Chantalle, a Congolese policewoman, was one of the first female trainees assigned to the genocide team. She is pictured in her living room with four of her seven children and her mother-in-law. Photograph: Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita
Posted on 09/19/2010 4:59:35 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A diplomatic row is raging over a draft of a UN report, leaked to the press late last month, that accuses Rwandan President Paul Kagame's troops of massacring Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring Zaire, now Congo, after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda of Tutsis and moderate Hutus that left 800,000 dead. The intervention of Kagame's forces has been credited with ending the 1994 killings.
The Rwandan government reacted furiously to the UN draft last week, calling it "outrageous" and describing its claims as "immoral". The government is now threatening to pull troops out of UN peacekeeping duties in protest. Many fear the UN will be forced to tone down the report when it is published, after some delay, next month.
Evidence is mounting that Rwandan forces, which were ordered by Kagame into Congo in pursuit of Hutu militias, may have taken systematic revenge on refugees, killing tens of thousands of civilians who had taken refuge in camps and villages across the border.
Killings of Hutus continued into the subsequent war, the Second Congo War, which ended in 2003, and the country is still scarred by conflict.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Chantalle, a Congolese policewoman, was one of the first female trainees assigned to the genocide team. She is pictured in her living room with four of her seven children and her mother-in-law. Photograph: Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita
I wonder if the UN report is going to mention how much blood is on the UN hands in all this.
The Clinton administration has a large share of blame — just for inaction, not for the massacres. Clinton pulled US forces out of Rwanda just to get out of the way.
We are accustomed to war as a political exercise. War, they say, is politics by other means. Except that sometimes war is more than that, its between peoples. Political war can be relatively antiseptic; overthrow the enemy’s government and its over.
War between peoples is actually, historically, the more common kind of war. It is also the bloodiest and most pitiless. Just overthrowing the government doesn’t solve the problem. The enemy himself has to be expelled to a safe distance or destroyed. The war doesn’t end until the map has been redrawn and demographics have been redistributed.
When the enemy government is the danger, you defeat the government. When the enemy people themselves are the danger, the logic is horrific but inevitable. A million Tutsis were murdered by, not merely the Hutu government, but the Hutus themselves. That inspires a whole different level of reply.
We just watched Hotel Rwanda with our daughter who had to watch it for a government class. So sad and frustrating the way the whole situation was treated by the international community. It appeared that noone cared and the UN were castrated.
Well put...
Thanks for posting this.
At the time, hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled to the DRC to escape retribution from Kangame. Many of these refugees had participated in the genocide of the Tutsis. Thousands of these Hutus died from Cholera in the Congo, and the mass of refugees were put on a forced march by the Congolese into the jungle.
I remember at the time that there were some 200,000 refugees who went into the jungle, and were not seen again.
It is these people who were likely massacred.
That part of the world is still the Heart of Darkness.
It has been an ongoing killing field for several decades.
I remember that Nightline with Ted Koeppel was scheduled to do a weeklong special on the Congo, beginning 9/11/01.
It was superseded for obvious reasons, and never rescheduled.
The world had moved on.
Estimates are that upwards of 5,000,000 have died in the Congo; a comparable number had died in Angola during its decades-long Civil War.
Why doesn’t this get the spotlight that the Palestinian drama receives ?
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