The face of evil; pathology of a genocide.
By Helen Ikua.
As so often happens in these instances, the key perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide concocted a revisionist narrative that sought to dispute the actual chronology of events; arguing in their own defence that the killings which took place between April and July 1994 were a spontaneous outpouring of justifiable rage, aimed at cutting down an oppressive class. But regardless of the fraught relationships that framed Rwanda’s colonial history, or the complicated involvement of foreign forces in Rwanda’s affairs, ultimately it is the people of present day Rwanda who chose to take up machetes, clubs, spears, bows, arrows, and in so doing plunged a nation into 100 days of blinding terror.
A flurry of events in the months leading up to Rwanda’s genocide, as well as the synergetic intersection of all the grotesque factors which sparked off mass killings that burnt through Rwanda with breathtaking speed and fury, leads one to a reasonable conclusion that the Rwanda genocide was as pre-planned and as premeditated as any in history.
Certainly, the precision and the deliberate coordination with which the heinousness of Rwanda’s genocide was executed, defies both the intelligence and organizational capabilities of the machete wielding gangs that became the identifiable villains of the genocide. But to be clear, the idea of ethnic cleansing had been toyed with before in Rwanda. Indeed, the notion of solving all of Rwanda’s problems by exterminating so called Tutsi invaders was an ideology that preceded the 1994 genocide, and such a final solution was often evoked by disgruntled Hutu politicians even at cabinet level.
But the world was changing. And by the time the 1990s arrived, they brought with them an emergent global political order that changed domestic calculations. Suddenly, the Africa of coups, ethnic cleansing, and constitutional strongmen wasn’t as fashionable anymore. And in a decade that brought with it the end of the Cold War, Rwanda’s Juvénal Habyarimana like many of his African peers found himself less and less mollycoddled by the West. Facing mounting pressure to open up his country’s political space, Habyarimana began to entertain new possibilities, including welcoming back Tutsi exiles and entering into a power sharing agreement as a way of signalling Rwanda’s willingness to embark on a more inclusive path. Needless to say, Hutu hardliners weren’t exactly chuffed about prospects of rapprochement with Tutsi rebels.
And where winds of change had succeeded in forcing conciliation upon Habyarimana, the president wasn’t above chicanery when it came to dealing with his adversaries. In fact, it’s reported that in 1990, Habyarimana staged an attack on his own capital in hopes of drawing the French into confrontation with Tutsi rebels, a ruse that worked seeing as France and Belgium dispatched contingents to bolster Rwanda’s internal security. A clearly partisan France went so far as to label Tutsi rebels the Khmer Rouge of Africa. And since old habits die hard, just because Habyarimana had acquiesced to multipartyism since 1991, wasn’t going to stop him from sowing ethnic discord amongst the opposition either.
In the event, whether governed by ulterior or altruistic motives, and whilst he was attempting the impossible, shuttling between Kigali and Arusha talking peace with Tutsi rebels, it seems that a seething clique of Hutu plotters who included the president’s wife Agathe were afoot. Previously, the Akazu were better known as small-time racketeers — drugs, gun running, periodic massacres, hateful rhetoric, that sort of thing. But Madame Habyarimana and her “clan” of confidants, relatives, tribal insiders, were about to move up in the world and morph into certified mass killers.
And as riveting as the intrigues of the Hutu elite might seem to the keen storyteller, there’s no doubt that Habyarimana was aware that broaching peace with Tutsi rebels would put him at odds with Hutu extremists. In fact, fear of Hutu rightwingers within his MRND party, more than likely informed Habyarimana’s duplicitous attitude towards the Arusha Agreement. Failure to secure absolute guarantees of personal amnesty from the RPF should he agree to resign, likewise must have weighed heavily on Habyarimana’s mind.
Still, the generation of Tutsi that had grown up in stateless limbo following events of the 1959 revolution that overthrew Tutsi monarchy, not to mention moderate Hutus situated inside Rwanda who hadn’t the stomach for bloodletting, were all looking to Habyarimana to take measures that would forestall a looming war rather than create even more refugees and displaced peoples.
But as mentioned earlier, the 1990s brought not just political but economic turbulence for African strongmen who’d been sitting pretty for decades. The end of the Cold War, demands for multipartyism, and crashes in prices of Rwanda’s major exports, were all factors that created internal pressure on Habyarimana’s presidency. A weakening economy left Habyarimana with little choice but to implement the IMF’s austerity measures, something that wasn’t going to help his domestic popularity. To add to Habyarimana’s worries was the ever present threat of Tutsi invasion.
