American lawyer jailed in Rwanda for giving legal counsel to Opposition leader

An American lawyer has pleaded not guilty to charges of denying Rwanda’s 1994 genocide in a court in Kigali on Friday. Peter Erlinder was also charged with publishing articles that threaten national stability in five hour hearing in the Rwandan capital. Erlinder is the lead defence lawyers at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda held in Arusha, Tanzania. Erlinder said he believes the charges arise as a result of some misunderstanding however he could face 25 years in prison if convicted.

It is hard to believe Peter Erlinder is serious about a "misunderstanding". He knows better than most this trial is political. Erlinder arrived in Kigali last month to help defend opposition leader Victoire Umuhoza Ingabire, who was charged with promoting genocide ideology. Ingabire is the chair of the Unified Democratic Forces. She returned to Rwanda in January after spending 16 years in exile in the Netherlands specifically to contest the presidential election against dictator Paul Kagame in August. Kagame, who has ruled Rwanda since 1995, threw Ingabire in jail on charges of “association with a terrorist group; propagating genocide ideology; negationism and ethnic divisionism”. She is now out on bail with her passport seized and has been given instructions not to talk to the media.

It was obvious this was a tactic to ensure Ingabire would not be able to contest the election. She enlisted Erlinder’s help to fight the spurious charges. The 62 year old Erlinder is a distinguished jurist and a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota before working for the ICTR. In his defence statements at Arusha, Erlinder disputed the standard characterisation of the genocide as Hutus deliberately slaughtering innocent Tutsis. Instead, he said, that the violence was more spontaneous and possibly the result of Tutsi rebels killing Hutu civilians. These provocative statements taken outside their courtroom context made him an ideal candidate for “propagating genocide ideology. He arrived in Kigali on 23 May and was arrested five days later. Martin Ngoga, Rwanda’s prosecutor general said it did not matter Erlinder made the offensive remarks abroad.

Erlinder requested bail to return to the US and receive treatment for injuries. He said he had not been maltreated but had also not had contact with family members or his doctor. On Wednesday, he was hospitalised after police said he had attempted suicide by taking dozens of pills. His family has denied the suicide attempt claim. On Thursday, the US State Dept called for him to be released on compassionate and humanitarian grounds. "We are pressing the Rwandan government to resolve this case quickly, and we would like to see him released on compassionate grounds," Philip Crowley, a state department spokesman, said.

The criticism of Rwanda is deliberately gentle. The country is a close American ally that has received hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid despite human rights violations in the months leading up to elections in August. No subject seems to be touchier than the genocide and the US has covered up evidence that Kagame and his Tutsi army were almost as culpable as the Hutu Power group that killed over half a million Tutsis in the period between April and June 1994. In recent years, thousands of Rwandans have been charged with the vaguely worded genocide ideology, which criminalises any non-government version of events in 1994. The difference now is, as the New York Times points out, Erlinder’s case is the first time Rwanda has leveled these charges against a Westerner.

Writing in MR Zine, American academics Edward Herman and David Peterson said Erlinder’s arrest revealed much about a regime that is routinely sanitised in Western intellectual life and media coverage. They remind readers Kagame does not like free elections and has either avoided them or rigged them. They said Kagame did the same thing before the last election in 2003. “Kagame's main rival at the time, a Hutu and former President Pasteur Bizimungu, was arrested and charged with ‘divisionism,’ a kind of Kagame-speak that means to provide political choices other than the one-party Kagame dictatorship,” wrote Herman and Peterson. “Hopefully, he has gone too far in using that Kafkaesque gimmick against Peter Erlinder, a notable fighter against both actual genocide and genocide denial.”

Rwanda’s Mucyo Commission implicates France in 1994 genocide

An 18 month Rwandan enquiry has implicated dozens of senior French political and military figures for their role in the 1994 genocide that killed up to 800,000 mainly Rwandan Tutsis. A 500 page report commissioned by Rwandan Prime Minister Paul Kagame named 33 senior French officials including the late President Francois Mitterrand and three former Prime Ministers including Dominique de Villepin. The report said French troops took direct part in the massacre and France provided political, military, diplomatic and logistic support. While Rwanda has no immediate plans to seek indictment, justice minister Tharcisse Karugarama said yesterday the report "could be the basis for potential charges against individuals or the state."

