The New Yorker
August 27, 2010
RWANDA PUSHES BACK AGAINST U.N. GENOCIDE CHARGES
Posted by Philip Gourevitch
A draft report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights arguing that the Rwandan military may have committed genocide in Congo in the late nineteen-nineties has been leaked to the press. Le Monde had the first item on the report yesterday; the Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor had the longest ones. The U.N. has so far refused to comment on the leak, except to say that the draft is not the final version of the report. The Rwandan government has rejected the report, but not said much more.
But earlier this month in Kigali, top Rwandan officials spoke freely and on the record about their efforts to have the draft report quashed. Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame, came to power in 1994 at the head of a rebel army that brought the extermination of Rwandan Tutsis by Hutu extremists to a halt. This army today is the chief contributor of troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur—and last month, after Rwanda received the draft report, Kagame met with the U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, in Madrid, and told him that if the report came out, Rwanda would withdraw from all of its commitments to the U.N., starting with Darfur.
“I was in the meeting,” Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, told me in Kigali a few weeks ago. Mushikiwabo followed up with Ban by letter (pdf), elaborating her government’s complaint and reiterating its threat.
In our conversation, she insisted that Rwanda wasn’t bluffing. She described the draft report as a disgrace, methodologically and politically, and she told me, “If it is endorsed by the U.N. and it’s ever published, we used very, very strong words—if the U.N. releases it as a U.N. report, the moment it’s released, the next day all our troops are coming home. Not just Darfur, all the five countries where we have police”—she mentioned Haiti, Liberia, and South Sudan—“everybody’s coming home.”
The draft report, which is five hundred and forty-five pages long, describes itself as an attempt to catalog the major atrocities committed by all parties in the tangle of wars that wracked Congo (formerly known as Zaire) between 1993 and 2003. The report states that tens of thousands of people were killed during that decade—a number far lower than normally cited by international humanitarian and human-rights groups and the press, which routinely speak of hundreds of thousands, even millions, killed in a shorter period of time.
The report uses a subtler, more legal conception of genocide than the one usually found in the press or in the public understanding. In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, for instance, Hutu extremists set out to exterminate the Tutsi minority, and close to a million were killed in a hundred days. But in international law, the crime of genocide is defined as an attempt to destroy a targeted group “in whole or in part.” By focussing on the question of intent and the concept of partial destruction, the draft U.N. report concludes that the accounts it collected of Rwandan forces and their local allies massacring thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutus at a time—even as they were organizing the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of other Rwandan Hutus—“reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide.”
Importantly, but less dramatically, the draft report also states that its findings do not meet the investigative or evidentiary standards that would be required in such a competent court to prove such crimes. The size of the report suggests extraordinary documentary thoroughness, but in a “background note” the U.N. Human Rights Commission explains that it required no more than two accounts from self-described witnesses to an incident for it to be included in its findings. This is a minimum standard in journalism, but beyond minimalist in international law—and by the background note’s math there rarely were more than two witnesses per allegation. It says: “The content of the report itself is based on the analysis of more than 1500 documents, interviews with about 1280 witnesses in relation to the 617 cases in the database specifically designed for the Project, and consultation with approximately 200 local and international N.G.O.s.” None of these sources are identified by name, nor are its authors. The U.N.’s own investigative team consisted of thirty-three people, only half of whom worked, for half a year, in the provinces where the crimes were committed.
So, at least on first glance, it is difficult to see how this report, which offers little in the way of detail connecting individually identified perpetrators and individually identified victims, could lead to any trials. But that is not likely to matter much in the court of international opinion. The atrocities the report describes are ghastly, their cumulative effect is crushing, and the allegation of genocide, particularly coming from the usually namby-pamby United Nations, is sensational.
Mushikiwabo, the Rwandan foreign minister, scoffed at the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s claim that the purpose of the report is to help the Congolese come to terms with their past. “Give me a break,” she said. “This is a report that is accusing Rwanda of genocide.” The report also attributes blame for killings, rapes, and other horrors in Congo to Congolese factions (including elements in the current government of Congolese President Joseph Kabila), as well as to Angolans, Ugandans, Zimbabweans, Burundians, fugitive Rwandan Hutu genocidaires, and a number of other armed groups. But, as far as Mushikiwabo was concerned, none of that would matter beside the accusation of genocide against Rwanda—and on this point, at least, the Rwandan government and its stiffest critics agree.
The “new” U.N. draft report was actually finished at least a year ago, and its existence has been an open secret for a long time. In January, Anneke van Woudenberg, the top Human Rights Watch researcher on Congo, told me that the report would accuse Rwanda of genocide. Politically, van Woudenberg said, the report would be a “bombshell” for Rwanda. And, speaking of politics, she also told me that the former U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, had been a chief sponsor of the report. “It was one of the last things Kofi Annan did before leaving office,” she said, “which was to ensure that the financing was in place for this study to take place and to happen.” Given that Annan’s reputation had been irreparably damaged by his gross mishandling of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath in Congo, his interest in blaming others is hardly surprising.
(Strikingly, the leak of the U.N. report comes the same week as news flashes that Rwandan Hutu rebels in Congo—a group, currently known by the acronym F.D.L.R., that has been visiting slaughter, rape, and pillage on the Congolese non-stop for the past sixteen years—systematically gang-raped close to two hundred women, men, and small children in an eastern Congo town a few weeks ago, while U.N. peacekeepers nearby steered clear.)
In her letter to Ban, Mushikiwabo argues that the U.N.’s own record gives it no standing to accuse the Kagame government of genocide. If the U.N. is so interested in crimes against humanity in Congo, she writes, the Secretary-General should remember the largely hushed-up scandals implicating U.N. peacekeepers in serial sex crimes against the civilians they were supposed to be protecting. These arguments won’t persuade anybody in the human-rights movement, which insists that it is apolitical in its pursuit of justice.
But justice is always selective, and a report like this is, of course, a political thing—and what’s puzzling is that the Rwandans seemed unaware that it was in the works until last month. This past spring in Kigali, everyone I asked in top military or intelligence circles said they’d never heard of such a project. When they got hold of it last month, these same officials clearly felt ambushed by the U.N., with which, despite the anguished past, it had established a close working relationship. When Kagame met with Ban in Madrid, he was there as the co-chair of the Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group, an appointment made in recognition of Rwanda’s remarkable development under his leadership.
In her letter to the Secretary-General, Mushikiwabo went so far as to say that Rwanda would quit its U.N. commitments even if the draft of the report leaked to the press. After all, she told me, “If you’re going to accuse our army of being a genocidaire army, don’t use us for peacekeeping.”
At that time, two weeks ago, Mushikiwabo said it was up to the Secretary-General to decide what to do about the report. Now that it has been leaked, it will be up to Rwanda as well.
UPDATE: This morning, U.N. headquarters in New York declared that it was “absolutely untrue” that Rwanda had ever threatened to pull out of Darfur on account of the Congo report. The U.N. spokesman said it was also out of absolute concern for the truth that the final report has not yet been released.
