Rwanda Revisted

Stephen Smith

This post should have come much earlier and for that I'm sorry. I meant to get to it last night but life prevented this.

Tonight, Erik flew in from Paris for a stopover on his way to Texas where he's pursuing a research project and he, Jonathan and I met at the Cedar Tavern for a — hic! — ¡No Pasarán! brain storming session. Now I'm home again and have had a moment to work on this post.

Today marks tenth anniversary of the first full day of slaughter in the Rwandan genocide. There have been a number of astounding revelations about French and Rwandan rebel involvement in the genocide. To cover them, Le Monde let loose its Africa specialist, Connecticut-born reporter Stephen Smith (above right). In a matter of days, his reporting set off a chain of international events and discoveries that have profoundly altered the state of public knowledge on the genocide and I thought I'd do the world a favor by putting them all in one place.

The world already knows that, since 1959, Rwanda's Tutsi minority had been the subject of periodic pogroms on the part of the country's Hutu majority. On 04.06.94, the private jet belonging to then Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, a Falcon 50, was shot down, touching off in a matter of hours the most intense genocide ever recorded: almost a million people were killed in 100 days.



Recent developments began on March 9 when Le Monde published excerpts of the final 220-page report by the crusading anti-terror investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière following his six-year investigation in the airplane crash of Habyarimana's plane at the request of French nationals also killed in the crash. A firestorm of recrimination and scandal has followed the publication of this article.

Bruguière's report names former rebel leader and current Rwandan president Paul Kagamé is the main organizer of the attack and puts him at the top of a list of high-ranking rebel accomplices, members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).

Bruguière's investigation collected hundreds of accounts, filed dozens of letters rogatory, required numerous missions abroad in collaboration with other investigators and included testimony from anonymous FPR dissidents under witness protection, of which one was a member of the "network commando," a clandestine group allegedly under Kagamé's direct control and allegedly responsible for carrying out the assassination.

This witness explained a hypothesis according to which Tutsi rebels sacrificed Rwanda's "interior Tutsis" (Tutsis who remained in Rwanda following the end of minority Tutsi rule in 1959) by provoking the Hutu into killing them so that the rebels could exploit the situation by seizing power: "Paul Kagamé had little care for the interior Tutsis who were almost assimilated to the Hutu in his eyes," says captain Abdul Ruzibiza. "The interior Tutsis were potential enemies that had to be eliminated, just like the Hutus, in order to take power, Paul Kagamé's main objective." Though under protection, Le Monde's sources claim Ruzibiza has received death threats.

Continuing Reading "Rwanda Revisited"...