Karugarama also highlighted “the role played by France in the aftermath to protect the genocidal forces and make it very difficult for them to be apprehended and brought to justice". Karugarama was referring to Operation Turquoise (pdf), the so-called “humanitarian mission” France launched in the south of the country after most of the killing had ended, in a vain attempt to stop the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from ousting the genocidal Hutu Power regime.

Mitterrand and de Villepin were among a dozen politicians named by the report along with twenty military officials. Mitterrand was French president at the time with very close links to President Juvenal Habyarimana whose assassination sparked the three-month genocide. De Villepin was the chief aide to then foreign minister Alain Juppé, who was also named in the report along with then-prime minister Edouard Balladur.

The report was the result of the 18 month long Mucyo Commission, named for its president and former justice minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo. Prime Minister Kagame commissioned the report as part of the tit-for-tat campaign which began in 2006 when a French judge issued a warrant for his arrest on charges related to Habyarimana’s plane crash (which also killed several French crew). Rwanda immediately cut diplomatic ties and ordered the French ambassador to leave Kigali within 24 hours. Kagame then asked Mucyo to investigate France’s role in the Habyarimana incident and expanded it to cover the whole genocide period.

The actual report is not yet readily available on the Internet, however the Rwandan New Times is serialising it, and released the first segment today. The report begins by documenting the French military operation in the immediate aftermath of Habyarimana’s death called Operation Amaryllis. While the official justification of Amaryllis was to rescue French citizens from Rwanda, the real reason was to send 464 elite soldiers to shore up the Hutu regime against the RPF (who now rule Rwanda).

France also made a deliberate decision not to interfere in the genocide itself. French senior ministers Alain Juppé and Michel Roussin explained the reasons why Amaryllis would not involve itself in the massacres. “It is not a question of intervening militarily in Rwanda,” said Roussin. “ It is clear that our mission is of a humanitarian nature whose aim is to repatriate our nationals and their families". On the same day, Juppé was more philosophical: "Can France keep order in the whole world?” he said. “Does she have the means and responsibility to stop, on the whole planet, people from killing each other?"

While the French government has not yet formally reacted to the report, Alain Juppé was quick to denounce Rwandan attempts to implicate him and France in the genocide. He called the report an unacceptable falsification and claimed that during his time as head of French diplomacy (April 1993 to May 1995), France did everything it could to help Rwanda reconciliation. "Did we, for example, systematically take the side of one camp against another, Hutu against Tutsi?” he asked. "Did we 'fail' to denounce the genocide committed by Hutu extremists starting in April 1994?” He said both questions were “untruths”. But with this report likely to have serious international repercussions, these untruths may yet be stranger than fiction.

North Kivu peace deal

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has issued a cautious welcome for the peace deal struck in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) province of North Kivu. UNHCR rep António Guterres told the signing conference in Kivu’s capital Goma it represented a big step in the search for a lasting peace but would not end the immediate problems. Guterres’ caution is understandable given the tenuous nature of previous agreements. The situation in North Kivu remains volatile with 800,000 displaced people still seeking refuge despite the Congolese war ending officially in 2003.

DRC president Joseph Kabila attended the signing in Goma, a city which has suffered heavy fighting in recent months. The UN and western governments exerted heavy diplomatic pressure to get the peace deal to the table and now hope the accord can put an end to fighting in the east, which has raged on despite the official end of Congo’s war five years ago. Last minute disagreements over war crimes cases threatened to derail the talks but the deal was finally sealed on Wednesday.

As well as the DRC government, the deal was signed by Tutsi rebel General Laurent Nkunda, the pro-government Mai Mai militia and about 18 other minor groups. The accord brings long negotiations to an end and includes an immediate ceasefire and the deployment of UN peacekeepers in 13 key locations. It also offers a probable amnesty to Nkunda and his forces however the rebels say the full implementation will require the disarming of a rival ethnic Hutu militia.

