 |
Rewriting History |
 |
On 6 April 1994, Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was flying back to Rwanda from Tanzania when his plane was shot down. His assassination triggered Rwanda’s notorious genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by extremist Hutu government-supported militias, ostensibly in retribution for their president’s death.
The Rwandan genocide is widely regarded as one of the most violent and indiscriminate slaughters of modern human history. Fortunately, the past fifteen years have seen admirable efforts at peace and reconciliation among Rwandans, while an international court hunts and prosecutes the Hutu masterminds of the violence.
But justice in Rwanda suffered a major blow in November 2006, when the Vice President of the Paris Court of Great Claims launched an investigation into who shot down Habyarimana’s plane. The investigation was prompted by families of the plane’s French crew, who fifteen years later are demanding an explanation. As a result, Judge Jean Louis Bruguiere officially charged Rwanda’s current president, Paul Kagame - who is Tutsi - with the assassination. Kagame immediately severed diplomatic ties with France.
Though Bruguiere’s indictment is unlikely to lead anywhere, as it is only valid in France, it stands as the latest development in a shameful trend of hypocrisies and atrocities on the part of the West, and particularly the French, regarding Rwanda.
First, there is the history of Rwanda’s ethnic tension. Though many Westerners dismissed the genocide as “spontaneous ethnic conflict,” racial tensions in Rwanda can be largely attributed to Western influence. Hutus and Tutsis are barely distinct ethnic groups. However, the Belgian colonial rulers decided that the vaguely taller, slimmer, and darker minority Tutsis were a “race” superior to the Hutus. They proceeded to force all Rwandans to officially identify as one or the other and to carry ethnic identity cards.
In the years between Rwandan independence in 1962 and the genocide, Western powers had a habit of backing Hutu governments to make amends for this discrimination. Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, and others were thus keen to back Habyarimina’s democratically-elected, allegedly “moderate†government. They were similarly keen to accept Hutu explanations that blamed Tutsis for his assassination.
However, there is now incontrovertible evidence that France’s “backing†of Habyarimana’s government meant that they were funding, training, and supplying arms to the militias that ultimately did the killings. France helped these militias import hundreds of thousands of machetes in the months leading up to the genocide.
The UN and various Western governments received advance reports from their envoys in Rwanda that the militias were amassing weapons and planning to kill all the Tutsis, but they decided not to intervene. Meanwhile, Habyarimana had enemies within his own government, possibly extremists who were angry that their moderate leader was planning to seek a peace agreement with the Tutsis.
Most experts on Rwanda agree that nobody really knows who shot down Habyarimana’s plane. What we do know, however, is that within an hour of his death one of the world’s best coordinated genocides ensued.
Rwandan state radio quickly broadcast news of the president’s death, and stayed on air constantly during the genocide blaming and vilifying the Tutsis, and helping coordinate Hutu militias around Rwanda to locate and kill Tutsis. Trucks full of machete-wielding “Hutu Power” militia were dispatched around Rwanda, systematically slaughtering all Tutsis and any Hutu who did not himself pick up a machete.
As many have commented, it takes hard work and planning to slaughter nearly one million people, in one hundred days, by hand. This was no “spontaneous ethnic violence.”
Only the most inept inquisitor would fail to ask the question: Could those responsible for this carefully planned and executed genocide, also be responsible for the key event that launched it?
Finally, there is the abominable complacency on the part of the West during the genocide. Virtually all foreigners, including aid workers and armed troops, evacuated. The UN’s miniscule, ill-equipped peacekeeping force, bravely led by Lt General Romeo Dallaire, was allowed to stay but was ordered not to intervene. Despite video footage of the massacres, appeals from well-connected Hutu moderates to their European “friends,†and all the arm-waving Dalliare and other remaining aid workers could do, absolutely none of the Western powers did anything to stop the genocide.
The genocide finally ended when General Paul Kagame led his rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), into Kigali and declared a ceasefire. A Tutsi who grew up in exile in Uganda, Kagame is a skinny, serious, strict teetotaler of a man who ran the RPF as a uniformed, disciplined army. It is generally acknowledged that the RPF demonstrated professionalism and restraint toward the killers during their advance.
Following the RPF victory, Kagame became president of Rwanda and worked to attract back, peacefully, the millions of Hutus who had fled the country in fear of retribution. Now in his second term, he has pushed for reconciliation, downplaying questions of ethnicity, promoting unity among Rwandans, and condemning the international community for treating Rwandan lives as “insignificant†during the genocide.
The French report is a pathetic stab at Rwanda from a state whose role in the genocide warrants its own international tribunal. However, it typifies a disturbing trend in the international justice system, in which Western powers are always the arbiters of justice and never the defendants. Few of us, for instance, realistically hope to see the US legally defend its actions in Iraq, nor can we hope to see France and its allies defend their decision to ignore Rwanda amidst its genocide.
A lack of justice, however, does not mean lack of guilt: Not only have the French indicted the wrong guy, but they have indicted him for a crime in which they themselves are complicit.
DISCUSSION
One RESPONSE to “Rewriting History”