 |
| Ms. Judi Rever Canadian Freelance Journalist |
hunted down massive numbers of Hutu civilians, killing and burning them
in Akagera Park, according to a dozen former RPA soldiers and other
witnesses.
 |
| Joseph Matata CLIIR |
BRUSSELS –
Joseph Matata, a Rwandan farmer who became a human rights activist, was
in Belgium in April 1994 when the genocide began. But his children and
ethnic Tutsi wife were at home in Murambi. a village on Rwanda’s
eastern border. At dawn on April 12, a militia of Hutu extremists known
as the Interahamwe arrived at their house looking for blood. The
attackers quickly forced the family outdoors and sliced his wife’s back
with a machete. They then went after Matata’s 12-year-old daughter,
cutting her neck and face. The girl fell to the ground and lapsed into a
coma. A Hutu neighbor named John intervened as the militia started
beating three other children with clubs. When the attackers thought
they’d killed two Tutsis, they decided to move on.
the help of a local gendarme who knew the family, John managed to get
Matata’s wife and daughter to the nearest hospital, while his remaining
children found refuge with another neighbor who kept them safe by paying
off marauding bands of killers.
week later, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)– a Tutsi rebel army that
routed Hutu extremists and seized power – swept into Murambi and brought
Matata’s wife and daughter to a more equipped hospital in neighboring
Gahini, a village in the commune of Rukara, on the shores of Lake
Muhazi.
that, I have to thank the RPF,” Matata said dryly at a restaurant in
central Brussels, referring to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, (RPF) the
political wing of the RPA and current ruling party of Rwanda.
the RPF formed an emergency coalition government in late July at the
end of the genocide, flights resumed to the country and Matata was
finally able to get home. He headed straight to Gahini to pick up his
wife and daughter, who had temporarily moved into a house near the
hospital that had nursed them back to health.
was then that Matata heard a litany of other horrors that had occurred
in Gahini and in villages throughout the prefectures of Kibungo and
Byumba. Civilians began to tell him stories about systematic killings of
Hutus perpetrated by the RPA, the victorious army that had supposedly
halted the genocide.
“I was
grateful to the RPF for helping my family but I couldn’t ignore what I
was hearing,” Matata said, unable to finish the same glass of Leffe beer
over our three-hour encounter. “As someone who believed in human
rights I felt obliged to investigate the
allegations.”
the 1970s and early 1980s, Matata — a voluble yet linguistically
precise man — worked at the National Bank of Rwanda in Kigali and became
critical of the former Hutu regime and one-party rule of President
Juvenal Habyarimana. He later moved to Murambi and opened an
agricultural business. In November 1990 when the RPA first invaded
northern Rwanda from Uganda, he was accused of aiding the RPF, a charge
he denied, and was briefly thrown in jail. By 1991, he became a founding
member of ARDHO, the Rwandan Association for the Defense of Human
Rights and would later head CLIIR, the Brussels-based Centre to Fight
Impunity and Injustice in Rwanda, where he’s become a tireless
chronicler of the complex, unrepentantly violent history of Rwanda.
58-year-old Rwandan of mixed ethnicity stages weekly protests outside
the Rwandan embassy in Brussels and issues missives condemning
disappearances and arrests in his homeland, incidents largely ignored by
organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He
has become, among Belgium’s curious sanctum of Rwandan exiles, a lawful
Zorro-like figure and a one-man support network for Hutus and Tutsis
behind bars or in flight.
did not last long in Rwanda under the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose
power was just beginning to flourish amid the ruins of war in July 1994.
Within days of his return from Belgium to Rwanda, he interviewed dozens
of villagers in Gahini and other sectors, many who would later
disappear. He also visited 10 mass graves in the towns of Muhazi,
Kayonza and Kabarondo. Some of the bodies of Hutus in those graves were
later burned or brought to mass graves containing Tutsis killed by the
Interahamwe before the RPA arrived.
witness that assisted him with the probe was one of Matata’s former
employees on a farm he owned in Murambi. This man, a Tutsi, had the
ghastly job of transporting corpses for the RPA in afougonnette – a kind of African taxi minibus – to mass graves.
