Accused Rwanda genocide "kingpin" defiant

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - The suspected architect of Rwanda's 1994 genocide begins a fourth week of testimony on Monday defying accusers in the biggest trial to date over the central African nation's 100 days of slaughter.

Prosecutors at the UN's Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) say former army colonel Theoneste Bagosora, now 64, was in charge as troops and machete-wielding militiamen butchered some 800,000 people.

But in lengthy comments from the stand, Bagosora has accused rebel-turned-president Paul Kagame of triggering the bloodshed, blamed the chief of UN peacekeepers for the murder of Rwanda's prime minister and even denied genocide took place.

"I do not believe in the genocide theory. Most reasonable people concur that there were excessive massacres," Bagosora said during testimony and cross-examining that has already gone on for three weeks since beginning on October 24.

"They have labeled and continue to label me as the mastermind of the massacres. ... The accusations that I led the killings are malicious."

Bagosora's remarks are typical of the unrepentant tone of much of the testimony heard at the UN court, which has so far indicted 81 people, convicted 22 and acquitted three.

A succession of hardline defendants from the Hutu ethnic group have expressed a mixture of irritation, anger and incomprehension at the notion that a genocide occurred in 1994.

Many say they believed they were defending Hutus against an onslaught by rebels from the minority Tutsi group who, they argue, were just as guilty of massacres in the heat of battle.

Bagosora argues the 1994 killings -- which shocked the world by their scale and crude methods -- were not premeditated despite prosecution evidence weapons were given out in advance and militias trained to slaughter Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The massacres began when President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, killing him and sending the tiny country spiraling into three months of chaos.

Numerous international figures including then U.S. President Bill Clinton and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have since expressed deep regret for the world's slow response.

Wearing a smart suit and pink shirt and tie during his court appearances, Bagosora, a Hutu, accused now President Kagame of causing the massacres by shooting down the aircraft.

"The tribunal has done nothing to arrest and prosecute this hardcore criminal," he said in testimony reproduced by the Hirondelle agency, dedicated to covering the Rwanda trials.

Before the killings broke out, Bagosora is accused of storming out of peace talks with Kagame's group in Tanzania and saying he was returning to Rwanda to "prepare the apocalypse."

The most dramatic moment yet in his judicial proceedings came last year with testimony by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of UN peacekeepers during the genocide.

As a stony-faced Bagosora looked on, Dallaire -- who was so traumatized by his failure to halt the murders that six years later he tried to commit suicide -- described him as the "kingpin" behind the genocide.

Bagosora, in turn, blamed Dallaire for the death of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, murdered a day after Habyarimana. Ten Belgian peacekeepers guarding her were taken to a military base, where Rwandan troops beat them to death.

Bagosora told the tribunal he had tried to save the men, but -- bizarrely -- claimed he was rebuffed by "mutinous" soldiers.

"They called me an accomplice of the enemy and threatened me ...I became afraid and withdrew," said Bagosora, who was the most powerful and feared officer in Rwanda at the time.

Bagosora faces life in prison if convicted on 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Listening to reports of his testimony, genocide survivors in Rwanda said Bagosora should suffer the same fate as the victims of the soldiers and militias he is accused of controlling.

"Don't talk about Bagosora," said Claude Hakiza, a shopkeeper in the capital Kigali. "The sound of his name leaves me trembling. He should not be alive now because he has on his hands the blood of every Rwandan who died in the genocide."

Until I opened the thread, I thought the defiant Rwanda genocide "kingpin" referred to were clinton and the missus.

I M P E A C H M E N T
h e a r --c l i n t o n --l o s e --i t

by Mia T, 11.11.05

This legacy confab is in and of itself proof certain of clinton's deeply flawed character, and a demonstration in real time of the way in which the clinton years were about a legacy that was incidentally a presidency.

Madeleine Albright captured the essence of this dysfunctional presidency best when she explained why clinton couldn't go after bin Laden.

According to Richard Miniter, the Albright revelation occurred at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons: Nothing]. Only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war.

Albright explained that a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton. Kill or capture bin Laden and clinton could kiss the accord and the Peace Prize good-bye.

If clinton liberalism, smallness, cowardice, corruption, perfidy--and, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, clinton cluelessness--played a part, it was, in the end, the Nobel Peace Prize that produced the puerile pertinacity that enabled the clintons to shrug off terrorism's global danger.

COMPLETE ARTICLE

bill clinton's Convenient Postmodern Pose:
"G-word"shame presages "W-word" horror

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE)

by Mia T, 4.6.04

This month marks 10 years since the advent of the Rwandan genocide, a cruel, violent and well-organized rampage that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children and the total disruption of Rwandan society. Over the past decade, scholars and advocates have rightly reflected on the reasons that the international community and nations in Africa must share the responsibility for this tragedy. As I said during my trip to Rwanda in 1998, "We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."

bill clinton
Learn From Rwanda
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A21

Note: clinton's use of "we" is consistent with his "buck stops there/everywhere but not here" policy.

Bill Clinton felt their pain. Retrospectively. In 1998, on his Grand Apology Tour of Africa, a whirlwind tour of whirlwind apologies for slavery, the Cold War, you name it, he touched down in Kigali and apologized for the Rwandan genocide. "When you look at those children who greeted us," he said, biting his lip, as is his wont, "how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children?"
Alas, the President had precisely identified the problem. In April 1994, when the Hutu genocidaires looked at the children who greeted them in the Tutsi villages, that's exactly what they thought: they didn't want those Tutsi children to have a chance to have their own children. So the question is: when a bunch of killers refuse to subscribe to multiculti mumbo-jumbo, what do you do?
"All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices," continued Bill in his apology aria, "who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
Au contraire, he appreciated it all too fully. That's why, during the bloodbath,

Clinton Administration officials were specifically instructed not to use the word "genocide" lest it provoke public pressure to do something.

Documents made public last week confirm that US officials knew within the first few days that a "final solution" to eliminate all Tutsis was underway.
SteynOnAmerica
CLINTON, CLARKE AND RWANDA: TEN YEARS ON

n the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.....

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts—thousands of Rwandans were dying every day—that were being reported in the morning papers, many did not "fully appreciate" the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential American policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as atrocities or the components and symptoms of genocide but as wartime "casualties"—the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.

Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might reasonably have been expected to "fully appreciate" the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washington that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term "genocide," causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Department to begin debating the word's applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate.

...whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices.

Samantha Power
Bystanders to Genocide
Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen
The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
The Atlantic Online

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