Let us now turn to another two sentences of the 16 which the plaintiffs have chosen in Paris to attack Charles Onana and his editor Damien Serieyx as genocide deniers.
The other articles of this series can be found here
Sentence 2 : “This demonstrates, if it were still necessary, that the conspiracy thesis of a Hutu regime having planned a “genocide” in Rwanda constitutes one of the greatest scams of the 20th century. “ (page 198)
Here the plaintiffs take the sentence out of context and do not cite the scope of the chapter, nor the previous paragraph which the first word, this, refers to. In this subsection of a chapter on the historical background of the French humanitarian operation, entitled The international context before the deployment of Operation Turquoise, Onana looks at how, when and by whom the term genocide was introduced at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and adopted in its official documents regarding the Rwandan events.
In this subsection Charles Onana twice underscores that he is not denying that a Tutsi genocide took place (page 191 and 194), but only analyzing how this specific characterization of the massacres was adopted within this international institution.
Onana argues that as early as 12 April, six days after the beginning of the massacres, the Rwandan Patriotic Front spokesperson at the UN Claude Dusaidi sent out a press release to all members of the UNSC which already spoke of “a systematic genocide being committed against the Tutsis and Hutus of the opposition.”
On 27 April 1994 United States ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright informs Washington that the Czech Republic and Argentina were working on a resolution which will address genocide, stating that what is happening in Rwanda can be classified as genocide according to the 1948 Convention on Genocide. Thus, despite no international inquiry or investigation that could corroborate these massacres as genocide, Albright is already pushing for this precise qualification. Yet other UNSC members, such as France, Nigeria and China, hesitated to come to such a conclusion without prior investigations, underscoring both ethnic and political dimensions, as well as the balance of power on the ground.
Furthermore, the RPF claimed as early as 30 April 1994 in a letter addressing the UN Security Council that they had solid evidence that the Habyarimana regime had planned a systematic extermination of Tutsis. The FPR also claimed, at the time, that these massacres would have been carried out even if the President had not been killed, during the Arusha peace accords planned transition period. However, this evidence of a meticulous plan to kill Tutsis was not provided by the RPF to the Arusha Tribunal, as it became operational a year later, although the RPF claimed to have such evidence since April 1994. Here Onana is referring to the utilization of the word genocide on the part of the RPF at a specific point in time where the characterization of the crime could not yet have been known (hence also the term genocide is here in quotation marks, as it refers to the RPF’s formulation of the events at that given point in time).
Thus the scam Onana is referring to in this sentence is not the genocide per se, but the RPF’s claim to have solid evidence of a plan to exterminate the Tutsi population on the part of the Habyarimana government as early as 30 April.
Sentence 3 is taken from the same sub-chapter and also concerns the hasty characterization of the massacres at that point in time. “In other words, so as to avoid having to expose itself to the slightest reflections or embarrassing questions, the United States officially validated, without the slightest reservation, the pressing request of the RPF to retain the word “genocide” or to qualify the massacres in Rwanda as such. This term is therefore retained without prior analyses and investigation. Its validation will never be subject to the opinion of professional judges nor to consultation of any international jurisdiction. It was the will of the RPF and the decision of an American Secretary of State which led to use of the term “genocide” to qualify the Rwandan events within the United Nations and mainly in the Security Council. » (page 190)
Here Onana is referring to a memorandum written by Head of US State Department intelligence unit, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), Toby Gati, who on 18 May 1994 wrote a three-page memorandum to the Secretary of State for African Affairs, George Moose. The Gati memorandum accuses the then-Rwandan government of "widespread, systematic killing of ethnic Tutsis" in violation of the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, and also underlined that the RPF “does not seem to have violated the Geneva Convention that define acts of genocide.”
The Gati memorandum paved the way for a major switch in U.S. government policy. Three days later, on May 21, Secretary of State for African Affairs, George Moose, authorized his subordinates to use the formulation "acts of genocide have occurred" in Rwanda.
However, in a 19 May 1994 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, José Ayala Lasso, on his mission to Rwanda 11-12 May 1994, he writes that the situation in Rwanda can be characterized as a “human rights tragedy” and called on both parties to accept a cease-fire: “ In my conversations with the military commanders of both sides, I clearly expressed the condemnation by the entire international community of the massive and extremely grave human rights violations committed by all those participating in the conflict.” He also underlined that “Heavily armed, those manning the roadblocks can by no means be relied upon to follow orders or instructions given to them by the commanders of the Rwandan Armed Forces.” Rwanda's national army had thus lost control over rougue elemets.
