Rwanda: International Genocide Expert Refutes Judge Bruguiere's Indictments
William Church
view author's other article
William Church
November 27, 2006
By Linda Melvern
Author of Conspiracy to Murder
We may never know who was responsible for shooting down the Mystère Falcon
jet under cover of darkness in the skies over Kigali at 8. 25 pm on 6 April
1994. Two African presidents, Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and the president
of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira were assassinated that night and almost
immediately afterwards, as the plane lay smouldering in the presidential
garden, there was a promise from the UN that an international enquiry would be
held. There was an imperative to find those responsible.
No international enquiry was ever held. The International Civil Aviation
Authority (ICAO) did not consider the attack on the plane to be a part of its
mandate. The aircraft was a state aircraft in its own territory and so was not
covered by the ICAO international convention. Only a flicker of interest was
shown at the ICAO, and only then at the request of Belgium. The attack on the
plane was discussed by the ICAO council on 25 April, 1994 and the minutes
record that the council president suspended further consideration until Belgium
could provide information. To this day, and although one of the best informed
governments about the realities in Rwanda, neither Belgium nor any other
government has provided information. Instead the mystery has deepened. There
has been a plethora of rumor and speculation about who planned the attack, who
fired the missiles and how under the cover of darkness the assassins fled the
scene.
One theory, that soldiers from the Rwandan army (FAR), downed the plan, was
reported almost immediately. In the intelligence headquarters of the Belgian
army (SRG), an enquiry was launched and in the days to follow a series of
secret reports from Belgian agents revealed how everyone seemed to believe that
Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, who had taken control in the chaos afterwards, was
responsible. This would support the current prosecution case at the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), where last November 2005,
Bagosora was accused directly of the missile attack. As a former commander of
the anti-aircraft battalion, he had been familiar with the flight paths and the
approaches of aircraft to the airport, the prosecutor had said.
The Belgian agents in Kigali in 1994 had two informers, one in contact with a
former Rwandan minister and the other a high-ranking officer of the Rwandan
armed forces. These informers claimed that Bagosora was behind the attack and
in a report to headquarters the agents wrote:
.everything points to the fact
that the perpetrators are part of the faction of the Bahutus inside the Rwandan
army, and this is strange
[it] leads us to believe that there was no
improvisation in the events. They also wrote that within half a hour of the
crash and well before the official announcement of the assassination over the
radio, ethnic cleansing had started inside the country, and was carried out
brutally on the basis of pre-established lists. The group responsible for this
was gravitating around the presidents wife, whose brothers and cousins had
become senior authorities or dignitaries in the regime. These high dignitaries
were involved in terror and money and it was difficult
for them to give up their privileges and advantages, the report noted.
The US also had information. In a declassified US State Department document,
dated 18 May, 1994, and addressed to Assistant Secretary of State George Moose
is the paragraph: Who killed the president? The assassins of Presidents
Habyarimana and Ntaryamira may never be known. The black box from the aeroplane
has probably been recovered by Rwandan government officials who controlled the
airport when the plane was shot down, or, according to unconfirmed reports, by
French military officials who later secured the airport and removed the body of
the French pilot from Habyarimanas plane after the crash.Information about
the downing of the jet was also made available to the journalist Colette
Braeckman, the Africa Editor of Belgiums Le Soir newspaper. In mid-June 1994
she received a letter from someone calling himself Thadée, who claimed to be
a militia leader in Kigali. He told her that two members of the French
Détachement dAssistance Militaire etlInstruction (DAMI) had
launched the missiles on behalf the Hutu Power CDR party (Coalition pour la
Défense de la République). Only four members of the CDR were involved. Those
who fired the missiles had worn Belgian army uniforms stolen from the hotel Le
Méridien. Members of the Presidential Guard spotted them leaving Masaka Hill
from where the missiles were fired. The missiles had been portable, probably
SAM, originally from the Soviet Union. Braeckman reported that in the three
days after the missile attack some 3,000 people living in the Masaka area were
murdered. The French academic Gérard Prunier, an expert on the Great Lakes
region of Africa, has spoken of white men on Masaka Hill on the evening of 6
April. Prunier has speculated that it might have been possible to hire
mercenaries to shoot down the plane. If mercenaries were involved Prunier
believes that the French mercenary Paul Barril would know them.