“He was traumatized. Sometimes the victims loaded into the taxi weren’t even dead. They would still be moaning and crying.”
employee in question — whom Matata described as a sensitive person
–eventually had problems with the RPF and was forced to flee the
country.
Matata’s initial investigation, witnesses described how the RPA combed
the hillside. “The RPA hunted people down like they would rabbit or
other prey. The soldiers did clean-up operations in the hills. They went
from house to house, shooting people.” Sometimes they used grenades, he
said.
Some people hid in banana groves or escaped to the adjacent forest, the Akagera National Park.
“Quite a few victims would see the soldiers coming and throw themselves into the lake and drown.”
The RPA also used another method — one of entrapment — to kill larger groups of people.
“They
asked people to gather in certain areas, in schools and markets. Those
who showed up at these meetings were given cooking equipment, clothes
and food. These people were told to spread the word about other
meetings. When larger groups of people showed up the RPA used grenades
or guns to kill them.”
Matata contends
the RPA called Hutus to meetings and slaughtered them in other areas of
the country as well. “The massacres were intensive and massive.”
was unable to complete a full investigation in Kibungo — with names and
numbers of victims — because his life was threatened on several
occasions. Within weeks he returned to Kigali and was forced in early
1995 to leave Rwanda for good. Nevertheless, his truncated work was
eventually bolstered by the findings of a man named Robert Gersony.
Gersony,
a consultant with extensive experience in African war zones, was hired
by the United Nations to conduct a survey on the feasibility of Rwandan
refugees returning to their homes after the genocide. Like many who
descended on Rwanda in the aftermath of genocide, Gersony and his team
were initially sympathetic to the RPF, and were granted access to 91
sites in more than 40 communes around the country. They conducted
interviews with 200 individuals and held another 100 small group
discussions.
But what they found was
disturbing enough to throw the United Nations into complete disarray,
findings that necessitated nothing sort of a paradigm shift in
international agency thought.
In September 1994, Gersony’s team discovered RPA soldiers appeared to have carried out genocide against Hutu civilians.
A
US State Department cable dealing with Gersony’s findings was sent to
then US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, and US
embassies in the region. The cable, dated September 1994, read: “(Hutu)
refugees were called for meetings on peace and security. Once gathered,
the RPA would move in and carry out the killing. In addition to group
killings, house-to-house searches were conducted; individuals hiding out
in the swamps were hunted; returnees as well as the sick, the elderly,
the young and males between 18-40 (years old) were victims. So many
civilians were killed that burial of bodies is a problem. In some
villages, the team estimated that 10,000 or more a month have killed
since April.”
Another cable sent by the
UN peace monitoring mission, UNAMIR, quoted Gersony using stronger
language to describe the crimes committed by the RPA against Hutus.
“Gersony
put forward evidence of what he described as calculated, pre-planned,
systematic atrocities and genocide against Hutus by the RPA whose
methodology and scale, he concluded, (30,000 massacres) could only have
been part of a plan implemented as a policy from the highest echelons of
the government. In his view, these were not individual cases of revenge
and summary trials but a pre-planned, systematic genocide against the
Hutus. Gersony staked his 25-year reputation on his conclusions which he
recognized were diametrically opposite to the assumptions made, so far,
by the UN and the international community.”
The
authenticity of the UNAMIR cable has been confirmed by two individuals:
an ICTR lawyer and a person who took part in discussions of Gersony’s
findings.
The cable, indexed and used as
evidence at the UN International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR), was
written by UNAMIR official Shaharyar Khan and was sent to UN
peacekeeping chief at the time, Kofi Annan. Khan went on to say that he
did not believe the killings were part of a ‘pre-ordained, systematic
massacre ordered from the top’ but admitted that the UN was now ‘engaged
in a damage limitation exercise.”
The
United Nations and the United States chose political subterfuge.
Gersony’s field notes were ultimately buried in a concerted effort to
protect the post genocide government led by Paul Kagame. No further
investigations were ever pursued, and those suspected of being behind
the slaughter of innocents were never questioned. *
Before
he left Rwanda, Matata tried to ascertain who was responsible for the
slaughter, at least on a local level. In due course he discovered that
authority emanated from a lieutenant colonel that would later go on to
lead the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping operation.
