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Published on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 by Jurist
Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning ... No Genocide?
The media reports of the December 18 judgment of Chamber-1 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed “masterminds” of the Rwandan genocide. But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.
Ever since former ICTR Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and ICTR Chief Investigative Prosecutor Michael Hourigan went public in 2007-8 exposing US-UK manipulations to grant de facto impunity to current Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his henchmen, between 1997 and the present, convictions of the vanquished in the Rwanda war are a given.
The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide. And Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times - not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Rwandan-Tutsi civilians.
This raises the more profound question: if there was no conspiracy and no planning to kill ethnic civilians, can the tragedy that engulfed Rwanda properly be called “a genocide” at all? Or, was it closer to a case of civilians being caught up in war-time violence, like the Eastern Front in WWII, rather than the planned behind-the-lines killings in Nazi death camps? The ICTR judgment found the former.
The Court specifically found that the actions of Rwandan military leaders, both before any after the April 6, 1994 assassination of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarima, were consistent with war-time conditions and the massive chaos brought about by the four-year war of invasion from Uganda by Gen. Paul Kagame’s RPF army, which seized power in July 1994.
Although the Chamber did not specifically mention more recent events, it is worth noting that this is the same government that was named in a UN Security Council commissioned report on December 12, 2008 as having invaded the eastern Congo (with Uganda) in 1996 and again in 1998 and have occupied an area 15-times the size of Rwanda since that time. Similar UN Security Council reports in 2001, 2002 and 2003, make clear that Rwanda and Uganda’s economic rape of the eastern Congo, and the resulting 6 million-plus civilian deaths, have long been an “open secret.”
As Lead Defense Counsel for Major Aloys Ntabakuze, who was convicted of three specific crimes committed by troops without evidence they were acting under his authority, I would say the judgment was actually a victory. Our defense was based on previously suppressed contemporaneous UN and declassified US documents that showed Kagame’s RPF as the war-time aggressor, which was responsible for the assassination of the former President and for preventing military intervention to end the predicted civilian massacres.
The ICTR oral judgment specifically refers to this “alternative” explanation of the tragic events in Rwanda, as being a basis for rejecting the conspiracy and planning charges against the former military leaders. But the documents show more.
As early as May 17, 1994, UNHCR was receiving reports of massive civilian killings by Kagame’s RPF in the 1/3 of Rwanda they had occupied since April 22. Other documents from August, September and October 1994 describe a conscious attempt by UN and US government officials to “cover-up” reports of RPF killings, including memos to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Apparently, US policy to create “impunity” for Kagame began nearly as soon as he took power.
Had the US “impunity policy” not been in place, Kagame might well have been prosecuted along with Military-1 defendants Bagosora and Nsengiumva, as ICTR Prosecutor Michael Hourigan recommended in early 1997. Kagame’s responsibility for the assassination of Habyarimana has been known to the ICTR Prosecutor since at least that time, if not early.
Had the US “impunity policy” not been in place, Kagame might well have spent the last decade awaiting trial at the ICTR, rather than getting rich from the resources of the Congo, and the blood of millions of Africans.
Ever since former ICTR Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and ICTR Chief Investigative Prosecutor Michael Hourigan went public in 2007-8 exposing US-UK manipulations to grant de facto impunity to current Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his henchmen, between 1997 and the present, convictions of the vanquished in the Rwanda war are a given.
The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide. And Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times - not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Rwandan-Tutsi civilians.
This raises the more profound question: if there was no conspiracy and no planning to kill ethnic civilians, can the tragedy that engulfed Rwanda properly be called “a genocide” at all? Or, was it closer to a case of civilians being caught up in war-time violence, like the Eastern Front in WWII, rather than the planned behind-the-lines killings in Nazi death camps? The ICTR judgment found the former.
The Court specifically found that the actions of Rwandan military leaders, both before any after the April 6, 1994 assassination of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarima, were consistent with war-time conditions and the massive chaos brought about by the four-year war of invasion from Uganda by Gen. Paul Kagame’s RPF army, which seized power in July 1994.
