August 27, 2010
Luc Cote, a war crimes prosecutor from Montreal, told AFP that Rwandan Tutsi troops and their rebel allies targeted, chased, hacked, shot and burned Hutus in the DRC, from 1996 to 1997, after the outbreak of a cross-border Central African war.
"For me it was amazing," Cote, who also investigated the 1994 Rwandan genocide and ran the legal office of the UN International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda from 1995 until 1999.
"I saw a pattern in the Congo that I'd seen in Rwanda," Cote said, referring to the Rwandan genocide where Hutu extremists butchered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
"It was the same thing. There are dozens and dozens of incidents, where you have the same pattern. It was systematically done," Cote said ahead of the official release next month of a UN report on atrocities committed in the central African nation.
His probe did not list a death toll but found evidence suggesting tens of thousands of Hutus had been killed. UN and other aid agencies said in the 1990s that 200,000 Hutus were unaccounted for.
The possibility of genocide forms only a part of a 600-page UN report co-authored by Cote that is a nightmarish inventory of murder, rape and looting that took place in the DRC from 1993 until 2003 as it was torn apart by more than half a dozen plundering armies.
The most damaging element in the report, a draft of which was obtained by AFP, says that Rwandan Tutsi commanders and their rebel allies may have committed genocide.
"The systematic and widespread attacks described in this report ... reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide," stated the probe.
The 34-member UN team under Cote's direction found evidence that the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and their rebel allies at the time -- known as the AFDL -- used hoes, bayonets and axes to butcher Rwandan and Congolese Hutus, often rounding them up beforehand.
In many other cases, the victims were raped, burned alive or shot dead.
The vast majority of Hutus who were killed were "women, children, the elderly and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces," according to the report, which was ordered by the UN High Commission for Human Rights.
Cote, who was also chief of prosecutions for the UN-led criminal court in Sierra Leone, said the DRC probe attempted to legally classify crimes but was not a judicial investigation that an internationally backed criminal court would require.
But he said "all this (evidence) put together, submitted to a court of law, this may constitute elements from which you can infer the intent to destroy a group as such, which is genocide."
The evidence, he said, includes speeches in which Hutus were targeted for elimination, systematic and repetitive killings, the burning of corpses, and attempts to bar outsiders from visiting massacre sites.
The UN findings are expected to lay the groundwork for the potential prosecution on war crimes or lesser charges of senior Rwandan figures such as Colonel James Kabarebe, who led Rwanda's military operations in the Congo and now heads the Rwandan forces.
Charges of genocide would need a higher standard of evidence than that contained in the report.
The report also does not identify the perpetrators, but cites Kabarebe as having led the successful drive to oust Congo's then president Mobutu Sese Seko.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who was Rwanda's de facto leader and defense minister at the time of the atrocities, is also referenced in the UN probe as having planned the Congolese rebellion and supplied weapons, munitions and training facilities for the Congolese forces.
Kagame has long been backed by the US, British and Canadian governments and is largely viewed as a brilliant military tactician who helped stop the Rwandan genocide.
In the aftermath, an estimated one million Rwandan Hutus left their homes and set up in UN-run refugee camps inside the Congolese border. Some of the refugees were guilty of genocide and secured weapons and training in the camps, but most of the refugees there were simply Hutus who feared violence and retribution in the homeland.
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