May 1994 is thus very early for the qualification of Tutsi genocide to be retained, as a in-depth investigation had effectively not yet been undertaken in the country. One can not help but notice the discrepancy between Madeleine Albright's conclusions and those of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights José Ayala Lasso.
UN special rapporteur of the commission on human rights in Rwanda, René Degni-Ségui, wrote in his Situation of' human rights in Rwanda report on 2 November 1995: “Although the existence of genocide has been confirmed, there is considerable delay in conducting the investigation.”
Degni-Ségui deplores the late deployment of the observers for security reasons, but underlines that “ It was at the end of the armed conflict that the deployment of observers was envisaged: “The delay in the deployment of observers is all the more unfortunate in view of the insecurity that is becoming increasingly apparent in Rwanda.”
He also states that the first two previous reports were carried out without investigations: “ The first two reports were prepared on the basis of documents and testimony provided by officials of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as a few survivors of the massacres.”
Degni-Ségui also writes “Massacres have allegedly taken place in various parts of the country, and particularly in the south. In addition to the mass graves for which the Armée Patriotique Rwandaise (the RPF military wing) is responsible we therefore have all those for which the militia and the Rwandese Armed Forces are responsible, so that it is now difficult to tell them apart. Investigations are under way to clarify the situation and determine where responsibility lies.” (the emphasis is mine)
Considering the wider geopolitical context Former French minister of cooperation Bernard Debré wrote in 1998 Le retour du Mwami: La Véritable Histoire des génocides rwandais (The return of Mwami, The true history of the Rwandan genocides), on this charecterization: “ two genocides were committed, but the first world power wanted that only one be recognized, because it was in its interest.”
Other scholars have also deplored this too hasty characterization of the mass massacres as a Tutsi genocide, without prior investigations at the time. For example Catholic Institute of the Vendée lecturer in political science, political philosophy and history and director of the Forum for Democracy International, John Laughland’s in his 2016 book, A History of Political Trials: From Charles I to Charles Taylor, addresses this issue in the chapter Jean Kambanda, convicted without trial, where he underscores: “ the Commission of Experts which reported to the UN General Secretary in 1994, and whose report was used as the basis for the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), said that there was overwhelming evidence that genocide had been committed against the Tutsis, but none for genocide against Hutus. So, one side was proclaimed guilty as charged even before the tribunal was created, and that proclamation of guilt became one of the founding documents of the tribunal.” (p 211)
Laughland calls the ICRT an example of victor’s justice, as due process should have called for a prior opening of an investigation, before deciding who is the most responsible for breaching peace and committing crimes within a given situation.
The same can be said for Southwest University of Political Science and Law Professor of International Law Alexander Zahar, who defined the existing literature on Rwanda available in 2003 as poor and simplistic historical research: in a 2003 review of English-language publications on the Rwandan genocide Zahar, signaling works such as Philip Goureveitch’s We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Alison Des Forges’s Leave None to Tell the Story and Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims become Killers, Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, calls their accounts “naive, tendentious, and derivative, written in a judgmental or didactic style foreign to scholastic endeavors”. Zahar explains how these writers tend to “reduce national defense to criminal conspiracy, political disagreement to ‘tribal’ tension, and a war involving regular and irregular forces, to genocide.”[i]
During the trial the plaintiffs’ lawyer Richard Gisagara cross-examining UNAMIR commander Luc Marshal, asked him about the alarming information he had received at the time through an informant Jean Pierre, and which he had reported, concerning the upcoming genocide. Luc Marshall answered by reminding the lawyer that the informant, Jean Pierre, turned out be a RPF agent, as revealed by his widow during an Arusha tribunal hearing.
Thus, one of the few examples the plaintiffs brought up as evidence that could have been corroborated at trial, that the genocide had been planned well in advance, collapsed during this trial. Worse, subsequently another plaintiff’s witness, Lawyer Bernard Maingain, unaware that this informer had been unmasked on the first day of the trial, brought up this same UNAMIR informant, Jean Pierre, as proof of a preplanned genocide during his testimony.
We also learned at trial from the testimony of human rights activist and former Coordinator of the Center for the Fight against Impunity and Injustice, Joseph Matata, that the 1993 report by ten experts from four NGOS amongst which the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and HRW, a report often cited as already having warned of an immanent outbreak of violence, the experts spent a mere two hours in the RPF controlled area while in Rwanda, making it thus impossible to establish and characterize the human rights abuses committed in that area.
To analyze when the formulation of the term genocide against the Tutsis was retained at the UNSC and to underscore that it was incorporated without extensive investigations, prior to the opening of the Arusha tribunal, cannot be considered as a form of genocide denial.
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