CHAPTER ONE

A People Betrayed

The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide

By LINDA MELVERN

Zed Books

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Genocide, April 1994





THE people had turned up in small groups, emerging from the eucalyptus trees at the back of the school. There was a girl, aged about six, with a machete wound in her head and a boy with a gaping hole in his shoulder from a bullet. He did not cry. One man had a hand almost severed from a machete blow.

Soon families were camped out in the classrooms, and when these became overcrowded people huddled together in groups on the playing field. Outside the gates of the school the militia brandished their machetes and hand-grenades. They cruised around in jeeps drinking beer, hurling vulgarities and chanting `Pawa, pawa' `power', for Hutu Power. The notorious Café de Gatenga, where the militia congregated, was nearby.

It was Friday 8 April 1994. Here in Kicukiro, and all over the city, people were fleeing in terror to churches, to schools, to hospitals and to wherever they saw the UN flag. The UN had peacekeepers in Rwanda, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), and 450 of them came from Belgium. These peacekeepers were spread out in fourteen different locations and the largest group was billeted at this technical school, the Ecole Technique Officielle, run by Salesian Fathers. There were ninety peacekeepers, part of the southern group, from the 14th company of Flawinne. The school went under the codename `Beverly Hills'. The commander was Lieutenant Luc Lemaire. He had been in Rwanda for two weeks.

Lemaire welcomed the people although he wondered how, with so little ammunition, he could protect them. There were explosions nearby and the sound of grenades and shooting. There were roadblocks. Then came the news that ten Belgian peacekeepers had been murdered by Rwandan soldiers. They could all be targets now. Lemaire had tried to reassure the younger members of his contingent.

Lemaire told his commanding officers by radio about the people at the school and he estimated their number at about 2,000. He ordered defensive positions built around the perimeter fence.

The food provided by the priests soon ran out. There was not enough water. There were insufficient medical supplies. Lemaire telephoned the local offices of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He was told that it was impossible for anyone to get through the roadblocks.

Then Lemaire heard that the Belgian government had decided to pull out its soldiers. It was unbelievable. The Belgians were the backbone of the mission. And what would happen to the people they were protecting? No one had an answer. Lemaire asked a bourgmestre to assemble the crowd and he stood on a chair to explain to the people that while the UN flag flew over the school they were safe, but that would not last. The politicians in Brussels were withdrawing the soldiers. Lemaire advised them to disperse, to slip away under cover of darkness. Several people approached him later and asked if, in the event of a pull-out, he would shoot them first, telling him that a bullet was preferable to being cut to pieces with a machete.

Lemaire spoke with a senior officer in the Rwandan army, Colonel Leonidas Rusatira, who came to the school. Lemaire asked Rusatira if, when the Belgians withdrew, he would make sure that Rwandan soldiers looked after the people. `I thought this man might be enough of a human being to protect them,' said Lemaire. Rusatira was the director of a military academy and said he had no soldiers at his command. Nevertheless, he brought them sacks of rice, although there was only enough for the children.

Lemaire considered escorting everyone to the headquarters of the UN mission, but he wondered if there were enough peacekeepers to took after them even there. To move the people in small groups would require more than ninety soldiers. They risked attack en route.





On Sunday 10 April Lemaire was relieved to see French troops, but they had flown to Rwanda only to evacuate expats. The French soldiers chose from the crowd three French and several Italian nationals. This approach angered Lemaire and he told them that they could at least take all the Europeans. Some 150 people were prepared for departure.

That day Lemaire was ordered to send soldiers to Gitarama, a town some forty miles away, to escort Belgian nationals to Kigali airport. He argued that this would diminish the security of the Rwandans he was protecting. The mission was cancelled, but for other reasons.

Lemaire's final evacuation order came on Monday 11 April and he faltered. He wanted the order confirmed. He contacted headquarters to be sure sure that his commanders knew the consequences. The log of the battalion records: `leave 2000 refugees at "Beverly Hills?"' He knew there were people in the crowd at risk.

`I did not want to leave,' he said some years later. `But I did not think there was any other solution.'

All that was left was to plan the departure. If the people found out what was happening there might be a riot so Lemaire planned for the peacekeepers to leave quietly, as though going out on a mission. By chance a French jeep was passing, and as it drove on to the playing field its soldiers were applauded by the crowd. One by one the UN vehicles left the school grounds. But it was soon obvious what was happening, that the peacekeepers were sneaking away. `We could not believe what they were doing ... just abandoning us when they knew the place was surrounded ... There were thousands of unarmed refugees ... it seemed unthinkable.'

People tried to hang on to lorries. The Belgian soldiers brandished their weapons, and fired into the air. The French soldiers prevented others from getting too near to the peacekeepers. The French promised the people that they would stay. At 13.45 the last Belgian soldier pulled out of the school. Then the French soldiers left. People started to cry. The bourgmestre, a member of Rwanda's Parti Social Démocrate (PSD), the centre-left opposition party, tried to calm everyone, and told them that they must defend themselves. `But we had no weapons, not even a stick,' someone said.

Soldiers and militia started firing at the people and throwing grenades into the crowd. Some people recognized as Hutu were put to one side. The vice-president of the national committee of one of the militia groups, an agricultural engineer, Georges Rutaganda, was in a jogging suit, standing guard at a small entrance located on the side of the athletic field. He was carrying a gun. In the crowd were pro-democracy opposition politicians and human rights activists but the vast majority of people carried identification cards with the designation Tutsi. There were both young and old people, and some who could barely walk.