“That
commander was Patrick Nyamvumba,” Matata said ruefully. “The soldiers
who massacred civilians were under his responsibility.”
 |
| General Nyamvumba Patrick |
Lt General Nyamvumba is a highly respected figure on the international
military stage, and currently Rwanda’s chief of defense staff. In 2009,
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon appointed him commander of the
UN/African Union hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), a post he held until
June this year, when Ban praised the general for his “dedication and
invaluable service” provided over four years.
four battalions deployed in UNAMID, the world’s largest and arguably
most important peacekeeping mission at an estimated 22,000 international
troops. The country’s crucial contribution to peacekeeping in an
unstable but politically important region such as Sudan has provided
Kigali with prestige in the hallowed halls of the United Nations,
according to analysts. Indeed, in October 2012, Rwanda secured a
rotating seat on the UN Security Council – and is generally accustomed
to receiving cover against allegations of serious breaches in
humanitarian law at home and in neighboring Democratic Republic of
Congo.
 |
| General Kazura Jean-Bosco |
how did Lt General Nyamvumba rise to the highest echelons of Rwanda’s
prodigious military? And more importantly how was he chosen as a chief
peacekeeper by the United Nations, a global body whose enshrining
principles are based on international law and security? And how did
Nyamvumba’s comrade-in-arms, General Jean Bosco Kazura, come to secure
his role in June as force commander of the UN’s newly created
peacekeeping force in Mali, MINUSMA? Just who is Kazura, and how did
this Tutsi officer originally from Burundi rise to prominence within the
RPA?
the last several months, a dozen former RPA soldiers and officers in
Africa, Europe and North America have quietly agreed to share their
knowledge of what these men did two decades ago along a swathe of
Rwandan territory that stretched from the border of Uganda to that of
Tanzania. And another young man — a Tutsi genocide survivor who was a
teenager at the time – has related chilling memories of Nyamvumba and
some of his men operating in an area on the western rim of the Lake
Victoria basin, a seemingly primeval paradise of red rutted paths,
papyrus reeds and bourbon coffee trees that belies its history as a
killing ground.
Kamanzi, the witness in
question, has a luminous face and a reluctantly determined demeanor. In
late April 1994, because he knew some of the young Tutsi soldiers based
in Gahini, he was entrusted with collecting livestock on abandoned
properties seized by the RPA. He remembers Nyamvumba as a pleasant man
who walked with a limp. “He presented well. He was calm and often
smiling. He was the ground commander. But soldiers were definitely
comfortable around him.”
Nyamvumba, whom Kamanzi called the
colonel, often stayed in the most beautiful house in Gahini overlooking
Lake Muhazi — the first dwelling on the left on a road leading to the
top of the hill. The witness went to Nyamvumba’s residence several times
when he was there. It was customary for young women to be milling
around; one well-known girl became Nyamvumba’s girlfriend.
regularly accompanied soldiers when they ransacked buildings, grabbing
merchandise, food and money. “It was wartime. We were trying to get by,”
he explained.
But it was during
operations, going house-to-house and into the fields — the teenager saw
first hand what the soldiers’ actual objectives were. Over a period of
two months, from late April onward, Kamanzi accompanied soldiers on
their missions at least two or three times a week. The soldiers referred
to the work as screening or cleaning out the enemy.
“I
saw soldiers kill people. Sometimes I stayed back in the vehicle
because I really did not want to see what was happening,” he said. “I
was frightened to see someone killed in front of me.”
The soldiers, many of them barely out of their teens, called the unarmed Hutus Interahamwe.
“But
what is sad is that these were villagers,” he explained. “They weren’t
Interahamwe. Many of them were working in the fields. Sometimes the
parents had fled and children were left at home alone. Unfortunately the
soldiers killed the children.”
Kamanzi remembers one traumatic incident early on, in a village near the Akagera park.
“We
went into a house. No one was there except a little girl about five
years old. The soldiers asked her where her parents were. She told them
they had gone into the fields. A few of us headed back to our vehicle
but one soldier stayed behind. After a few seconds I heard a gunshot.”
“The
soldier shot her dead. He later told me she was the daughter of an
Interahamwe. He didn’t even think that she was just a little girl.”
“At that point I wondered: did these people come to save us?”
