Rwanda has not healed: "Tribalism, state sponsored abuses continue"

By Tawanda Kanhema
The Statesman
December 3, 2009

RWANDAN genocide hero and inspiration behind the film Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina, says the east African country has neither healed from the 1994 genocide nor learned any lessons from it, as he accused the Rwandan government of continuing human rights abuses through the alleged arbitrary arrest and transportation of Hutus to work illegally in mines in the Congo.

The former hotel manager, who risked his life and saved 1289 people from machete wielding militias and armed forces by hiding them in a Kigali hotel during three months of extensive ethnic conflict, had no kind words for the United Nations system either, which he still sees as flawed.

"It's ironic that I am standing here today addressing a Model UN conference, when 15 years ago, the United Nations abandoned me and many others in a genocide, a madness that took away a million out of seven million lives."

Rusesabagina addressed nearly 1500 political science and humanities students from universities in the U.S., Belgium, Nigeria, Venezuela and China at the just ended American Model UN Conference in Chicago.

Congo produces, Rwanda sells

The Rwandan government, he said, was forcing Hutu prisoners to work in Congolese mines, where the UN has accused Rwanda of stealing thousands of tonnes of coltan, gold and other minerals over the past decade.

"We saw Rwanda raiding the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) for minerals and now, the Rwandan Army is taking Hutus to prisons without charges and then taking them to Congo to work in mines," said Rusesabagina,

"Rwanda is exporter number one of coltan in the region and yet we do not produce a single pound of coltan in Rwanda. Congo produces minerals and Rwanda sells the minerals."

The UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo established in 2001 that the Rwandan government was exporting minerals stolen from the Congo.

The UN Security Council this week extended the mandate of the Group of Experts that has been working on plugging mineral leaks from the DRC and facilitated the creation of recommendations to control the buying and processing of lucrative mineral products that originate from the DRC.

Between 1994 and 2000, the period during which the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath stirred up the security situation of the entire Great Lakes region, Rwanda exported more than 1,500 tonnes of coltan against a local production of zero tonnes, according to the UN report.

"In the mining sector, SOMINKI (Société minière et industrielle du Kivu) had seven years' worth of columbo-tantalite (coltan) in stock in various areas. From late November 1998, Rwandan forces and their RCD allies organized its removal and transport to Kigali," the UN experts established,

"Between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of cassiterite and between 1,000 and 1,500 tons of coltan were removed from the region between November 1998 and April 1999. It took the Rwandans about a month to fly this coltan to Kigali."

The UN has since imposed a regime of sanctions barring arms imports by certain groups and organisations into the DRC, but no significant action has been taken against Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, countries implicated in the mass looting of minerals during the war.

Recounting the genocide

The United Nations had 2,500 troops stationed in Kigali when the genocide erupted. The troops had been deployed as peacekeepers to enforce the Arusha Peace Accord intended to mark the end of the civil war between the Rwandan Government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels.

UN peace keepers kept peace for a few days and then the tide turned, as news of the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana broke on April 6 , 1994, sending the country into turmoil.

Rusesabagina feels this should have been the decisive moment for the United Nations to stand up and defend the innocent, if the international community had had the political will to stop the genocide.

"The Rwandan Army killed 10 of them (UN peace keepers), and then they abandoned the whole nation to a gang of thieves and murderers... they just stood there and observed. They did not have the political will." said Rusesabagina.

"I only discovered what had happened after three months when I drove to the south, there was no human being alive, no animals... I came to notice that my family members, sister and little brother had been killed. My mother in-law... her two houses had been destroyed, she had been killed with her daughter in-law and six grandchildren... dumped into a mass grave. That was the saddest day of my life."

Rusesabagina's sister-in-law had also lost her husband, and she was left with eight orphans to look after as a widow. Several villages in the rural areas had been razed to the ground, and hundreds of victims were burnt in their houses as they hid in roofs to avoid the militias.

It was in the desolate villages of southern Rwanda, surrounded by the charred remains of three months of unbridled atrocities, orphans and widows, that Rusesabagina decided to establish an organisation to assist the thousands of victims of the genocide and started working actively as a humanitarian. The Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation (HRRF) was formed in 2005.

Looking back, he says he wishes he had saved 10 times more than the 1268 people, and says more can be done to stop the ongoing human rights abuses.

"It's so sad to note that not only Rwanda but the whole world never learnt anything from the genocide. The Congo has the largest number of UN observers, but hundreds of thousands of women are being raped, and at least two million people have been displaced in Darfur (Sudan)."


HRRF has grown into a force to reckon with in the region, speaking against human rights abuses in Rwanda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where five million people have been killed in more than a decade of fighting.

No lessons learnt

"The problem continues. A genocide does not take place and disappear. You see it coming, developing, and people turn away and close their eyes. We saw the genocide coming and the killing had been going on for four years during the civil war."

Despite the international outrage at the perpetrators and subsequent outpourings of grief that followed the Rwanda genocide, Rusesabagina says the relations between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda have not changed for better.

"We have never played a win-win game in Rwanda, we have always played a win-lose game. I win, I rule, you lose, you go to exile."

Justice evades Rwanda

Rusesabagina says justice has not been done to the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. He lamented what he described as the miscarriage of justice by the tribunal set up to try perpetrators of war crimes.

"The international community has completely failed when it comes to justice in Rwanda. Only a few people have been charged for committing "acts of terrorism" by killing two presidents. The Arusha Tribunal has never dealt with one case of war crimes from the Hutus," he said.

The Arusha Tribunal, based in Tanzania, has dealt with 14 cases, out of thousands of possible suspects who acted as sponsors, militia leaders or organizers during the conflict.

Note:
Tawanda Kanhema is a journalist studying Political Science at Truman State University in the U.S.

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