In fact, ever since Rwanda had declared itself a Hutu dominated Republic, Tutsi exiles launched sporadic incursions into Rwanda from their bases in Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zaire. These rebel incursions were prevalent between 1961 to 1973 and tended to be repulsed with the help of Belgian troops. While the 1973 coup that overthrew Gregoire Kayibanda and installed his army chief of staff did not restore the rights of Tutsis, and indeed throughout the 1980s there was no resolution for Tutsis with regard to their repatriation back to Rwanda, Habyarimana’s reign nevertheless saw a decade of less frequent massacres of Tutsis inside Rwanda.
Of course, by this time Tutsi exiles were becoming increasingly politicized. And in response to the 1979 overthrow of Idi Amin and with an aim of mobilizing against statelessness, the Tutsi intelligentsia formed the Rwandese Alliance for National Unity (RANU) as the first political grouping of Tutsis in exile. But worsening conditions during Milton Obote’s second presidency, catalyzed the militarization of young Tutsis who joined Museveni’s bush war and eventually formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
Two of the Tutsis who joined Museveni’s NRA were Paul Kagame and Fred Rwigema who’d grown up together in Kahunge refugee camp. Both were active members of RANU and later founding members of the RPF. Kagame and Rwigema were with Museveni when a handful of rebels launched the rebellion against Obote’s regime with an attack on Kabamba barracks in February 1981. And by the time a victorious NRA entered Kampala in January 1986, about a quarter of its 16000 troops were Banyarwanda and Fred Rwigema was deputy commander of the force.
The contributions of Tutsi refugees to the NRA’s five year armed campaign did not go unnoticed. Indeed, several Tutsi refugees were appointed to high ranking positions in Uganda’s new government. Fred Rwigema, erstwhile deputy commander of the NRA was appointed chief of the army, second in command only to Museveni himself. Whilst Kagame, Museveni’s Tanzanian trained bush spy was appointed acting chief of military intelligence. Having joined the NRA’s campaign early on and accumulated sufficient experience, it’s hardly surprising that Tutsis formed a disproportionate number of NRA officers. Other highly placed Tutsis within the NRA regimen besides Kagame and Rwigema were Peter Baingana, Adam Waswa, Chris Bunyenyezi, and Steven Ndugute.
But it wasn’t long before complaints emerged that the NRA and by extension Uganda’s new government was overly dominated by Tutsi refugees. These developments led to the demotion of Rwigema from his army command. With Museveni increasingly backed into a corner over the issue of indigeneity and in need of maintaining his political coalition, refugees found themselves labelled as foreigners with no citizen rights. Tutsi officers who’d fought faithfully alongside Museveni, as well as Banyarwanda in government jobs were relieved of their positions and replaced with so called indigenous Ugandans. In response to tumultuous winds of change in Uganda, it was now clearly a matter of growing urgency for Tutsi exiles to escalate their plans to return to Rwanda.
And on October 1 1990, elements of the Rwandan Patriotic Army led by Fred Rwigema abandoned their positions in the Ugandan army to invade North Eastern Rwanda. This incursion effectively marked the commencement of Rwanda’s civil war. Nevertheless, the invasion suffered a set back when Rwigema was killed on day two. It’s alleged that a weapon or weapons were drawn and fired, following a heated argument between Rwigema and his deputies Peter Baingana and Chris Bunyenyezi. By all accounts, this fallout amongst the RPA top command occurred because Rwigema advocated for a slow advance into Rwanda to allow for the sensitization of Hutus to the RPF’s goals, whilst Baingana and Bunyenyezi proposed a swift advance to Kigali regardless of any anti-RPF propaganda that had been sown amongst the populace.
In any event, no sooner had Rwigema met his death on Nyabwenshogozi Hill, than a refurbished RPF brought their experience in Uganda’s bush war to bear. And whether Rwigema’s attack was repulsed by Habyarimana’s troops with the help of the French, or stymied by backstabbers in the top echelons of the RPA, the fact remains that Kagame returned from his military studies in the US to take charge of the campaign. And where the rebels had looked all but defeated by the end of October, Kagame withdrew his troops to the Virunga mountains and regrouped before launching guerrilla style attacks that created enough of a stalemate on the ground to secure political leverage for the RPF.