Colonel
Nyamvumba rarely accompanied soldiers during operations. But there was
one incident, Kamanzi recalled, where they’d received word that Hutus in
a particular village might be armed. On that day, the ground commander,
his escorts and a team of soldiers went in separate vehicles to the
location, eventually surrounding a property there. Kamanzi went along
too. Nyamvumba gave orders in Swahili, a language the teenager did not
understand, and he and Nyamvumba stayed behind a few metres while
soldiers fired shots for an extended period of time. Like in every
mission he was privy to, there was no combat; soldiers just proceeded to
kill.
Former soldiers and
officers explained that before April 1994, Nyamvumba had been a middle
ranking officer with very little if any command experience; he was above
all the chief instructor of the RPA’s training wing, which shifted from
the Gatunda township near the Ugandan border to Gabiro at the edge of
the Akagera Park after the genocide was unleashed. The battalion that
was created under his direction to euphemistically screen, mop up, or comb the
hillsides of Hutu civilians was considered highly clandestine. Oscar
operated in areas already cleared of insurgents, in the rear of the
RPA’s 157th mobile force led by the notorious Fred Ibingira, now a Lt. General, and the 7th brigade under William Bagire.
interviewed for this story said Nyamvumba supervised this battalion,
which consisted of several companies of young soldiers drawn principally
from RPA’s High Command – consisting of Kagame’s escorts — and soldiers
from the training wing. Nyamvumba received direct instructions from
Kagame, according to senior officers familiar with the operations.
operations were conceived, planned and coordinated by Kagame and the
Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), along with intelligence
staff from High Command and the training wing, officers alleged.
intelligence officer that worked directly for Kagame was Silas
Udahemuka, who helped coordinate operations. Udahehumka was assisted by
three other Kagame escorts: Innocent Gasana, Jackson Mugisha, and
Charles Matungo.
At the time, DMI was
headed by Kayumba Nyamwasa, long considered second to Kagame in Rwanda’s
military hierarchy. General Nyamwasa fell out with his boss in 2010,
fled to South Africa and survived an assassination attempt by suspected
Rwandan agents. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
central figure from DMI that helped execute was Jackson Rwahama. He
advised, inspected and attended secret meetings, officers explained.
“Rwahama was a senior killer from the Ugandan army, had worked in
intelligence for Idi Amin,” one officer said, referring to Uganda’s
ruthless dictator during the 1970s whose regime was marked by egregious
human rights abuses and political repression.
“Rwahama
helped coordinate the killings. Remember Nyamvumba was young at the
time and had little experience. They asked themselves ‘how are we going
to kill a lot of people in a short period of time before anyone knows
about it?’ Rwahama was the best person to plan this,” the officer
confided.
and soldiers confirmed that in addition to working alongside DMI in a
scheme to clear Hutus from these prefectures, Nyamvumba had at least
three deputy commanders overseeing death squads. They were John Birasa,
Emmanuel Butera and Jean Bosco Kazura.
By
all accounts, Kazura was an intellectual with a passion for soccer and
little battle experience apart from briefly serving in a battalion known
as Delta Mobile. Originally from Burundi, he spoke fluent French,
English and Kinyarwanda, was commissioned in 1992 and joined RPA High
Command where he became a translator for Kagame, regularly listening to
Radio France Internationale and greeting important visitors that came to
see Kagame and RPF chairman Alex Kanyarengwe at Arusha House at the
RPF’s military base, Mulindi, before the genocide.
Immediately
after the assassination – which would ignite the genocide and spark a
killing frenzy predominantly against Tutsi civilians — Nyamvumba left
the Karama training wing near the Ugandan border, along with
intelligence staff and several nominees of the main rank and file there.
The intelligence staff that went with Nyamvumba were Dan Munyuza,
Rwakabi Kakira and Kalemara alias Kiboko. Leaving his official job as
chief instructor, Nyamvumba and his men ‘started to sweep’ from Gatunda
and on to Ngarama, where they would make a temporary base.
According
to testimony, some of the first operations began along the eastern
border of the demilitarized zone, where the RPA had an upper hand in the
pre-genocide war of invasion. The RPF had lured Hutu peasants in this
area, with promises of salt, sugar, medicine and other basic
necessities. These were some of the first people to be caught and killed
in the RPA’s snare.
