Rwanda's genocide: Justice to spare the powerful?

As the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) begins to wind down its activities, strident calls have now surfaced that it must not do so before it indicts and tries soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) 'who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rwanda in 1994'. The latest of these calls is a 1 June letter written by 48 academicians to Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the UN, President Barack Obama of the United States and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom. We applaud the commitment of the authors to see justice done. But we are also struck by the fact that in tone, style and language this letter mimics recent letters and press statements released by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, who during his visit to Rwanda in March 2009 laughably found a 'power of horror', as he put it in his Los Angeles Times article of 11 April 2009. The purpose of this article is to answer this persistent and – as we shall show – diversionary call for the transfer of RPF soldiers to the ICTR.

Our response is in five parts. First, notwithstanding the claims the letter makes, its practical effect is to introduce moral equivalence between the actions of those who committed the genocide and those who fought to stop them. Second, the letter ignores the circumstances of the genocide and of the events surrounding its end. Third, the letter says that Rwanda has not prosecuted RPF soldiers yet the fact is that over 46 trials of soldiers who committed crimes in 1994 have already taken place. Fourth, while there can hardly ever be a justification for the killing of civilians, the tragic history of warfare early in the 20th century and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq shows that this will always happen, odious and unfortunate as it is. Finally, we are troubled by the selectivity of both Human Rights Watch and its supporters regarding the legal treatment of the events revolving around the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

HOW THE LETTER MAKES THE CRIMES OF RPF SOLDIERS THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF GENOCIDE

In the third paragraph, the letter glibly states that the authors 'certainly recognize the RPF's crimes against humanity and war crimes are not comparable to the genocide, either in scope or extent'. This legalistic formulation ignores the fact that there has been a strenuous campaign by genocidaires living in exile and their families who use the evidence of crimes committed by RPF soldiers to make the odious claim that the war to stop the 1994 genocide was in effect a reverse genocide. Academicians and human rights activists are, in effect, ignoring this travesty of the truth and indirectly supporting the efforts of the revisionists and genocidaires. Indeed, the transfer of RPF soldiers to the ICTR would be the ultimate diplomatic and moral coup for the historical revisionists and genocide deniers. The trial of those who planned and executed genocide in the same court with those who put their lives in line to stop it but committed crimes in doing so is precisely the moral fillip the killers are looking for.

The real issue for debate here is how to hold everyone to account by: a) giving fair treatment to fundamentally different kind of acts; b) not giving a moral and diplomatic victory to the genocidaires; c) endangering the process of reconciliation; and d) reinforcing the views of the historical revisionists. Genocide is an exceptional crime and its unique moral repugnancy should never ever be softened by spurious comparisons with other crimes.

THE LETTER IGNORES THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE 1994 EVENTS

All historical events belong irreducibly to their time. Once events are removed from their historical context, they cannot be understood or explained. We know this much to be true: Some RPF soldiers committed crimes against humanitarian law. However, every objective account of the 1994 war invariably makes two observations: a) that the RPF was a remarkably disciplined fighting force given the circumstances; and b) the RPF as an organisation never sanctioned either revenge killings or other reprisals against the general population. The killings that occurred were committed by errant elements. Many of those who committed crimes were soldiers who arrived in theirs village and found their families exterminated and neighbours wearing clothes of the deceased, or holding their furniture and other property of the dead in their houses.

But it is also important to understand exactly how the genocide was organised and how it was stopped in order to discuss this matter in a meaningful manner. The genocide was perpetrated by the armed forces, security agencies such as the gendarmerie and the police, political party militias and, critically, a sizeable part of the general population. As studies show – including those by Human Rights Watch – enough machetes were bought to arm nearly one million men. Civilian involvement was central to the ideological and political objectives of the genocide, as well as to its efficient execution.

At the same time one must remember the extraordinary circumstances under which the war to stop the genocide was fought. The urgency of stopping the genocide as fast as possible and the acute asymmetry of means between the genocide forces backed by the government, the French, and Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) soldiers required the latter to take tremendous risks and often fight above their physical and psychological capacities. This war was not fought from the sanitised cockpit of a jet fighter. It was not fought from behind the armour-plate of tanks or armoured personnel carriers. It was fought on foot and through one decimated village after another. There was nothing to shield RPA combatants from the immediacy of the horrors of the genocide. Soldiers were crossing a blood-soaked terrain littered with the defiled and mutilated bodies of children and pregnant women. Toward the end of the war, when professional government soldiers and propagandists had understood the game was almost over, the hardest battles were fought not against soldiers but against militias and armed civilians galvanised by the radio RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines), which used to tell them that RPA bullets were nothing but peas or pellets of water. Often individual RPA soldiers were not sure whether the civilians were killers or innocents.

