A Rebuttal to the Mutsinzi Commission Report - by Kanyarwanda Veritas
[In Philip Gourevitch’s post to The New Yorker of 8 January 2010, he describes the just-released Mutsinzi Commission Report on the 6 April 1994 missile strike against the Rwandan presidential jet that killed two duly-elected Hutu heads of state, the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, and their entourages, as well as the French flight crew, as ‘remarkable’ and ‘an extraordinary historical and political document.’ There’s a certain ‘last days of Bernie Madoff’ tone to Gourvitch’s writing—like he can hear History's Five-O coming up his back stairs and he’s got to put out this one last ‘the check is in the mail’ pitch rationalizing his long since debunked historical pyramid scheme on the Rwanda genocide of April-July 1994 before they book ‘im, Dano.
Even the ‘Dallaire fax,’ which is the source of the title to Gourevitch’s On the Town in Kigali gossip-novel, ‘We Wish to Inform You . . .’ has been shown by our own Chris Black to be a fabrication, long after the fact, of British MI6. His The New Yorker (sl)easy style, which glosses over historical irrationalities with bathos and lurid sentimentality, is not enough to hide just how bereft of any decent concern for the real victims his ‘victims justice’ agit-prop really is. His evidence-free insinuation that Mme Habyarimana aided and abetted in the murder of her husband, the President, and the others on board the Falcon 50, if not actionable, is certainly unspeakable.
Gourevitch gave away his essential anti-democratic (fascistic) yearning early in his Rwandan melodrama, when he cited a warning by the Archbishop of Kigali to the Rwandans of the 1930s that if they continued to allow the majority Hutu intellectuals to propagate their anti-monarchic, even communistic ideas, like majority rule, that Rwanda would become a Bolshevik enclave in Africa. This same sclerotic anti-majoritarian vein pops out again in this latest post with his identification of the martyred Habyarimana as ‘dictator’ and his constant references to an ‘Extremist Hutu Power’ faction—a term coined and used exclusively by the RPF and its lobby to describe those forces within Rwanda who were defending the country against a foreign invasion by troops of the Ugandan National Resistance Army, strongly backed by the US, on 1 October 1990, beginning a four year occupation and reign of terror by the so-call Tutsi rebels of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front. And his racist condescension toward and patronization of Africans, in general, and Rwandans, in particular—not unlike Mamdami’s or Melvern’s, in their glib acceptance of ‘these peoples’’ irrational resort to murderous violence for settling political and ethnic matters—can only be understood as an expression of his helpless desperation in clinging to a now bankrupt version history—and a morally vacuous career.
But, I guess, since the great White hunters are still writing History, the rest of us small gamers will have to get by on those few, meager visitation from Truth and hope that the eventually overwhelming weight of our facts and figures will bury these foppish clowns. What follows is just such a visitation—if not particularly brief—from Truth: a rebuttal of that part of the Mutsinzi Report that was recently leaked to Continental Magazine—and quickly glommed onto by the Belgian RPF flack Collette Braeckman. The full report—after a couple of false starts—has come out in French, and I’ll attach it. Gourevitch claims he has his hands on—though he has not yet ‘absorbed’ (you think that means read?)—an English version.
Even the ‘Dallaire fax,’ which is the source of the title to Gourevitch’s On the Town in Kigali gossip-novel, ‘We Wish to Inform You . . .’ has been shown by our own Chris Black to be a fabrication, long after the fact, of British MI6. His The New Yorker (sl)easy style, which glosses over historical irrationalities with bathos and lurid sentimentality, is not enough to hide just how bereft of any decent concern for the real victims his ‘victims justice’ agit-prop really is. His evidence-free insinuation that Mme Habyarimana aided and abetted in the murder of her husband, the President, and the others on board the Falcon 50, if not actionable, is certainly unspeakable.
Gourevitch gave away his essential anti-democratic (fascistic) yearning early in his Rwandan melodrama, when he cited a warning by the Archbishop of Kigali to the Rwandans of the 1930s that if they continued to allow the majority Hutu intellectuals to propagate their anti-monarchic, even communistic ideas, like majority rule, that Rwanda would become a Bolshevik enclave in Africa. This same sclerotic anti-majoritarian vein pops out again in this latest post with his identification of the martyred Habyarimana as ‘dictator’ and his constant references to an ‘Extremist Hutu Power’ faction—a term coined and used exclusively by the RPF and its lobby to describe those forces within Rwanda who were defending the country against a foreign invasion by troops of the Ugandan National Resistance Army, strongly backed by the US, on 1 October 1990, beginning a four year occupation and reign of terror by the so-call Tutsi rebels of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front. And his racist condescension toward and patronization of Africans, in general, and Rwandans, in particular—not unlike Mamdami’s or Melvern’s, in their glib acceptance of ‘these peoples’’ irrational resort to murderous violence for settling political and ethnic matters—can only be understood as an expression of his helpless desperation in clinging to a now bankrupt version history—and a morally vacuous career.