By the end of
April, the training wing – ostensibly run by Nyamvumba — was relocated
to Gabiro, at the edge of Akagera, a park originally spanning 2,500
square kilometres comprised of swamp, savannah and mountains.
Oscar battalion – as it eventually would be called — grew in small
numbers to an estimated 800 soldiers as the genocide wore on, with new
waves of Tutsi passouts from within Rwanda and surrounding countries.
The force would eventually be sent across the prefectures of Byumba and
Kibungo; localities targeted included Muvumba, Ngarama, Gituza, Bwisige,
Muhura, Murambi then on to Kibungo.
at the time in High Command and known to be close to Kagame, became
deputy commander of these operations, initially in Byumba. Then, sources
say, Kazura’s and Nyaumvumba’s men advanced toward Kibungo town, to
Kanyonza, Kabarondo and Rukira.
“The soldiers did this job deliberately,” said David, a former RPA officer.
David
is a loquacious, middle-aged Rwandan Tutsi living in exile. When he’s
not talking about Rwanda, his manner shifts easily between jovial and
ironic. Surprisingly, like so many Rwandans who’ve endured the horror of
genocide, his face betrays little of the emotional scars that lie
underneath. But his expressions change quickly. When he speaks of the
crimes that unfolded around him in eastern Rwanda, his mouth contorts
and his brow twists in trenches.
“The
soldiers were digging mass graves. They had the manpower to dig, to
burn,” David said. “There were some serial killers, people who were
trained just to kill, to exterminate. Others were there to see and get
rid of the dead.”
RPA would kill small groups of Hutus on the spot, he explained. But
with larger groups, attempts to separate them were made. Many were
brought by trucks to killing grounds in Akagera and were later shot or
stabbed. Some were starved for days then killed with hammers and hoes.
One
of the main killing centres was Nasho next to a lake of the same name,
on the park’s southern flank. The commanders moved around, depending on
the magnitude of operations.
was at times in Nasho overseeing those killings. Sometimes John Birasa
was there with Nyamvumba, who was working under Kagame’s orders,” David
pointed out. “This was something they were trying to do in secret, not
to alert other troops in the main fighting battalions.”
a guest lodge of more than 200 rooms that had once been the home of
Rwanda’s king — used by the RPF for screening, identifying and
eliminating Hutus, as soon as the genocide started.
Other
known killing grounds were located between five and 10 kilometres from
Gabiro deeper in the park, and at Rwata, some 30 kilometres from Gabiro
toward the Akagera River.
“From Gabiro,
Hutus could not escape; they were surrounded by soldiers. They were
thrown into mass graves dug with bulldozers. Then soldiers started
shooting at them,” an intelligence officer that received daily reports
of the operations said.
This
officer estimates that thousands of people died in this manner. He said
anywhere between 100 to 200 people were put onto lorries, and between 5
and 10 trucks went through Gabiro deeper into the park daily – at night
— for months.
Gabiro had the logistics:
bulldozers for digging, stocks of diesel and petrol to burn corpses,
and acid to dissolve the victims’ remains. The ashes were then mixed
with soil or placed into lakes in the park, according to sources.
By
June, at the height of the genocide, Kazura was in Rwamagana in
Kibungo, east of the capital. A soldier in High Command said Kazura was
an operational commander of about 100 soldiers that hunted down
civilians, killed them and dumped them in a pit in neighboring Rutonde.
was personally involved in carrying out and commanding and overseeing
those operations of hunting down and rounding up civilians, bringing
them to a detention house and taking them to the killing site,” said the
soldier, who was present during the murders.
In
one incident, Hutu women and children that had taken refuge in a
Catholic church in Rwamagana were taken to Rutonde, where they massacred
and thrown into a pit with Tutsi victims that had been killed by
Interahamwe earlier in the genocide, he noted.
Other
people, including men, were captured in neighboring areas and
eventually detained at a petrol station, before being killed and buried
in the pit.
“Women’s arms were tied
behind their backs with their pagnes (wraparound garments) and men were
tied with their shirts. They were taken to a detention centre at the
petrol station in Rwamagana. In the evening they were killed at the
station or were taken to the pit and killed there,” the soldier
described.
