Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: January 2010

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Rwandan Report Blames Hutu Extremists for 1994 Assassination

This blog began in April 2007, its launch designed to mark the anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide. Having been at the site in Kigali where the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart crashed after being shot down, I and others long suspected Hutu extremists were behind the incident. Now a new report has repeated that. Here is how Voice of America reported the story today:

A government-created panel in Rwanda has concluded that Hutu extremists were responsible for the 1994 assassination of the nation's president, also a Hutu, setting off ethnic violence that resulted in 800,000 killed, mostly minority Tutsi. The report falls short of directly implicating the French in the attack.

In April 1994, the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart was shot down. Hutu militia groups, blaming Tutsi rebels, used the president's death as an excuse to launch a 100-day genocide that left the rest of the world in shock.

For years the exact nature of the president's assassination has been a matter of strong contention. A French judge in 2006 found the Tutsi-rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front, led by now-president Paul Kagame, was responsible for the surface-to-air attack. The charge led the Rwandan president to cut off diplomatic relations with the European nation, ties which had long been on icy terms.

The Rwandan government accuses the French of helping to fuel the ethnic slaughter.

The report, which took two years to complete and was based on interviews with over 500 witnesses, found no direct involvement of the French in the plane crash, although it does allege strong ties between the French military and the Hutu regime.

Rwanda and France restored relations in November.

No one expected the panel, commissioned by the Kagame government, to find the Tutsi rebels guilty of the assassination, but analysts say the inquiry represents the most extensive investigation yet undertaken to uncover the mystery surrounding the former leader's death.

Rwanda Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama says the depth of the research backs up the report's claims. "The eyewitness testimonies of people who were in the control tower, of people who saw the plane collapse when they were at the crash site, of people who were doing different jobs around the airport, around the military camp - what they saw, what they heard that very night is what is in that report. And their conclusion, the conclusion of this [report], is that his plane was shot from Kanombe military barracks and that it was shot by extremist forces within President Habyarimana's regime," he said.

The final document alleges that the late president's own inner circle were the conspirators behind the missiles which brought down the jet.

The president was returning from peace talks in Arusha and was set to begin integrating the rebel RPF forces into the national army as part of a negotiated power-sharing agreement, allegedly opposed by the extremist elements within his regime.

Analysis given by ballistic experts at a British university were key to the report's finding that the projectiles originated from Hutu-controlled territory.

Eds Note: Back on August 6, 2008, I posted an item (The Rwandan Genocide: Who Was Really To Blame?) which reported that declassified US government documents pointed at the responsibility of Hutu extremists for downing the airplane carrying the then Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana.

One was a memo to the Secretary of Defense written two days after the plane crash in Kigali. It said Hutu extremists "probably shot down the president's plane."

Another document, a May 9th, 1994 Defense Intelligence Agency report, also pointed to Hutu extremists -- this time, a group within Rwanda's military. The DIA report explained that President Habyarimana, a Hutu, supported a reconciliation agreement with Mr. Kagame's mainly-Tutsi rebel group. It says Hutu hardliners were against the peace-and-power-sharing deal, especially provisions for integrating Tutsis into a new military. It concluded the plane crash "was actually an assassination conducted by Hutu military hardliners."

The State Department appeared to share that view. Another declassified document said there were, in theState Department document's words, "credible but unconfirmed reports that Hutu elements in the military" opposed to a peace deal with the Tutsis "killed Habyarimana in order to block the accords."

Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Rwandan Report Blames Hutu Extremists for 1994 Assassination