Rwanda's Himmler: the man behind the genocide

By Chris McGreal

Chris McGreal, who witnessed the Rwanda genocide first-hand, reports on the background to the trial of Theoneste Bagosora, which laid bare the extent of the planning for the killings and the mobilisation of the state to implement the murder of about 800,000 people.

You might call him the Heinrich Himmler of Rwanda. Theoneste Bagosora was less grand than the Nazi SS leader, eschewing pitch-black uniforms and grand military parades, but he espoused an ideology as hateful and ultimately as deadly as the man who oversaw the Holocaust. And he was just as organised.

Bagosora, now 67 years old, was a retired colonel and chief of staff in Rwanda's defence ministry when, in April 1994, he gave the order to implement a longstanding plan to exterminate his country's Tutsi minority.

One hundred days later, about 800,000 people had been murdered in one of the most extensive mobilisations of a population against its fellow citizens ever seen.

When the killing was over, the organisers attempted to portray the mass murder as a spontaneous bloodletting born of fear and anger that no one could stop.

What amounts to genocide denial is still being espoused by apologists for the Hutu extremist regime that oversaw the killing and by some defence lawyers in and out of the courtroom, who have sought to blame the victims for their own murder by delving into a history of oppression by Tutsis before most of the victims were born.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has buried that obscene version of history by convicting Bagosora of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – and, in the process, establishing that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was neither accidental nor spontaneous.

The trial laid bare the extent of the planning for the genocide and the mobilisation of the state to implement it. It provides the most complete record of the planning of the killing going back to four years before the mass slaughter began. And Bagosora was at the centre of what the prosecution called "preparing the apocalypse".

"He was the man in control, hands down, no dispute," said one of the prosecutors, Barbara Mulvaney. "It began in 1990. He was at camp Kanombe, the military hub, sitting there with two of our other defendants, and they rounded up 1,500 Tutsis and dissidents and tortured them and killed some of them, and then it slowly progresses.

They sensitised the public as to who the enemy was. Then they organised the militia, and armed the militia, took the militia to training camps and military bases around Rwanda. And they had their lists of who to kill."

At the beginning of the 1990s, Rwandan politics had polarised with the twin pressures of foreign demands for the introduction of multi-party democracy, and an invasion by Tutsi rebels who had grown up in exile in neighbouring Uganda.

President Juvenal Habyarimana bowed to demands for greater political freedom and new parties promptly sprang up, including some that were militantly anti-Tutsi.

At the same time, Habyarimana was under pressure from moderate Hutus in his government and foreign powers to negotiate with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels, who seized large parts of the north of the country.

Bagosora was a member of the Akazu, an extremist network drawn from north-west Rwanda with Habyarimana's wife at its centre.

The Akazu was involved in weapons and drug smuggling but, more than anything, it was a solidly pro-Hutu ideological group that viewed the Tutsi minority as the enemy.

Bagosora, in league with fellow Akazu members, established a militia, the Interahamwe – "we who work together". Its central ideology was a hatred of Tutsis.

There followed a propaganda campaign questioning the loyalty of every Tutsi. One extremist newspaper published the Hutu 10 Commandments, which called on Hutus to "stand firm and vigilant against their common enemy: the Tutsi".'

It said Tutsis should not be allowed to work in politics, government or the military and accused them of pursuing ethnic superiority.

The eighth commandment said: "Hutu must stop taking pity on the Tutsi."

A radio station sprang up full of voices denouncing Tutsis as less than human, as devils and the enemy, prompting periodic local massacres during the early 1990s. Bagosora had a hand in it all.

In 1992, Bagosora instructed senior defence ministry officials to draw up the names of those deemed to be enemies of Rwanda and their "accomplices".

The list included moderate Hutu politicians who wanted a negotiated deal with Tutsi rebels, and many prominent Tutsis. A copy of the list was found in the car of a senior army officer killed in a car crash.

A year later, the moderate defence minister, James Gasana, attempted to disarm the militias. Bagosora threatened to kill him. The minister fled with this family to Italy. The new defence minister, Augustin Bizimana, enthusiastically carried on arming the Interahamwe.

In early April 1994, a UN officer in Kigali, Luc Marshal, a Belgian colonel, reported that Bagosora told him the only way to solve Rwanda's problems was to exterminate the Tutsis.

The dam broke a few days later when Habyarimana finally bowed to international pressure and flew to Tanzania to finalise a peace agreement that would have seen the RPF in government and its forces integrated with the Rwandan military.

"Habyarimana was flying back to implement the deal," said Mulvaney. "If that plane had landed, Bagosora would have personally lost his house, his job, his position. That's on a very personal level. But he would also have had to demobilise his forces in the army and integrate them with the RPF and they felt Habyarimana had capitulated, and Bagosora wanted to stop him. It was the catalyst to start the killing.

"Bagosora needed a big event to mobilise people, to spark the bloodlust and put the killing machine into place. Habyarimana was seen by the people as 'papa'. That's why they shot down his plane."