The soldier estimated that at
least 600 people were killed in this manner in Rwamagana alone, and
more than 2000 in total from outlying areas.
Another
soldier said by early July, Kazura was moving around, coming to
Rwamagana several times a week with his white Land Cruiser. He stayed at
the Dereva Hotel, a kind of guesthouse where he had access to
girlfriends and alcohol. It was known that Kazura had “special forces”
at his disposal.
soldier, a quiet, self-assured man named Damas, confirmed that
Rwamagana had become a microcosm of detention and killing throughout the
genocide. Damas was on site in July when soldiers at the gendarmerie
killed an estimated 200 Hutu men with guns and small hoes. Many of the
Hutus had their arms and hands tied behind their backs. Some of them
were already dead from being shot while they were rounded up in their
home areas.
Damas has vivid memories of
the slaughter, which took place under the cover of night in a tent sent
up in the compound of the Rwamagana gendarmerie barracks.
“No
one could say no when it was happening or that it had to stop,” he
said. “On a personal level, it was shocking, but we were in a killing
situation.”
The victims were later
loaded onto three Mercedes trucks and brought to the Akagera Park.
“After it was over, one soldier said aloud: ‘Not all of these bastards
are killers. We didn’t have to kill all of them! The soldier was then
struck in the head with a hoe and brought to a hospital.”
Damas
said Kazura was not present during the slaughter that night, and that
forces carrying out the killings were part of the regular army under a
major named Gahigana.
Sources said that
as the genocide wound down, both Kazura and Nyamvumba were known to have
overseen the transport of Hutu refugees back into Rwanda from camps in
Tanzania where they had fled. In one instance, an officer witnessed
Kazura directing operations in which an estimated 120 woman and children
were promised food, supplies and a peaceful return home. They were put
on trucks at Benako, a town on the Tanzania border, and brought to
Rwanteru, Rwanda, where they were killed, according to the officer.
“I
was there when they were collected in trucks. Most of them were ladies
and children. The men were very few,” the officer explained. “These
people were killed under the command of Kazura. They were killed with
hoes in Rwanteru.”
Many refugees that
escaped to Tanzania at the time later refused to go back home. Some
survivors of those attacks gave testimony for this article. One refugee
said RPA soldiers arrived in his village in the commune Gituza on April
9th. “It was early in the morning. The entire population started to run
as soon as they saw RPF troops. I saw wounded people trying to get
away. I made the decision to flee with my family.”
The
refugee, his wife and three sons ran south along the Kayonza-Kagitunda
road to Mirambi then onto Rukara, finally settling at a place called the
Karambi Trading Centre where many other displaced Hutus had sought
refuge. But the location was quickly overtaken by RPA troops. At that
point his life would change forever.
“On April 19th,
we were surrounded. The RPF told us they’d bring us back home. The next
day, two lines of soldiers arrived. They escorted us to a bean garden
behind the trading centre and started to fire on us.”
The
refugee said the shooting lasted between 5 and 10 minutes before the
soldiers began reloading ammunition. As his three young sons and wife
lay in a pool of blood, the refugee ran for his life to the park,
wounded in the forehead, buttocks and stomach.
“In the end, I was not able to bury my family,” he lamented.
*
In
conjunction with sweeping operations aimed at exterminating Hutus in
the northern communes of Byumba, death squads run by DMI were pounding
neighboring localities such as Giti and Rutare.
A
confidential, 55-page document from the ICTR outlines a macabre and
highly organized operation in these two areas, where a contingent of 100
DMI troops led by Jackson Rwahama rounded up countless Hutus before
slaughtering them with grenades, guns or hoes, between April 17 and 25.
A
witness who worked for DMI at the time said the operations conducted in
Rutare and Giti were held on the heels of meetings with Kayumba
Nyamwasa, then DMI chief.
The
witness said soldiers initially undertook patrols throughout Rutare,
where they arrested entire Hutu families, stole their belongings before
“eliminating them with hoes, known as agafuni.”
The killings were directly supervised by Sgt Tharcisse Idahemuka, according to the witness, who was present at the time.
Hutu
intellectuals were particularly targeted. “Eliminating the maximum
number of Hutu intellectuals was a priority because these people posed
an immediate and future threat of exposing the truth regarding RPF
activities. And the death of these intellectuals would weaken the
potential for political parties in the short or long term,” the witness
said.
