THE 1994 RWANDAN GENOCIDE

Table of Contents

- THE 1994 RWANDAN GENOCIDE

- 2 African Leaders Die, U.N. Says; Rocket May Have Downed Plane

- Troops Rampage in Rwanda; Dead Said to Include Premier

- Anarchy Rules Rwanda’s Capital and Drunken Soldiers Roam City

- Heart of Rwanda’s Darkness: Slaughter at a Rural Church

- Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwanda Killings ‘‘Genocide’

- Shattered Nation: Rwanda Now Faces Painful Ordeal of Rebirth

- Rwanda’s Past Again Vies to Be Prologue

- Crisis Points Up Tough Choices for Tribunal on Rwanda

- Court Convicts 3 in 1994 Genocide Across Rwanda

- 10 Years Later in Rwanda, the Dead Are Ever Present

- Extremist Hutu Officials Blamed in ‘94 Rwanda Assassination

- Life Sentences in Rwanda Genocide Case

- Rwandan Is Convicted in 1994 Killings

- About TimesFiles

THE 1994 RWANDAN GENOCIDE

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2 African Leaders Die, U.N. Says; Rocket May Have Downed Plane

BY PAUL LEWIS

April 7, 1994

UNITED NATIONS, April 6 — The Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, two small and troubled Central African countries, were killed today in a plane crash, United Nations officials said. Rwandan diplomats said the plane had been hit by gunfire or a rocket as it approached the airport at Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

The deaths of the two Presidents, Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, were first announced by radio stations in the two countries, then by the French Embassy in Kigali, United Nations officials said.

The two men were returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where they and other African leaders had met in an attempt to end the ethnic warfare that has recently devastated Rwanda and Burundi. Fighting between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in each country has left thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled in recent months.

Heavy fighting broke out around the presidential palace in Rwanda on Thursday, hours after news of the deaths of the two presidents spread, Reuters reported residents as saying. The news agency said that explosions rocked Kigali but added that residents could not immediately tell who was fighting whom.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement that the assassin who shot down the presidential plane was still unidentified. At the United Nations, Rwanda’s representative, Jean Damascene Bizimana, said the plane had been hit by a rocket. “It was not an accident,” he said. “It was an assassination. There was rocket fire at the plane. The plane was brought down as it was landing, and the two Presidents were killed.”

He added that the plane had caught fire as it hit the ground and that there were no survivors.

The French Embassy in Kigali said that there were 10 people aboard the plane, and that none had survived.

Mr. Bizimana called the death of the two Presidents a tragedy because it came at a critical moment as both countries were trying to end ethnic violence and civil war. U.N. Force in Rwanda

“For both of us it’s a tragedy for many reasons,” he said, “because we are at the beginning of our peace process. And in Burundi the situation is very difficult. We both count very much on the support of the international community and the United Nations.”

Mr. Bizimana said that “enemies of peace” were responsible for the assassination but that it was too soon to know for certain who was involved.

This month’s Security Council president, Colin Keating of New Zealand, appealed for calm in Rwanda and Burundi and called upon their people to refrain from any further violence. He also extended the Council’s condolences to the families of the two men.

The United Nations recently deployed a 2,500-member peacekeeping force in Rwanda to try to stabilize the country and restore order, but it has so far rejected appeals for a similar force to be sent to Burundi.

At the Dar es Salaam meeting, President Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania had pleaded for an end to the months of violent tribal conflict in Rwanda and Burundi between the Hutu, who are the majority tribe in both countries, and the rival Tutsi minority. Both the dead Presidents were Hutu.

“Now is the time to say ‘no’ to a Bosnia on our doorstep,” Mr. Mwinyi had told the two Presidents. “Now is the time to insure that hostilities are not passed on to the children of Rwanda and Burundi.”

The meeting was the latest foray in a diplomatic offensive by President Mwinyi, who is also trying to put together an African peacekeeping force in Burundi. The United States has suspended its $16 million aid program to Burundi. Burundi Leader Assassinated

The situation in Burundi, which like Rwanda was once a Belgian colony, has deteriorated sharply since last October, when its previous President, Melchior Ndadaye, and several members of his Cabinet were assassinated during a short-lived military coup.

Relief agencies have estimated that as many as 100,000 people may have been killed in wave after wave of tribal fighting between Hutu and Tutsi. The Tutsi, who make up some 14 percent of Burundi’s population, have long dominated the army and the Government, as they have in Rwanda.

Troops Rampage in Rwanda; Dead Said to Include Premier

BY WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT

April 8, 1994

One day after the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed in an apparent rocket attack on their plane, the Rwandan capital of Kigali dissolved into terror and chaos today as disparate army and police forces went on a rampage, reportedly killing the country’s interim Prime Minister and at least 10 Belgian peacekeeping soldiers.

According to reports received here and at the United Nations, the interim Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, was shot to death after armed men abducted her from a United Nations compound where she had taken refuge. In addition, according to the reports, three Cabinet ministers as well as other officials and members of their families were abducted and 17 Jesuit priests were killed.

The sudden convulsion of violence occurred as the capital city remained all but cut off from the outside world, leaving it unclear who was in charge and even who was battling whom.

But in telephone and radio reports reaching the outside, residents and relief workers inside Kigali described a city that appears to have been given over to anarchy, with gangs of young men wielding clubs and machetes rampaging through streets, looking to settle old scores.

In a telephone interview with Radio France Internationale, not long before she was abducted, Ms. Uwilingiyimana said: “There is shooting, people are being terrorized, people are inside their homes, lying on the floor.”

United Nations officials in New York said much of the violence was being carried out by members of the Presidential Guard of Rwanda’s late President, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was killed in the plane crash on Wednesday along with President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, Rwanda’s neighbor to the south.

The two leaders were returning from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where they and other African leaders met in an attempt to end years of ethnic warfare in their countries.

Since gaining independence from Belgium in 1962, Rwanda has experienced constant tension between the minority Tutsi ethnic group and the larger Hutu group. President Habyarimana, a Hutu, presided unsteadily over Rwanda for more than 21 years, successfully fending off challenges from Tutsi-dominated rebel groups, including a guerrilla war launched from Uganda in 1990.

The two sides in the guerrilla war signed a cease-fire last summer, and a United Nations peacekeeping force of 2,600 troops has helped enforce a shaky peace since then. As part of the accord, Mr. Habyarimana was supposed to form a multiparty government, representing both Tutsis and Hutus, but the parties were unable to agree on a distribution of power.

United Nations diplomats in New York said they believed that in the violence today, the Hutu-dominated presidential guard was attempting to stop others in the government, including other Hutu leaders, from taking over the presidency.

They said that this effort appeared to be behind the abductions and killings of the interim Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers.

In addition, the diplomats said that troops in the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Popular Front, a rebel group, had forced their way out of a compound where they were under United Nations protection and were battling in the streets with elements of the army and with the Presidential Guard.

Unsuccessful Rescue Effort

According to the United Nations, the peacekeepers tried today to get armored vehicles to the home of a United Nations staff member where Ms. Uwilingiyimana had sought refuge, but they were held up by roadblocks. Under rules of engagement that allowed them to fire only in self-defense, the peacekeeping troops did not use force to get through.

United Nations diplomats said the Prime Minister’s guards were overpowered by the Presidential Guards, who took her away and killed her.

They said 600 to 700 other Presidential Guards went around the city “abducting opposition leaders and their families,” including the president of the constitutional court and the president of the National Assembly. Unconfirmed reports said at least some of them were killed.

The United Nations diplomats said “unruly elements” of the army were responsible for killing other Belgian peacekeepers. The United Nations peacekeeping force is drawn from 24 countries.

The United Nations officials said in New York that with no authority in the capital, officials on the scene were urging the military and the police to form an interim authority that would stabilize the situation. But there was concern that the Presidential Guard might try to seize power.

Reports this evening from the United Nations said that the rest of Rwanda outside the capital was calm. Reports from the United Nations also said that in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, the president of the National Assembly took over the Government.

The ethnic rivalries in Rwanda and Burundi have been a major ingredient in the life and politics of both nations since each became independent from Belgium in 1962.

Massacres in Rwanda in 1963, for example, are estimated to have taken some 20,000 lives. A decade later, in 1972, another outbreak of ethnic violence resulted in death of more than 100,000 Hutu in Burundi, and a military coup in Rwanda that first brought Mr. Habyarimana to power.

The attacks in Kigali today came after reports in Rwanda that a rocket had slammed into a French-made jet carrying President Habyarimana and President Ntaryamira home from the meeting in Tanzania.

While nobody knows who fired the rocket, both men, as well as Rwanda’s Prime Minister, were Hutus.

Anarchy Rules Rwanda’s Capital and Drunken Soldiers Roam City

BY DONATELLA LORCH

April 14, 1994

KIGALI, Rwanda, April 13 — Food had run out, drinking water was scarce and the streets of this capital city, empty of residents, was a terrifying obstacle course today of drunken soldiers and marauding gangs of looters dressed in a patchwork of uniforms, armed with machetes, spears, bows and arrows and automatic weapons.

Children carried hand grenades, and open-back trucks, loaded with angry men waving weapons at passing cars, sped through the city. As night fell, screams could be heard coming from a church compound where more than 2,000 Rwandans had taken refuge. A short time later, after the sound of machine-gun fire, the screaming stopped.

As tribal and political violence that began last week continued unabated, with tens of thousands of deaths reported, the evacuation of foreigners, most of them Belgians, was completed today by Belgian troops. Rwanda is a former Belgian colony. The French and Belgian troops were still at the airport but were to leave on Thursday in accordance with an ultimatum by rebel troops that required all foreign soldiers to be out of Rwanda by midday.

As soon as the foreign military pulls out, Rwandans and officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross expect rebel troops to begin a major offensive to take Kigali. On Tuesday the interim government fled to the town of Gitarama, about 30 miles southwest of the capital.

Rebel officials said the attack was meant to end the chaos and bloodshed in the capital, but many here worried that it would only provoke another cycle of violence and killing.

“And the tragedy is that I don’t know whether anyone will be able to stop it,” said Philippe Gaillard, the head of the International Red Cross here. “When you negotiate with people with machetes, how can you make them understand about humanitarian neutrality?”

Tens of thousands of refugees who left the city during the past few days still lined the road south toward neighboring Burundi, walking with little more than the clothes they wore and a few bags. Although the thousands of rotting bodies that have littered the streets were cleared up with bulldozers and trucks on Tuesday, the streets of each neighborhood are barricaded by roadblocks — some belonging to the Rwandan Army, others to the presidential guard and still others to looters.

Officials of the International Red Cross, the only foreigners left in Kigali except for journalists and the 2,500-member United Nations military contingent, said the tension and terror in the city had steadily increased since the fighting began last Wednesday. It was virtually impossible for anyone to move around in the capital.

“There is nothing these people can do,” said Mr. Gaillard. “The only thing left to do is to save your skin. Many, many people have been killed. I guess every Rwandan is fighting against his own brother and this is very sad. I asked the Minister of Transport to organize the pickup of the bodies. He looked into my eyes. He said, ‘It is impossible to say how many died because it is so awful.’”

Fighting broke out last Wednesday after the Rwandan President, Juvenal Habyarimana, was killed in a suspicious plane explosion here that also took the life of Burundi’s President, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Both men were members of the Hutu, the majority tribe in both countries that has long been subject to the political domination of the minority Tutsi tribe, members of which make up the rebel army. Their deaths fed a centuries-old tribal hatred that erupted into an all-out battle for political control and spawned a terror campaign in Kigali by troops loyal to Mr. Habyarimana.

As the showdown for Kigali approaches, this city of gently rolling lush green hills has become the site of a free-for-all. No one is in control and discipline is nonexistent, even within the Rwandan military ranks.

The rebels control at least three neighborhoods of the city, and officials say there are some 2,000 of them in the capital out of a total force of about 20,000. The Rwandan Army also numbers in the tens of thousands, many of whom are highly undisciplined conscripts.

A Game of Chance

For many, survival in Kigali is a game of chance. With food stores closed and then looted, food is a rarity. Today, for the first time since the battle began, the Red Cross distributed 30 tons of food to 6,000 people. Many city residents have either fled or taken refuge in churches or hotels.

Eighteen Belgian nuns and lay brothers abandoned a hilltop hospital for the insane, leaving behind 200 patients, The Associated Press reported. As the Belgians were picked up by an armored Belgian convoy, the hospital administrator, Gerard Van Selst, said he had no illusions about the fate of the patients or of the 500 Tutsi refugees camped out there.

“They’re finished,” he said. “A huge number will be killed.”

At the Milles Collines Hotel, in the heart of the city, there is CNN, but no food. The rooms are full of Rwandan military families who have taken refuge here and who tend to stay in their rooms or huddle and talk in dark hallways.

The hotel is also the headquarters for about 20 foreign journalists, whose presence the families hope will somehow protect them from attack by the rebels.

Looting for Food

The only way to get food or cars and gasoline is by looting houses and embassies. Many Rwandans have taken to sewing homemade scarves with a Red Cross emblem, hoping it will save their lives.

“We came here because of the security,” said a woman who would give her name only as Agnes and said she had traveled with five other families from the northern suburbs of the city. “There was so much killing and everybody was running so we ran also.”

A Plea to Outsiders

About 30 Red Cross workers and a half-dozen members of Doctors Without Borders are the only relief workers left in the city. Besides distributing food, the Red Cross brought in surgical teams and five trucks with 25 tons of medical equipment by convoy from Bujumbura, Burundi. Starting Thursday the Red Cross planned to set up its own hospital in Kigali as well as help pick up the wounded from churches.

The doctors also brought a surgical team, but it has been difficult for them to work here. On Tuesday the Hutu radio station accused the Red Cross of using its convoys to help only Tutsi wounded. The Red Cross suspended operations for a day until the radio rescinded its broadcast.

“We haven’t been able to evacuate the wounded to a hospital,” said Mr. Gaillard. “It is not possible to go everywhere because fighting is high. They have been gathered in churches and many haven’t eaten for six days or a week. Trucks will go out with food to the churches tomorrow and try and bring the wounded to the hospital. I hope the international community and the donors will not forget this little country in Africa and will come once more to help the people.”

But even with good contacts on all sides, nothing can be taken for granted by the Red Cross. Its convoy from Burundi had no trouble until it reached Gitaram, where it met up with two cars from the Kigali office that came to help talk it through the roadblocks.

At first the barricades were manned mostly by relaxed army soldiers. But the roadblocks multiplied as the convoy approached Kigali and were often little more than half a mile apart. No one seemed to be in charge.

At one barricade, as a soldier waved on the trucks, two others demanded that they stop and pointed their stick grenades at the lead car and truck. A Rwandan soldier, brandishing a knife, threatened to slash the truck tires unless all the vehicles were immediately unloaded. By midday most of the soldiers seemed drunk, many swigging beer and homemade whisky. Rwandans fleeing the fighting filled the roads.

‘Do Not Panic’

The most difficult area to navigate, even with the help of a Rwandan Army colonel as a guide, was the last mile or so on the outskirts of Kigali, where there was sporadic heavy fighting today.

“You will hear the whistle of bullets over your head,” said Mr. Gaillard to the convoy passengers as he briefed them beforehand. “Do not panic. Duck down.”

A few dead bodies were lying on the side of the road, which was empty except for the militia and looters at the checkpoints. The groups of men at the barricades brandished machetes, guns and spears, surrounding the passing cars and peering threateningly through the windows. The last several hundred yards were driven crouched down in the car to avoid any shooting.

In town all the stores were barricaded and closed down, and many streets empty of cars. But everywhere — on doorsteps, in driveways and along the road — were men with knives and guns.

Heart of Rwanda’s Darkness: Slaughter at a Rural Church

BY DONATELLA LORCH

June 3, 1994

NYARUBUYE, Rwanda, June 1 — The banner across the entrance to the red brick church here announces the celebration of a festival. A poster of Pope John Paul II is tacked on the main door and above it is a large white statue of Jesus, his arms beckoning. Inside are the remains of victims of a mass slaughter carried out by Government-trained militiamen in mid-April.

In what they had hoped would be a refuge from the deadly irrationality of tribal and political violence, more than 500 members of the Tutsi tribe found their way to the church compound only to be shot or hacked to death by Hutu soldiers in classrooms, bathrooms and courtyards, and then left to rot.

It appears that they were methodically hunted down, first in the church, then in the school and finally in the workshops near the soccer field. Residents say that probably 1,000 more were killed and buried in mass graves in the town, which in just inside the border with Tanzania.

A frenzy of killing was evident at the rear of the compound. There eight rooms are filled with hundreds of corpses, shoulder to shoulder, and piled onto one another. One hundred more killed in a courtyard are now half skeletons, their flesh in shreds. There are so many that it is impossible to walk through without treading on them. More corpses are hidden in the tall grass.

“It took them two days to kill everyone in the church,” said Consolata Mukatwagirimana, 27, a Tutsi whose family was killed at home and who like the rest of the townspeople has fled to a camp 50 miles away. She accompanied reporters to the church.

“People from three communities had taken refuge in this place,” she said. “Several hundred militias came. I recognized some from our own town. They were shooting and using machetes.”

This village, now under control of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel group led by the minority Tutsi tribe, appears typical of many devastated by regular Army troops or militiamen of the majority Hutu tribe in the early days of the two-month old civil war. The buildings are empty, the livestock is gone. Only corpses and the sound of the wind remain.

When entire towns were erased by such massacres, the killers usually buried their victims. But many of Nyarubuye’s dead remain where they fell, probably because the militia, and later the rebels, lacked the time or manpower to dispose of the bodies.

The massacre here took place on April 16 and 17. And while it is one of the largest known so far, it is one of more than a dozen uncovered in Rwanda since civil war broke out on April 6.

Since then, tens of thousands have been killed, with unverifiable estimates of 200,000 and more. Though the fighting is between the army and the rebels, the mass killings have mostly been done by Hutu military and the extremist militias, youths trained by the military and the former ruling party of Rwanda.

They have tried to mount a campaign to exterminate all members of the Tutsi minority tribe and have even hunted down moderate Hutu politicians. The massacres have been uncovered as more than half the country has been taken over by the rebels, who escorted journalists to see the butchery. United Nations officials and relief workers say there are more massacres to be discovered and that mass killings continue in Government-controlled areas.

Although the rebels have the upper hand militarily and are routing the Rwanda Army in the south, the fighting in the capital, Kigali, is heavy, with mortars and machine-gun fire at night. The Patriotic Front controls northern and eastern Rwanda, areas made mostly empty and silent by large-scale death. The rebels took over countryside already devastated by the Rwandan Army.

Near the northern rebel headquarters of Mulindi, on the Ugandan border, the large tea estates are overgrown and the fields unkempt.

Village after village is deserted but refugee camps marked by United Nations blue plastic tarpaulins have sprouted on the hills and in the towns.

Rebels Protect Farmers

The paved road to Kigali is officially in rebel hands but few venture down it because they say it is unsafe. Most travelers prefer a dirt road with its detour of several hours. There are frequent rebel road checkpoints made of plastic Coca-Cola crates, but only occasionally are troops seen driving by. Rebels act as guards for farmers in the fields to protect them against marauding militias.

The area around Nyarubuye fell to the Patriotic Front in the first week of May but the town, about 20 miles east of Rusumu, Tanzania, on a dirt road, is so remote that the massacres were only discovered recently.

Almost all the residents have either taken refuge in Rusumo or have been killed. The town was mostly Tutsi, set high on a plateau covered with wild flowers. Soon after the massacres began in Kigali on April 6, Tutsis from three communities came to take refuge in the church.

Bones on the Altar

Ms. Mukatwagirimana, who was given refuge by a Hutu family, said the militias had been planning the attack for a while. “It was not something they acted upon spontaneously,” she said. “They had been thinking about it. Before they would talk about such things, but we thought it was just words. I have seen so much this does not shock me. I no longer feel and fear.”

A dozen bodies lay sprawled in the brick church’s main courtyard, some no more than pieces of flesh and skeletons dressed in clothes. One woman was hacked to death as she ran away. She lies face down, one arm outstretched, the other clutching her small child, decapitated. In the church, pieces of human flesh lie in between the low wooden pews. Bones and a skull clutter the altar.

The classrooms still have the chalked lessons on the blackboards. In one, the lesson of the day had been French conjugation. More than a dozen boys were killed there. Scores of spent cartridges litter the veranda.

In the sacristy of the church, which had been ransacked by the killers, incense censers had been thrown on the floor along with the priests’ vestments and broken clay statuettes. Outside in the empty stillness, doors creak and the wind rustles like rain through the banana trees.

Almost all the residents have left. But too old to move, Chrisostome Gatunzi, a Hutu who says he is between 80 and 90 years old, stayed behind with his thin, frail wife. They live in a small house several hundred yards off the main road, tended by a nine-year-old grandson who just returned after three weeks hiding in the countryside.

Mr. Gatunzi says he heard the screams and watched his neighbors being killed but was too weak to do anything. He talks about how he watched the militias, in groups of 20, round up residents, kill them and then throw their bodies in mass graves a few hundred yards from his house. He cannot hold back his anger and pain. He chokes when he speaks.

“I witnessed when they hacked them and put them into a pit,” Mr. Gatunzi said. “I knew some of them. I don’t know why others want to kill Tutsis. We have lived together for such a long time as neighbors and friends. It’s unbelievable seeing your neighbor hacked to death. These people are saying they want to create a new Rwanda. How can you do that by killing neighbors and friends? It has hurt my heart so much.”

Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwanda Killings ‘‘Genocide’

BY DOUGLAS JEHL

June 10, 1994

WASHINGTON, June 9 — Trying to avoid the rise of moral pressure to stop the mass killing in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration has instructed its spokesmen not to describe the deaths there as genocide, even though some senior officials believe that is exactly what they represent.

That decision has left the Administration at odds with the Secretary General of the United Nations and a cast of distinguished experts who say there is no doubt that the violence, which is said to have killed at least 200,000 people and perhaps as many as 400,000, is part of the deliberate and widespread extermination of an ethnic group.

But American officials say that so stark a label could inflame public calls for action the Administration is unwilling to take. Rather than compare the massacre with, for example, the deaths under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the State Department and the National Security Council have drafted guidance instructing spokesmen to say merely that “acts of genocide may have occurred.”

While no memorandum explicitly prohibits a broader denunciation, Administration officials say they recognize the guidance as a boundary on their public pronouncements.

Lives and Dollars

That caution appears to reflect the attitude of an Administration that has become deeply wary of new entanglements abroad, particularly in cases like Rwanda, a landlocked African country to which the United States has no historic ties. Without oil or other resources as a rationale, the case for military intervention would have to be based on whether ending the killing is worth the cost in American lives and dollars.

Still, with independent witnesses providing detailed accounts of organized killings of members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group by the majority Hutus, some senior American officials acknowledge that the Administration’s public posture reflects a certain lack of candor.

“Genocide is a word that carries an enormous amount of responsibility,” a senior Administration official said this week. If the United States joined in describing the killings as genocide, the official and others said, it would be natural — and unwelcome — for voters to expect that the response would include dispatching troops.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the United States and other signers are supposed to respond to genocide by investigating and punishing those who are responsible. Some critics have suggested that the White House may be seeking to evade the obligations of that accord.

But Administration officials say they believe the treaty does not carry an absolute obligation to act. Instead, those who defend the policy argue that the first obligation before joining in so unequivocal a castigation is to be absolutely sure of the facts.

“As a responsible Government, you don’t just go around hollering ‘genocide,’” David Rawson, the United States Ambassador to Rwanda, said in an interview. “You say that acts of genocide may have occurred and they need to be investigated.”

Cries of Hypocrisy

Diplomacy is not famous for haste or blunt truths, and American Administrations have proven slow in denouncing slaughter in Central Africa, including the tribal massacres in Burundi last fall. It was only this month that the State Department agreed to establish an office to look into what the Administration now portrays as five years of genocide under Pol Pot in Cambodia that ended 15 years ago.

But with Rwanda a gruesome feature of international news coverage since early April, those troubled by international passivity have begun to lash out with particular venom at what they describe as the Administration’s hypocrisy.

Herman Cohen, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, used an op-ed article in The Washington Post last week to lambaste the Clinton Administration for what he called its “wimpish approach” in Rwanda. Mr. Cohen declared flatly that the killings there “must be called genocide.”

“Another Holocaust may just have slipped by, hardly noticed,” Mr. Cohen wrote.

Geraldine Ferraro, who headed a United States delegation to a special session convened by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, used the less than categorical language on May 25 to outline the American position. A day later, the State Department described the question of whether genocide was being committed in Rwanda as one that is “under very active consideration.”

But Mr. Rawson said this week the Administration intended to await a United Nations report which is not scheduled for four weeks.

Political as Well as Ethnic

Because the bloodshed has been rooted in political as well as ethnic tensions, sorting out the killings could prove complicated. Witnesses have said Tutsis were the victims of the worst violence, much of it carried out systematically by Government troops and Hutu militias, but Hutus have been killed in reprisal and in battles with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi-led rebel group that now controls half of Rwanda.

The Administration’s cautious language nevertheless mirrors the standoffishiness the United States has adopted since the killing began on April 6, after President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, died in a suspicious plane crash.

Seeing Rwanda as a first test of its restrictive new guidelines on peacekeeping, the Administration has not only ruled out sending American troops but has stood in the way of an aggressive United Nations plan to dispatch an African force of 5,500.

The Defense Department has agreed to lease some 46 M-113 armored personnel carriers to the United Nations for use by Ghanaian troops, but the schedule for delivering the vehicles has slowed the deployment. Even the precise mission is undefined, in large part because the United States insisted on a more cautious mandate for the troops than other nations did.

Shattered Nation: Rwanda Now Faces Painful Ordeal of Rebirth

BY RAYMOND BONNER

December 29, 1994

Signs that life is returning to normal can be found everywhere in Rwanda. A roaring crowd fills a Kigali stadium for a Sunday afternoon soccer match. The cement factory in the southwest is operating again. Children play in dirt schoolyards. Day laborers in their green aprons pick tea on vast estates. And the carols of worshipers pour forth in a packed church where scores were massacred in April.