The signature of Laurent Nkunda was a key success factor. His forces have clashed with government troops since 2004 and he has been successful in painting himself as a protector of Congo’s Tutsi minority especially from the remnants of the Hutu Interahamwe militia (known as ex-FAR) who were responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Nkunda helped Joseph Kabila overthrow the hated Mobutu reign but fell out with the new Kinshasa regime. The DRC and the UN issued an arrest warrant for Nkunda in 2005 but that has been nullified by the new deal.

Nkunda’s forces have been mainly fighting the government aligned Mai Mai who have been equally as brutal. Both sides use child soldiers indiscriminately. The Mai-Mai are a loosely aligned local defence group of pro-government forces made up of warlords, traditional tribal elders, village heads, and politically motivated resistance fighters. In 2006, Human Rights Watch called for the DRC government to charge Mai Mai warlord Kyungu Mutanga on counts of murder, rape and abuse of civilians.

Analysts are sceptical the latest deal can achieve much as the talks excluded two key players: Rwanda and the Hutu Interahamwe (ex-FAR). Those displaced by the conflict want to see the repatriation to Rwanda of members of Hutu extremist militias they regard as the main cause of insecurity in the region. The DRC government has tabled a plan that provides for the repatriation of Rwandan Hutu fighters, first voluntarily and then by force from mid-March if they refuse to leave. But most of the people in North Kivu are hopeful the deal will bring peace to a devastated region. "There are too many killings, too many rapes and abuses that should stop at all costs," said local farmer Alphonse Batiburasabinako. Up to 1,500 Congolese die in the region every day, mostly from preventable diseases and malnutrition.

The news comes just days after the International Rescue Committee released its report into "Mortality in the DRC" (pdf) over the last ten years. The report notes that although a formal peace accord was signed in December 2002, the war has since given way to several smaller conflicts in the five eastern provinces including North Kivu. The IRC’s earlier four studies, conducted between 2000 and 2004, estimated that 3.9 million people had died (mostly from disease and malnutrition) in the DRC since 1998, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. This fifth survey, covering the period from January 2006 to April 2007, found the DRC’s national crude mortality rate (CMR) of 2.2 deaths per 1,000 per month is 57 percent higher than the average rate for sub-Saharan Africa. This is despite recent improvements. Once again it found most deaths are due to preventable and treatable conditions. The IRC says recovery from conflict is a slow and painful process. They called on steadfast international commitment to secure recent gains and prevent further deterioration in a country that remains in deep need.

UN Court reduces sentence of Rwanda genocide hate radio chiefs

On the day a Rwandan census announced that 937,000 people died in the 1994 genocide, three of the media bosses instrumental in urging on the massacre have been given small reductions in their jails sentences. In the Tanzanian city of Arusha, the UN Appeals Court for Rwanda has dismissed the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide of two executives of radio Radio Television Libres des Milles Collines (RTLM) and the chief editor of Kangura newspaper. Two of the men have had their life sentences reduced. Ferdinand Nahimana, RTLM’s founder, will now serve 30 years and Hassan Ngeze, Kangura’s editor, will serve 35. RTLM’s director Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza will now serve 32 years instead of 35.

Despite the reductions, the harshness of the sentences reflects the powerful role of the media in communicating the instructions and the enthusiasm for mass murder in Rwanda. Kangura means “wake it up” in the Kinyarwandan language. The newspaper called on citizens (extremist Hutus) to exterminate the "cockroach ethnic Tutsis" and published the "Hutu 10 Commandments" telling people to kill. In the days before the start of the killing the editor Hassan Ngeze wrote: "Let whatever is smouldering erupt.”

Hassan had inside knowledge things were about to erupt. He was a member of the akazu (“the little house”). The akazu was the entourage of the family of long-standing President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his wife Agathe. But the little house turned on the Habyarimanas after the president agreed to sign a peace deal in 1994 with the Tutsi rebels. They ordered his troops to shoot down the president’s plane over the capital on his return from peace talks in Tanzania. There were no survivors (the Burundian president was also aboard and was collaterally assassinated). Immediately, akazu member Colonel Théoneste Bagasora installed a new Hutu Power government. They conveniently blamed the Tutsi rebels for Habyarimana’s death and within 24 hours the genocide had started.