Although the Chamber did not specifically mention more recent events, it is worth noting that this is the same government that was named in a UN Security Council commissioned report on December 12, 2008 as having invaded the eastern Congo (with Uganda) in 1996 and again in 1998 and have occupied an area 15-times the size of Rwanda since that time. Similar UN Security Council reports in 2001, 2002 and 2003, make clear that Rwanda and Uganda’s economic rape of the eastern Congo, and the resulting 6 million-plus civilian deaths, have long been an “open secret.”
As Lead Defense Counsel for Major Aloys Ntabakuze, who was convicted of three specific crimes committed by troops without evidence they were acting under his authority, I would say the judgment was actually a victory. Our defense was based on previously suppressed contemporaneous UN and declassified US documents that showed Kagame’s RPF as the war-time aggressor, which was responsible for the assassination of the former President and for preventing military intervention to end the predicted civilian massacres.
The ICTR oral judgment specifically refers to this “alternative” explanation of the tragic events in Rwanda, as being a basis for rejecting the conspiracy and planning charges against the former military leaders. But the documents show more.
As early as May 17, 1994, UNHCR was receiving reports of massive civilian killings by Kagame’s RPF in the 1/3 of Rwanda they had occupied since April 22. Other documents from August, September and October 1994 describe a conscious attempt by UN and US government officials to “cover-up” reports of RPF killings, including memos to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Apparently, US policy to create “impunity” for Kagame began nearly as soon as he took power.
Had the US “impunity policy” not been in place, Kagame might well have been prosecuted along with Military-1 defendants Bagosora and Nsengiumva, as ICTR Prosecutor Michael Hourigan recommended in early 1997. Kagame’s responsibility for the assassination of Habyarimana has been known to the ICTR Prosecutor since at least that time, if not early.
Had the US “impunity policy” not been in place, Kagame might well have spent the last decade awaiting trial at the ICTR, rather than getting rich from the resources of the Congo, and the blood of millions of Africans.
13 Comments so far
Show AllThere is a difference between revisionism and telling the truth. Mr. Peter Erlinder is doing the latter (telling the truth). This truth will set all Rwandans (Hutu, Tutsi, Twa) free. Rwandans are currently living under the terror of Paul Kagame's regime that uses all methods under the sun to suppress any dissent including mass murder, torture, rape, imprisonment, etc...). So far, Kagame and his cronies have succeded at hiding what really occured in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994. Anything after that, they have succeded at calling it "Reprisal" crimes. They have so far gotten away with all of their crimes, lack of democracy and major human rights abuse. The level of impunity granted to these people is a disgrace considering how many have died in Rwanda.
What they are having a hard time getting away with, is exporting their crimes into the Congo. Their invasion has led to over 6 million deaths in the Congo. Kagame and his regime's abuse of the Congolese people that includes mass murder, rape, torture, amputations on a grand scale as well as the looting of the minerals in the Congo is really showing his true colors. Now, that he has signed the recent accord, he want to pretend to save the people he has terrorised for years, AGAIN. The theory that he stopped the genocide in Rwanda is as much a lie to the gullible as him suddenly becoming the savior of the teh Congolese people after his terror campaign.
Dear Mr. Erlinder, please keep up the good work.
Challenging common assumptions about the Rwandan genocide does not constitute "genocide denial." That's the sort of logic the Kagame regime uses when someone inconveniently brings up its own appalling human-rights record.
Accusations that the RPF engaged in murderous and genocidal behavior on a massive scale continue to pile up, and in many cases are so specific and convincing that they defy summary dismissal. Suggested reading: The Spanish indictments; L’Histoire Secrete, by former RPA officer Abdul Ruzibiza; and Surviving the Slaughter by Maria Beatrice Umutesi.
The standard accounts of the Rwandan genocide, exonerating the RPF and congratulating it for "ending the genocide" need to be re-examined. According to historian Rene Lemarchand, the time has come "to give serious thought to a revisionist history of the carnage, one that gives sustained attention to the other side of the story."