The presence in Rwanda of a French mercenary, Captain Paul Barril, does add
another dimension to the mystery. Barril was spotted in Kigali at the end of
1993, telling people that he had been taken on as an advisor to Habyarimana.
A former number two of the French Groupe dIntervention de la Gendarmerie
Nationale (GIGN), police special forces, he helped to create an anti-terrorist
cell in the Elysée Palace that answered only to President Mitterrand. Barril
had his own private security companies and had worked for Habyarimana since
1989, when he reorganised the intelligence service which operated from within
the Presidential Guard. Barril said he was in Kigali on 7 April. He claims to
be close to the French anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, whose
recently published report in Paris contains claims from Rwandan exiles,
claiming to be former RPF soldiers, who say they took part in the missile
attack on the orders of President Paul Kagame.
Yet more hearsay evidence comes from Jean Kambanda in his fascinating
confession to the ICTR. Kambanda, the prime minister in the interim government,
says that President Sese Seko Mobutu of neighbouring Zaire, (now DRC) had
warned Habyarimana not to go to Dar-Es-Salaam on 6 April. Mobuto said this
warning had come from a very senior official in the Elysée Palace in Paris.
There was a link between this warning, said Mobutu, and the subsequent suicide
in the Elysée of a senior high-ranking official working for President François
Mitterrand, an official who had killed himself on 7 April after learning about
the downing of the Falcon. This was François de Grossouvre, a presidential
advisor on African affairs.
One other notable episode comes in the night-time hours after the crash, with
an approach to the Canadian Force commander of the UN peacekeepers, Lt.-Gen
Roméo Dallaire, by two officers from the French military assistance mission in
Rwanda offering specialized help to investigate the missile attack. A French
military and technical team was available immediately in Bangui, the capital of
the Central African Republic, some six hours away, they told him. Dallaire
declined the offer insisting there would have to be an international enquiry.
That night Dallaire sent peacekeepers to the wreckage, but they were prevented
by Presidential Guard from reaching it. Dallaire also sent peacekeepers to the
place from where the missiles were probably fired. Nothing was found. It was
May before the UN got access to the plane. Only later would Dallaire learn that
RTLM, the Hutu Power radio station, had almost immediately broadcast that those
responsible for the death of the president were
from the RPF, and that Belgian UN troops had been in on the plot. This story
had spread like wildfire and Dallaire would later describe how it was broadcast
repeatedly. Nothing was done to counteract these broadcasts. In the morning of
April 7 ten UN peacekeepers from Belgium were murdered, lynched by Rwandan
soldiers who had been told they were part of the assassination plot.
More recently a new and crucial witness has emerged who has never before been
interviewed. In May, 1944, Collette Braeckman met an air traffic controller who
had been in the control tower on the night of the missile attack. This man gave
her a graphic description of events about how the presidential jet had approach
the runway and how three missiles had been fired from Masaka Hill. This
information directly challenges Bruguières Rwandan informants who claim that
two missiles were fired. And according to the air traffic controller, he was
the only person who knew the exact time the plane was to land, and that he had
given this information to the airport commander, Cyprien Sindano, a member of
the extremist Hutu Power, the CDR.
The continuing secrecy of western nations, the withholding of evidence and
the failure to conduct an international enquiry is shocking. There is much that
might be learned from a serious assessment of available information. Instead we
are left with hearsay, rumour, speculation and cover-up and we may never know
what really happened that night.
Copyright: Linda Melvern
Linda Melvern is the author of Conspiracy to Murder. The Rwandan Genocide
(Updated paperback. Verso, April 2006)
Sharangabo Rufagari
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