RTLM was the voice of that genocide. It was a creation of Hutu hardliners and began broadcasting in 1993. It had an ominous message: “Tutsi are nomads and invaders who came to Rwanda in search of pasture.” It was the first of the media to announce the President’s death. RTLM would become the primary medium of conducting the genocide that followed. It was quickly to blame Tutsis for Habyarimana’s death. For the next three months it incited and cajoled Hutus to seek revenge and “exterminate the Tutsi cockroaches”. RTLM also broadcast the names and addresses of the country’s Tutsi minority and the Hutus that sympathised with them.

In all of this was the hand of the new government. Authorities knew they could reach a larger audience by radio than by public meetings and urged the people to listen to the radio so that they would know what was expected of them. RTLM was the most popular station in the country with its lively music and informal and spontaneous style. It was a mouthpiece for Hutu Power propaganda. It told the people what was happening in the street and castigated those who were “not doing their duty” and taking part in the massacre. RTLM's chilling message was: “there is no place for moderates”.

By the end of June 1994, a period of just three months, there were very few Tutsis left, moderates or otherwise. The genocide was brutal and efficient. To help with the killing, the army trained up large proportions of the civilian population into a militia called the “Interahamwe.” Only a very small proportion of this makeshift army had guns, most made do with machetes and knives. Together they went on a rampage, indiscriminately killing Tutsis as well as Hutu intellectuals, doctors, nurses and other professionals.

But like the Nazi obsession of exterminating the Jewish population, the Rwandan government was undone by its bloody fixation for killing Tutsis. The rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took advantage of the chaos to seize control of the country and end the genocide. The Interahamwe, and with them the RTLM and Kangura bosses, fled across the border to President Mbuto’s camps in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo). There they continued to hassle and raid Rwanda for several years until the RPF supported Laurent Kabila to overthrow their patron Mbuto. They destroyed the power of the militia but the action brought in nine countries and set in motion eight years of war that devastates Congo to this day.

Laurent Nkunda: Congo’s latest nightmare

UN officials in Eastern Congo are blaming rebel leader Laurent Nkunda for forcing almost a quarter of a million people from their homes since the start of the year. Nkunda’s forces are responsible for forcing 230,000 people into refugee camps in the city of Goma which straddles the border with Rwanda. The displacement camps are full again for the first time since the end of the war in 2004 and the UN warns that Congo could be on the brink of another all-out conflict.

Nkunda is a member of Congo’s Tutsi minority and claims he is merely protecting the Tutsi population from violence of Hutu extremists who fled into Congo from Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. Yet Nkunda is also claiming a greater Rwandan kinship that sees both Tutsi and Hutus victims of violence at the hands of Congolese people. Like others from his community he alleges the country’s million strong Kinyarwandan speaking people – both Tutsis and Hutus – have long been discriminated against. Hutus have inhabited parts of North Kivu for centuries, but there were influxes of Tutsis and Hutus from Rwanda to Congo in the 1930s and 1960s, populations who today complain they are treated with contempt.

Nkunda himself was born to a Tutsi family in North Kivu in Congo in 1967. He studied psychology at university before joining the Rwandan Patriotic Front's (RPF) rebellion against the Hutu-led Rwandan government (FAR) in 1993. It was this extremist Hutu government that authorised the genocide that killed upwards of half a million Rwandan Tutsis in the first half of 1994. However, they were distracted by the slaughter and allowed the RPF to claim control of the capital Kigali by July 1994.

After the genocide, the Hutu Interihamwe militia fled into neighbouring Congo where they became known as the ex-FAR. The ex-FAR continued to harass and slaughter the native Tutsi population including both of Nkunda’s parents. The young Nkunda also came back to Congo after the end of the Rwandan war and help Joseph Kabila’s fledgling rebel army. In 1996 the Rwandan army came across the border to help Kabila’s defeat both the Interihamwe and their backer – long-term dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Joseph Kabila finally overthrew Mobutu in 1997 but then turned on his Rwandan backers.