This is a sickening example of genocide denial, and I am appalled that CommonDreams would publish it. Check the UN Genocide Convention: genocide and conspiracy to commit it are *separate crimes* (Article 3 (a) and (b)). There is no need whatsoever to prove conspiracy or top-level planning in order to demonstrate that genocide -- murder and other acts committed against national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups -- took place. I assume Mr. Erlinder knows this, and therefore that he is deliberately attempting to mislead. Note, moreover, this remarkable passage: "Or, was [the Rwandan 'tragedy'] closer to a case of civilians being caught up in war-time violence, like the Eastern Front in WWII, rather than the planned behind-the-lines killings in Nazi death camps?" I presume that by "civilians being caught up in war-time violence ... [on] the Eastern Front in WWII," Mr. Erlinder is referring to events like the "Holocaust of Bullets," in which about 1.5 million Jewish civilians were systematically slaughtered by Nazi soldiers and death squads in 1941-42, before the machinery of the death camps was established. (See the New York Times story at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/world/europe/06priest.html for more.) Were these 1.5 million Jews, and the millions of Slavic civilians murdered on the Eastern Front to advance the Nazi scheme of imperial conquest and racial subjugation, simply "caught up in war-time violence"? This is a classic trope of Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists, as well as of those in positions of authority in Turkey, Iraq, West Pakistan, and numerous other genocidal regimes who have standardly sought to justify campaigns of mass murder by reference to "the fog of war." It is a disgraceful performance, one that seriously besmirches CommonDreams' hard-earned progressive reputation.
Peace and Justice Seeker
Dear Adam,
I am disappointed with your intervention on the subject by comparing the holocaust of Jews to the Rwandan genocide.
As you can see, the subject of this wring was based on clear facts. You may dismisse them, but that will not change their nature. a point I am not getting from you is how you compare the holocost of Jews with the Rwandan genocide. I want to know if Jewish people had invaded Germany with their heavy weaponory and killed their way to capital city. The commons knowledge is that Jews never attacked Germany. They found themseves being rounded up, taken to concentration camps and killed. If this is how it happened, who would then be considered Nazi in case of Rwanda? The people of Rwanda who were attacked by some Tutsi elements from the Ugandan army? How can you clear Kagame from being a nazi leader for having ordered members of his army to kills Tutsi he claimed he was protecting, in order to have a good lie to use in accusing the then government for not protecting its people?
Who do you compare more with nazi and who do you compare more with Jewish victims in light of surrounding circumstances.
Please I would advise to have an open mind discussing such a delicate topic instead of baselessly dismissing facts and resorting to insults and threat in order to silence your interlocutroby as currently practiced in Kigali.
Good luck.
My dear friend...
and others who have attacked me personally rather than examining the ICTR evidence that goes contrary to the accepted story re: Rwanda.
What cannot be denied is that Kagame-led forces were the aggressors 1900-94 and that Kagame assassinated Habyarimana, which touched off the last 100 days of the Rwanda War. It also cannot be denied that, since at least May 17,1994 UN and USG documents show that massive crimes were committed by the RPF before, during and after the April-July period...commonly called the "Rwanda genocide" It also cannot be denied that the Kagame RPF military has invaded and occupied the Congo from 1996 to the present, resulting in more than 6 million deaths.
IF my position is "genocide denial" it means that the RPF aggressors and criminals became the "good guys" for 90 days. But indictments by judges in Spain and France have come to different conclusions. The spanish judge indicts Kagame for assassination of Habyarimana and some 300,000 civilian deaths in 1994, and thousands in Kibeho refugee camp in 1995.
Former ICTR prosecutors, not me, have explained the US/UK/UN cover-up of RPF crimes in 1994, 1997 and 2003-present. See testimony/affidavit of ICTR prosecutor Michael Hourigan and books by Carl Del Ponte and Florence Hartman published in 2007-08.
My reference to the eastern front was not to dispute that there were genocidal crimes that took place during the german/soviet fight to the death...only that what is called the "holocaust" was highly planned conscious policies of the Nazi state, carried out in a organized manner. The events you describe might well be considered part of the same.
The point is that the evidence of the ICTR showed nothing of the sort. The Military-1 trial was the first in which formerly suppressed documentary evidence was made available to the court....thus, the no conspiracy, no planning ruling. However, individual defendants were found guilty under command responsibility for genocidal crimes committed by troops under their command.
