Rwanda, a small landlocked state at the heart of equatorial Africa, with a surface area 26,000 square kilometres, has an essentially rural population estimated, at the beginning of the 1990s, at 7,000,000 inhabitants - 80% Hutus, 15% Tutsis and 5% Pygmies.
For centuries, Rwanda was ruled by a king from the Tutsi elite, who reigned supreme over the various chiefdoms. In 1899, Rwanda became a German protectorate, but, at the end of the First World War, the League of Nations granted Belgium the mandate to administer the country. It was subsequently put under the trusteeship of the UN in 1946, and became independent in 1962.
However, supported by the supervisory authorities, the Hutus took to changing the customary order of things. Thus, in 1973, a Hutu, General Juvénal Habyarimana seized power in a coup d’état. That was the beginning of a period of “witch hunting”, during which the Tutsi minority was gradually stripped of its prerogatives. In 1990, several hundred thousands Tutsis who had been expelled or had escaped from the country created an armed political movement called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
Peacekeepers were forbidden from using force…
In August 1993, after a lot of ups and downs, peace agreements were signed between President Habyarimana and the RPF, according to which the latter had to be represented in a caretaker government. To ensure peace, the UN deployed 2,500 peacekeepers in Rwanda within the framework of UNAMIR. But these troops were forbidden from using force…
During the same period, tens of thousands of young Hutus were mobilized and sent to camps for training on the use of weapons by militiamen of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), and those of Hutu Power. Armouries for firearms, bladed weapons and munitions were set up. Early 1990, President Habyarimana personally supervised the distribution of weapons in all communes…
Some Belgian and French servicemen immediately started sending out clear warnings about the extremely dangerous situation such actions entailed. In order to be able to act, they requested for back-up as well as the amendment of their mandate. Their voices fell on deaf ears. The UN simply issued an official statement expressing its concerns, but maintained the ban on the use force by UNAMIR.
Rwanda had become a real time bomb which the UN failed to defuse due to apathy and the lack of foresight. Tension had mounted to the extent that the least spark would trigger off the most appalling tragedy. This bomb finally detonated on April 6, 1994, when a plane transporting President Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart was shot down by two missiles over Kigali, the Rwandan capital.
That was the genesis of a horrifying episode of butchery…
That was the signal…
The Hutus, in a deadly rage, grabbed the weapons that had been stocked over several months and embarked on exterminating the Tutsi population. The killings were systematically organized such that no witness survived. All Tutsi men, women and children had to be wiped out using machetes, sticks, clubs, etc.
The entire country was caught up in this bloody orgy, which lasted for three unending terrifying months, and claimed the lives of over 500,000 human beings, more than half the Tutsi population.
But the RPF Tutsis, backed by Uganda, retaliated and launched an offensive against the Hutu militiamen. The latter were defeated and, on July 4, 1994, the Tutsi army, the APR, conquered Kigali and Butaré and Paul Kagamé, the RPF leader, became the new president.
The Hutu government, its army and militia, as well as a good number of civilians fled en masse to neighbouring countries, notably Zaire (the Democratic Republic of Congo). Goma witnessed an influx of two million refugees, in a matter of days.
On July 19, 1994, a national union government was formed between the RPF and seven other Rwandan political parties.
According to MSF (Médecins sans frontières), about 200,000 Hutus, considered to have been involved in the Tutsi genocide, have since been executed or allowed to die by the ruling RPF.
On November 8, 1994, the UN adopted a resolution for the setting up of an international tribunal for Rwanda, with a mission to identify and judge the organizers and authors of such crimes against humanity committed in the country.
France role
The Rwandan Hutu-Tutsi ethnic crisis already existed in 1990 when peace agreements were signed between President François Mitterrand of France and President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda.
It was thus in keeping with such commitments that France, in the years that followed, was called upon to provide military assistance to the Rwandan army, with a strength of approximately 50,000 men. A senior French officer was appointed adviser to the chief of staff of the Rwandan army while 600 troops from French Special Forces ensured supervision and training.
French forces were enjoined to withdraw
However, in accordance with peace accords signed in Arusha, Tanzania, between the Rwandan Hutu government and the Tutsi RPF, French forces were enjoined to withdraw. This was respected to the extent that on April 6, 1994, when the massacre began, barely 24 French soldiers and less than 500 under-equipped “peacekeepers” were left in Kigali.
A few weeks after the beginning of hostilities, close to 2,000 Western troops, including 450 French soldiers were sent to Rwanda to evacuate foreign nationals.
By mid-June 1994, France launched “Opération Turquoise”, a humanitarian initiative backed by the UN Security Council.
The 2,500-man French contingent, with base in Goma, Zaire (DRC), entered Rwanda through Cyangugu. Their mission was to stop the genocide by creating a humanitarian zone in the south of the country. Thousands of refugees thronged into this haven, including members of the interim government, Hutu militiamen and civilians.
The French troops were equipped with Mirage and Jaguar planes, combat helicopters, and about a hundred armoured vehicles. Meanwhile, the RPF and the Tutsi army were already in control of the rest of the Rwandan territory.
The mission of the French soldiers of “Opération Turquoise” having been accomplished, the French government called on the UN to continue.
Editor’s note
The UN and Western powers, particularly France, have been blamed for having been indifferent to, or even condoned (!), the hair-raising Rwandan tragedy.
It is easy to make such criticism, but there is one clear fact that must not be overlooked. The people responsible for the Rwandan genocide were those who, for ethnic reasons, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, and those who premeditated and organized such atrocities. The training provided by the French military assistance mission, under the terms of regular defence agreements signed with the Rwandan government, clearly has no direct connection with the Tutsi genocide perpetrated with all the barbarism we know.
Furthermore, as concerns the former colonial masters, France being one of them, it should be pointed out that while it is their duty to assist and protect their former colonies, their scope of action is limited by a hard rule that provides for the self-determination of a people with regard to managing its own internal affaires. Thus, meddling in such matters is considered to be against the principle of non-interference. In this light, any intervention by Western troops, without UN Security Council’s green light, would certainly have been labelled by the international community as a neo-colonial aggression and condemned as such.
However, the fact is that the murderous attitudes of crazy militiamen and uncontrollable mobs have, on several occasions in recent times, been at the origin of crimes against humanity and genocides. Averting such atrocities requires rapid international awareness followed by the rapid deployment of adequate armed intervention forces capable of containing such unbridled rage. But, this will also entail a new moral obligation of interference which will be an exception to the principle of non-interference mentioned earlier.
Who can say where one ends and where the other begins…
It is easy to understand the logic behind such a doctrine. But when it comes to applying it practically on the military field, in a real conflict situation, that is when the actual huddles of such an undertaking stand out.
With regard to criticisms concerning the inertia of the Security Council and the rationale behind the decisions it took, the onus is on it to explain.
It is up to each one of us to make an honest self-evaluation and reflect on what he or she said or took the initiative to do during the heinous Rwandan genocide, or during the days before the tragedy, or even, in the past, when other crimes against humanity were committed, be it in line with the ideology of Bolshevik, Nazi, or Khmer rouge, or without any reason other than pure racism.