An international arrest warrant against nine close aides of Rwanda’s Tutsi President, Paul Kagame, on a charge of participating in the assassination of former Hutu leader Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994 has led to a new diplomatic war over Rwanda.
French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière ordered the prosecution this week to arrest nine high-ranking Rwandan officials, including James Kabarebe and Charles Kayonga, commanders-in-chief of the Rwandan Patriotic Army and of the infantry respectively, and Faustin Nyamwasa-Kayumba, Rwandan ambassador to India.
Brugière held that Paul Kagame should stand trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for his part in bringing down the airplane carrying Habyarimana on April 6 1994. The Rwandan Hutu dictator was killed in the crash.
Under French law, a warrant cannot be issued for Kagame because he enjoys immunity as a head of state.
Rwanda, a small country of barely 24 000 square kilometres, is located at the centre of the Great Lakes region bordering Uganda, Tanzania, the former Zaire and Burundi. Hutus are about 80% of a population of about eight million. The Tutsi community forms most of the rest.
Habyarimana, a Hutu, had enjoyed French and Belgian military support since the late 1980s despite strong evidence that Hutu militias linked to the Rwandan army (FAR, after its French name) had been massacring opposition leaders, especially Tutsis.
The FAR had been fighting back the guerrilla rebellion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) led by exiled Tutsis, including Kagame. The exiles were based in Uganda.
Total victory
Brugière told prosecution that ”since October 1993, Kagame considered the physical elimination of president Habyarimana the only means for reaching his political objectives — of a total victory [in the civil war], even at the price of [triggering] the massacres against [his own] Tutsi” minority.
Habyarimana’s death in April 1994 stepped up the civil war, and triggered the massacre of up to a million Tutsis. The massacres were perpetrated by radical Hutu militias in less than 100 days. Thousands of moderate Hutus were also executed.
The genocide only ended when Kagame’s RPF captured the capital, Kigali, and chased the Hutu militias out of power.
Brugière bases his accusations against Kagame and his aides on evidence linking the missiles fired at Habyarimana’s plane to Tutsi guerrillas. According to Brugière’s investigation, the two ground-to-air missiles had been sold by the former Soviet Union to the Ugandan government, the main ally of the RPF.
Brugière says the RPF had used similar Soviet-made missiles in other attacks against Rwandan Hutu military planes and helicopters.
The Rwanda genocide is considered the worst war crime since the Holocaust against European Jews during World War II. The international community remained passive through the massacres.
Responsibility for the killings has not been fully established. Brugière accuses Kagame of provoking genocide against his own people by killing Habyarimana, but the new Rwandan Tutsi regime accuses French army officers in charge of the United Nations peacekeeping Operation Turquoise of training, arming and protecting Hutu militias before and during the genocide.
These accusations have been repeated in Kigali during hearings at a local tribunal seeking to fix international responsibilities, especially of the French government, in the massacres.
‘Errors of appreciation’
During these hearings, which started on October 26, former Rwandan Tutsi ambassador to France Jacques Bihozagara said: ”Operation Turquoise was aimed only at protecting genocide perpetrators, because the genocide continued even within the Turquoise zone.” The zone was guarded by French troops.
France has denied any role in the killings, but has accepted that its forces committed ”errors of appreciation” of the situation. In December 1998, a parliamentary inquiry concluded that French policy towards Rwanda in the civil war years was flawed by ”incoherencies”, but dismissed accusations of voluntary participation in the genocide.
Parallel to Brugière’s inquiry and the Kigali tribunal hearings, several other investigations are under way in France and at the international level.
Paris-based Judge Florence Michon is investigating the participation of French military officers in the massacre of Tutsis. Her inquiry was set off by Tutsi survivors of the genocide, who in February last year lodged complaints in Paris against French soldiers for ”complicity in crimes against humanity” in Rwanda.
Under pressure from Michon’s investigation, the French government announced the declassification of 105 military secret-service documents related to the Rwandan civil war.
Judgements
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha in Tanzania, has been investigating the crimes since January 1997. Since June this year, it has handed down 22 judgements involving 28 accused. All of the accused are Hutus.
An international tribunal in Belgium has also given rulings against Hutu leaders, and new hearings are scheduled in Brussels next year.
Despite France’s official denial of any involvement in the genocide against the Tutsi minority, many independent French and international analysts back Rwandan accusations against Paris.
French military officers posted with the Rwandan army in their headquarters ”necessarily knew what was going on in the Rwanda military structures; they were fully informed that massacres were in preparation”, says Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who headed the UN mission sent to Rwanda in 1993.
French journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, author of a book on the Rwandan genocide, confirms Dallaire’s accusations against French military advisers.
”French military officers trained the killers in the genocide,” De Saint-Exupéry says in his book L’Inavouable: La France in Ruanda (The Unspeakable: France in Rwanda). ”They did that on orders, by teaching the Rwandan army counter-insurgency strategies and tactics.”
Dallaire believes that French officers also participated in skirmishes between the Rwandan army and the guerrillas. ”In the days that followed the killing of Habyarimana, we saw Europeans soldiers wearing the Rwandan military uniform, taking part in manoeuvres,” he had said in a statement made following the massacres.
These testimonies are corroborated by a new documentary film just released in France on the French and international complicity in the genocide.
In the film, titled Kigali, Des Images Contre un Massacre (Kigali, Images Against a Massacre), French journalist Jean-Christophe Klotz, who witnessed some of the mass killings of 1994, presents interviews with Hutu, French and other international authorities at the time, and proves that they consciously neglected desperate Tutsi calls for help. — IPS