UN 'shut down' Rwanda probe [another UN cover-up alert]

AN AUSTRALIAN former UN war crimes investigator has revealed documents exposing a UN cover-up of its inquiry into the events that triggered the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Adelaide lawyer Michael Hourigan says the UN shut down his investigation in 1997 into the shooting down of a plane carrying the extremist Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and the president of Burundi.

The investigation implicated ethnic Tutsi rebel leader Paul Kagame, who is now the President of Rwanda. The 100-day genocide, in which Hutu extremists murdered Tutsis and moderate Hutus, began hours after the plane was shot down.

Late last year, President Kagame was publicly blamed for the crash by French anti-terror judge Jean-Louis Brugiere.

A never-before released memo reveals that Mr Hourigan's team of UN investigators had received detailed information from three well-placed sources about the plane attack. The sources all implicated Mr Kagame and offered to provide further information, including documentation.

Mr Hourigan wrote the memo in early 1997 for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's senior judge, Louise Arbour.

Mr Hourigan told The Age that after he gave Ms Arbour the memo, she told him to end his investigation.

"She was aggressive and negative. She had done a 180-degree turn. She effectively told me that my inquiry was at an end," he said.

Late last year, Mr Hourigan prepared an affidavit for the tribunal. "I feel that unknown persons from within the UN leadership and possibly elsewhere pressured judge Arbour to end (Hourigan's team's investigations) into the shooting down of president Habyarimana," it says in part

Mr Hourigan said the informants told him a "foreign power" was linked to the attack.

The exposure of Mr Hourigan's memo and affidavit, along with Mr Brugiere's findings, places fresh pressure on the UN to explain why it stopped its investigation.

A spokesperson for Ms Arbour, who is now the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, did not respond to questions sent by The Age.

The UN has released few details about Mr Hourigan's investigation, although some UN officials have said it was outside the UN's mandate.

But Mr Hourigan's affidavit says Ms Arbour and other senior UN figures had initially supported the investigation. "It was made clear to me that our investigations into the rocket attack upon the president's aircraft was an act of international terrorism which clearly fell within the (tribunal's) statute."

Mr Hourigan's memo to Ms Arbour describes, but does not name, the three sources who approached the investigators. It says they revealed the existence of a covert attack unit, called the "network", which was under the control of Mr Kagame.

In 1994 he was the leader of Tutsi rebel force that invaded Rwanda and ended the genocide.

The memo says the sources claim the covert unit "was advised to put in place a contingency plan to eliminate president Habyarimana on or about 15 Mar 94 …"

The sources say the network under the command of then General Kagame planned and executed the rocket attack on the presidential plane.

Mr Hourigan, who quit the tribunal following the meeting with Ms Arbour, said he did not know where the sources were or whether they were still alive.

When Mr Brugiere released the findings of his inquiry last November, Mr Kagame dismissed them as "politically motivated". France supported the Hutu government at the time of the genocide.

Mr Kagame cannot be prosecuted by the French because he is a head of state. Only the tribunal can prosecute him.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1093746,00.html

JOINING HANDS: Warren at a rally in Rwanda

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, is not known for hugging pastors. Catholic and Protestant clergy have been convicted in connection with the genocide in his country in 1994, and Kagame has repeatedly stated his disdain for religious organizations. Thus a buzz went up in Kigali's Amahoro Stadium last month when Kagame allowed Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback megachurch in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of the best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life, to throw an arm over his shoulders and "pray for the President."

In fact, their bond now extends well beyond prayerful embrace. Kagame has committed his government to cooperation in a five-to-seven-year self-sufficiency project staffed by Rwandan volunteers but initiated, advised and at least partly funded by Warren's network of "purpose-driven churches." Warren talks of turning Rwanda into "the first purpose-driven nation."

For months the clergyman has alluded in general terms to an immense volunteer effort called the PEACE plan, aimed at transforming 400,000 churches in 47 nations into centers to nurse, feed and educate the poor and even turn them into entrepreneurs. Its details remain unknown, but its Rwandan element seems to have outrun the rest. Warren says he was "looking for a small country where we could actually work on a national model," and Kagame, impressed by The Purpose-Driven Life, volunteered Rwanda in March. In July Warren and 48 other American Evangelicals, who have backgrounds in areas like health, education, micro-enterprises and justice, held intensive planning meetings with Rwandan Cabinet ministers, governors, clergy and entrepreneurs. One dinner was attended by a third of the Rwandan Parliament. Says Scott Moreau, a professor of missiology at Wheaton College in Illinois: "I've never heard of this level of cooperation in the last 100 years between any megachurch, mission agency or even a denomination and a national government."

Warren will not quote a budget for the effort, stressing its volunteer nature. But he talks of sending each Rwandan church kits he calls "school in a box," "clinic in a box," "business in a box" and so on. (The "clinic," he says, might include medicines for malaria and eventually AIDS, with guides for their administration.) He has tapped Saddleback congregants to talk with the heads of specific Rwandan sectors. Sam Smith, a retired U.S. federal administrative judge just returned from Kigali, says he hopes to send U.S. police, prosecutors and judges to advise their African counterparts in areas like sexual-assault investigation and police-lab construction. Warren also expects about 500 of the "small groups" that make up Saddleback to "adopt" individual Rwandan villages and begin sending short-term visitors in the fall. With a preacher's flair, he compares the program to a starter batch of yeast that someone once gave to his mother, which engendered 20 years' worth of pancakes.

Rwandan officials are eager to get started. "The program seems like something that will lift our country in many ways," says Minister of Youth, Culture and Sports Joseph Habineza. The project also enjoys the moral support of White House faith-based initiatives czar James Towey, who says, "In the past, government has been indifferent or hostile toward efforts such as this one. That is not the case with this Administration."

Jared Diamond

Do you have a source for his statements ?

Yes, it's Chapter 10 of "Collapse".

He doesn't mention the UN or any of that, but gets more into the anthropological and societal reasons as to why the madness occurred. It was not purely a genocide, as in areas where there were no Tutsis, mass murder also occurred, but it was poor landless peasants who murdered rich landed folk and stole their land.

Rwanda is and was very overcrowded. Diamond looks at things objectively and tried to decide why it happened. The Hutu/Tutsi thing was only an excuse. Once it started, heirs killed off their ancestors to accelerate inheritance - even if they were all Hutus.

It's a very interesting analysis and he goes in depth into the whole sad affair.

If you're going to read something by Diamond, I can recommend "Guns, Germs & Steel". I thought it was a better read than Collapse, although Collapse is the best seller.

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