Nkunda meanwhile became a senior officer in the Rwandan-backed Rally for Congolese Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma), one of the main rebel groups fighting in DRC from 1998 to 2003. In 2004 he was named general in a new national Congolese army created from troops of the dissident forces at the end of the war. He refused the post and withdrew with hundreds of his troops to the forests of Masisi in North Kivu. Nkunda controlled the former Sominki (Société Minière et Industrielle du Kivu) Rwandan export trade (pdf) in cassiterite (found in coltan ores). In August 2005 he announced a new rebellion but launched no military operations at that time.

The government and the UN issued a warrant for Nkunda’s arrest in September 2005. But Nkunda remained at large. At the start of the following year his forces attacked Congolese government soldiers and occupied several towns in North Kivu province. After a brief period of calm, they resumed combat. They attacked and raped civilians and looted their property. Tens of thousands of Congolese were forced to flee to neighbouring areas or across the border to Uganda.

In February 2006, the US based Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the UN and the Congolese transitional government to arrest Nkunda and charge him with war crimes. HRW claimed his whereabouts were well-known to authorities since the arrest warrant was issued. “The police and army have done nothing about arresting him,” said Alison Des Forges, senior advisor to the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. “So long as Nkunda is at large, the civilian population remains at grave risk.”

The reason that Nkunda remains at large is mainly due to the influence of Rwanda. While officially Rwanda does not condone his activities, they say they are sympathetic to his case and “can understand his argument”. Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande told the Washington Post that the root cause of eastern Congo’s instability is not Nkunda but the ex-FAR. “It's like saying, if we didn't have these Tutsis, the ex-FAR would not have people to kill,” he said. “It is an ugly way of seeing things, but, let's hope that which is just will prevail”.

Clashes in Kinshasa

At least 150 people have been killed in the Congolese capital Kinshasa after clashes between the army and forces loyal to opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba. The violence started on Thursday last week and went for two days before Government troops regained control of the streets. Bemba is now currently seeking refuge in the South African embassy. Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila defended the role of the army saying order had to be restored “at any cost” and has demanded Bemba face justice in a Congo court.

The violence has upset the peace process which ended DR Congo's war and led to elections in 2006. In the country’s first free vote since 1960, Kabila won the presidency from Bemba in a run-off election with 58% of the vote. But Bemba rejected the result claiming the election was rigged. Violent clashes at the time claimed at least a dozen lives. Bemba was elected a senator in the new parliament and was given repeated ultimatums to disband his military force, numbering in the thousands.

Instead of disarming, Bemba’s supporters took to the streets last week and immediately sparked clashes with Kinshasa’s security forces. Shooting on Thursday morning gave way to mortar fire in the afternoon. The mortar fire set buildings ablaze and destroyed an oil refinery. Bemba himself claims he was the target of an assassination plot and said two battalions of government troops surrounded his house. Bemba escaped to the sanctuary of the South African embassy. Thousands of others were also forced to flee the capital.

Among them were 200 people (including 50 members of Bemba’s military) who took refuge across the river in Congo-Brazzaville. Although there is no bridge between the two capital cities, the refugees crossed the Congo River aboard smugglers' canoes. The soldiers were disarmed by Republic of Congo marines before being housed in transit centres and a Red Cross compound.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is still recovering from a six-year civil war, widely considered the most lethal conflict in the world since World War II. Four million died in fighting, hunger and disease. Nine nations were dragged into the carnage which mostly in eastern Congo. The east had long been a home for disaffected groups from bordering countries such as the ethnic Hutu, Interihamwe, the group most responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide. These groups were protected by long-term Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

In 1996, the Rwandan army invaded Congo supported by a rebel Congolese army led by Laurent Kabila (father of current president Joseph) and drove Mobutu from power. Kabila was installed as the country’s new leader. But he fell out with his allies and ordered all foreigners to leave the country. Most refused to leave. A Rwandan counter-surge was defeated by a multi-national force of Angolan, Zimbabwean, and Namibian troops. In 1999 Uganda invaded in support of rebel group called the Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo (MLC) and established control of the north.