But even as the shaky N’sele ceasefire came into force in July 1992, both sides carried on rearming in anticipation of all out hostilities. Thus Habyarimana continued to obtain weapons from Egypt, South Africa, and France, whilst the RPF continued to source weapons from Uganda as well as from Tutsi exiles in America and Europe. Against this backdrop of civil warring that had been going on in fits and starts since 1990, the Arusha Agreement was envisioned as a magic bullet in the face of anticipated tectonic shifts in Rwanda’s politics and military. But rather than selling the benefits of broad based transitional government to ordinary Rwandans, the 1993 Arusha treaty had the opposite effect and proved to be problematic for Habyarimana on a number of levels.
To begin with, the agreement provided Hutu extremists with the necessary fodder to incite fear that Rwanda was reverting back to pre-revolution days of Tutsi overlords. Secondly, international support for the military demobilization and political integration that was key to an amicable settlement wasn’t forthcoming, something that risked diminishing Habyarimana’s political capital at a time when he could least afford it. Thus caught between a slow-moving international community and Hutu hardliners who could have cared less about détente with Tutsis, Habyarimana was now standing squarely in the path of an approaching perfect storm.
And so it was that on the evening of April 6 1994, Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down over Kigali as “papa” returned from a regional meeting in Arusha. All twelve souls on board, including French crew, Rwanda’s army chief of staff, as well as Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira, perished instantly. Ironically, Déogratias Nsabimana, the army chief of staff who died alongside Habyarimana in that fateful crash, may only have followed the president to Arusha as a spy working for the Zero Network.
With the death of its ruler confirmed, Rwanda was plunged into a state of shock. But yet within hours of the downing of Habyarimana’s plane and as if on cue, roadblocks sprang up all over Kigali. The butchering of Tutsis began on the very next day and did not stop until Hutu extremists were overrun by Tutsi rebels. Suffice to say, the highly organized cooperation between the army, the presidential guard, and trained civilian militia who constituted the interahamwe and the impuzamugambi, not to mention the systematic prefecture by prefecture and door to door searches for Tutsis and moderate Hutus that were launched by these militias, puts paid to any notion that Habyarimana’s assassination was an unanticipated event.
And whilst plenty of water has passed under the bridge since Rwanda’s genocide shook the world to its core, history buffs still ponder the seemingly unprovoked carnage that claimed hundreds of thousands in just one hundred days. But as far as apportioning blame for the masterminding of Rwanda’s genocide, one man in particular stands out. As chief of staff in Rwanda’s Defence Ministry, as a man who was openly opposed to the Arusha Agreement, and as an ideologue of the most frightening variety, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora was uniquely placed to form militia, rustle up finances for them, and synchronize their activities with the activities of existing troops.
Nobody gained more purchase from Habyarimana’s death than Théoneste Bagosora. For even as Rwanda imploded with spectacular ferocity, Bagosora acted more or less like a man who’d just executed a magnificent coup d’état. Such was Bagosora’s newfound confidence as chief coupist, that he and a Colonel Rwagafirita quickly convened the top brass in a crisis meeting to which the head of the UN’s peacekeeping and assistance mission in Rwanda was invited. In the course of this crisis meeting, Colonel Bagosora suggested that Rwanda’s military take over the running of the country until a civilian administration could be put in place. To which General Dallaire responded that Rwanda still had a civilian administration under Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a line of thought that did not go down well with the misogynistic Bagosora, who dismissed offhand the idea of Mrs Uwilingiyimana running Rwanda for even a second.
It was now clear that Bagosora meant to do the civilian prime minister deadly harm. And sure enough, on the morning of April 7 1994, the presidential guard came for Agathe Uwilingiyimana whom they murdered together with her husband. Ten Belgium peacekeepers assigned to guard the prime minister were disarmed and taken to Camp Kigali. Upon arrival at Camp Kigali, some of the Belgian blue berets were killed instantly, others were ritually murdered in a gruesome process that involved splicing of Achilles tendons and castration amongst other unmentionable abuses, and yet others held out in a building onsite and waited for reinforcements that never came before going down in a hail of machine-gun fire.
As one might expect and as Hutu hardliners had no doubt hoped, the murders of the Belgian peacekeepers caused widespread revulsion and resulted in near complete withdrawal of all foreign troops stationed inside Rwanda at the time. As a matter of fact, the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR’s force size to a paltry 270 personnel. But for the Ghanaian contingent which remained in Rwanda throughout the genocide, the country, and more specifically the Tutsi minority, had literally been delivered into the hands of Théoneste Bagosora.