The reality, as we have seen in other war zones, is that individual soldiers whose sense of proportion is cauterised by horrors beyond description often descend into bouts of violence or engage in revenge killings. Of course, they too are wrongdoers, but the burdens and psychological pressures of their personal circumstances are different from the circumstances of the killers who deliberately planned and executed mass murder. On account of these extraordinary circumstances, we categorically oppose prosecution of RPA combatants who halted the genocide and saved us in the same forum that is trying the genocidaires. Some of us do not even understand why those we consider as heroes should be tried at all, considering the sacrifices they made trying to save us while the rest of the world blankly abandoned us.

Reading the letter of the scholars, it is as if not a single RPF soldier to have committed crimes in 1994 has ever been tried. Indeed, the letter makes the patently false claim that the RPF 'never prosecuted any of its soldiers for war crimes in 1994 until this 2008 case'. That there have been over 45 indictments and trials of soldiers accused of crimes in 1994 has been completely ignored, as has the fact that those who have been convicted have actually been handed jail sentences ranging from two to 10 years. It is instructive that in one case the trial court had awarded the sentence of life imprisonment, before it was reduced to six years on appeal.

LESSONS FROM RECENT AND MORE REMOTE WESTERN HISTORY

We keenly support the advancement of international humanitarian law, not only because of its role in rendering justice in the face of gross human rights violations but particularly because it is the basis for prosecuting those who killed our families, friends and community during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis. However, we firmly reject the formalistic and narrow interpretation favoured by Human Rights Watch and its supporters. This interpretation essentially seeks to turn the liberators and the victims that tried to defend themselves into killers. Further, this interpretation of international humanitarian law is socially and politically concocted; it ignores the utmost importance of physical security in many parts of the world. It stems from a section of Western society that has enjoyed extended economic opulence, political stability and dominance and almost total collective physical security.

Some of the scholars that signed the letter calling for the prosecution of RPA soldiers by the ICTR are known supporters of the genocidaires. Others seem to fall under the intellectual spell cast by those who argue for the unquestioned triumph of Western liberalism, characterised most profoundly by American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama's book, 'The End of History'. The end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyuma famously stated, marked 'the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government'. Less than 10 years later, Fukuyama was proved wrong in a horrible turn of events. On 11 September 2001 – '9/11' – America was attacked by terrorists, the collapse of the Twin Towers claiming the lives of 2,976 innocent people. In the terms of Fukuyama, the US and more generally the Western world re-entered the realm of history; it was the first time homeland America had been attacked since Pearl Harbor. We did not rejoice in this act of terrorism; the horrors of the New York cold-blooded killings painfully reminded us of our own recent experience in the 1994 genocide. Despite the fact that the USA alongside the international community failed us in our time of need, we came to consider the USA as our friend.

But we are interested in what happened subsequently, since it relates to some of the arguments now being made against Rwanda. The 9/11 attacks sparked a security response that came to be known as the 'War on Terror', a 'war' which has allegedly led to human rights abuses under several policies adopted by the US government. These include 'enhanced interrogation techniques', special rendition – described by critics as torture by proxy – the indefinite incarceration of people accused of terrorism, and more recently, thousands of deaths resulting from air strikes by NATO troops in Afghanistan. Few of these alleged abuses have become the subject of legal prosecution under international humanitarian law.

For the sake of this discussion allow us to make comparisons, although this is in no way to seek to trivialise the atrocities of 9/11. The victims of 9/11 were less than 0.001 per cent of the American population; in contrast, in Rwanda, around one million people were killed, about 8 per cent of the total population and 75 per cent of the targeted Tutsi population.

Indeed, in terms of the magnitude and intensity of the existential threat and nature of the enemy, the events of the summer of 1994 in Rwanda could be more appropriately compared with 60 years ago during the Second World War. The war against the Nazis led to, among other outcomes, the Anglo-American bombardment of German cities. After the German bombing of London, Britain responded with an intense bombing campaign between early 1942 and 1945 –approximately 75 per cent of these bombs were dropped in commercial and densely populated residential areas. The result was that most victims were civilians – women, infants and elderly people because the men were away on military duty.

Following suit, the Americans soon abandoned their precision-bombing doctrine, and embraced the British approach toward the end of the war. Some 72 per cent of the bombs that they deployed were dropped in the last 10 months of the war after 1 July 1994, that is to say, after the Luftwaffe was defeated in April 1994 and the German armies were collapsing on all fronts. The most emblematic of these air strikes was the last great raid of the town of Dresden in February 1945 using incendiary bombs.