And...for multiple crimes, committed by multiple actors to be considered "a" genocide, rather than genocidal acts within a larger context which is NOT "a genocide" (i.e. the WWII eastern front)
I understand that this new information is upsetting...but it does not change the fact that the story of the Rwanda War...and crimes committed have been told by the victors...not unlike the Japanese being held responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I hope that all interested in the evidence will examine the evidence in the Military-1 trial and many of the documents which are available on my website: www.rwandadocumentsproject.net. We can continue this dialogue via email if you like: peter.erlinder@wmitchell.edu
best regards,
pe
Mr. Erlinder, please look again at the title of your article. It clearly implies that if no conspiracy or planning can be proved, then "no genocide" occurred in Rwanda. That is blatantly untrue under the UN Genocide Convention, as I pointed out.
There is no question that Kagame's RPF forces committed major crimes during the later stages of the genocide, and beyond (in Zaire/Congo). In fact, I have argued that these can themselves be considered genocidal atrocities. At least between April and July 1994, however, they were dwarfed by the Hutu-extremist campaign to exterminate every last woman, man, and child of Tutsi ethnicity who could be hunted down by Rwandan soldiers, militias, and death squads, assisted by tens of thousands of ordinary Hutu civilians.
You write: "What cannot be denied is that ... Kagame assassinated Habyarimana, which touched off the last 100 days of the Rwanda War." This is ridiculous; the assertion that the RPF killed Habyarimana is nothing more than a hypothesis -- a tenable one, but one that has never been proved, and that stands beside equally tenable hypotheses -- e.g., that Hutu extremists downed the plane in order to remove an obstacle to their desired "final solution of the Tutsi problem." And note the implicit logic here: that if the leader of a country is killed by outside invaders, then it is understandable (reasonable? acceptable?) for the authorities to respond by seeking to slaughter every last innocent civilian within the country, down to the youngest child, who happens to share the same ethnicity as the majority of the invaders. Sorry, but that is a moral abomination.
I also remain deeply disturbed by your depiction of World War II on the Eastern Front as consisting of "multiple crimes, committed by multiple actors ... rather than genocidal acts within a larger context which is NOT 'a genocide'." This obfuscates the fact that it was the Nazis who invaded the Soviet Union with a carefully-prepared and highly-detailed plan to subjugate the population, including via the pre-planned extermination (through execution, starvation, and overwork) of tens of millions of Soviet civilians. The vast majority of genocide scholars would consider this Nazi campaign to constitute a straightforward policy of genocide in the form of aggressive war -- analogous to the Spanish destruction of native populations across large swaths of the Americas during the 15th and 16th centuries. The millions of civilian deaths on the Eastern Front, Jewish and otherwise, were part and parcel of this genocidal enterprise. Depicting those victims as simply "caught up in war-time violence," or as part of a "struggle to the death" between two (apparently equally blameworthy) nations, is precisely the line of argument advanced time and again by Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists.
thanks for your response
...but you are completely informed about the assassination of Habyarimana. Affidavits from former ICTR investigators, prosecutors make clear that Kagame's culpability was known and suppressed in 1997. Please check the trial record.
In addition there was multiple witness testimony from former RPA officers who were involved in the particulars...the assassination was part of a long-standing plan to seize power, rather than share it under the Arusha Accords...
With respect to your assessment of the Genocide convention, it is partially correct. It is possible for acts to be committed with the requisite specific intent (dolis specialis in civil law) but that specific intent cannot be transferred one to another...without there being a plan, or structure....however, to link an otherwise disconnected series of events into a single offense..."a genocide" actually does require the kind of planning and structural execution seen in the Nazi extermination program, and is implicit in the genocide convention language, when it is translated into the elements of a crime under either civil or common-law systems...which the convention treaty, itself, is not.
My point about the eastern front continues to be that when "the genocide" is referred to in common conversation...the images it invokes are NOT those on the eastern front...altho some of the violence may have had genocidal intent...that cannot characterize all the crimes committed by the German military, or its supporters as such...and certainly not those committed by those other than Nazi's...and there were many, as you know. And, some of those might also have been committed with genocidal intent.
