Victoria Brittain
The fourth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda will be marked this week at Bisesero, where new evidence shows Tutsi survivors fought hand-to-hand battles against Hutu extremists led by local officials and businesspeople for 10 weeks.
The survivors’ testimony also reveals how French soldiers drove away, leaving wounded and starving Tutsis at the mercy of these killers. The failure of the international community to prevent the genocide was acknowledged last month in President Bill Clinton’s apology to survivors.
The flood of new information coming out for this anniversary, mainly from French journalists and academics, is likely to increase international guilt about both the past and the current situation.
The needs of survivors – traumatised, lonely, destitute, and still in fear for their lives – have been largely underestimated by international agencies. The stories of 71 survivors of Bisesero are recounted in a grim report published last week by African Rights.
Among the most important new information published in France is Le Figaro’s report last week that the crew of the plane which crashed, killing the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, in April 1994, paving the way for the genocide, were secretly working for the French government.
The report said the two missiles that brought down the plane were Iraqi armaments which had been seized by the French army in the Gulf War.
Patrick de Saint-Exupry is Le Figaro’s expert on Rwanda. His earlier disclosures led to a parliamentary investigation which is now under way into France’s role in the supply of arms to the extremist regime for at least a month after the genocide started.
His report last week said that the families of the three crew, who were retired French air force personnel, had run into a “stone wall” trying to find out about their deaths.
Jacquy Heraud, Jean-Pierre Minaberry and Jean-Michel Perrine officially worked for a private air company but were posthumously decorated as chevaliers de la Lgion d’honneur by the French government.
One widow said the men had been given the military status of “killed in action”, although they were civilians. Le Figaro published a telegram from the then co-operation minister, Michel Roussin, to Perrine’s widow saying her husband had died “in official service”.
The French parliamentary commission was told at its first meeting two weeks ago that the French embassy in Kigali had prevented French troops going to the rescue of threatened Rwandans. It heard accusations that French diplomats and specialists on Africa had turned a blind eye to the killings.
Survivors told African Rights that 2 000 of them came out of hiding after nearly 10 weeks when they saw French soldiers driving past Bisesero. They asked the soldiers to save them. But the soldiers drove on, saying they would be back in three days – during which time half the survivors were killed.
Further deepening the mystery about the French role in the events, last week Le Monde quoted a French priest working in Rwanda as saying that witnesses had seen whites firing the missiles at the presidential plane.
It also reported from the Belgian senate’s inquiry into the genocide that as early as 1992 the Belgian authorities knew the extermination of the Tutsis was being planned by a secret military unit.
In January 1994 – three months before it began – the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations was warned by its own military unit in Rwanda that the training and planning for killing Tutsis at the rate of 1 000 in 20 minutes was complete. No action was taken. The head of that department was the present UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan.
Bisesero’s hills are still covered with bones and skulls. The killings there and the survivors have a unique place in the history of the genocide. The African Rights’s report describes the heroism of the 50 000 people who fought for their lives on these hills until 1 000 emaciated survivors remained. Many can no longer bear to live there.
The key organisers of Bisesero’s genocide fled abroad; most have been indicted by the UN tribunal at Arusha, but three have been arrested.