Congo was now divided into three parts only one controlled by Kabila, with one each for Rwanda and Uganda. In 1999 six parties (DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Uganda, and Rwanda) signed the Lusaka Accord ceasefire which called for a UN peacekeeping force and the withdrawal of all foreign troops. But mutual suspicion prevented enforcement of the Accord. Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and succeeded by his son Joseph. Finally in 2002 there was progress and most of the international armies left the country. The parties ratified the Pretoria Accord in 2003 which put in place a transitional government and planned an election which eventually took place in 2006. Kabila beat Bemba in a runoff after a stalemate in the first election.

Altogether up to 50 million people were displaced by the war. With the aid of 17,500 peacekeepers, Kinshasa has regained control of most of the country. But the east of the country remains dangerous with rebel Rwandan and Ugandan forces refusing to return to their native lands where they fear they will be targets of revenge. And while Hutu militia remain in the forests of east Congo where they prey on villages for food and money, the Rwandan army will continue to launch incursions to try to wipe them out.

By rights Congo should be one of the richest countries in Africa. American, Canadian, European and South African mining companies have all begun to invest in the mineral-rich Katanga province in an attempt to gain access to the vast reserves of gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper and tantalum (also known as coltan, a key component of mobile phones). San Francisco based engineering firm Bechtel Inc estimates that the DRC's mineral ores alone are worth $157 billion dollars. But not everyone is benefiting from outside investment. This huge country is the size of Western Europe but has few roads and little electricity outside the major cities. The Congo remains the heart of darkness.

Rwandan genocide trial starts today

An important step on the long road to justice in Rwanda takes place this week with the trial of former Kigali prefect Colonel Tharcisse Renzaho in Tanzania. The 63 year old Renzaho is charged with ordering the April 1994 slaughter of ethnic Tutsis by extremist Hutus at a church, a pastoral centre and an education centre in the capital Kigali. He has denied the charge. Renzaho is represented by two lawyers, François Cantier from France and Barnabé Nekui from Cameroon.

In 1994, Colonel Renzaho was in control of the capital's police force and local officials. The UN war crimes tribunal has alleged that when the killings broke out in April that year, he incited Hutus to kill members of the Tutsi minority. The prosecution also says Renzaho used state radio to instruct the police, army and civilians to man roadblocks so they could identify and intercept Tutsis. His instructions also applied to Hutus who had Tutsi wives. He faces life imprisonment if convicted.

The German-trained Renzaho is a lieutenant-colonel and former professor at the Rwanda Military Academy. Though a minor figure in the Rwandan armed forces, in 1990 he was nominated the Prefect of Kigali following an attack by the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF would eventually do him out of a job when they eventually took control of the country in the wake of the 1994 massacres. After Hutu Power government was destroyed, Renzaho fled to neighbouring Congo, where he worked for President Laurent Kabila, the father of the current president Joseph Kabila. There he collaborated with the exiled Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda who also fled the country in 1994. Renzaho was ranked third on the tribunal’s list of most wanted criminals. He was arrested in 2002 and it has taken over four years for him to come to trial.

The international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Arusha in neighbouring Tanzania, has often been criticised for operating too slowly. The UN Security Council resolution 955 created the ICTR in November 1994. Its avowed purpose was “to contribute to the process of national reconciliation in Rwanda and to the maintenance of peace in the region”. Its term of engagement was the prosecution of those responsible for crimes in Rwanda for the calendar year 1994.

The Tanzanian site of the tribunal is deliberate. It also where the failed Arusha Accords of 1993 took place. The US and France sponsored the accords in an effort to end the civil war between the Hutu-led Rwandan Government and the Tutsi-led rebel RPF. The accords stripped considerable power from long-term President Habyarimana and created the framework for a transitional coalition government that would include RPF representatives. Habyarimana signed the accords in October 1993 and in the same month the UN sent in a peace force (UNAMIR) to facilitate the implementation of the accords.

