Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

The Mutsinzi Report on the Rwandan Genocide

By Philip Gourevitch
The New Yorker
January 8, 2010

I have obtained, and am posting here, the first English-language copy of a massive new report by a Rwandan investigative commission into the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, the country’s long-time dictator, whose plane was shot down by a pair of surface-to-air missiles and crashed in the backyard of his own palace on the night of April 6, 1994. As I have reported in my 1995 New Yorker article “After the Genocide” and in my book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda,” Hutu Power extremists used Habyarimana’s assassination as the pretext for going ahead with their plans for a genocide of the Tutsi minority—a program of massacres in which close to a million Tutsis were murdered in the next hundred days.

I have not yet had time to absorb the new report and its multiple annexes in their entirety, but I have read around in it enough to offer some initial thoughts about this extraordinary historical and political document. And the report makes for compelling reading, despite its dry and cumbersome title: “Report of the Investigation into the Causes and Circumstances of and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/1994 Against The Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidental Aeroplane Registration Number 9XR-NN.”

As I wrote in The New Yorker:

Habyarimana’s assassins have never been positively identified, but at the moment the bulk of circumstantial evidence collected by international investigators points to a job sponsored by members of the Hutu Power entourage. Immediately after the Presidential plane was shot down, the Rwandan Army sealed off the area around Kigali Airport, from which the surface-to-air missiles that hit the plane had been fired, thus preventing an investigation by the U.N. and adding to speculation that top Rwandan officers had something to hide…. [But] regardless of who killed Habyarimana, the fact remains that the organizers of the massacres were primed to exploit his death instantaneously.

In other words, the assassination was a coup d’etat. At the time of his death, Habyarimana was on the brink of implementing the Arusha Accords, a power-sharing peace agreement with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Paul Kagame (who is now Rwanda’s president). But the Hutu Power genocidaires wanted to consolidate their power through their campaign of extermination. Habyarimana, then, appeared to have been killed as a traitor to the Hutu Power cause; but his death was blamed on Kagame and the R.P.F. and turned into fuel for the Hutu Power cause.

The new Rwandan report—known, after its lead author, Jean Mutsinzi, as the Mutsinzi Report—lays out this story in remarkably convincing detail. It draws on a number of previous international investigations and on a remarkable collection of more than five hundred interviews that its own investigators conducted with former officers of the Hutu Power regime and other eyewitnesses, who describe the events before, during, and after the assassination with convincing consistency.

The broad findings are not surprising. What makes the Mutsinzi Report most remarkable is the thoroughness and seriousness of the underlying investigation, which covers not only the events leading up to the downing of the plane. It traces the history of earlier investigations into Habyarimana’s assassination and the genocide, and draws on these findings (which have never before been collected and cross-referenced) to build its own. The Mutsinzi commission brought in independent British ballistics experts to establish the trajectory and origins of the missiles that struck the plane; and, in passages of the report that read like pure farce, they traced the mystery of the black box from the cockpit, which kept disappearing and reappearing and ultimately vanished.

Obviously, the report serves President Kagame and his government’s interests. So why has it taken them so long to produce it? For more than a decade, critics held up the post-genocide government’s seeming reluctance to examine Habyarimana’s death as evidence that Kagame had something to hide. That impression was encouraged further when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, a satellite of the court at the Hague, opened an investigation into allegations of R.P.F. culpability in the shooting down of the plane, and Kagame’s government fought hard and successfully to shut down this investigation. Then, in 2007, Jean-Louis Bruguière, a French anti-terrorism judge who had made his name capturing Carlos the Jackal, indicted nine of Kagame’s closest associates for terrorism for bringing down Habyarimana’s plane. Rwanda promptly broke off all diplomatic relationships with France. Instead of merely denouncing Bruguière’s case as a pack of lies, Kagame established the investigative committee that produced the Mutsinzi report. (Among the report’s surprises are damning passages drawn from investigations of the same international tribunal that the Rwandans had stonewalled.)

France’s sponsorship of Rwanda’s genocidal regime is a steady subtext throughout the attached documents. Indeed, Habyarimana’s plane was a gift of the French, it had a French flight crew who died with him, and the French military was in joint control with the Hutu Power forces of the area where the missiles were fired and the plane crashed. An earlier Rwandan government investigative report that documented France’s role in the genocide was harsh and damaging, and its findings contributed to the work of the Mutsinzi commission. And yet this new report has brought about a rapprochement between Kigali and Paris. Over the past two years, Bruguière’s case fell apart as his “eyewitnesses” recanted, until even the French press treated it as a joke. Throughout that time Rwanda maintained a hostile public tone toward France; last fall Rwanda even joined the British Commonwealth. In private, however, Kagame maintained a constant dialogue with France, and established communications with President Nikolas Sarkozy—and two months ago, on the day after Rwanda’s admission to the Commonwealth, France and Rwanda reestablished normal diplomatic relations. Before that happened, of course, the Rwandans had shared the about-to-be-released Mutsinzi report with the French. The normalization of relations amounts to France’s acceptance of the report’s conclusions—and in the past few days the French press has been covering the substance of the report in uncharacteristic tones of admiration and respect.