In another incident described by
the witness, Colonel Rwahama and Jack Nziza, then a major, intercepted
Hutu civilians on their way to a displacement camp. The two men oversaw
patrols that led the Hutus to a series of houses on a nearby hill
surrounded by a banana plantation and a forest.
With
Kalashnikov wielding soldiers standing guard outside, DMI troops
unleashed grenades inside the houses, killing between 300 and 400
people, according to the witness, who expressed remorse for his role in
the violence.
“It was horrible to see. Corpses were completely calcified. There were no survivors.”
The
witness said the orders to carry out these grisly operations came from
Nyamwasa. Individuals with roles in the operation were also named, and
included Jean-Jacques Mupenzi, Habass Musonera and Joseph Zabamwita.
Within
days the DMI contingent would move on to Giti, where soldiers proceeded
to round up prisoners — mostly men — and slaughter them in the house of
a former bourgmestre. The witness remembered the victims’ skulls being
smashed by hoes and ‘brain matter all over the floor.’
DMI
would continue to kill waves of displaced Hutus streaming into Giti
from other areas, separating them from Tutsi families who were given the
grim task of digging graves and were nicknamed Tiger Force. A corporal
named Emmnauel Nkuranga was in charge of eliminating Hutu prisoners,
according to the witness.
He also stated
the RPF held meetings in neighboring communes to persuade people hiding
in the bush to go home, where they were eventually murdered, and that
young Hutu men whose families had been opposed to the Habyarimana regime
joined RPA ranks but were later killed. Truckloads of Hutus rounded up
on military trucks also passed through Giti on their way to Gabiro,
where they would ‘simply be eliminated.’
At
the time, Gabiro was still nominally run by Nyamvumba, who would return
to the barracks to check on waves of new recruits. The military
barracks was 36-square-kilometres and like other areas in Akagera, was
off-limits to UNAMIR and NGOs, ostensibly because Kagame’s army needed
to remove anti-personnel mines in the area.
Several
officers and soldiers contend that immediately after the genocide and
in the years that followed, Nyamvumba and Kazura worked alongside DMI
supervising the screening of Hutu men rounded up at night or recruited
from all over Rwanda, in particular from Gitarama, Kibuye, Gikongoro,
Cyangugu, Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, to be eliminated at Akagera and in
Nyungwe forest in southwestern Rwanda.
“Nyamvumba
was chief coordinator of those operations because after all he had
already done it. He was critical,” said an officer.
Another
officer who worked in intelligence had a slightly nuanced view: “Right
after the genocide, Nyamvumba wasn’t the one looking for those
recruits,” he said, noting that brigades led by notoriously violent
commanders such as Ibingira killed or rounded up Hutu civilians post
genocide.
“But these people were
eliminated from the training wing, which Nyamvumba was in charge of, so
yes he shared responsibility for what was taking place,” the officer
added.
A soldier at Camp Garde Presidentielle (GP) in Kigali witnessed Kazura’s participation in these operations in 1995, as well.
“Kazura
was involved in taking people in lorries from Kigali to Gabiro. Those
people were young Hutu men that were lured into military training from
all over the country then taken to Kigali, to Camp GP,” he said, adding:
“Kazura was personally involved in transporting the recruits.”
“And
then those men were taken to Gabiro where they were killed and burned
near the training wing, at a place called New Camp, near the house of
the former king of Rwanda.”
Some of
these young men died on their way to Gabiro, which by then had earned
its reputation as a bona fide death factory, not unlike the Nazi
extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau yet much smaller and without the
labor.
“Many were taken in containers in trucks and died en route. They died of suffocation,” he explained.
In
1996, the Tutsi soldier in question was in Gabiro for training where
Hutus were still being brought to the barracks, and witnessed Kazura,
Nyamvumba and key members of DMI on site.
“Kazura,
Nyamvumba, Jack Nziza and Nyamwasa were personally involved in killing
and supervising the burning of bodies,” the soldier said grimly.
