN, who had come to the implementation of the Arusha accords. According to diverse sources, it seems that despite everything, some military technicians continued to operate in Rwanda. A couple of Frenchmen were notably assassinated, it seems by the FPR, in the hours that followed the attack. This couple set up sophisticated electronic equipment. Other leads of this type exist.
On 8 April 1994, two days after the attack against president Habyarimana, France launched Opération Amaryllis in order to permit the secured evacuation of 1500 residents, essentially westerners. The Rwandan survivors have strongly criticised that operation which, according to numerous testimonials, did not include the evacuation of the Rwandans threatened with the massacres, even when they were employed by the French authorities. France also evacuated dignitaries from the Habyarimana regime, and on 11 April, 97 children from the orphanage protected by Madame Habyarimana were evacuated. According to several sources, several dignitaries close to the Habyarimana family were also evacuated. Operation Amaryllis terminated on 14 April.
UNAMIR's Kigali sector commander, Belgian Col. Luc Marchal, reported to the BBC that one of the French planes supposedly participating in the evacuation operation arrived at 0345 hours on 9 April with several boxes of ammunition. The boxes, about 5 tons, were unloaded and transported by FAR vehicles to the Kanombe camp where the Rwandese Presidential Guard was quartered. The French government has categorially denied this shipment, saying that the planes carried only French military personnel and material for the evacuation. [2]
France was very active at the UN in the discussions about the reinforcement of the UNAMIR in May 1994. In front of the inertia of the international community, France obtained the backing of the UN to lead Opération Turquoise from 22 June to 22 August 1994. The declared goal was to protect the "threatened populations," both by the genocide and by the military conflict between the FPR and the temporary Rwandan government. No hierarchy between the two types of threatened people was established. The two parties of the military conflict assimilated them and the system was organised to remain neutral between the two different groups. This system was humanitarian in some cases, notably during a cholera epidemic in refugee camps in Zaïre, the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, however it was the source of many distinct controversies surrounding the French role at the time of Operation Noroit and the criticism of having facilitated the desertion of those responsible for the genocide and a massive refugee movement of the population to Congo (around two million people). France has accused the FPR of having provoked half of these movements by refusing the advice of French authorities to not get involved in the north west of the country.
France, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council of the UN, has been accused of a role that some of those answerable to France refute and who claim that Operation Turquoise was an exemplarily humanitarian intervention. Some use as context that in supporting a group that would become genocidal, and who, according to the French parliamentary report, did not hide their genocidal intentions, France would have favoured the launching of the genocide.
As the outgrowth of a press campaign, especially the articles written by the journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry which appeared in 1994 and in 1998 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, the French parliament decided to examine the actions of France in Rwanda using a parliamentary information mission for Rwanda [3]. Some French NGOs who specialise in Rwanda would have preferred a parliamentary enquiry mission whose judicial powers would have been more extensive in order to find the truth. After several months of work, the president of the parliamentary mission, the former Defence Minister Paul Ouilès, concluded that France was "not guilty" (December 1998).
Ten years later, during the year 2004, books, films, radio programmes and television shows have brought the controversies surrounding France's role in Rwanda back to life. Unsatisfied by the conclusions of the report from the parliamentary mission for Rwanda, some citizens and NGOs have formed a citizens' enquiry commission. After a week of work in Paris, their "provisional conclusions" were read on 27 March 2004 at a conference that they organised the enclave of the French Assemblée nationale in the presence of one of two of the original people who had publicly stated the findings of the parliamentary mission, the former deputy Pierre Brana. On 7 April 2004 a serious diplomatic incident took place between France and Rwanda during the commemoration of the genocide in Kigali. In the course of the ceremonies, the Rwandan President publicly accused France of not having apologised for its role in Rwanda while desiring to participate in the ceremonies.
In July 2004, the ministers of Foreign Affairs from the two countries convened in order to "share the work of a memory piece " about the genocide. Rwanda announced several days later, according to a dispatch from Agence France-Presse from 2 August 2004, that "the council of ministers has adopted the organic law project to aid in the creation of the independent national commission charged with assembling proof of the implication of France in the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994." The French minister of Foreign Affairs "took action" for the creation of the Rwandan commission.
