THE RWANDA GENOCIDE SEEN IN A NEW LIGHT:

New Critical Investigation of Rwanda Massacres

The Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague wants a secret UN-report on the massacres in Rwanda handed over. She considers re-opening investigation of mysterious plane crash.

By Gunnar Willum and Bjørn Willum

THE HAGUE - The attempt to place the responsibility for the massacres in Rwanda, which almost six years ago meant the deaths of a million people, is now taking a dramatic new turn. 

The Chief Prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal Carla Del Ponte tells Aktuelt, that she considers to re-open the investigation of the plane crash, which sparked the Rwandan Genocide.

The plane carrying then Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down on April 6th, 1994. That night went down in history as the night when the Genocide of an estimated one million people commenced.

Del Ponte says in an interview with Aktuelt that it would be within her jurisdiction to investigate the downing of the plane, 'if we have evidence or concrete suspicion that the assassination of the President was an act related to the Genocide." If this is the case, the investigation will be re-opened, she says.

Immediately after the plane crash, which took place shortly after dark, roadblocks were erected all over Kigali, and Hutu extremist militias took to the streets. The murder of the President gave the Hutu extremists the possibility to take power in Rwanda and initiating systematic elimination of their political Hutu opponents and of the Tutsi minority.

About 12 hours after the plane crash ten Belgian UN-troops were taken prisoner by the extremists, mutilated and murdered. The result was that Belgium, whose troops constituted the core of a UN-force stationed in the country, withdrew its troops. With nothing obstructing the slaughter the population then became fair game for the Hutu extremists.

Until now it has been assumed that Hutu extremists downed the plane to take advantage of the ensuing chaos to seize power.

This was also the common assumption when a secret investigation team at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1996 started to give the circumstances of the plane crash a thorough going-over.

But at some point around New Year 1997 the evidence started to point in a different direction, after three informants from the current Rwandan government claimed they had been part of a secret commando-operation team, which had shot down the plane.

The three soldiers were in 1994 part of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which stopped the massacres by driving the Hutu extremists into exile and then took power in Rwanda.

They claimed the leader of the RPF, Major General Paul Kagame, Rwanda's current Minister of Defence and strongman, had been behind the downing of the plane.

Suddenly the investigation turned deadly serious.

When the investigators were facing the decisive breakthrough in the investigation they contacted Carla Del Ponte's predecessor Louise Arbour at the Tribunal's head office in the Hague. Louise Arbour was very intersted in this information, several investigators tell Aktuelt.

But when an investigator flew to the Hague to personally hand over a memoranda about the case, she made a U-turn and closed the investigation.

Why Arbour closed the investigation remains unclear, but a former investigator has told Aktuelt, that Arbour had been threatened by the Rwandan government not to open an investigation into RPF war crimes.

A few months later one of the investigators wrote a report about the case at the UN headquarters in New York. The report was shelved, but in March this year revealed by the Canadian paper National Post.

This has made Chief Prosecutor Del Ponte demand that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan hand over the report.

Del Ponte denies to have had any prior knowledge of the investigation. "I have no information, no documents, nothing. I read about it for the first time in the Canadian press," she says.

If it is the RPF that shot down the plane, the history of the Genocide must be rewritten.

Although it will not alter Hutu extremists' responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, it will put the RPF in a completely different light. RPF has so far been considered in the West as the victims and as those, who stopped the Genocide.

"[The RPF] knew that they planned the massacres," says Colonel Luc Marchal, who was second-in-command of the UN-troops in Rwanda and during the months before the Genocide had daily contact with both sides in the conflict.

Besides the excellent level of the RPF intelligence networks Colonel Marchal points to the Hate-propaganda spread through media controlled by the Hutu extremists. "They made no secret of their intentions," he says.

The RPF, he says, also knew that the extremists were just looking for an excuse to execute their plans.

But why kill the Hutu President and thereby provide the best of reasons for the extremists to commence the slaughter of Tutsis?

Militarily, the RPF knew they were more than a match for the government army of Habyarimana, Marchal says. "They knew very well what the result [of a war] would be," he says.

Despite being militarily superior, however, observers agree that for political reasons the RPF could not be seen as having unilaterally re-started the war and run over the country. But if the enemy government massacred civilians it would make it very hard indeed for the international community to oppose an RPF conquest of the country.

And the RPF did not care much for the Tutsis inside Rwanda, Marchal says.

The RPF consisted predominantly of exile-Rwandese, who had fled Rwanda during previous pogroms on Tutsis. The Tutsis who remained in Rwanda, he says, "were considered as collaborators by the RPF", since they had not joined the fight against Juvénal Habyarimana's Hutu dictatorship.

If indeed the RPF shot down the plane, rather than being the victim of the Hutu militias, the RPF entered into an unholy alliance with the murderers, while the Tutsis inside Rwanda therefore constituted nothing more than a bargaining chip for the rebel movement.

And the chip - denoting almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus inside Rwanda - was sacrificed on the alter of power.

Should this be true, it therefore seriously shatters the notion that the conflict in the tiny Central African country is about Hutus and Tutus fighting for power.

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE WAS ALSO PUBLISHED ON APRIL 17:

Rwandan Government Suspected of War Crimes