But the accords inflamed extremist Hutus who felt that Habyarimana had sold out his people. On the 6 April 1994, a plane carrying Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamina crashed as it was about to land in Kigali airport. It was no accident. The plane was shot down by a surface to air missile. No-one knew who shot down the plane, though many had motives. Hutu extremists laid the blame on the rebels. Paul Kagame’s RPF blamed Hutu extremists supported by the French who armed Rwanda to the tune of $25 million between 1990 and 1993.

Who ever did it, and to this day it remains an unsolved crime, the Arusha Accords were in tatters. Within hours a new hardline Hutu administration was in place. They wasted no time in seeking what they saw as revenge for a Tutsi atrocity. Colonel Renzaho quickly marshalled his subordinates to organise patrols and barriers to capture and kill Tutsi. He also maintained links with the Interahamwe militia who obeyed his instructions when he went around the city.

In the first week 20,000 Rwandans were killed, the vast majority of those Tutsi. As the month of April progressed, the killings spread. Renzaho was at the centre of the Kigali killings. He directed the Interahamwe militias to break into houses of prominent Tutsis where the occupants were killed, reportedly in his presence. He dismissed two city councillors opposed to the slaughters. For the next two months he authorised killing and distributed weapons to militias. He fled into exile in June after the RPF victory.

Tharcisse Renzaho lived in exile in several African countries and went into hiding after the tribunal identified him as a suspect. In 1997 he evaded a police trap laid by Kenyan police. But in 2002 he was eventually given up by Congolese President Kabila under pressure from the US. Congo turned him over to the ICTR. He pleaded not guilty in his immediate initial court appearance. In 2005, the prosecutors discovered new material which modified the charges against him. The long slow march to justice culminates with the start of his trial today.

Inside the Hotel Rwanda

The backdrop for the story is the Hotel Des Milles Collines (which shares its name with the nickname for Kigali, town of the thousand hills, as well as the virulent propagandist pro-Hutu Power radio station RTLMC – Radio Television Libre Mille Collines.)

There Paul Rusesabagina hides his Tutsi wife, their children and 800 refugees. He had to produce a fax from Belgian hotel management in Brussels to exert his authority among reluctant staff as the 100 day extermination campaign goes on outside the precariously protected walls of the hotel grounds.

At one point in the film, Rwandan army personnel arrive to demand the refugees. Rusesabagina rings up the boss of Sabena to tell him they will all be killed. The Sabena boss wants to know who is really pulling the strings. Rusesabagina thinks for a moment and then tells him that the French are arming the Hutus.

The Sabena honcho (Jean Reno in a cameo) pulls strings with the French government to get the potential killers to withdraw – for now. Luckily for the refugees, fear of European retribution is a strong motivating force.

In another episode, he confronts a Hutu general (Bizimungu) and tells him point blank that genocide investigators will come and they look for him because of "his two general’s stars". He persuades Bizimungu the general needs him alive in order to testify on his behalf.

This is Rusesabagina’s escape route. A UN delegation comes to the hotel to help the refugees flee to the airport. The refugees had alerted their friends and relatives abroad and many now had foreign passports and visas for international travel.

However news of the delegation’s departure from the hotel is leaked to the hate radio station RTLM. They in turn stir up the militia Interihamwe (Rwandan for ‘those who attack together’) to launch an ambush. This happened frequently during the genocide.

The UN managed to defuse the ambush. Finally the convoy arrived at the front line of the war where the oppositionist RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) kill the militia men and the refugees are ‘safe’ in rebel controlled territory.

The real-life Rusesabagina and family fled to Brussels where they still live. The Tutsi-led rebels overthrew the government in August 1994 and the genocide was over. The French also hypocritically sent in a relief force at the end of the war called Operation Turquoise well after most of the victims were killed. Estimates vary between 500,000 and 800,000 dead, all within three short months.