And a man as prepared as Colonel Bagosora knew exactly how to operationalize his genocide. As a prelude to mass extermination of the Tutsi population, the colonel’s axe came down first on Hutu moderates, in case they got in the way of total power grab. Individuals such as Joseph Kavaruganda became easy targets for Bagosora’s goon squads. Others, such as Foreign Minister Boniface Ngulinzira, being facilitators of the Arusha Agreement bore the brunt of Bagosora’s wrath. In fact, Ngulinzira and about three thousand others were taken on April 11 at Kicukiro Technical School, after being abandoned by a detachment of Belgian paratroopers and left to the devices of the interahamwe. Former Defence Minister James Gasana, had of course long fled to Italy under threat of death after refusing to cosign on arming the interahamwe.
And if it's true that Habyarimana’s death caught most of the world including the UN flat-footed; investigations into the plane crash that killed him have been equally steeped in complication, and impeded by lack of technical evidence such as flight data recorders. Moreover, different judicial inquiries into Habyarimana’s death have tended to arrive at stunningly different conclusions.
In fact, a now largely discredited judicial inquiry carried out by Jean-Louis Bruguière, whose fealty for all things French and personal animosity towards Kagame coloured his investigation, concluded that the RPF was responsible for the attack on Habyarimana’s plane and recommended that arrest warrants be issued against nine Rwandan nationals. But perhaps more creditably, a 2010 inquiry carried out by Marc Trévidic, concluded that the attack on Habyarimana’s plane was launched from Kanombe, a tightly controlled perimeter used as a training and billeting area by the presidential guard. Importantly, Trévidic travelled to Rwanda and conducted field simulations at the crash site, as well as interviewed eyewitnesses who saw or heard missiles being fired.
A 2007 open inquiry conducted by experts from the Defence Academy at Cranfield University, likewise surmised that Habyarimana’s plane was fired at from areas controlled by his own forces. Curiously, the British investigation ruled out Russian made SAM 16 missiles as the projectiles of choice. The British inquiry cast a wide net beyond technical aspects of the case, and drew on eyewitness testimony from members of the presidential guard as well as Belgian peacekeepers who were either within the crash zone, or witnessed the attack or its aftermath.
And no analysis of Rwanda’s genocide would be complete without examining the role of the French, whose participation in events preceding and towards the end of the genocide can only be described as extremely problematic. It’s worth mentioning of course, that France’s unstinting support of the Hutu government in Kigali was a matter of foreign policy paramountcy for Francois Mitterrand, who viewed Rwanda as a French outpost in an Anglo-African region of the continent.
Given Rwanda’s long history of military entanglement with the French dating as far back as the 1970s, French military officers have often been attached to key units of the Rwandan army and gendarmerie, and so it’s not surprising that the likes of Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, a trainer with the Rwandan para-commando battalion are mentioned in connection with the genocide. Indeed, following the downing of Habyarimana’s plane, Major Grégoire can be construed to have played an obstructionist role as far as UNAMIR’s and General Dallaire’s efforts to secure the crash site. Arriving within minutes of the crash, Gregoire is said to have spent hours searching for the plane’s black box which has since come up missing.
It’s also a well known fact that France supplied arms to Habyarimana’s regime prior to and during the genocide. Disturbingly, a French National Assembly investigation found that a majority of weapons deliveries made to Rwanda between 1990 and 1994 were done outside proper procedures.
And then there's the dealings of Hutu elites with French mercenaries. Madame Habyarimana’s interactions with the likes of Paul Barril for instance merit closer scrutiny, particularly because Bagosora and his government of genocidaires would go on to task Barril with “Operation Insecticide,” whose goal it was to bolster interahamwe by crushing Tutsi rebels. And in scuffles that took place prior to the genocide, Mr Barril reportedly provided marksmanship and infiltration training to Hutus who were to be deployed behind RPF lines.
As for French rescue efforts once the genocide got underway, “Operation Amaryllis” launched by a handful of French paratroopers on April 9 1994 has been variously described as a disgrace. French and Belgian troops set out to rescue only French nationals, and in some instances separated French nationals from their Tutsi spouses and children. Moreover, Tutsis who managed to clamber aboard trucks that the French had commandeered from UNAMIR, were forced off at interahamwe checkpoints to meet a certain death. And where they had barred Tutsis from their rescue caravans and refused asylum to the children of the murdered prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the French exhibited no such scruples when it came to spiriting away genocidal masterminds such as Madame Habyarimana who remains a resident of France to date.
And then there’s “Operation Turquoise,” launched by the French towards the end of the genocide on June 24 purportedly as a humanitarian mission under UN auspices, but widely viewed as cover to provide protection for the interahamwe and their genocidal masterminds as they fled to Zaire before the advancing RPF. In fact, so murky was the role of the French army during “Operation Turquoise,” that it raised charges of complicity in genocide. French soldiers were not only accused of carrying out atrocities, but of helping the interahamwe find their victims.
