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Rwanda leader's murder still awaits UN probe
President's 1994 killing triggered African genocide
Steven Edwards, National PostPublished
Monday, November 27, 2006
The speed with which the United Nations has moved to investigate the recent political assassinations in Lebanon is in startling contrast with its lethargy over a 1994 missile attack that killed two African presidents. While experts worry Lebanon could erupt in violence that tears the Middle East apart, the murder of Juvenal Habyarimana, the Rwandan President, on April 6, 1994, sparked three months of slaughter now known as the Rwandan genocide. More than 800,000 people died after unknown assailants blew up Mr. Habyarimana's plane, which was carrying Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Burundian President, officials from both countries and three French crew.
Startlingly, there has been no UN probe. Now, a French judge acting for the French victims' families has gone ahead with his own investigation and the fallout has sparked a major row between France and the current Rwandan government. Rwanda recalled its ambassador after Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's leading anti-terrorist judge, signed arrest warrants for nine aides of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President. The judge has also accused Mr. Kagame of ordering Mr. Habyarimana's death, but as a sitting president, he is immune from prosecution. The Bruguiere investigation is based in part on documents first uncovered by the National Post in 2000. While Mr. Kagame denies any involvement in the assassination, the pressure for an international investigation is only likely to increase from here.
Marie-Rose Habyarimana, one of Mr. Habyarimana's eight children, said from her current home in Ottawa she plans to renew a plea she made on the 12th anniversary of the genocide for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to support demands for an international probe. "The arrest warrants offer us a bit of hope for justice, and that this time the UN will do its job," she said. "How is it that they can start probes into the murders in Lebanon in record time, and still be doing nothing to find out who killed my father and the others in the plane almost 13 years ago?"
The Post's investigation stemmed from a desire to plumb a mystery riddled with Canadian connections.
Retired Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission, was in Rwanda during the genocide, while Louise Arbour, former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, later became the UN's chief prosecutor for Rwandan war crimes. In the documents obtained by the Post, former UN investigator Michael Hourigan says Ms. Arbour rejected a full-scale UN investigation when he met her in 1997 to present new information suggesting elements of Mr. Kagame's rebel Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) downed the plane. The nine people now targeted by Mr. Bruguiere include one named in an "internal memorandum" given to Ms. Arbour at that meeting. The 1997 memorandum says the head of a special operations unit that allegedly brought down the plane reported directly to Faustin Nyamwasa-Kayumba, head of the RPA's intelligence network. Mr. Nyamwasa-Kayumba is now Mr. Kagame's ambassador to India.
Ms. Arbour, today the UN Human Rights Commissioner, has never commented publicly on what transpired at the 1997 meeting. One of her former senior prosecutors speculated she was reflecting UN concern Mr. Kagame would react to an investigation by refusing to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal.
Indeed, Mr. Kagame had been in effective control since his mainly Tutsi army put an end to the extremist-Hutu slaughter of Rwanda's Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus in July, 1994. Mr. Bruguiere has cited Mr. Hourigan saying the UN prematurely halted the probe under pressure from the United States, which wanted to maintain good relations with Mr. Kagame. His current report says only Mr. Kagame's forces had missiles capable of causing a plane crash. However, the Kagame government says there were other arms sources in the region. The French also helped arm Habyarimana government forces. The Kagame government says extremist Hutu forces killed Mr. Habyarimana, who was returning from a peace conference at which he had agreed to share power with the RPA's political wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The death of their Hutu leader enabled Hutu extremists to blame the Tutsis and call for the group's slaughter.
"On the face of it, the logic of the Hutu extremists doing it because Habyarimana had seemed too willing to compromise seems strongest," said Gerry Caplan, a Canadian political organizer and analyst who wrote a 2000 study of the genocide for the Organization of African Unity. "For Kagame, it seemed there would inevitably be chaos and anarchy, and why would that be good for the RPF and the Tutsi? But I have no doubt that if Kagame had thought it was useful to his plans in some way, he wouldn't have hesitated to do it."
Of course, it happened, there was horrendous slaughter and Mr. Kagame, instead of having to share power, attained total power. Only an independent international investigation has any chance of solving the mystery. Why the resistance?