Hymn of Zoroaster

Beerbarn burning, lunatic churning
Fearing Druj and drudgery
Thus faked Zarathustra
Master of the house
In carnation enduring
Mazdamatters to the Bactrians
Who is the creator of Good Disposition?
Dreams of well induced laborious awakenings
Before this new crisis, consider again
Choosing one from twins
Isha, Asha we each fall found
Into the mudpool of the mind mound
All are punished in the garden
Assembled by justice, fused and wizened
Common mortals with a case of the mentals
Living in the desired abode of praise
Sincerity the key to its mystic word
Doors to the never ever eternal
Wellwishing in ruling deeds of life
Cows decide between noblemen and nomads
Spreading the gospel of twofold prosperity
Those who choose, convict
Subliminal issues from impudent voices
Lain low by lady luck or the law
Watch out for the troubled maw of ignorance
Mumbling mystic words of Druj and jury
Raise up their first amendments
And vindicate their tongues at will
Imprecations are what concern you
And the smell of lasting darkness
So that you are disposed well
let power in speech be yours to tell

A Fishy Story called Rwanda

Woolly Days recently rewatched a DVD version of Irishman Terry George's film Hotel Rwanda about the genocide in that country in 1994.

Terry George is a confederate of Jim Sheridan and he was interned in the seventies for links to Sinn Fein.

His movie invoked thoughts of the Holocaust and how the vast majority of ‘ordinary decent Germans’ could not or would not notice what terrors were going on around them.

There was an uneasy feeling that not only was it possible then, that it was possible still and that Rwanda was the modern world’s closest resemblance to the WW2 genocide.

Nothing I saw in Hotel Rwanda undid that feeling.

Wisely it did not try to generalise. Instead, it took a specific set of circumstances and personalised the experience. Don Cheadle played the real life role of Paul Rusesabegina, the Rwandan under-manager (the over manager was a white Belgian) of the Sabena owned Hotel Des Milles Collines (Hotel of the thousand hills of Rwanda and pronounced 'Mickeleen') in the Rwanda capital Kigali.

It was a four star hotel and it was a centre of international activity in Rwanda. Rusesabegina's key role was to "maintain the dignity of the hotel at all times". He was also a Hutu married to a Tutsi.

The story starts in early 1994 just before the assassination of president Habyarimana. The president had gone to neighbouring Tanzania to sign a peace settlement with the rebel Tutsis. On return to Rwanda, his plane which also contained the Tutsi president of Burundi was shot down at he tried to land. All aboard were killed.

The genocide started within 24 hours. The Hutu militant radio (also invoking the thousand hills in its name – Radio Television Milles Collines) led the charge with a fierce volley of hate propaganda. "The Tutsis must have killed our president, we must get revenge," they said. It exhorted all Hutus to weed out "the cockroaches" – their unmistakable code for Tutsis.

The situation was not helped when European peacekeepers were withdrawn after 10 of its Belgian number were killed by Rwandan militia groups. Memories of the then-recent deaths of Americans in Somalia, and bodies dragged around the streets of Mogadishu by taxi, were still fresh. The Europeans withdrew leaving the bloody stage to be defended by a small 250-man UN international group (mostly Pakistani).

The Belgian manager of the hotel retreats to corporate HQ in Brussels and leaves Paul in charge. The building is quickly transformed into a refugee sanctuary protected by a thin veneer of light blue – the small remaining troops of UN Canadian general Romeo Dallaire (played with genuine exasperation by Nick Nolte) working miracles with his minor army. The precarious support of the Police is maintained by adroitly placed bribes – a skill Paul has in abundance as a hotel functionary.

The 800 Tutsi refugees in the hotel survive by marshalling their overseas relatives to gain visas and by Paul's ability to get support from the head of Sabena to get the French (who were arming the Rwandans) to intervene.

All around them, the massacres take place. Between half a million and eight hundred thousand (no one is really sure) Tutsis died in three months. The world did nothing.

There are chilling resemblances to the current situation in Darfur, equally unloved and neglected by the West. The wheels of genocide turn again.

Terry George has done the world a great service with this noble and heartfelt work.

The real Paul Rusesabegina emigrated with his wife and family and is now living in Belgium, Rwanda's former colonial master.