Nearly twenty-five years later, there are still no
convictions for the assassinations that turned first Rwanda, then the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), into a vast killing ground. Not
in the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), where two
investigations of Kagame were shut down, and where a judge told defense
attorney Tiphaine Dickson, “We don’t investigate plane
crashes [or Tutsis, only Hutus].” And not in the French or Spanish
courts, where French and Spanish citizens claimed jurisdiction because
their relatives died in the plane shot down or in the ensuing massacres.
The subtext of the Rwandan War and the Congo Wars
was competition between the US/UK and France. France, which was then the
dominant power in the region, had been the patron of Habyarimana’s Hutu
government; the US and UK backed Kagame’s invading Tutsi army, which
emerged victorious in 1994, declared that English would from thereon be
Rwanda’s international business language, then invaded and occupied
French-speaking Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) two
years later.
France and Rwanda have engaged in a bitter argument
off and on for all these years about who was responsible for the 1994
Rwandan Genocide. Their embassies have often been closed in one
another’s capitals, and France pulled out of
the 20th anniversary commemoration in Kigali after President Kagame
once again accused France of participating in the killing.
One of the recurring points of contention is
Opération Turquoise, France’s emergency relief response, which began on
June 23, 1994, several weeks before General Paul Kagame (now President
Paul Kagame) seized power in Kigali. Some French officials who were in
office at the time, most notably former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé,
have maintained that Opération Turquoise created a humanitarian
corridor for Rwandan Hutus fleeing into Zaire, for fear of being
massacred by General Kagame’s advancing Tutsi army. Kagame’s government
has claimed that France instead provided an escape route for Hutus
guilty of genocide, although the vast majority flooding into Zaire were
civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. According to the
2010 UN Mapping Report on
Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003,
Kagame’s troops followed the refugees into Zaire and massacred as many
as 250,000.
In “Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family’s Five-Year Flight Across the Congo,” Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga
describes how he and his family and 300,000 more Rwandan Hutus fled
Kagame’s advancing army all the way through the Congolese jungle, from
east to west, as many more died of hardship or were massacred by
Kagame’s troops along the way.
The authors of the UN Mapping Report said that the
massacres in Congo would most likely be ruled a genocide if a case were
brought to court, but none has been and none ever will be without a
major geopolitical shift in power. In 2013, in one of his many cynical
moments, Bill Clinton told BBC journalist Komla Dumor
that he would not condemn his friend Paul Kagame for murdering the
refugees because “it hasn’t been adjudicated.” (And because it happened
on his watch, with his support, as did the 1998 Rwandan and Ugandan
invasions of DRC, during which Kagame and Uganda’s Museveni became what
another UN report called “the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of
natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the DRC.”)
France of course wants its share, and French
officials now in power have decided to close the case against Kagame in
order to secure access to Congo’s riches, which he significantly
controls. The court’s ruling came shortly after Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo
became Secretary-General of La Francophonie, an international
organization similar to the British Commonwealth, in what was widely
perceived to be another concession to smooth French-Rwandan relations
and ease France’s access to Congo’s riches.
Kayumba Nyamwasa, former Rwandan
General, Chief of Army Staff, and Chief of Military Intelligence, was
also named as a defendant in the French indictment. Speaking to Jane
Corbin in the BBC video “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” he said that Kagame most definitely ordered his troops to shoot down the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents:
Jane Corbin: Who do you believe was behind the shooting down of the plane?
Kayumba Nyamwasa: Paul Kagame undoubtedly.
JC: Paul Kagame?
KN: Oh yes, oh yes.
JC: You know that?
KN: One hundred percent.
JC: Were you at meetings where it was discussed?
KN: Well, I know. I was in a position to know, and he knows I was in a position to know. And he knows that.
BBC interjection: General Nyamwasa has offered to cut a deal with the French judge totestify.
JC: If you discuss these matters with the judge and it implicates you yourself, are you willing to do that?
KN: Obviously. If it implicated me? Why not? Because I think that truth is what matters.
Closing the case is not acquitting
The French court said they were closing the case for
lack of “credible” and “significant” evidence despite abundant such
evidence. That does not mean, however, that they acquitted Kagame,
Nyamwasa, or anyone else who was in Kagame’s inner circle at the time
Habyarimana and Ntaryamira were assassinated. As Rwandan American legal
scholar Charles Kambanda said, “This is a political decision which could
well be superseded by another political decision to reopen the file
when there is additional ‘credible’ and ‘significant’ evidence.” In
other words, France has mollified Kagame for now, but it’s kept a knife
behind its back.
*
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Ann Garrison is an
independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she
received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for
her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be
reached at ann@anngarrison.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Ann Garrison, Global Research, 2019