Another example of the deplorable side effects of warfare is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August 1945, which caused the deaths of countless civilians. The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the United States' ethical justification for them have been the subject of continuing controversy, with some critics calling the bombings a 'crime of war'. When asked about the bombing of Hiroshima during his first ever press conference in Tokyo in 1975, Emperor Hirohito answered: 'It's very regrettable that nuclear bombs were dropped and I feel sorry for the citizens of Hiroshima but it couldn't be helped because that happened in wartime.'

Finally, one could also cite the fate that befell the French civilians summarily executed (between 10,000 and 40,000; the figures are disputed) for their alleged collaboration with the Nazis during the 'épuration sauvage' phase of the country's liberation.

These figures are cited not to make what would be morally reprehensible comparisons between categories of atrocities against civilians in Europe and in Rwanda, but to underline the fact that these killings were carried out by nations that were heirs to European humanism against civilians who were in many cases certifiable non-combatants. In contrast, many of the civilian deaths that occurred in 1994 occurred in circumstances in which certifiable civilian genocidaires and combatants and militias were mixed with innocent civilians. Indeed, in its 1999 report on the genocide, Human Rights Watch itself observes that: 'It is impossible to say how many of those [killed] were active participants in the genocide or were engaged in any military action against the RPF when they were killed.'

The second lesson that recent history teaches us is that progress in these matters is not in any society a foregone conclusion.

A RACIALLY TAINTED SELECTIVITY

In 2004 the UN proclaimed a responsibility to protect, but in truth that responsibility has always been part of international humanitarian law. If Human Rights Watch and scholars who support its campaign are keen to see to it that all sides are held to account for their role in the genocide as they say, then we should scrutinise all who are in breach of their obligations. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, 'Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.' There is a duty to punish genocide but, more critically, there is a legal – not merely moral – duty to prevent genocide. Indeed, the convention explicitly obliges contracting parties to call upon 'the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.'

From the beginning of 1994, General Roméo Dallaire requested in vain that his UN superiors allow him to take firm action against extremists because he had received evidence of a plot to commit mass murder against the Tutsi and the political opposition. On 21 April 1994 and two weeks after the beginning of the genocide with the killings at their most intense, the very same the UN Security Council the scholars are appealing to indict RPA soldiers shamelessly decided to reduce the UN peacekeeping force from 2,500 men to a purely symbolic 270 soldiers. This event weakened the force at its greatest hour of need and, more importantly, explicitly signalled to the genocidaires that they had the warrant of the international community to do as they wished with their victims without the interference of the UN.

Earlier, on 11 April, one of the most horrible acts of cold abandonment took place at ETO Kicukiro school in the vicinity of Kigali. A well-armed contingent of Belgian UN soldiers were protecting about 5,000 mostly Tutsi residents, who came to take refuge after the genocide began. The Interahamwe militia soon got wind of this and kept a murderous vigil around the school, day and night. On the morning of 11 April, the UN forces informed the refugees that they had orders to withdraw and that they would have to leave that very day. The pleas by the refugees that this would effectively deliver them to the killers were ignored. In an event that will forever shame the uniform of the UN forces, trained soldiers left unarmed civilians at the mercy of killers sworn to exterminate them. In desperation, some of the refugees even flung themselves in front of the moving cars. The UN forces responded to this by shooting in the air to scatter them. The dust had barely settled when the Interahamwe moved in, rounded up the unarmed refugees and marched them to Nyanza Kicukiro, a rubbish dump and start to kill them. Of the 5,000 refugees less than a hundred survived, partly because the killers got tired and a nearby platoon of RPF fighters moved in to rescue them in the night.

Yet this analysis does not even begin to deal with the moral, material and ideological support that the French government continued to give to the genocidal Rwandan government until the very end. Ironically, Human Rights Watch has been instrumental in documenting elements of French complicity in the genocide.

In March 1998 President Bill Clinton in Kigali formally apologised for the conduct of his country during the genocide. In April 2000, Belgian Prime Minster Guy Verhofstadt did the same. Four years later a representative of the UN secretary general read a message expressing Kofi Annan's regrets for the role of his organisation during the genocide.

If Human Rights Watch and the scholars that support its campaign against the RPA want bring to account every party involved in the events revolving around the genocide, why they don't call for France, the UN, Belgium and the USA to account for their deeds, be they actions or omissions?

The selectivity regarding the genocide in Rwanda that is now being pursued by these campaigners mirrors that of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which up to now only seems interested in prosecuting Africans. This selective approach neither advances the application of the international humanitarian law nor encourages poor and weak countries of the world to support any form of international justice. The evidence they see is that international justice is a one-sided affair that spares the wealthy and the powerful.

* IBUKA ('remember') is an umbrella organisation concerned with the rehabilitation of survivors of the Rwandan genocide and Rwandan society in general. AVEGA (Association of widows from the genocide Agahozo) and AERG (Association of student survivors from the genocide) are associations involved in IBUKA.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.