In hindsight, Rwanda with its long held tribal and political grudges had probably always been heading to a point of conflagration. But if Bagosora and allies had hoped for an easy takeover of Rwanda and a complete routing of the RPF, then they were sadly mistaken. The inkotanyi or the inyenzi if you like, a far more disciplined outfit than the rapists of the interahamwe were soon sweeping in from the north and east, taking more and more territory on the approach to Kigali. By July 1994, there was nothing left for the likes of Bagosora but to decamp to Congo. Naturally, the colonel said his adieus to General Dallaire and promised to kill the Canadian if they ever came face to face again.
And for all intents and purposes Bagosora had staged a clean getaway. After all, the sprawling lawlessness of Congo is a place where a man can lose himself indefinitely. And yet for reasons best known to himself, the colonel perhaps forgetting that he was a wanted man, decided to trundle off to Cameroon where he was apprehended on March 9 1996.
And since even a man as brimming with strategic acumen as Bagosora could not have managed genocide on his own, other persons of interest vis a vis events of 1994 who were likewise detained in Cameroon were André Ntagerura, Ferdinand Nahimana, and Anatole Nsengiyumva, all arrested on March 27 1996, all high ranking military, hate media, or political figures who played a role in Rwanda’s genocide.
Finally on January 23 1997, Théoneste Bagosora alongside the other ICTR indictees arrested in Cameroon were transferred to Arusha to face trial and answer for their past misdeeds. Three long years after Rwanda’s genocide had ended, Théoneste Bagosora together with others drawn from Rwanda’s security services were charged in the ICTR’s so called “Military case 1.”
By June 2007 final submissions had been made in Military case 1, with the prosecution calling for life sentences to be imposed on all the accused, arguing that Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, et al., were remorseless conspirators of considerable power who had prepared, planned, directed, incited, and ordered the killing of Tutsi civilians as they cowered in churches, stadiums, banana groves, swamps, etc.
It’s ironic of course that a man as pitiless as Bagosora was lucky to escape with his life, or indeed to receive the benefit of counsel and the fair hearing that he had denied his victims as they pled for their lives. But having thus received his day in court, trial judges in Arusha returned a verdict that held the unrepentant Théoneste directly responsible for masterminding Rwanda’s genocide. In addition, the judges ruled that Bagosora had authorized crimes that occasioned an immense if not unprecedented toll of human suffering.
And like any other conflict, Rwanda's genocide although replete with plenty of villains produced its fair share of heroes. The church and in particular the Catholic church in Rwanda, managed to cover itself in the type of ignominy that doesn't wash off with any amount of scrubbing. Tales are told of priests who personally participated in the killings, raped their erstwhile congregants, or handed over fellow priests and nuns to the rampaging militias to be summarily executed. Under various aliases and with the connivance of the church, some of these priestly genocidaires then went on the run and hid in parishes in Europe, where they tended to flock who had no idea that they were literally being ministered to by wolves.
The church's fingerprints were to be found all over the Nyarubuye massacre for instance. On April 15 1994 in what was one of the single worst incidents of the genocide that resulted in ICTR trial and conviction for local mayoral authority, about 20000 people who had taken shelter in Nyarubuye Catholic church located in Kibungo prefecture were set upon with guns, grenades, and machetes after local officials got to the refugees by bulldozing and demolishing the walls of the building. In Nyange over at Kibuye prefecture, a local priest by the name of Athanase Seromba gave permission for his church to be bulldozed so that the interehamwe could slaughter about 2000 Tutsi who were sheltering inside. Thereafter, Seromba fled to Italy where he hid until his apprehension and conviction to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
As for the heroes of the genocide, the Ghanaian contingent merit honourable mention from none other than General Dallaire himself, who said of the squad, “Others ran while the Ghanaians stayed.” For even as fighting engulfed Rwanda and the Belgians, Bangladeshis, Tunisians, and others departed, General Kwami Anyidoho (veteran peacekeeper of missions in Liberia, Cambodia, Lebanon) and 450 unarmed Ghanaian troops stayed behind, and against all odds secured and turned the airport and various stadiums into safe zones for the internally displaced. Utilising their negotiating skills to the limit, Ghanaian peacekeepers were often the only thing standing between a convoy of Tutsi refugees, and a mob of interehamwe baying for the blood of the transportees.