This
testimony is strengthened, to some degree, by an ICTR official who
requested anonymity but disclosed that Kagame’s and Nyamwasa’s hands
have been “covered in blood” for decades.
an interview, the official said the ICTR Office of the Prosecutor had
enough evidence to indict Kagame, Nyamwasa, Nyamvumba and others
‘several times over” but was unwilling to do so because of political
interference within the office itself, and by the United States, a
staunch ally of the Rwandan president.
ICTR official said witnesses brought forward evidence against Nyamvumba
for his role in killings in the east, and against Kazura with respect
to his role in transporting and eliminating Hutu recruits.
ICTR, whose mandate has been to try genocide suspects for crimes
committed in 1994, is winding down operations. Yet it has not prosecuted
a single member of Kagame’s regime.
ICTR evidence of alleged activities of Kazura and Nyamvumba, the United
Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) confirmed
unequivocally that it had indeed screened Kazura before choosing him as
UN force commander in Mali this year.
United Nations applied the human rights screening policy in the
appointment of General Kazura to the position of Force Commander for the
United Nations Integrated Mission in Mali,” Kieran Dwyer, DPKO chief of public affairs, said in a statement.
Officials
refused to discuss how DPKO specifically screened Kazura or Nyamvumba
for their jobs as chief peacekeepers. Requests this month to interview
Kazura — and Nyamvumba in 2012 — were not facilitated by the UN.
Yet Dwyer admitted this new information would be taken seriously.
material provided contains new information. The United Nations takes
this information seriously, and will thoroughly assess the information
in accordance with the human rights screening policy,” the UN official
went on to say.
In 2008, the
United Nations was drawn into a human rights debacle after deciding to
renew the mandate of another Rwandan General, Emmanuel Karake Karenzi,
who was deputy commander of UNAMID, despite a Spanish indictment against
him for war crimes committed against Hutus in the 1990s.
February 2008, Spanish magistrate Fernando Andreu Merelles issued an
indictment against 40 Rwandan officials, including Karake and Nyamwasa,
for crimes committed against Hutus during and after the genocide.
Nyamvumba
himself was cited in the 2008 indictment as having played a role in
massacres against Hutu civilians in Murambi, Kizimbo and Kigali Rural,
although no indictment was actually issued against him, because more
evidence was needed.
“A witness said
Nyamvumba was heavily involved in the operations of massacres in these
three areas,” confirmed Jordi Palou-Loverdos, a lawyer representing
victims in Spain’s special court for serious crimes.
Another
witness, also a top RPA lieutenant, provided evidence against Nyamvumba
to the magistrate, he pointed out, adding that investigations were
continuing in the case.
“The Spanish
court is continuing to gather complementary evidence of international
crimes committed in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The
research is ongoing,” Palou-Loverdos said.
Kagame
himself — who is lauded for defeating Hutu extremists responsible for
killing more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the
genocide — enjoys immunity from prosecution because the Spanish court
does not have jurisdiction to indict a head of state.
Spain has sufficient evidence implicating the Rwandan president in
having a command role in large-scale massacres of Hutu civilians in the
Rwandan towns of Byumba and Kibeho, in the murder of Rwandan bishops,
Spanish missionaries and Spanish aid workers, and in the slaughter of
Rwandan and Congolese Hutu refugees in the DRC in the 1990s, according
to Palou-Loverdos.
most of these cases, we know very positively from key former RPF
soldiers that there was a radio call directly from Mr Kagame to his
subordinate commanders to do the work,” the lawyer said.
witnesses have testified that there were strict instructions that these
decisions could only be taken by Mr. Kagame,” Palou-Loverdos added.
Matata’s own investigation into RPA killings in Kibungo in 1994, he was
not surprised that the UN caved into Kagame’s wishes to appoint
Nyamvumba in 2009 as UNAMID chief.
barely reacted when the decision was announced,” Matata said. “But I
admit that it is disheartening to see the RPF’s army in a peacekeeping
force. How do killers ensure peace? These soldiers are implicated in
crimes in Rwanda and the Congo, but the UN refuses to listen.”
Tutsi soldier — who lost most of his family to Hutu extremists during
the genocide — said he’s ashamed to call himself Rwandan. And yet he is
adamant about one thing: “I want people to know about these hidden
crimes. The ball is in our court to tell the truth and say what we
know.”
“We need a better future for our country; we have to tell our children what really happened.”
The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a “time”, yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine
