A People Betrayed

The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide

Linda Melvern

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786995476
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

Events in Rwanda in 1994 mark a landmark in the history of modern genocide. Up to one million people were killed in a planned public and political campaign. In the face of indisputable evidence, the UN Security Council failed miserably in its response. In this classic of investigative journalism, Linda Melvern tells the compelling story of what really happened, revealing both the scale, speed and intensity of the unfolding genocide, as well as exposing the governments and individuals who could have prevented what was happening, if they had chosen to act. The book also tells the unrecognised heroism of those who stayed on during the genocide - from volunteer peacekeepers to courageous NGO workers. Twenty-five years on from one of the darkest episodes in modern history, A People Betrayed is a shocking indictment of how Rwanda was ignored then and how today it is remembered in the West.

1 | GENOCIDE, APRIL 1994

§ The people arrived in small groups, emerging slowly from the eucalyptus trees at the back of the school. Some of them were wounded. There was a girl, aged about six, with a machete wound in her head, and a boy with a gaping hole in his shoulder from a bullet. He did not cry. One man had a hand almost severed from a machete blow. Other people arrived at the front gate and some were running in terror, sometimes with militia in pursuit.

Soon there were families camped out in the classrooms, and when these became overcrowded people began to huddle together in groups on the playing field. They were on UN territory, which they believed no one would dare violate. Outside the school gates the militia brandished their machetes and hand grenades. They cruised around in jeeps, drinking beer, hurling vulgarities and chanting ‘Pawa, pawa’, ‘power’, for Hutu Power.¹ The notorious Café de Gatenga, where militia congregated, was near by.

It was Friday, 8 April 1994. Here in Kicukiro, and all over the city, there were people fleeing in terror, to churches, to schools, to hospitals and to wherever they saw the blue United Nations flag, which was where peacekeepers were billeted. The best equipped and trained peacekeepers were from Belgium, providing the backbone of the mission known as the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). There were 450 Belgians, and they were spread out in fourteen different locations all over the city. The largest group was located at this technical school, the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO), run by Catholic Salesian Fathers. It comprised ninety Para-commandos from the second battalion of Flawinne, among the elite of the Belgian army. These soldiers were responsible for the central Kigali sector. Their code name was ‘Beverly Hills’ and their commander was Lieutenant Luc Lemaire. He had been in Rwanda for two weeks.

On the face of it, their assignment was unambiguous. It was classic peacekeeping, the provision of a neutral buffer between two enemies. A three-year civil war had ended and the UN was to oversee the peace agreement. For this to work effectively there had to be the consent of the parties; they would take part in joint patrols with the Rwandan army and gendarmes. Lemaire said nothing had gone right from the beginning: ‘It was obvious to us that the gendarmes were playing around with UNAMIR … in the end we stopped telling them the details of our patrols.’²

Lemaire welcomed the people, although he wondered how, with so little ammunition, he could protect them.³ There were explosions near by and the sound of grenades and shooting. Then the shock news came, over the UNAMIR Motorola, that ten Belgian Para-commandos had been murdered by Rwandan soldiers. It had seemed impossible. The message urged them to continue their mission and to try to preserve life.⁴ But Lemaire knew they could all be targets now and he tried to reassure the younger members of the contingent.

Lemaire told his commanding officers about the people at the school. He told them explosions could be heard all day and that a huge sweep of ethnic cleansing was taking place.⁵ He estimated the number of people sheltering at the ETO to be several hundred. It was his duty to protect them, he was told.⁶ Lemaire ordered defensive positions built around the perimeter fence. More people were arriving all the time. The people were traumatized, terrified, cold and hungry.

The food that priests had provided soon ran out. There was not enough water. There were insufficient medical supplies. Lemaire told headquarters that they had stopped treating the sick and wounded in order to keep the required reserves necessary for all UN personnel.⁷ He telephoned the local offices of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He was told that it was impossible for anyone to get through the roadblocks to come to their aid.