But, I guess, since the great White hunters are still writing History, the rest of us small gamers will have to get by on those few, meager visitation from Truth and hope that the eventually overwhelming weight of our facts and figures will bury these foppish clowns. What follows is just such a visitation—if not particularly brief—from Truth: a rebuttal of that part of the Mutsinzi Report that was recently leaked to Continental Magazine—and quickly glommed onto by the Belgian RPF flack Collette Braeckman. The full report—after a couple of false starts—has come out in French, and I’ll attach it. Gourevitch claims he has his hands on—though he has not yet ‘absorbed’ (you think that means read?)—an English version.
[Such a version can be found here: http://mutsinzireport.com/?page_id=47]
But, as with the Muyco Report before it, our translation from the French of this rebuttal of Mutsinzi should serve. Though from the looks of his body of knowledge on these events, I wouldn’t expect Gourevitch to pick up on it. Hell, I guess if The New Yorker’s got your back, you don’t have to get it right—ever. –mc]
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A Rebuttal of the Mutsinzi Commission Report
The 6 April 1994 Attack: Focusing on elements of the Jean Mutsinzi Report
by Kanyarwanda Veritas
Rwanda/Attack of 6 April 1994—The investigation that accuses Extremist Hutus:
Continental Magazine
Friday, 4 December 2009
On reading parts of the Mutsinzi Report without any historical analysis, the uninformed might find themselves as overwhelmingly convinced as they were with the sensational Jean de Dieu Mucyo Report on France’s involvement in the Rwandan Tutsi genocide of 1994. But readers who are familiar with the methods and strategies of the RPF, especially those used by the commissions created by the current Kigali regime, will notice right away that the Mutsinzi Report is batched testimony that was either made-to-orders or scripted and given to ‘rehearsed witnesses’ to present, a potpourri of tricked-out situations and information and of documents interpreted in such a way as to turn them into disinformation for manipulating public opinion. In short, the Report of the Mutsinzi Commission is a diversion!
My focus will be partly on the Commission, itself, and partly on extracts from certain testimony and documents.
The Mutsinzi Commission:
Continental Magazine presents The Mutsinzi Commission as an ‘Independent Committee of Experts’ presided over by Jean Mutsinzi, Chief Justice of the African Court of Human Rights and Peoples and the former Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court. This Committee, composed of members of the RPF, cannot be considered independent, impartial or even credible, since it was created by the RPF, which is a party to the matter that the Commission is charged with investigating. Furthermore, the appointment of an international functionary to head this Commission smacks of chicanery. Since Mutsinzi is Rwandan, the Rwandan government should not have assigned him a mission that conflicts with his functions with the Commission of the African Union. This was done to project greater credibility onto the Report. The Commission is not independent because it answers to the Rwandan government and cannot report its findings to the public, something it has twice tried to do and has twice been thwarted by the Rwandan government. The Commission cannot deliver its findings or judgments, but must convey only the views of the RPF.
The Rwandan government should have asked either the UN or the African Union to create a truly independent Commission, one that the Rwandan government would not have been able to control, made up of foreign investigators, including, especially, representatives of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the insurers of the presidential Falcon 50 executive jet. The report of such a Commission would not need to be modified in any way, nothing added or deleted or touched up, by the Rwandan government. Such a Commission would not only be independent but also, and more importantly, impartial. It would be able, for example, to look in foreign countries for witnesses who hold important positions of responsibility that provide them the opportunity to know of situations and possess information the likes of which a simple soldier, or non-com or any other kind of officer, like those available to the Mutsinzi Commission, would not have access.
It should have been a Commission free from that prejudice that considers all Rwandan refugees to be people with something to hide or for which to be condemned. These people fled death at the hands of the RPF. If the FAR had surrendered, all their officers would have been executed on the battlefield, and the current debate would never have taken place because ‘no witnesses would have survived.’ The proof of this is that many ex-FAR officers who turned themselves over to the RPF or those who returned to the country or were repatriated, were killed along with their families. For details on this go to http://www.virungavision.com/, and look at the document
“Situation des Ex-FAR” to see the names of those killed by the RPF. So it is tendentious to assume that those witnesses who are in exile cannot bear fair witness and, on the basis of such prejudice, cast suspicion on the investigation of French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière.
The RPF makes false accusations against these potential witnesses in exile to discredit them. Yet these are the very people whom a truly independent investigatory commission should contact, paying no attention to the false accusations from Kigali. Furthermore, it should be understood that people living inside Rwanda cannot even discuss the idea that the RPF, often referred to just as Paul Kagame, were implicated in the assassination of President Habyarimana, making them responsible for the catastrophe of April 1994, at a time when one cannot even accuse an individual RPF soldier of having killed a parent or a close relative.
