The evidence points in one direction only

Professor Lemarchand is the doyen of the historians of Rwanda and Burundi, and we are all in his debt for his pioneering work.

But in recent years he has been arguing, to the surprise of many of his admirers, that the evidence was leading him to believe that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had attacked Habyarimana's plane.

Now I'm equally surprised that he would launch this criticism of me without having read the full Mutsinzi Report. If he had done so, he would have found, among other things, testimony from an abundance of eyewitnesses that leading Hutu extremists hated the Arusha Accords, were determined they never be implemented, and were ready to kill the president if he softened on this issue. Which is exactly what happened after Habyarimana formally declared on 2 April that he intended in six days to swear in the new broadly-based transitional government agreed at Arusha.

Many in the military were especially vexed by the key Arusha article that Professor Lemarchand himself describes in his letter: ‘with regard to its control of the armed forces... the FPR ended up controlling 40 per cent of the troops and 50 per cent of higher ranks.’ As the report of the OAU-appointed International Panel of Eminent Personalities stated: ‘On the all-important question of military strength, the accords seemed a complete capitulation by the government team to the RPF. The two parties agreed to integrate the two armies [Habyarimana's FAR 35,000, the RPF's 20,000] into a single force of 19,000. 60 per cent were to be FAR, 40 per cent RPF. The officer corps were to be split 50-50. This meant that more than 2/3 of FAR troops faced demobilisation’ and fully half its officers would lose their positions.

The report continues: ‘No one in the [Habyarimana] army, whether hardliners or not, would ever accept such a move. Indeed, the government's military advisers in Arusha made their disdain for the agreement abundantly clear at the time, and observers had little doubt they would do all in their power to prevent its implementation.’ I was present when a senior Tanzanian officer who had monitored the Arusha negotiations told the International Panel that FAR officers made little attempt to disguise their determination that the agreement would never be implemented. The RPF, by contrast, seemed quite satisfied with the outcome. After all, many in the two opposing camps saw everything in black-and-white ethnic/racial terms. From this perspective, the Tutsi, some 10-15 per cent of the population, had pulled off a gigantic coup. Hutu extremists were only too aware of this remarkable and unacceptable development.

Professor Lemarchand wonders why some key extremist Hutu leaders were on the plane when it went down, if their own fellow plotters were responsible. I asked the same sensible question myself in my analysis. If they knew the plane was to be attacked, why did they make the trip at all? I have no good answer. It's not implausible that the attackers considered giving up the lives of a few colleagues a small price to pay for getting rid of the president. As for the unlucky victims, perhaps they thought the plane wouldn't be attacked with them on it, and perhaps they had no alternative but to board if the president ordered them to. Had they demurred, they would have given the plot away. But this is mere speculation, and I criticised the Mutsinzi commission for not addressing this question.

Finally, as Professor Lemarchand will find when he actually reads the report, and as I stressed in my Pambazuka analysis, the commission treated their mandate as a typical criminal investigation. Who most plausibly had the motive, the opportunity and the means to attack the president's plane? Whose behaviour showed unusual, suspicious patterns? Whatever questions linger, such as why extremist leaders were aboard the doomed flight, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence points in one direction only. It was not towards the RPF.

* Gerald Caplan has a PhD in African history. He recently published