The struggle of President Kagame’s regime to establish security, order, and a modicum of justice in Rwanda and to create conditions for economic and political development has always been in large part a struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of an international community that failed—or worse, betrayed—Rwanda during the genocide. In this context, the report on Habyarimana’s plane is the latest in a yearlong string of diplomatic and political moves that show the new Rwandan government achieving a level of sophistication, skill, and effectiveness in commanding international respect that has rarely, if ever, been seen before in Africa. A year ago, Rwanda was being blamed for all the woes of the war next door in the Democratic Republic of Congo—and now those woes have come to be seen overwhelmingly as the result of the continued presence of fugitive Hutu genocidaires in Congo. Leaders of these Hutu Power armies in exile, who had operated with impunity from European capitals, are being rounded up. And this week, on the day that the report first leaked in the French press, France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, was in Kigali to announce the establishment of a special court in France to prosecute refugees suspected of genocide. Today’s issue of Rwanda’s official newspaper, New Times, announces that Sarkozy will visit next month.

At the top of France’s list for the new genocide court, New Times also reported, is Madame Agathe Habyarimana—the assassinated President’s wife, who has long been rumored to have been in on his killing. The report details at length how openly the Habyarimana assassination plot was spoken about in the months before his death; at one point, it notes that President Mobutu Sese Seko of neighboring Zaire (now Congo) got wind of the plans and told Madame Agathe to warn her husband, but she didn’t. On a recent tour of Habyarimana’s palace grounds, I was shown the plane’s wreckage, and also the solarium where the President’s wife, popularly known as Madame Agathe, was said to have sat and watched him fall to his death.

The Mutsinzi report is hardly the last word on Habyarimana’s assassination or the events that surrounded it. There are still more questions raised in this report than are absolutely answered. But it marks a dramatic change in the way that Rwanda officially confronts its own history. Sprinkled throughout the annexes are discussions of matters that the current regime has often been accused of refusing to discuss: accusations of mass revenge killings by Kagame’s troops in 1994, for instance. Kagame’s power these days is as close to absolute as it gets—and so it is striking that he should use it to engage such debates.

The Rwandans have created an excellent media guide (pdf)—a brief summary for reporters looking for the talking points and money quotes in the report. The Falcon Report (pdf) is the core of the thing—the sweeping narrative of the investigation and its findings. The report’s footnotes will prove a feast for Rwanda aficionados—but they are really the appetizer for the report’s many annexes. For ballistics and aviation-crash buffs, there’s the DASSR Report (pdf) to begin with, and the annexes pretty well speak for themselves: Volume I (zip folder) contains documents on Hutu Power ideology and the build-up to the shooting down of the plane and the implementation of the genocide: there’s stuff on “Anti-Belgian Propaganda,” the “Course and Development” of the plot, the “Desire to Kill Habyarimana,” and the “Rejection of Arusha Negotiations and Accords.” Volume II (zip folder) deals with “Accusations of France,” the absurd drama of the “Black Box,” Hutu Power’s “Blocking of the Investigation into the Assassination Attempt,” the “Coup D’Etat Attempted by Colonel Bagosora,” and “The FAR and the Missiles.” (You can also download a compressed zip folder that contains the entire suite of documents mentioned above.)

Related Materials:
A Rebuttal of the Mutsinzi Commission Report

Habyarimana's alleged assassins slowly and surely eliminated

Rwanda: Dealing with the reality, achieving common ground, and betting on the future

Rwanda: Declaration on the shooting down of Habyarimana's aircraft on April 6, 1994

Major General Paul Kagame behind the shooting down of late Habyarimana's plane: An eye witness testimony

Testimony of Abdul Ruzibiza about how mistakes by both the Rwandan Government and the RPF led to the Rwandan genocide of 1994

UN and Canada Complicit in Rwanda Cover-Up: Americans and Rwanda Patrotic Front (RPF) Planned and Launched Aircraft Attack

UK-Rwanda: Habyarimana’s assassination was a coup, said UK Defense Ministry

The alleged mystery surrounding the black box of the Rwandan genocide

Assassination of President Habyarimana: the UN accused of complicity

Explaining the Ultimate Escalation in Rwanda:How and Why Tutsi Rebels Provoked a Retaliatory Genocide

The Assassination of former Rwandan President Habyarimana? Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now!

Civilian Plane Shoot-Downs and International (In)Justice; From 007 to Rwanda

New Revelations on Who Killed Habyalimana and Ntaryamira on April 6,1994

Rwandan witness retracts claims over Habyarimana assassination

Is Judge Bruguière’s investigation of the 6 April 1994 attack nothing but a burst bladder?

Habyarimana assasination and modesty in leaders

Rwanda genocide: What if Kagame killed Habyarimana?

posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 2:02 AM