A radio message came on Saturday, 9 April, in which Lemaire was ordered to prepare his men to leave; he was told that the entire Belgian contingent was pulling out of Rwanda. This was unbelievable. The people at ETO were all at risk from the militia. He radioed to ask what would happen to them.⁸ No one had an answer. Lemaire asked a bourgmestre to assemble the crowd, and he stood on a chair to explain to the people that while the UN flag was flying over the school they were safe, but that this was not going to last.⁹ He told them that the civil war had resumed and that the politicians in Brussels had decided to withdraw their soldiers from the UN mission. He advised them to disperse, to slip away under cover of darkness. The people were outraged and many of them pleaded for rescue, to be taken to UNAMIR headquarters a few miles away. Some people made plans to block the exits should the soldiers try to leave. There were several people who approached Lemaire later and asked whether, in the event of a pull-out, he would shoot them first, telling him that a bullet was preferable to being cut to pieces with a machete.

Lemaire spoke with a senior officer in the Rwandan army, Colonel Leonidas Rusatira, who came to the school.¹⁰ Rusatira was the head of a Rwandan military academy, the Ecole Supérieure Militaire (ESM), and had been in government as the Director of the Cabinet in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lemaire asked Rusatira whether, when the Belgians withdrew, he would make sure that Rwandan soldiers looked after the people. ‘I thought this man might be enough of a human being to protect them,’ said Lemaire. Rusatira said he had no soldiers at his command. Nevertheless, he brought sacks of rice to the school, although there was only enough for the children.

Lemaire considered escorting everyone to the headquarters of the UN mission, but he wondered whether there were enough peacekeepers to look after them even there. To move the people in small groups would require more than ninety soldiers. They risked attack en route.

§ On Sunday, 10 April, Lemaire was relieved to see French troops, but they had flown to Rwanda with orders only to get French nationals and Rwandan VIPs out of the country. The French soldiers, who were able to drive freely round the city, chose expatriates from the ETO crowds, selecting only three French and several Italian nationals. This angered Lemaire, and he told the French that they could at least take all the Europeans. Some 150 people were prepared for departure.

That day Lemaire was ordered to send soldiers to Gitarama, a town some forty miles away, to escort Belgian nationals to Kigali airport. He argued that this would diminish the security of the Rwandans he was protecting. The operation was cancelled, but for other reasons.

Lemaire’s final order to withdraw from the ETO came on Monday, 11 April at 12.30. He faltered. He wanted the order confirmed. He said he contacted the most senior Belgian officers in order to be sure that his commanders knew what the consequences would be. The military log of the battalion records: ‘Leave 2000 refugees at “Beverly Hills”?’¹¹ Colonel Luc Marchal, the commander of the Kigali sector of UNAMIR, confirmed the order.

‘I did not want to leave,’ Lemaire said some years later. ‘But I did not think there was any other solution.’

All that was left was to plan the departure. If the people found out what was happening there might be a riot, so Lemaire decided the peacekeepers would try to leave quietly, as though going out on a mission. By chance a French jeep was passing, and as it drove on to the playing field, its soldiers were applauded by the crowds. They thanked the French for their protection. Then one by one the UN vehicles slowly began to leave the school grounds. Soon it was obvious what was happening, that the peacekeepers were sneaking away. ‘We could not believe what they were doing … just abandoning us when they knew the place was surrounded … There were thousands of unarmed refugees … it seemed unthinkable.’¹²

People tried to hang on to lorries but the Belgian soldiers brandished their weapons, and fired into the air. The French soldiers prevented people from getting too near to the UN peacekeepers. The French were promising that they would stay. But at 13.45 p.m., as the last Belgian soldier pulled out of the school, the French soldiers also began to leave. People were crying and screaming. The bourgmestre, a member of Rwanda’s Parti Social Démocrate (PSD), the centre-left opposition party, tried to calm everyone, and told them that they must defend themselves. ‘But we had no weapons, not even a stick,’ a survivor later recalled.