But in the six months since the end of a civil war that surpassed the unthinkable — hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered and then hundreds of thousands fled — such signs mask two crucial unresolved problems that threaten to pitch this country into another cauldron of violence.

They are refugees and justice — too many of the former, too little of the latter.

Real stability within Rwanda remains elusive, indeed impossible, while more than a million Rwandans, out of a prewar population of over eight million, are still in exile in neighboring African countries. But the refugees will not return until they know they can get their house or plot of land back, until revenge killing and arbitrary imprisonment stop.

And that will not happen, Rwandans and United Nations officials agree, until there is a judicial system that punishes those responsible for the massacres, and deters those who would abuse the law today, whether for revenge or for personal gain.

For Rwanda’s leaders, re-creating a homeland is an intimidating task made harder by the lack of foreign aid — most of which has gone thus far to help the refugees, not to rebuild a nation. It is also a test of their political strength and skill as they seek to re-establish trust in the face of new ethnic friction and the shadow of the former Government and its military, now in exile with the refugees.

Few countries have suffered the destruction Rwanda has. The human loss is incomprehensible — at least half a million of the Tutsi minority killed, men, women and children shot, stoned, hacked up with machetes by Hutu militiamen and soldiers.

There may be no administrative building in this country that still has its roof and windows. Offices were systematically looted or vandalized by officials of the former Government before they fled.

What unleashed this mayhem? It was not simply an eruption of long-simmering ethnic hatreds. It is not even entirely accurate to say the Hutu and Tutsi are different ethnic groups — they speak the same language, worship the same God, share many of the same cultural traditions.

Even the physical characteristics that once distinguished them — the Tutsi, tall and thin; the Hutu, short and broad — have disappeared for vast segments of the population after generations of intermarriage.

“Bad leaders,” said Goretti Uwamariya, 29, when asked what had caused the war. It is the answer one hears over and over again in Rwanda, from peasants in remote villages to intellectuals, and it underscores the fact that the Hutu and the Tutsi lived together, friction contained, until politicians set them against each other.

Mrs. Uwamariya, a Tutsi, was at church on the Sunday before Christmas, worshiping with Hutu and Tutsi at a Mass in which her family members killed by Hutu mobs in the April violence were remembered: her husband, a brother, a sister and several aunts and uncles.

Mrs. Uwamariya said it would not be easy to live with the Hutu again, but it would be necessary to try because there really was no other choice. In October she gave birth to a daughter.

“I’ll teach her to love everybody regardless of their tribe or their region,” she said. “Otherwise she will become like the killers of her father.”

The Rulers Not a Democracy Or a Dictatorship

It is hard to pin a political label on Rwanda at the moment.

It falls short of being a democracy, since no one was elected to any position, and the dominant institution is the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which won the war and is in effect the ruling political party.

The most important political leader is Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, who was commander of the rebel army and is now Vice President and Defense Minister.

But it would be unfair to call the Government a military dictatorship. The army is one of the most disciplined in Africa. At roadblocks, soldiers, though dressed in rumpled uniforms, are polite and sober and do not demand money. On the Rwandan side of the border with Zaire, the officials are inefficient, bureaucratic, pleasant and honest. On the Zairian side they are inefficient, bureaucratic, nasty and corrupt.

Rwanda has a civilian President and Prime Minister, and while they do not have General Kagame’s influence over the country’s political direction, they are more than figureheads.

Most Cabinet members are civilians, and two key posts, Interior and Justice, are held by Hutu. Most of the 11 provincial governors are civilians, and in Cyangugu, the third-largest province, the Government recently named a Hutu human rights campaigner, Theobald Rutihunza, to the top spot.

“I’m not sure how much power I have,” Mr. Rutihunza said in a recent interview in his barren office. But he is testing it daily as he investigates human rights abuses by the army and urges commanders not to arrest people without sufficient evidence.

Throughout the country some 15,000 people have been seized on the street or hauled from their homes because someone has accused them of involvement in the massacres. Many Rwandans fear a dangerous abuse of power, like that which marked the former Government.

“Before, it was the militia,” said a Tutsi intellectual. “Now it is the army. It is the same.” He lost sisters and brothers to the Hutu militia and has other family members in the Patriotic Front.

But the human rights picture is decidedly mixed.

The Justice Minister allows foreign journalists to go into the prisons far more readily than do his counterparts in some democratic countries.

The country, roughly the size of Vermont, is also awash with United Nations human rights monitors. They poke and probe into prisons and allegations of human rights abuses to a degree that would not be tolerated by a vast majority of the members of the United Nations.

These contradictions have led to uncertainty about where the country is headed. Any hope that it will be a stable, relatively open society is doomed if the Government cannot get the refugees back, because the refugees will become the army that plunges Rwanda into another round of warfare, the way the Patriotic Front grew out of the mass of Rwandan refugees who fled to Uganda 30 years ago.

The Refugees; Who Can Count The Exiles?

With so many of its citizens refugees, the current Government cannot claim to be legitimate. The leaders of the former Government know that, and the refugees have become their pawns in a deadly game.

“The R.P.F. won the war militarily,” said Jean Kambanda, who was Prime Minister in the former Government when it was defeated. “But they lost the political war, because the population has fled.”

There are more than four million refugees in Zaire alone, he asserted, which is four times the United Nations figure. “Only some children, old people and sick people who could not flee are left in the country,” he said.

Mr. Kambanda has become prime minister of a government in exile. The president is Theodore Sindikubwabo, who was President of the former Government during the slaughter of Tutsi. The chief of staff of the exile army, Augustin Bizimungu, was the military chief of staff during the massacres.

At his home in exile in Bukavu, Zaire, on the shore of picturesque Lake Kivu, Mr. Kambanda said there had been a genocide. He also said his Government had tried to stop the killings by the militia. He handed a visitor a pamphlet, “The Rwandese People Accuse . . . ,” which accuses the Tutsi-led Patriotic Front of genocide of Hutu. Sophisticated and printed on high-quality paper, the pamphlet has been distributed in the refugee camps.

Striking a moderate stance in a recent interview, Mr. Kambanda, 39, a bespectacled economist, said there must be a negotiated political settlement between the current and former Government.

But the former army is preparing for war, training near the refugee camps, with the arms it took with it when fleeing Rwanda. A full-scale invasion seems unlikely, but guerrilla attacks are almost certain, which would likely lead to repressive measures by the Government, which is just what the exile government wants.

The former Government’s militia, the men who carried out most of the massacres, are now terrorizing the camp populations to keep the refugees from going home. Even children have become tools to help promote the former Government’s objectives.

At least 60,000 children are orphans. Many lost one or both parents to the mobs or to cholera; other parents are still alive but have become separated from the children.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has begun a major effort, using computers and field workers, to find parents or other members of a child’s extended family.

But the effort has been hampered by the militia. The Red Cross stopped working in one orphanage after young toughs threatened workers taking two boys to join their parents. And in some camps the militiamen are not allowing the relief workers to deliver messages from people in Rwanda to relatives in the camps, a service the Red Cross has performed in wars around the world.

The current Rwandan Government insists that it is only because of such intimidation that the refugees are not returning. But fear of the Patriotic Front soldiers is also keeping the refugees in the camps.

Goretti Umiziyimana’s home in Kigali is only a couple of hours by car from the refugee camp in southern Rwanda where she has lived for several months, but she is afraid to go home.

The new Government needs the likes of Mrs. Umiziyimana, 27, a secondary school teacher, and she should have no reason to fear. Her husband, a radio journalist, Tharcisse Rubwiriza, was killed by the militia in April because he was a moderate Hutu.

Actually, she has gone back to Kigali a couple of times. And she found two soldiers and their families living in her house. It is a common occurrence — houses abandoned by Hutu who fled now being taken over by soldiers or Tutsi. The soldiers have refused to leave the house, and Mrs. Umiziyimana said they told her they knew her husband had been killed, which she took as an implicit threat.

But many refugees have returned, at least 600,000 by some counts. These are not the Hutu who fled to Zaire this summer. These are Tutsi who fled during Hutu pogroms 20 and 30 years ago.

Their return is changing the demographics and politics of the country in a potentially explosive way. No census has been taken since the war, but there is no doubt that Tutsi now make up far more than the 15 percent of the population that they did before the war. In Kigali and some villages, Tutsis are the majority.

In Masaka, east of Kigali, the prewar population of 8,000 shrank to only a few hundred after the killing and exodus. It is now back to 5,000; 4,000 are Tutsi from the diaspora.

“We came back because we had regained our country,” said Jean Kamuzinzi, 42, who was tending a small herd of cattle. The cattle and 10 Tutsi families had come back together from Burundi; they were given the grazing land and houses by the new Government, which is more governmental support than returning Hutu get.

The Tutsi returning from Burundi appear to cause the most problems.

“They are very arrogant,” said Francois Nsanzuwera, Kigali’s chief prosecutor. “They feel they are entitled to everything. Even other Tutsi are annoyed.”

Several Rwandan Tutsi said that Tutsi who had returned from Burundi were occupying their houses. They are afraid to do anything to get their houses back for fear of being killed.

For centuries, the Tutsi have felt superior to the Hutu, an attitude reinforced by the Belgians, who ruled through the Tutsi. The Tutsi in Burundi feel their superiority even more keenly, because even though they are only 15 percent of the population, they have dominated the army and the Government.

There is a growing concern here that Tutsi from Burundi may eventually gain similar political control in Rwanda. And already there are questions about how serious the Patriotic Front is about getting the Hutu refugees to return.

“So far they’ve made good speeches,” said Shaharyar Khan, the senior United Nations diplomat in Rwanda. “But not enough has been done on the ground to bring people back.”

Returning Hutu refugees have been subjected to such intense and humiliating screening and interrogation that they often wish they had stayed in the refugee camps and certainly carry no message to others to return.

“You need a different atmosphere,” Mr. Khan said. He suggested that it could be done with inexpensive gestures, like welcoming committees in villages.

But at some point, if it wants to get the refugees back, the Government will have to engage in negotiations with Hutu leaders now in exile.

“We will go home when they negotiate with our leaders,” said a university student who is now a refugee in the Kibumba camp. The condition he set is one that many educated refugees place on repatriation.

Not all of the refugees are peasants. Thousands of the country’s former civil servants are refugees, as are doctors, teachers and other professionals the country needs back if it is to develop.

So far, the new Government has adamantly refused to negotiate with anyone who had any connection with the former Government, arguing that their hands are bloodied by the genocide. But Mr. Khan and others argue that there are moderate Hutus in exile and the Government needs to talk to them.

The Future; How to Rebuild A Country?

Earlier this month, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is not prone to hyperbole, said it feared that “the indecision of the international community” would lead to “an escalation of violence and a resumption of hostilities, with the same horrific results and incalculable repercussions in humanitarian terms.”

Getting the refugees home has been a priority of the international community. Yet the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has not had a consistent policy on repatriation.

First the agency was neutral, neither encouraging nor discouraging refugees who wanted to return. Then it helped those who asked for help. Then it stopped doing even that. Recently, it went back to a policy of providing assistance to those refugees who express a desire to go home. But this will not be enough.

An aggressive campaign will be required to get the refugees back, one that insures the safety of the refugees in the camps and when they get back home. And the refugees will be more likely to go home if there is something to go home to, like electric power, water, schools — in short, a functioning government.

Rwanda can not rebuild without vast outside assistance, any more than Germany or Japan could have recovered after World War II without American aid.

While the bill for the Rwandan emergency is approaching a billion dollars, nearly all of it so far has gone for the refugees.

“We have $700 million of jerrycans and powdered milk, and I haven’t got $2 million dollars to put the power system in order so that people can read and write and not be looted at night,” Mr. Khan said.

Mr. Khan told of a Government minister who visited his office one day and looked out the window at the parking lot filled with United Nations vehicles. “I wish I could have just one of those,” the minister said. He has to walk to work.

A high priority is the judicial system.

“It is the basis of our reconstruction and rehabilitation and any kind of development,” said Aloyise Inyumba, Rwanda’s Minister of the Family and Women. “People have lost confidence because they don’t have security of their lives, security of their property.”

For months, United Nations and private relief agencies have been saying that rebuilding the judicial system is the highest priority. “It is the key to everything,” said one United Nations official.

Justice Minister Alphonse Nkubito has drawn up a long list of his needs, from paper and typewriters to vehicles, which he has given to a long line of representatives from governments and private organizations who come by his devastated offices to ask how they can help.

And what has he received? A couple of weeks ago, $27,000 in cash from the German Government — appreciated, but barely enough to buy the paper he needs, Mr. Nkubito said.

And beyond that?

“Many promises,” Mr. Nkubito said.

Rwanda’s Past Again Vies to Be Prologue

BY JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR

November 24, 1996

JEAN VATILI has never felt so powerless. He returned to Rwanda last week along with hundreds of thousands of other Hutu refugees and, like many others, found that his property had been confiscated by Tutsi immigrants.

That first day, Mr. Vatili, a former central bank official, confronted one of the Tutsi squatters in his village of Kabaya. The man immediately pointed a finger and accused Mr. Vatili of taking part in the 1994 genocide against Tutsi. Fear crossed Mr. Vatili’s face, and he slunk away.

When hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees returned home last week to Rwanda, many aid workers and diplomats here hailed the end of the refugee crisis that began when Hutus flooded into Zaire two years ago, fleeing a civil war.

But in a sense the struggle between the two ethnic groups in this lush Central African nation is only beginning a new chapter.

“I will tell you the truth,” Mr. Vatili said. “The wish for the returnees is that power has to be shared, because the Government is dominated by Tutsi and we need some Hutus on our side to be in power, too.”

Minority Rule

For the last two years, the Tutsi-controlled Government in Kigali has held the moral high ground. After all, it was the Tutsi rebel army that ended the Hutu massacres of 1994, putting Hutu militias and civilians to flight. Moreover, Hutu militia members became guerrillas operating out of United Nations refugee camps. They had continued sowing terror and insecurity in western Rwanda with cross-border raids.

In contrast, the Tutsi-led army promised stability and peace. It did not take long for the United States and other Western democracies to throw their support behind the new minority government it formed.

But now that the refugees have been driven home by strife in Zaire, the Tutsi elite in Kigali no longer have an outside threat to justify their hold on power. This presents Rwanda’s leaders with a long-term problem. Since the Tutsi are only about 15 percent of the population, moving toward democracy would ultimately mean sharing power with the Hutus.

Returning Hutus now find themselves living in something not unlike a police state. Ultimate authority still lies with the Tutsi-dominated army. Power flows from the Defense Minister, Paul Kagame, not from the Hutu President, Pasteur Bizimungu, widely seen as a figurehead. There are still military checkpoints on all major roads, and in the last two years the authorities have arrested 85,000 Hutu men on genocide charges. None has yet had a trial.

None of this bodes well for reconciliation. The first major hurdle the Government faces is to solve the myriad property disputes between Hutu returnees and Tutsi, a potential flashpoint for violence. After the Tutsi rebel victory in 1994, about 800,000 Tutsi who had left Rwanda in 1959 after the first wave of anti-Tutsi violence returned to the country. The military has steered many of these refugees to empty houses left by the fleeing Hutu. Now the Tutsi are being asked to leave those confiscated homes to make room for returnees, and this is hard for many of them to bear.

A second challenge for the Government is to identify and arrest the thousands of former fighters still believed to be at large in the population, without sparking a Hutu revolt. That will not be easy. The ground at the border where the refugees crossed is littered with identity cards that young men tore up as they entered Rwanda.

Rwandan officials say they would like to erase the ethnic distinctions that have riven the country again and again in the past. The Hutu and Tutsi are not tribes as such — they share the same language and customs — but rather are more like distinct classes. The Tutsi, a tall, generally thinner people from the Nile River valley, have historically made up the ruling elite, while the Hutu, a stockier, Bantu people, have made up the working class.

Patrick Mazimhaka, the minister for rehabilitation and social integration, says that because the nation’s party politics have split along those Hutu-Tutsi lines, Rwandans aren’t ready for democratic elections. “We will continue to share power based on ideology, not based on ethnicity,” he said. Of course, elections would probably lead to a Hutu victory if they were held now.

The Government says the priority instead is reconstruction. A crucial mission is to attract aid to build new housing, schools, roads and clinics. To that end, Rwanda is asking Western nations for $600 million at a conference in Geneva this weekend.

The money could not come too soon for people like Mr. Vatili, who is sleeping on a neighbor’s floor. New housing would mean the squatters would have someplace to go.

“We will just wait and see,” he said. “If there is justice, maybe we will get back our houses.”

Crisis Points Up Tough Choices for Tribunal on Rwanda

BY IAN FISHER

December 19, 1999

ARUSHA, Tanzania — Little has been tidy or efficient in the last four years here as an international court has wrestled with the incomprehensible: how to mete out blame for at least 500,000 deaths in Rwanda in 1994. Maybe that is no surprise. This is the first time the world has formally prosecuted the crime of genocide, the attempt of one people to exterminate another.

But a furor over the order by appeals judges to release a top suspect because the tribunal had held him too long before charging him has made the last few weeks more than difficult for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The chief judge, Navanethem Pillay, put her worries bluntly the other day.

“We are in a crisis,” she said. “We really have to worry what is the future of this tribunal.”

In the starkest terms, the tribunal faces a difficult choice: either prosecute suspects as harshly as Rwanda wants and risk its judicial integrity, as the appeals judges see it, or worry strictly about legal issues and risk having Rwanda cut off its help permanently. While unlikely, that move would mean an end to the tribunal, experts say.

There are many problems, but the case of the suspect, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, has heightened concerns about the court’s independence and unveiled a conflict between blind justice and the realities of prosecuting crimes committed in a time and place as ugly as Rwanda was in 1994.

Though there is much sympathy for Rwanda’s anger over the case, many analysts say Rwanda’s leaders have another agenda: to show their power over the tribunal and keep at bay any prosecution for their own excesses during that time.

The crisis began in November, when appeals judges at The Hague ordered the release of Mr. Barayagwiza, a minister in the previous Rwandan government who helped set up a radio station used to incite violence against the Tutsi. The appeals judges said prosecutors had violated his human rights by keeping him in jail too long without charge.

“Nothing less than the integrity of the tribunal is at stake in this case,” the judges wrote. “Loss of public confidence in the tribunal, as a court valuing human rights of all individuals — including those charged with unthinkable crimes — would be among the most serious consequences of allowing the appellant to stand trial in the face of such violations of his rights.”

The government of Rwanda — currently led by ethnic Tutsi who in 1994 defeated the Hutu government that was behind the genocide — was outraged. It immediately suspended cooperation with the tribunal, a blow because nearly every witness must travel here from Rwanda.

Though they later relented, Rwandan officials in fact refused a visa last month for the new chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte. As she waited for her visa, Mrs. Del Ponte made clear just how dependent the tribunal is on Rwanda’s help to prosecute nearly 40 suspects in detention here.

“If I don’t get cooperation with Rwanda, I can open the door of the detention unit and set them all free,” she said in an interview in this northern Tanzanian town, where the tribunal is based. “Second, I can close the door to my office. Without Rwanda I can do nothing at all.”

Rwandan officials argue strongly that Mr. Barayagwiza, who is still being held, must face his day in court, regardless of the excessive imprisonment the judges found before he was charged: from May 1996, when he was arrested in Cameroon, to October 1997, when he was indicted by the tribunal. (The prosecutors argue that the tribunal is not to blame, because he was being held at Rwanda’s request, not theirs, for much of that time.)

“If one would weigh the potential injustice to one man against the injustice to millions of people, a strictly legal interpretation of the issues would not be one to make,” said Richard Sezibera, the Rwandan ambassador to the United States.

“If one wanted to make a comparison — that is not explicitly accurate but indicative — it would be like releasing Goebbels of Nazi Germany on a technicality,” he added. “And that is not acceptable. It should not be acceptable to the world.”

[Indeed, the international community would like to avoid any further accusation of callousness toward the events in Rwanda. On Thursday, a report by an international panel held the United Nations and its leading members responsible for failing to prevent or end the genocide.]

Though relations between Rwanda and the tribunal had improved before last month, Rwandans still complain that the tribunal here does not get sufficient attention because the same chief prosecutor is also responsible for prosecuting war crimes in the Balkans. They have also been angry that only six cases have been resolved in four years.

They are clearly concerned about the precedent the appeals decision could set; four suspects have either filed for release on similar grounds or say they intend to. This includes perhaps the most sought-after suspect, Col. Theoneste Bagosora, considered to have been the military organizer of the mass killings.

No one doubts Rwanda’s stated concerns. But many experts believe that the country will not break its cooperation because it would then have to spend its own meager resources tracking down suspects and having them extradited from countries that might be reluctant to send suspects to Rwanda, where they could be put to death. (The tribunal’s maximum penalty is life in prison.)

In addition, Rwanda’s own prisons and courts are already swollen with nearly 125,000 suspects whose cases are also being prosecuted at an agonizingly slow pace.

Many people here suspect, however, that Rwanda has been flexing its muscles to send a message to the tribunal about one of the most sensitive chapters of the genocide’s history: massacres by the Tutsi rebels who overthrew the former Hutu government and ended the genocide. Human Rights Watch estimated the number of people they killed to be at least 25,000 to 30,000 people.

What to do about Tutsi commanders who committed atrocities clearly concerns the prosecutor’s office. Tribunal officials say they want to be viewed as an impartial international court, not a “court of the victors” as at the Nuremberg trials after World War II. As she retired this fall, the former chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said “both sides” should be investigated for crimes.

A court official here, speaking on the condition of anonymity, recently made a point of raising the issue of prosecuting Tutsi soldiers. “It will be incumbent on the court, if and when that time comes, to have some spine,” the official said.

Mr. Sezibera, the Rwandan ambassador, said his country does not oppose the tribunal’s right to prosecute anyone. “There is no doubt that they have a very clear mandate,” he said. “They should go and fulfill that mandate. The government of Rwanda has nothing to hide.”

As a condition for cooperating again, Rwanda has demanded a reversal of the Barayagwiza decision. That condition is impossible to meet, in part because the tribunal is not one entity. Rather it is a mix of institutions — prosecutors, administrators, trial judges and appeals judges — each with its own interests and agenda.

Judge Pillay, for example, has said flatly that the judges will not trade prosecutions for Rwanda’s cooperation. “We will not be influenced by any outside factors,” she said.

Even though she reportedly disagrees with the decision, she noted that Rwanda itself had asked for “an independent tribunal,” and it should have patience with it. “They didn’t ask for a lynch mob,” she said.

Meantime, Mrs. Del Ponte has taken the unprecedented step of asking the appeals chamber to reconsider.

But then there are the interests of the appeals chamber itself. The language of the decision suggested that it was punishing the prosecution and demanding a quicker pace to the trials.

The prosecutors have in fact come under the most criticism for incompetence; the judges regularly reprove them from the bench. But court officials argue that their mistakes were largely growing pains.

“In 1996 the tribunal was on a learning curve,” said Kingsley Moghalu, a tribunal legal adviser and its chief spokesman, mentioning the year Mr. Barayagwiza was arrested. “That sort of thing would not happen now.”

Court Convicts 3 in 1994 Genocide Across Rwanda

BY SHARON LAFRANIERE

December 4, 2003

In the first case of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court here on Wednesday convicted three Rwandans of genocide for media reports that fostered the killing of about 800,000 Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, over several months in 1994.

A three-judge panel said the three men had used a radio station and a newspaper published twice a month to mobilize Rwanda’s Hutu majority against the Tutsi, who were massacred at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks. The court said the newspaper “poisoned the minds” of readers against the Tutsi, while the radio station openly called for their extermination, luring victims to killing grounds and broadcasting the names of people to be singled out.

The three men convicted were Hassan Ngeze, who owned the newspaper Kangura, Ferdinand Nahimana, who controlled the popular radio station RTLM, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, the station’s co-founder. Each of the three were found guilty of three counts of genocide and two counts of crimes against humanity. Mr. Ngeze and Mr. Nahimana were sentenced to life in prison. Mr. Barayagwiza was sentenced to a lesser term of 27 years because, the judges said, his rights had been violated early in the case. All had been in the court’s custody for years.

In 100 days in 1994, prosecutors in Arusha contend, about 7 out of 10 of Rwanda’s Tutsis were wiped out with a brutal efficiency. The United Nations, which failed to intervene during the massacres, set up the international court in the relative safety of Tanzania three months after the killings ended to bring the main perpetrators to account.

Wednesday’s verdicts were the first convictions of media executives for crimes of genocide since 1946, when the Nuremberg tribunal sentenced the Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher, to hang for his campaign against the Jews.

In a 29-page summary of the Arusha judgment, which was read aloud in court, the judges pointed out that they were addressing issues that had not come before an international court for many decades. “The power of the media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility,” the summary said. “Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences.”

Elated prosecutors called the verdicts a historic victory. “This is really a groundbreaking decision,” said Stephen Rapp, the lead prosecutor. “The court said there is a wide range for free expression, but when you pour gasoline on the flames, that’s when you cross the line into unprotected expression.”

John Floyd, Mr. Ngeze’s lawyer, called the judgment a major setback for free speech and an invitation to dictators to close down any media outlet on the grounds it could provoke violence.

“This is a terrible, terrible decision, the worst decision in the history of international justice,” he said. He claimed that American courts, with their great concern for free speech, would have thrown the case out.

Floyd Abrams, a legal expert on the First Amendment disagreed. He said in a telephone interview that while the United States protected free speech more fiercely than any other country, it did not shield statements intended to provoke violence and likely to do so. “We would have protected some of the materials that were before the court,” he said. “But even the First Amendment would not provide a basis for acquitting these defendants.”

Mr. Nahimana, who argued that his radio station was taken over by extremists during the killings, and Mr. Ngeze intend to appeal, their lawyers said. Mr. Barayagwiza refused to go to court, and his lawyer made no statement after the verdict.

Besides drawing a legal boundary between free speech and criminal incitement to mass murder, tribunal officials said the verdicts vindicated the court’s slow and expensive approach to delivering justice in a region where the powerful have long enjoyed impunity.

The international court has faced intense criticism. In nine years, with a staff of 872 and an annual budget of $88 million, it has produced only 17 convictions, including Wednesday’s.

The United Nations recently gave the court more judges and appointed a new lead prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow of Gambia, to replace Carla Del Ponte, who was splitting her time between the Rwanda tribunal and one set up in The Hague to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Tribunal officials said Wednesday’s verdicts showed that the court had overcome most of its troubles. The pace of trials has clearly picked up: in the past month, two new cases have begun against eight ministers of the interim Hutu government that ruled during the massacres. One verdict was delivered earlier this week, and four more are expected soon.

But there is no decision about who will investigate charges that the Tutsi organized revenge killings of Hutus after a Tutsi-controlled government came to power in mid-1994. Rwandan officials say they want to handle it themselves. Some critics say the tribunal must investigate or lose credibility with Rwanda’s Hutu.

And the location of the court, 1,200 miles from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, means that few Rwandans feel a part of the process. For a court organized to impart a sense of justice and help the Hutu and the Tutsi reconcile, that is a major impediment.

Bongani C. Majola, the deputy prosecutor here, put it this way: “Rwandans say, ‘Listen, we are the victims, but we know nothing about what is happening there. We don’t see it on the papers, we don’t hear it on TV, we don’t hear people in the bars talking about it. So to us, nothing is happening.’”

What the verdicts will do, said Mr. Rapp, the lead prosecutor, is help set an international standard governing the responsibility of those who control the media for hate-spewing broadcasts and articles.

The cases turned on whether the three men were deliberately trying to create a frenzy of violence, or were simply trying to arouse the Hutu to defend themselves against armed Tutsis who were trying to overthrow the Hutu government.

The three-year trial detailed how the hugely popular RTLM station turned into a messenger of death. Copies of Mr. Ngeze’s newspaper showed it relentlessly denigrated the Tutsi and suggested on its cover that the machete was the best way to deal with them.

The judges found that the station and newspaper branded all Tutsi, armed or unarmed, as the enemy. They quoted a witness who testified: “What RTLM did was to spread petrol throughout the country little by little, so that one day it would be able to set fire to the whole country.”

In sentencing Mr. Nahimana, Navanethem Pillay, the presiding judge, said “Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.” To Mr. Ngeze, the newspaper owner, she said: “Instead of using the media to promote human rights, you used it to attack and destroy human rights.” She called Mr. Barayagwiza, an extremist political leader, the linchpin of the three men’s conspiracy to incite genocide.

The court also found that Mr. Barayagwiza distributed a truckload of weapons used by Hutus to kill Tutsis and that, in one town, Mr. Ngeze ordered Hutu militias to murder Tutsis.

As gangs took to the streets with nail-studded clubs and sharpened sticks, the radio broadcasts grew increasingly chilling, court records show. One RTLM announcer advised: “Look at a person’s height and his physical appearance. Just look at his small nose and then break it.”

Another broadcaster discovered hundreds of famished Tutsis hiding in the dormitory of an Islamic center in Kigali. A survivor testified that the station announced that armed Tutsi fighters were in the mosque.

By the next morning, the Hutu militia had herded the Tutsi into nearby houses and lobbed grenades inside, the witness said.

Two months later, RTLM announced on the air that incredibly, still more Tutsis had fled to the mosque, hoping for refuge.

“I went there to take a look and saw that they looked like cattle for the slaughter,” the broadcaster said. “I don’t know whether they have already been slaughtered today or whether they will be slaughtered tonight. I feel they are all going to perish.”

10 Years Later in Rwanda, the Dead Are Ever Present

BY MARC LACEY

February 26, 2004

MURAMBI, Rwanda — If, for whatever reason, one has the desire to relive the horror of the Rwandan massacre of 10 years ago, Emmanuel Murangira is the man to see.

Mr. Murangira, 48, is a survivor of a schoolyard blood bath that killed tens of thousands of people seeking refuge on the hilltop campus of a technical school here that has become one of the country’s many memorials to the dead. He walks soberly and silently as he guides visitors down the hallways. He unlocks classroom after classroom and pushes open the doors.

“This is genocide,” he says.

Inside, the rooms are full of the partially preserved remains of hundreds of those who were killed by Hutu extremists. The stench is overpowering. The scene is worse still.

Closer inspection of the remains, which have been treated with a traditional substance to slow decomposition, reveals exactly in what manner many of them died.

A woman has her arms over her face, as if protecting herself from attack. One of her forearms has been hacked off. Another, a youngster, has a thin crack across his skull, the imprint of a machete.

All across Rwanda, there are similar scenes of butchery, preserved by survivors just as they were. But with the 10th anniversary of the mass killing approaching in April, the Rwandan authorities are working to bury the bones while still preserving the memories of the estimated 800,000 Tutsi, who make up a minority in the country, and moderate Hutus who died.

“We want the memorials to be centers for the exchange of ideas, not collections of bones,” said Ildephonse Karengera, the country’s director of memorials.

But just what to do with all the remains is the question. Some want the bones displayed for as long as they last as evidence of what happened, just in case doubters emerge. But Rwandans traditionally bury their dead and some people say it is disrespectful to leave so many bones and bodies exposed.

A compromise is emerging, one that calls for burying more bodies without sanitizing the horror of what occurred.

“For those who say it is undignified to show bones, we’re burying them, in a sense, behind dark glass,” said Dr. James Smith, who runs Beth Shalom Holocaust Memorial Center in Britain and is working with the Rwandan government to revamp some of its memorials. “For those who say it is necessary to see the death, we’re accommodating them, too.”

The memorials are just one part of Rwanda’s attempt to recover from the events of 1994. The Tutsi-led government that now runs Rwanda has eliminated ethnicity from identity cards and made it a crime to say or do anything that can be construed as “divisionist.”

As for prosecuting those who killed, an international tribunal is slowly working its way through the big fish while Rwandan courts handle the lieutenants. With too many offenders to possibly try, President Paul Kagame recently released tens of thousands of people from jail and ordered them to face community trials, known as gacacas.

Those proceedings, which will begin countrywide in the coming months, are already having one unforeseen effect. Defendants are pointing out with more specificity where the killing occurred, and more remains are being found. Some bodies were dumped into latrines. Others have spent the last decade in swamps. Mass graves are being dug up, as well.

Rwanda hopes the 10th anniversary will attract worldwide attention to the country, its past but also its attempts to recover. On the morning of April 7, the date the killing began in earnest, the government is planning a somber march through the city, followed by 10 minutes of silence. The main memorial in Kigali will officially open its doors.

The federal government intends to focus its attention on a handful of main memorials. Local jurisdictions will maintain other sites. But locals will be encouraged to begin using some properties again, despite the unimaginable things that happened there.

“Everybody wants a memorial,” Mr. Karengera said. “But the whole country can’t be covered with memorials. We’re a small country. We can’t live with that kind of chaos.”

Thanks to donations from Rwanda’s former colonial power, Belgium, and the foundation run by former President Bill Clinton, work is under way on an education center at the school in Murabi that will tell the story of the killings without offering up so much first-hand evidence.

Mr. Murangira narrowly escaped death himself. He was shot in the head during the attack on the school. But somehow, hidden under corpses and bleeding from his head, he managed to live.

There were only three other survivors that day and Mr. Murangira, with a deep indentation in his forehead from where the bullet was removed, wants to make sure that the attack is never forgotten. The smell, the sight, he can deal with that.

“Those who smell are my relatives,” he said. “How can I mind?”

All the same, Mr. Murangira is thrilled that a permanent memorial will soon take the place of his ad hoc effort to keep the victims’ memories alive. “It’s hard for me to be here,” he said. “But I cannot leave before they put things in order.”

A similar overhaul is planned for the church in Ntarama, west of Kigali, where the space between the pews is filled with human remains and bloody clothes. In the back, survivors of the massacre here have lined up skulls, reserving a special row for the children.

“I want people to see the bones,” said Pacific Rutaganda, 48, who survived the church slaughter but lost his sisters, parents and in-laws inside. “I don’t want them buried away. There is no way if you see this that you can say genocide never happened. Genocide happened.”

He then began pointing at the skulls, indicating the weapon used to kill each person. “This is an ax,” he said, noting a huge gash in the temple of one victim. “This is a bullet. Here’s an arrow and here’s a club.”

Dancilla Nyirabanzungu said her family was somewhere in the church. She lost her husband, 2 children and 15 other relatives in April 1994.

Pregnant at the time, she survived because bodies collapsed on top of her and the killers assumed she was dead, too.

Soon afterward, though, she gave birth to a boy, whom she named Hakizimana, or Only God Can Save.

He is nearly 10 now, and he knows little about what happened in the year of his birth. He knows that his father died with all the others in the church. And he knows his mother is drawn to the place, sitting on the front step just about every day.

But for him, the church yard is a playground, one that attracts many visitors. “People keep coming,” he said.

Extremist Hutu Officials Blamed in ‘94 Rwanda Assassination

BY JOSH KRON

January 12, 2010

Extremist Hutus in Rwanda’s government in 1994 were responsible for shooting down a plane carrying the Rwandan president, who was also a Hutu, in a premeditated attack that set off a spiral of violence that led to genocide, according to a report released Monday by the current Rwandan government.

The report, requested by President Paul Kagame, accused members of the Rwandan armed forces of firing surface-to-air missiles at a private jet that was carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi as they were returning from peace talks in Tanzania on April 6, 1994.

The report, a result of more than two years of research, including more than 500 interviews and input from British ballistics experts, also includes allegations about the French military that are related to the assassination.

The role of the crash in catapulting Rwanda, a tiny central African country, into violence that left about 800,000 minority Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead is well documented. But the question of who shot down the president’s airplane had remained a matter of dispute.

The current government, which is mostly Tutsi, and many independent historians have long contended that senior members of the Hutu-dominated government plotted to kill Mr. Habyarimana to set off ethnic violence. That hypothesis remains a cornerstone of the current government’s legitimacy and historical narrative.

Critics, though, have contended that the Kagame government’s reluctance to investigate the plane crash implied doubts about who was really responsible. These critics view the report’s conclusions as unsurprising.

A French judge in 2006 accused Rwanda’s ruling elite, including Mr. Kagame, of being complicit in the plane’s destruction, an allegation that led Rwanda to suspend diplomatic relations. Some members of the current government have since been arrested on charges of plotting the assassination.

Rwanda has accused France of working with the former Hutu-dominated government during Rwanda’s civil war. The report offers many details of France’s relations with the government in 1994, including an assertion that French soldiers were deployed near the place from which the missiles that brought down the president’s plane were launched.

The two countries resumed diplomatic relations late last year, days after Rwanda was admitted to the Commonwealth, an association of 54 countries. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is scheduled to visit Rwanda in February.

Life Sentences in Rwanda Genocide Case

BY MARLISE SIMONS

June 24, 2011

PARIS — A United Nations tribunal on Friday handed a former government minister and her son life imprisonment for their roles in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, finding them guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including multiple rapes. The former minister, who had been in charge of family and women’s affairs, is the first woman to be convicted of genocide by an international tribunal.

Four others at the joint trial were also convicted Friday by the court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is based in Arusha, Tanzania.

Although other women have been similarly sentenced by local courts in Rwanda, the conviction of the former minister, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 65, stands out because of her position. The court found that as family minister, she had used her political power to help abduct and kill uncounted Tutsi men, women and children alike in her home district of Butare in southern Rwanda.

The court said that in her region, she had issued orders to the feared Interahamwe, the Hutu militia, whose mission it was to hunt and kill as many ethnic Tutsis as possible.

The three-month killing frenzy across Rwanda in the summer of 1994 left more than 500,000 people dead, most of them ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

Butare, which had a wide mix of Hutu and Tutsi people, was the scene of much brutality. In their summary, which was streamed by video from the court, the tribunal judges cited the example of a massacre at the Mugombwa Church, which was filled with people seeking refuge from the killings.

Armed assailants attacked the church, bombarding it with grenades. “As those taking shelter escaped into the courtyard of the church, they were slaughtered. This two-day attack resulted in the death of hundreds, if not thousands, of Tutsis,” the summary said.

The government minister’s son, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, who was in his early 20s and a student at the time, also was found guilty of helping to organize the massacres in Butare, where he had joined his mother and became a militia leader.

The court found that Mr. Ntahobali, together with militia and soldiers, had been stationed at one particular roadblock, near Hotel Ihuliro, that was “the site of numerous beatings, rapes and killings.”

Both mother and son have said they were not guilty of any charges.

As the presiding judge read from a summary of the verdict, he described instances of Mrs. Nyiramasuhuko and her son acting in tandem. For example, he said the two, accompanied by militia and soldiers, made visits to the Butare government offices where many Tutsis had sought shelter.

The two went there “to abduct hundreds of Tutsis; many were physically assaulted, raped, abducted and taken away to various places in Butare, where they were killed,” the judge said.

“Both Nyiramasuhuko and Ntahobali ordered killings,” he said. “They also ordered rapes. Ntahobali further committed rapes, and Nyiramasuhuko aided and abetted rapes and is responsible as a superior.”

In earlier verdicts, the Rwanda tribunal had found that rape was used as part of genocide, but in this case they charged the counts of rape as a crime against humanity and a war crime.

Mrs. Nyiramasuhuko is the first woman to be found guilty by an international tribunal not only of genocide, but also of rape, because of her “responsibility as a superior.”

At the tribunal trying those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, the only woman suspect, Biljana Plavsic, a Bosnian Serb leader and a former Bosnian president, was also charged with genocide. She had been a member of the collective presidency of Bosnia from 1990 to 1992.

But the genocide charge was dropped after she pleaded guilty to persecutions of Bosnian Muslims. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The United Nations-backed courts dealing with crimes in Cambodia and in Sierra Leone has had one female suspect, Ieng Thirith, a former minister of social affairs under the Khmer Rouge regime, who has since gone on trial in the Cambodia court for her role in the genocide committed while the regime was in power from 1975 to 1979.

The judgments on Friday concluded a trial that began 10 years ago, an uncommonly long time even by the standards of war crimes trials.

The judges said the court had heard from 189 witnesses and dealt with 13,000 pages of evidence. They said they had written a final judgment of 1,500 pages.

The court also handed a life sentence to Elie Ndayambaje, a former mayor of Muganza commune. Alphonse Nteziryayo, a former military police commander and prefect of Butare, received a 30-year term; Sylvain Nsabimana, another former prefect of Butare, got a term of 25 years; and Joseph Kanyabashi, a former mayor of Ngoma commune, was sentenced to 35 years.

Rwandan Is Convicted in 1994 Killings

BY JOSH KRON

November 17, 2011

KAMPALA, Uganda — It was one of the most notorious cases in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In a normally sleepy lakeside town, more than 2,000 Tutsis driven from their homes accepted a local priest’s offer of refuge in his church. But it was a ruse, and after days of siege the building was bulldozed, killing them all.

About 4,000 other Tutsis were slaughtered in Kivumu, one of the bloodiest killing fields in the campaign to eradicate the ethnic minority, whom Hutu leaders called “cockroaches.”

On Thursday, Kivumu’s former mayor, Grégoire Ndahimana, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, the 43rd conviction by the special United Nations tribunal covering the Rwandan genocide as it prepares to wrap up its mission. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The Rwandan government saluted the verdict but expressed dismay at the sentence.

“We welcome the conviction of Grégoire Ndahimana, but think the court has been too lenient in sentencing,” said Martin Ngoga, Rwanda’s chief prosecutor. “The judgment does not fully appreciate the role in the genocide of local authorities like Ndahimana, who were very instrumental in the killings.”

The tribunal’s work has cemented many of the grim particulars of the storm of ethnic hatred that left more than 800,000 dead nationwide. Still, some suspects remain on the loose, and some critics have argued that the tribunal failed to investigate the current Rwandan government for its own abuses in the process of pacifying the country.

Mr. Ndahimana hid in neighboring Congo for 15 years, spreading further violence as a member of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., a rebel group primarily made up of fugitive Rwandan Hutus. The United States lists the group as a terrorist organization. He was arrested in 2009 by a special team of Congolese authorities and United Nations special operatives after the governments of Rwanda and Congo joined forces with the United Nations to oust the rebel Hutus.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

THE 1994 RWANDAN GENOCIDE

2 African Leaders Die, U.N. Says; Rocket May Have Downed Plane

Troops Rampage in Rwanda; Dead Said to Include Premier

Anarchy Rules Rwanda's Capital and Drunken Soldiers Roam City

Heart of Rwanda's Darkness: Slaughter at a Rural Church

Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwanda Killings 'Genocide'

Shattered Nation: Rwanda Now Faces Painful Ordeal of Rebirth

Rwanda's Past Again Vies to Be Prologue

Crisis Points Up Tough Choices for Tribunal on Rwanda

Court Convicts 3 in 1994 Genocide Across Rwanda

10 Years Later in Rwanda, the Dead Are Ever Present

Extremist Hutu Officials Blamed in '94 Rwanda Assassination

Life Sentences in Rwanda Genocide Case

Rwandan Is Convicted in 1994 Killings

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