A more claim to "genocide"...which certainly is as effective as "terrorist" in labeling an offense as not worthy of careful thought, or the application of legal norms and evidentiary proof....the ruling at the ICTR was precisely on that legal point...Your insistence of demonizing ALL acts committed by the group you despise...is why we have moved beyond..."an eye for an eye"...and require evidence, precise definition of crime, and a presumption of innocence for the accused.
But, of course, this is only important if one is interested in "law" rather than their own view of "justice"...and I don't trust mine, an more than I trust yours...Of course we can differ on this...
But on the evidence of what actually DID happen in Rwanda...the exposure of a 14 year cover-up of RPF crimes by the US/UK is in full swing at the ICTR...and the facts of what happened in Rwanda are already in the public record for those who are interested.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments, but like most in the US, you have been misinformed about what occurred in Rwanda...and who was responsible...and who were the victims, under what circumstances. But, this will change as the research and original documents become more familiar to interested researchers...
best regards,
pe
bligh4
What an excremental article. Does the author really think that the REAL story of the Rwandan genocide was the killing of Hutus by Tutsi's.
Some moderate Hutus were killed by the government militias, but EVERY SINGLE TUTSI that could be found- men, women and children- were killed by the government militias. All the while government spokesmen were on the radio ordering the killing of the "cockroaches".
If this was not genocide then genocide does not exist. The author should be ashamed of himself.
Bligh4: I have looked at several RTLM transcripts and have seen no evidence that government spokesmen were ordering the execution of the Tutsis, as you claim. Have you seen transcripts indicating otherwise?
The standard story about the radio stations is that they were instruments of the genocide -- and they may have been, but not nearly as directly as is typically implied. The transcripts that I have seen (available at the ICTR website, and employed by the prosecution) hardly provide smoking-gun evidence. No one directly orders anything. The DJs are in most cases cautious and eliptical.
Incidentally, if Hutus employed "hate media," Tutsis apparently did, too -- but have not been charged in an international court. Impuruza, a Tutsi-refugee publication, printed a poem in December 1990 that referred to Hutus as “termites,” “wild rats,” “thieves,” “traitors,” “ugly creatures,” and “looters, hooligans and killers.”
This is actually worse than anything I've seen in the RTLM transcripts. If I'm wrong, I would sincerely like to see the proof.
It's not surprising that a defense attorney for the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide would engage in genocide denial. It is very surprising and even more disappointing that Common Dreams would publish this sort of garbage. What's next? Bringing in a representative of the Turkish government to deny the Armenian genocide? Japanese "revisionist" historians who want to deny Japan's
mass rapes and murders in China in 1938?
There is nothing progressive about genocide denial, even if it does criticize U.S. foreign policy.
Are all of the media who reported on the Rwandan genocide part of the Evil U.S. Imperialist Conspiracy? Is Human Rights Watch part of the conspiracy too? Is this report all forgeries except for the part about Tutsi atrocities?
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/rwanda/
This matter is about America seeing a strategic interest in the Congo Central Africa region and using the "crisis" as an opportunity. Kagame and the RPF military was the proxy to make that 'opportunity' possible. And Kagame was trained at an army officer training program in America.
So if American military program is tied to Kagame, and American corporate interests have benefitted from Rwandan military activity in the Congo region, and American political leaders are complicit, if not directly accountable, who and what will bring justice to this matter?
Forget the International Criminal Court. The ICC is an instrument of European political interests.
American ties to the massacres and proxy militarism and warmongering has to be faced by the American people. The American people have to bring their own people to justice otherwise the injustices and criminality will continue generation after generation.
"even a dead fish can go with the flow"
If this is true, the USA + the UN officials that granted "impunity" should be in the dock at the International Court.
This would of course include Bill Clinton, Warren Christopherat the very least.
This should also squash any hopes of exprez Clinton holding any position at the
United Nations.
Perhaps Hilary Clinton should resign her recent appointment, as she repeatedly claimed "experience gained" at the White House when her partner ran the show, did she endorse this travesty of justice, inhumanity and abuse of power?
Wealth/power concentration + overpopulation/resource depletion = genocidal war
or
Unfettered Capitalism + Organized Religion = Death
Nature is indifferent to cruelty, suffering and blood.