Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

The Spark That Ignited Rwanda’s Inferno

By ROBERT MACKEY
The New York Times
January 12, 2010

As followers of the Rwandan government’s Twitter feed will already know, a new report on the 1994 assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana — an event Hutu extremists used as an excuse to begin the massacre of up to one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu that year — was released this week accompanied by a five minute video summarizing an investigative commission’s findings.

The full report is posted on a Web site named for its lead author, Jean Mutsinzi — at Mutsinzireport.com — and the video reconstruction of the strike on the president’s plane embedded below was posted on YouTube by the commission.

Video Analysis of Habyarimana Plane Crash
 
As my colleague Josh Kron reported in Tuesday’s New York Times, the video summarizes a report that says that extremist Hutus in Rwanda’s government at the time were responsible for shooting down a plane carrying the Rwandan president, who was also a Hutu, in a premeditated attack with surface-to-air missiles intended to undermine a peace agreement and justify a genocidal rampage.

Philip Gourevitch, the author of a book on the genocide — which was preceded by a remarkable article in The New Yorker in 1995 — called the report an “extraordinary historical and political document,” in a post on the magazine’s Web site.

Mr. Gourevitch explains the report’s findings reinforce the theory that “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 BBC reports that the late president’s son “rejected the findings of the report before it was published, describing the exercise as a game.” That is not the report says that members of Mr. Habyarimana’s inner circle plotted his death, and his own wife may face charges in a new French court established to prosecute Rwandan refugees in exile there who are suspected of genocide.

According to Mr. Gourevitch, a Rwandan newspaper reported last week that one of the names on the list of those who may be indicted by the French court is “Madame Agathe Habyarimana — the assassinated President’s wife, who has long been rumored to have been in on his killing.”

Related Materials:
A Rebuttal of the Mutsinzi Report on the Rwandan genocide

posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 1:05 AM