Most of the people decided to try to escape to UN headquarters but instead they were herded along the road by militia and soldiers. `As we walked ... the soldiers and militia terrorized us with their grenades and guns ... they slapped and beat people up, stealing their money ... it was a long walk and the militia were everywhere.'

At one moment the Presidential Guard ordered the people to sit down and cursed and insulted them for being Tutsi, telling them they were going to die. Then the convoy moved on again. `As we walked along, the militia were hitting people with machetes. Some of the people who were wounded fell down and were trampled upon.'

They came to a crossroads that led to Nyanza-Rebero and when they reached a gravel pit near the Nyanza primary school they were told once more to sit down. A witness said that Rutaganda was instructing the militia how to proceed; there were militia coming from different directions and they had machetes. `The Presidential Guard were watching us from a place that was higher than where we were.' Then the soldiers started firing and threw grenades. Some people tried to break through the militia but were struck down with machetes. `We were so stunned that no one cried out ... it was only afterwards that you heard the voices moaning in agony ... then the Interahamwe [militia] came in and started with the machetes, hammers, knives and spears.' People in pain were told that they would be finished off quickly with a bullet if they paid money. There were children crying over the bodies of their dead parents.

The next morning militia came back to kill anyone still alive. Survivors of Kicukiro were mostly children who hid under the bodies.

In the next few days Lemaire and his men were deployed helping to escort Europeans to the airport. Told that their UN mission was over, they were the first to fly home. On the tarmac and in front of television cameras, one of them slashed his blue beret with his combat knife. Lemaire wore his beret. He still believed in the UN ideal.





In the course of a few terrible months in 1994, 1 million people were killed in Rwanda in circumstances similar to these. It was slaughter on a scale not seen since the Nazi extermination programme against the Jews. The killing rate in Rwanda was five times that achieved by the Nazis.

The killing in Rwanda was vicious, relentless and incredibly brutal. The stories of betrayal, of insensate cruelty, of human suffering, are reminiscent of stories of Treblinka or Babi Yar. But, unlike the Holocaust, far from trying to conceal what was happening, the killing took place in broad daylight. The incitement to genocide was broadcast via a radio station and the people were psychologically prepared for months, and were ordered and coerced to carry out the extermination. In Rwanda, the perpetrators and organizers of genocide were secure in the knowledge that outside interference would be at a minimum.

The international community, which passed laws fifty years ago with the specific mandate of ensuring that genocide was never again perpetrated, not only failed to prevent it happening in Rwanda but, by pumping in funds intended to help the Rwandan economy, actually helped to create the conditions that made it possible. The whole of the international community was involved while genocide was being planned: the United Nations and many of its agencies, independent aid groups, and two of the most powerful international institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The Holocaust in Europe was a unique historic event and to some people to make a comparison is insulting to the memory of its victims. Yet when it comes to Rwanda the comparison is impossible to resist, for the central purpose was the elimination of a people. Every Tutsi was targeted for murder.

To the outside world, however, the genocide would be portrayed as something very different: a senseless civil war, a tribal conflict between Hutu and Tutsi, in which old conflicts and bitter rivalries led to an almost primitive Savagery. The images of crude barbarity relayed across the world, the machete attacks, the bodies floating down rivers, corpses piled by the roadside, seemed only to confirm the atavistic nature of the killing. True, there was a civil war, but preoccupation with that blinded most commentators, governments, the UN Secretariat and Security Council to the fact of the genocidal killing perpetrated by one of the parties to the civil war. But a genocide does not take place in a context of anarchy. Far from being a chaotic tribal war, what happened in Rwanda was deliberate, carefully planned and clinically carried out by an extremist group using army units and gendarmes to drive people systematically from their homes and assemble them at pre-arranged places of slaughter. A militia of the mainly unemployed, the Interahamwe, those who work together, and the Impuzamugambi, those with a single purpose, were trained to kill 1,000 human beings every twenty minutes. Local administrators organized the disposal of bodies in garbage trucks. The slaughter continued unhindered for three months.

Nor was the massacre a remote African episode, beyond the control of the outside world. Arms, from machetes to rocket launchers, were supplied by France, South Africa, Egypt and China. The governments of both France and Egypt were intimately involved in arms deals with the extremists in Rwanda. In order to pay for them, money was taken from funds supplied by the international financial institutions. In the year in which the genocide was planned, Rwanda, a country the size of Wales, became the third largest importer of weapons in Africa. World Bank officials were fully aware of the militarization of Rwanda, but failed to share their knowledge even with the UN Security Council.

With the help of individuals who know the truth (and have found it very hard to live with), it has been possible to piece together the facts. Documents held in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, as well as hitherto unpublished evidence of UN Security Council deliberations in New York, reveal a sequence of events that is as agonizing as it is shocking. There is evidence, too, of a more sinister dimension. There are those who were all too aware of the situation in Rwanda, and who nevertheless failed to take action. There are those whose actions contributed directly to events. There are others who helped conceal the reality of what was taking place. And there are some who covered it up. There is evidence that points not just to negligence, but to complicity.

What happened in Rwanda showed that despite the creation of an organization set up to prevent a repetition of genocide — for the UN is central to this task — it failed to do so, even when the evidence was indisputable.

The combination of revelations about the scale and intensity of the genocide, the complicity of western nations, the failure to intervene, and the suppression of information about what was actually happening, is a shocking indictment, not just of the UN Security Council, but even more so of governments and individuals who could have prevented what was happening but chose not to do so. It is a terrible story, made worse because its true nature has been deliberately distorted and confused.