Rwanda Decries Genocide Reference in UN Report

UNITED NATIONS (Aug. 27) -- Rwanda has slammed the United Nations for a draft report that suggests Rwandan troops, who entered the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1994 to hunt down perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, themselves committed massacres that could also be considered genocide.

Describing the leaked draft as "malicious, offensive and ridiculous," the Rwandan government said it was "immoral and unacceptable" for the U.N. to accuse its army of committing genocide when the world body had failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Calling the draft report "a dangerous and irresponsible document" that could destabilize the region, Rwanda said the U.N. had not consulted with the country's authorities in its "DRC Mapping Exercise."

"Given the gravity of its mission, the Mapping Team's failure to consult with Rwanda even though they found time to meet with over 200 NGO [nongovernmental organization] representatives is shocking and shows complete disregard for fundamental fairness," said Ben Rutsinga, a government spokesman.

The French paper Le Monde published details of the 545-page draft report Thursday. It documents human rights abuses between 1993 and 2003 in Congo. The report also said the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army and its rebel allies committed widespread massacres between 1996 and 1997 against Hutus following the genocide in Rwanda, where Hutus killed around 800,000 Tutsis.

In the report, investigators cited an incident in the eastern Congo where they concluded that Hutus were specifically targeted since people who were able to convince the Tutsi soldiers that they "belonged to another ethnic group were released just before the massacres."

"I saw a pattern in the Congo that I'd seen in Rwanda," Luc Cote, a war-crimes prosecutor from Montreal who led the 34-member probe, told Agence France-Presse. "It was the same thing. There are dozens and dozens of incidents where you have the same pattern. It was systematically done."

"The systematic and widespread attacks described in this report, which targeted very large numbers of Rwandan Hutu refugees and members of the Hutu civilian population, resulting in their death, reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide," the U.N. investigators said in the draft report.

"The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces," they added.

In a statement today, the Rwandan government charged that the report was leaked in an attempt by the U.N. to deflect attention from an incident in eastern Congo, where as many as 200 women were gang-raped by rebels in a village close to a U.N. base.

There are now reports suggesting the U.N. knew about the presence of these rebel groups in the area but failed to prevent the atrocities, which were committed over a number of days.

"The timing of the leak of this draft report is quite revealing; it appears that the U.N. is attempting to divert international attention from its latest failure in the Great Lake Region where recently hundreds of Congolese women were savagely raped under the watch of its peacekeeping force," the Rwandan government statement said.

Meanwhile, the U.N. has stressed that the leaked passages are only part of a report that is still not ready. U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky today criticized Le Monde for going public with the draft report.

"We're obviously rather surprised and disappointed that Le Monde, even though it knew that the final version was coming, went ahead and published," he said.

Le Monde also reported that Rwanda has threatened to pull its troops who are serving in U.N. peacekeeping missions. Nesirky said that, contrary to the report, Rwandan President Paul Kagame had not told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that he was planning to withdraw the nation's troops.

"That is absolutely untrue," Nesirky said. However, he did not deny that there had been correspondence between other officials in the Rwandan government and the U.N. on the subject.