‘Not one minute after the UN left, the gendarmes and militia came,’ said a survivor. They were firing their weapons at the people and throwing grenades into the crowd. People were being chased by militiamen wielding machetes, clubs and spears. Some people could not run because they were too young, sick or elderly.¹³ Those recognized as Hutu were put to one side. The vice-president of the national committee of one of the militia groups, an agricultural engineer, Georges Rutaganda, was seen in a jogging suit, standing guard at a small entrance located on the side of the sports field. He was carrying a gun.¹⁴

In the crowd were pro-democracy opposition politicians and human rights activists, but the vast majority of people carried identification cards with the designation Tutsi. In the crowd was the minister of foreign affairs, Boniface Ngurinzira, who had helped to negotiate the peace agreement that had ended civil war and had provided for power-sharing. Two days earlier he had been rescued from his home by peacekeepers.

A large crowd estimated at more than two thousand people now made its way out of the gate with the intention of trying to reach UN headquarters a few kilometres away. But the column of people was stopped en route by members of the Para-commando battalion just near a factory, the Sonatube. They were all diverted, told that they were going to a place called Nyanza, where they would be safe.¹⁵ A pick-up truck filled with members of the Para-commando unit passed them. The commander of the Para-commando unit, Major Aloys Ntabakuze, was there and the refugees walked past Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, a senior official in the Ministry of Defence, who was watching from his car. These army officers were coordinating and controlling the situation.¹⁶

‘As we walked … the soldiers and militia terrorized us with their grenades and guns … they slapped and beat people up, stealing their money … it was a long walk and the militia were everywhere,’ a survivor recalled. ‘The Interahamwe [militia] were armed with machetes, clubs, axes, spears and nail-studded metal sticks. Some women were forcibly taken away and raped.’¹⁷ There was a torrential downpour and the people were wet and shivering in the cold.

At one of the crossroads, leaning on his vehicle, was Rutaganda, who was watching the proceedings. At one moment the soldiers ordered the people to sit down and cursed and insulted them for being Tutsi, telling them they were going to die. Then the convoy moved on again. ‘As we walked along, the militia were hitting people with machetes. Some of the people who were wounded fell down and were trampled upon.’¹⁸

They came to a crossroads that led to Nyanza-Rebero, and when they reached a gravel pit near the Nyanza primary school they were told once more to sit down. It was late afternoon. A witness said that Rutaganda was instructing the militia how to proceed; there were hundreds of militia coming from different directions and they had machetes. Rutaganda directed them into position. One man carried a sack filled with grenades. The Tutsi who tried to escape by passing themselves off as Hutu were denounced and were killed on the spot.

‘The Presidential Guard were watching us from a place that was higher than where we were,’ a survivor recalled. After about half an hour a grenade was thrown into the crowd. Then the soldiers started firing. Some people tried to break through the militia but were struck down with machetes. A witness would later testify how he saw his child on his wife’s back blown off by a grenade. ‘We were so stunned that no one cried out … it was only afterwards that you heard the voices moaning in agony … then the Interahamwe came in and started with the machetes, hammers, knives and spears.’ The survivors were mostly children who hid under the bodies. People in pain were told that they would be finished off quickly with a bullet if they paid money. Some girls were selected and their clothes removed and they were raped. The rapes continued well into the night. There were children crying over the bodies of their parents.

The next morning the militia came back to kill anyone found alive. The UN, said one of the survivors, had been their only hope of survival.¹⁹

Lemaire and his men ended that day at the airport. In the days to follow they provided military escorts for an emergency operation to get all expatriates out of Rwanda, with soldiers from France, Belgium and Italy – Para-commandos and parachute regiments, some of Europe’s elite brigades – specially flown in for that very purpose. Once this operation was complete, it was the turn of the Belgian peacekeepers to leave, and Captain Luc Lemaire and the ninety soldiers from the ETO were among the first to fly home. When they arrived in Brussels, and were greeted by TV news crews on the tarmac, one of them took out his combat knife and shredded his UN blue beret. In the next three months massacres like the one at the ETO became commonplace as thousands upon thousands of people were killed in circumstances similar to these – in churches, schools, hospitals, health clinics, in sports stadiums and at roadblocks. The killing was vicious, relentless and incredibly brutal. It took place in broad daylight. Far from trying to conceal what was happening the perpetrators and organizers of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi remained secure in the knowledge that there would be little international condemnation and that outside interference would be at a minimum.

The combination of revelations about the speed, scale and intensity of the genocide, the failure to intervene when it was threatened and the suppression of information about what was actually happening is a shocking indictment of govern...