Habyarimana's plane was hit by two missiles as it came in to land at Kigali airport on 6 April 1994. A large part of the fuselage landed in the president's swimming pool a short distance away.
Although Hutu extremists and their supporters have tried to pin the assassination on the RPF, Mulvaney has little doubt that Bagosora was responsible.

"My personal opinion as a prosecutor is that the preponderance of evidence is that the men in our courtroom are the men who shot down the plane. They surrounded the site. They wouldn't let the UN in, they wouldn't let foreign observers in, they took the shell casings. They had much more to gain," she said.

What followed in the subsequent hours suggests that Bagosora and his cohorts were prepared for Habyarimana's death.

The killing started almost immediately, beginning with those whose names were on the death lists drawn up in the months and years before.

Many were moderate Hutu politicians, civic leaders and anyone of importance thought to be too soft on the Tutsis.

Those murdered included Boniface Ngulinzira, the Rwandan foreign minister who negotiated the peace deal with the RPF, as well as other cabinet ministers.

Bagosora called a meeting of military officers and invited the UN commander in Rwanda, a Canadian lieutenant general, Romeo Dallaire.

Dallaire had alerted the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, to the looming genocide months earlier but his warnings were ignored.

Now he was seeing them come to fruition, although he did not initially understand that it was Bagosora who was driving the killing.

The UN commander initially thought Bagosora would put a stop to the massacres. Instead, he found a man who was determined to take over the government and carry through the plan to exterminate Rwanda's Tutsis.

Later, Dallaire described meeting Bagosora in the first days of the killing as "shaking hands with the devil".

The UN commander quickly concluded that what was under way was "planning a coup" and rejected Bagosora's proposal for the military to take control, saying Rwanda still had a civilian government headed by the moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana.

Hours later, Bagosora despatched the presidential guard to murder her. She was raped with a Fanta bottle before being killed with her husband.

Ten Belgian peacekeepers who had been guarding the prime minister were disarmed and taken to a military camp close to where Bagosora was meeting his officers. They were tortured and murdered over a period of several hours. Their bodies were cut into so many pieces that when Dallaire first saw them he could not make out how many soldiers he was looking at.

Bagosora later admitted in court to being at the scene during the killings but said he had been powerless to stop it.

The intent was to drive the UN out, and it worked. The Americans and British blocked the UN security council from despatching more troops to end the killing before it spread to other parts of Rwanda. Many of the peacekeepers already there were withdrawn. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were abandoned.

Bagosora assembled a "committee of public safety" to hand pick a new and compliant government led by a new president, Theodore Sindikubwabo, and prime minister, Jean Kambanda.

Throughout April 1994, the murder spread across Rwanda, from city to town and deep into the countryside. The army and Interahamwe led the way, planting roadblocks to catch fleeing Tutsis.

Tens of thousands who sought refuge in churches, or thought there might be safety in numbers by crowding in to football stadiums, were butchered with guns and machetes.

They were hunted down in banana groves and burned out the attics of their homes. In towns such as Kibuye, the regional governor, Clement Kayishema, led the slaughter of 11,000 Tutsis in the Catholic church in a single day and 10,000 in the football stadium on the next.

Work – a euphemism for killing

Sindikubwabo and Kambanda flew around the country to congratulate the murderers on their "work" and to urge the general population to help with the killing. But the politicians were little more than Bagosora's puppets.

One former gendarme told the international tribunal how he saw Bagosora spit in the face of an army officer who refused to kill Tutsis and then transferred him to the front to fight the RPF. The same witness said he saw Bagosora sign documents authorising the distribution of weapons and food to the Interahamwe at the height of the genocide.

Another witness said he saw Bagosora give a speech to the Interahamwe urging them "to be courageous in their work".

Work was a widely used euphemism for killing during the genocide.
Dallaire last saw Bagosora in July 1994 as his forces were in full retreat from the RPF. By then, most of Rwanda's Tutsis were already dead. The colonel threatened to shoot the UN commander if he saw him again.

"I was threatened with a pistol [by Bagosora] and was told that next time he will kill me," said Dallaire.

Bagosora fled to neighbouring Zaire where the UN fed and watered his troops while they continued to attack Rwanda, and the Hutu extremists kept up their threats to exterminate all Tutsis.

He later fled to Cameroon where he was arrested in 1996 and sent for trial at the international tribunal.

In court, Bagosora described the accusations as nothing more than "ignominious propaganda". "I solemnly declare that I did not kill anyone or issue orders for anyone to be killed," he said.

Mulvaney sat across the court room from Bagosora for much of the trial. "His testimony was bizarre. He even threatened to kill me in the courtroom. It's hard to understand how one human being can do this to another. But I can tell you he's chilling, he's a chilling man," she said.

"It was a very strange situation. One of our witnesses said that Bagosora had gone to a roadblock with two other people. He was asked about that during his cross examination. All of a sudden he said: 'Neither Hitler, Himmler or Goering ever went running around in Berlin to flush out Jews to be killed.' We were astonished."

Source:
The Guardian-UK