On 22 October 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda officially demanded that the "Republic of France" allow former ambassador Jean Michel Marlaud and one of his military representatives, officer Jean Jacques Maurin to respond to the demand of the defence of the presumed mastermind of the genocide: Colonel Bagosora pending judgement. Colonel Bagosra was the first Rwandan officer to have graduated from the French École des Officiers. [4]
On 27 November 2004 in a televised debate on France 3, after the showing of the French film "Tuez les Tous" (English: Kill Them All), created by three students of political science, the president of the parliamentary mission for information for Rwanda, a Mister Paul Quilès stated for the first time that "France asks to be pardoned by the people of Rwanda, but not by their government".
[edit] The United States
The role of the United States is directly inspired by their defeat that they underwent during their intervention in Somalia in 1993. For two months, from April to May 1994, the American government fought over the word "genocide" which would have obliged the international community to intervene in Rwanda as merited by the Convention for the prevention and the repression of crime and genocide (adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948), which was incontestably one of the largest detractors from the effectiveness of UNAMIR during the genocide.
In 2001 the government of the United States declassified documents, which confirm the attitude of the United States of not having taken into account the reality of the situation starting in January 1994 [5].
This attitude was perceived very negatively in the world and more specifically by the survivors of the genocide which led President Clinton to present his excuses to the Rwandan people. The French political class also vigorously underlines it when France's responsibilities in the events are evoked.
These elements of inaction tempered the information according to which the United States would have armed the FPR of Paul Kagame. If it is undeniable that Paul Kagame followed the military training of the United States in his capacity as an Ugandan officer, it is probable that he would have benefited from anglo-saxon aid via Uganda, this endorsement does not appear to be as large or determined as that that was received from the outside of those who he fought: the army of the regime of President Habyarimana and then the interim government which led the genocide.
[edit] The Organisation for African Unity and other African countries
The OAU, which has today become the African Union, created a report on the genocide in 2000. Before the UNAMIR mission led by Gen. Roméo Dallaire (military) and Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh (civilian), the OAU had indeed sent a Neutral Military Observation Group, known by its French initials as GOMN.
[edit] The UN
The role of the United Nations has been criticised, especially by France and Rwanda. The UN did not make an enquiry into the attack. For several weeks, the international community let the killers act without intervening. UNAMIR, the mission of the United Nations in Rwanda, had to figure things out during this period in conditions that UNAMIR's commander, General Roméo Dallaire described in great detail in his book "J'ai serré la main du diable" (Published in English as: Shake Hands With The Devil) The UN created a report on the genocide.
In January of 1994, Rwanda obtained a representative in the Security Council. For the duration of the genocide, the Rwandan representative, from the government which was leading the genocide, attended the debates of the security council.
A quote from Roméo Dallaire's book :
- "Let there be no doubt: the Rwandan genocide was the ultimate responsibility of those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and eventually conducted it. Their extremism was the seemingly indestructible and ugly harvest of years of power struggles and insecurity that had been deftly played on by their former colonial rulers. But the deaths of Rwandans can also be laid at the door of the military genius Paul Kagame, who did not speed up his campaign when the scale of the genocide became clear and even talked candidly with me at several points about the price his fellow Tutsis might have to pay for the cause. Next in line when it comes to responsiblitiy are France, which moved in too late and ended up protecting the genocidaires and permanently destabilizing the region, and the U.S. government, which actively worked against an effective UNAMIR and only got involved to aid the same Hutu refugee population and the genocidaires, leaving the genocide survivors to flounder and suffer. The failings of the UN and Belgium were not in the same league. (p.515)"
The Guardian on April 12th 1994 ( UN troops stand by and watch carnage ) stated that when viewing a woman "being hauled along the road by a young man with a machete":
- "none of the troops moved. 'It's not our mandate,' said one, leaning against his jeep as he watched the condemned woman, the driving rain splashing at his blue United Nations badge. The 3,000 foreign troops now in Rwanda are no more than spectators to the savagery which aid workers say has seen the massacre of 15,000 people"
