The Rwandan government says French report into Habyarimana’s plane crash proves what they have long known
“It’s like a ‘I told you so’ type of report,” is how Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Louise Mushikiwabo summed up the findings by French Judges Marc Trevidic and Nathalie Poux, which concludes that the missile that downed former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane-- an event which is largely perceived as the impetus for the genocide against the Tutsi—was fired from a base held by loyalist forces from Habyarimana’s Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR).
In a composed, but confident tone, Mushikiwabo told The Independent that she was satisfied to see that the report, released on Jan. 11, did not, “wrongly accuse her government,” but rather “reinforced the historical reality [and] confirms what we have known for a long time.”
At the same time Mushikiwabo cautioned not to make too much of the report, as it’s not the “alpha omega of everything that surrounds the genocide.” The report, she added, simply repairs the damage that Judge Louis Bruguiere caused with the release of his 2006 report, which claimed that members of the Rwanda Patriotic Forces (RPF), the rebel movement that has since evolved into the country’s most dominant political party, was behind the plane crash. “It exposes Bruguiere, a man who masquerades as a judge with all his laughable documents,” said the minister.
When asked what the report means for Rwanda-French relations, Mushikiwabo explained that anything that promotes “clarity, serenity and good will,” is always a good addition, but that the report is really meant for the French judges. “It’s for their own purposes to use as they see fit. It’s not for us,” said Mushikiwabo. “If any action needs to be taken we have our own documents.”
The report, which was assembled by ballistic and acoustic experts working under the supervision of the two judges, and which involved extensive field research in Rwanda, will certainly temper the many conspiracy theories that have emerged since the event occurred on Apr. 6, 1994. “The French report is timely,” says genocide researcher Dr. Tom Ndahiro. “It is a slap on the face and mind of genocidaires and their sympathisers, especially genocide deniers from wherever they operate from. This report makes many books and articles by known genocide supporters worthless.”
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the report’s release the Unified Democratic Forces (UDF) party headed by Victoire Ingabire, who is herself on trial in Kigali for supporting a terrorist group, and the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), a party made up largely of former comrades-in-arms of President Paul Kagame, some of whom have been tried and sentenced in absentia for crimes of threatening state security and propagating ethic divisions, said in a joint statement that they were not convinced by the new findings.
“Considering the level of infiltrations and deployments of operatives in Kigali city and its surroundings by the then rebellion,” no firing spot can rule out the involvement of Kagame’s people, the statement argued. “Only an international inquiry composed by experts from different countries will pave the way to justice denied,” it said, vowing to produce “very credible witnesses”.
Dr Theogene Rudasingwa, a former Rwandan Ambassador to the US who went on to establish the RNC from exile after falling out with Kagame, also said, according to the website gahuza.com, that he stands by his prior allegations, made to the BBC and on his facebook page, that he heard Kagame say in 1994 that he ordered the shooting down of the plane.
But Rudasingwa, who was one of the RNC members to be sentenced to a 24 year jail sentence for the aforementioned crimes, could find his voice increasingly sidelined after the recent report. Now, not only has Rudasingwa initially propagated Kagame’s version of events when he was still part of the government—an action he has since said he regrets—but he has not one but two credible reports to contradict.
The first report on the crash, known as the Mutsinzi report, was released in 2009 and was conducted under the supervision of retired Chief Justice Jean Mutsinzi. According to Philip Gourevitch, an award-winning journalist who has written numerous articles about Rwanda as a staff writer for the New Yorker, in addition to the internationally renowned book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families,” the Mutsinzi report was remarkable for the “thoroughness and seriousness of the underlying investigation.”
Not only did the Mutsinzi commission bring in independent British ballistics experts to establish the trajectory and origins of the missiles that struck the plane, writes Gourevitch on his New Yorker blog of Jan. 8, 2010, but the report, “draws on a number of previous international investigations and on a remarkable collection of more than five hundred interviews that its own investigators conducted with former officers of the Hutu Power regime and other eyewitnesses, who describe the events before, during, and after the assassination with convincing consistency.”
The conclusion of that report clearly identifies Hutu extremists, led by Col. Théoneste Bagosora, as the culprits behind the crash. “[They] calculated that killing their own leader would torpedo a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords,” says the report. “The landmark deal would have ended years of conflict by creating a broad-based transitional government and an integrated Rwandan army.”
Individuals such as Bagosora, Anatole Nsengiyumva, Mathieu Ngirumpatse and Joseph Nzirorera—all members of the president’s inner circle—says the report, “viewed the Accords as an existential threat to a Hutu-¬dominated Rwanda as well as their own political and economic standing. These men were not simply opposed to a reconciliation process; they were committed to the wholesale extermination of Tutsis.”
The landmark Mutsinzi report was interpreted by many as the final word on the subject in Kigali, but since the pilots of the downed Falcon 50 jet were Frenchmen, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a powerful French anti-terrorist judge, had been put to task years earlier to conduct his own investigation.
Bruguiere findings were released in Nov. 2006 and accused Kagame’s RPF rebels of infiltrating the area around the airport and firing the missile. Without visiting the site or verifying some of the testimonies from the witnesses, the report concluded that the rocket was fired by the rebels from a farm of a sympathiser located in Masaka in Gasabo district, 4 km from the airport. Bruguiere subsequently issued arrest warrants for nine Kagame associates leading Rwanda to break off diplomatic ties with France.
Today links between the two countries have been restored after President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Kigali in February 2010 and admitted that France had made a “grave error of judgement” in not recognising sooner that its then Rwandan allies were bent on genocide. In Sept. last year Kagame made a return visit to Paris where he said that he was trying to “find ways of overcoming the past and going forward with a better relationship.”
The case, however, still causes bitter divisions within the French elite, where some officials and soldiers are outraged at being accused of complicity. Bruguiere’s inquiry was backed by many who sought to blame the Tutsis for bringing disaster on themselves, and some writers have attempted to promote a theory of a “double genocide” with both sides equally to blame.
But on Jan. 11, a front page editorial in the influential Le Monde newspaper expressed hope that the new report would bring the polemic to an end. “Judge Bruguiere’s biased inquiry almost led not only to a terrifying judicial fiasco, but to a revisionist conclusion,” it warned, arguing that French forces had been wrong to stand by the Rwandan regime for so long. “Because this embarrasses a lot of people, it took a long time for this truth to be established.”
Back in Rwanda Mushikiwabo says that she is pleased that this investigation is complete because it has long been a “distraction we don’t need.” The minister adds that the Rwandan government will continue to provide facilitation for any further investigations so long as they are “legitimate,”—a condition that Rudasingwa and other opposition figures will have a tough time qualifying in Kigali.
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written by Rajab Kakyama, January 18, 2012
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written by Ggomba, January 18, 2012
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written by Col. Tamale katuusa, January 18, 2012
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written by Anthea Turwomwe, January 19, 2012
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written by kagoya, January 19, 2012
For Ggomba to allege that the missile's serial number links Kagame to the downing of the plane proves his lack of facts. Nothing like that has ever been established, but also, the direction of a missile, speed, distance it travels and the hit target (where it lands) can determine the direction the missile was fired from.
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written by Rigosong, January 19, 2012
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written by Rajab Kakyama, January 19, 2012
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written by Raymond St. Pope, January 20, 2012
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written by Isaac, January 21, 2012
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written by katamba mutyaba, January 22, 2012
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written by Rigosong, January 22, 2012
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