Continental Magazine reproaches Judge Bruguière for having issued arrest warrants against Rwandan suspects without having heard their side of the story. However, all the prisoners of the ICTR have been subjects of arrest warrants without trying to locate them, bring them before investigatory commissions or hear their stories before issuing these warrants. Even Kigali makes up lists of ‘suspects’ that are used like arrest warrants without ever bringing them before an investigatory commission. Kigali has even convicted certain refugees of contempt without ever going to their countries of asylum to depose them. Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze are cited in the Mutsinzi Report though no one from this investigation ever went to the UN prison in Arusha where they have been held for almost ten years to interview them.
To wrap up this subject, the Rwandan government of the RPF, being a party to the events under investigation, has no moral authority to create any kind of commission whatsoever to investigate the Rwandan drama, especially one composed solely of members of the RPF. At the very least, members of the victims’ families should have been included. There must be an independent and impartial International Commission, made up of real experts, capable of contacting without prejudice those people likely to have credible information and not just those whose knowledge is dubious, who have been rehearsed and trained to give the testimony they give or be forced into the kind of situation where there is no freedom of expression, but only fear for one’s life.
Focus on Extracts from the Mutsinzi Report
The Arusha Accords
“The Arusha Accords were supposed to go into effect at the end of 1993. But under pressure from extremist Hutus in his inner circle, President Habyarimana postponed the due-date several times.”
This is a lie and a piece of brazen disinformation.
In fact, the signing of the Arusha Peace Accords took place on 4 August 1993, and the Accords were supposed to go into effect 34 or 37 days later, either on 7 or 10 September 1993, after the swearing in of the members of the Broad Based Transitional Government (to include the RPF). The Accords distributed the government ministries among the various political parties and the RPF, and gave a number of phantom seats in the Transitional Parliament to each party. It is the political parties and the RPF who were supposed to designate their representatives in the Transitional Institutions and give their lists to the Prime Minister and to President Habyarimana to organize the swearing in ceremonies. President Habyarimana’s party was ready by the due-date. But the other political parties and the RPF had not yet finished designating their representatives.
In November or early December 1993, the UNAMIR organized a meeting between the governing party and the RPF in Mulindi, at the headquarters of the RPF, to discuss this delay. The governing party was represented by Minister Félicien Gatabazi, chief of the delegation, Minister Frédéric Nzamurambaho, the Chief of Staff of the National Gendarmarie, the then Colonel BEM Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a high official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amri Sued, and others. Paul Kagame led the RPF delegation, which included, most notably, the RPF’s Presidential Counselor for political affairs, and others. The meeting decided that the delay was not due to the ill will of any of the parties involved, and acknowledged that two of the parties experienced real internal difficulties in sticking to the schedule. The RPF was ready on 28 December 1993, and it sent its representatives to Kigali. With the swearing in of President Habyarimana to open the ceremony, the inauguration of the other Transistional Institutions was to take place on 5 January 1994. The other Institutions could not take the oath because of conflicts resulting from the implosion of certain political parties, the polarization of their fringe elements, and the impossibility of agreement on the lists of names to be submitted. The RPF blended in and demanded that those fringe elements that were allies of theirs be sworn in, opposed the participation of the CDR in the Transitional Institutions because it did not have the right, and boycotted the swearing in ceremony for the members of Parliament. The status quo persisted until the Habyarimana assassination. Here is an extract from his last speech, broadcast on the radio 15 January 1994.
“I would like you to remember, once again, that the Arusha Peace Accords allot extensive power in the political parties before they participate in the Transitional Institution. This agreement makes them, in fact, responsible for naming their representatives to the Transitional National Assembly. It determines the number of ministerial portfolios each party will hold, as well as the number of members each will send to the Transitional National Assembly. From there, no one, no institution, can strip these parties and political groupings of the rights conveyed to them by the Arusha Peace Accords.
So, we have to respect the proposals of the Peace Accords and avoid interfering in the internal affairs of the parties. We have to let the political party officials make their decisions independently, in accordance with the by-laws of their parties.
In this way we will respect the laws and rules that we all chose when we put our names to the Peace Accords.
Consequently, we have to insist that the political forces who have not yet achieved it among their own memberships, come to a consensus on the lists of their representatives to the Transitional National Assembly and the Broad-Based Transitional Government, so that every effort can be made to remove all obstructions to helping our country get beyond this impasse and permit us to set up those institutions laid out by the Arusha Peace Accords.” [. . .]
“For this reason, on learning of the negotiations impasse in which the parties found themselves, I became of the opinion that we must impose the course to be followed and the timetable that will bring us by next week to a point where we can set up the two remaining Transitional Institutions, the Transitional National Assembly and the Broad-Based Transitional Government.
1. We cannot, in any event, by-pass either the Arusha Peace Accords or the law on Political Parties or the by-laws governing each party. To do so would not solve anything because it would go dangerously against our resolution to base our conduct on the principles of a State of laws. This is why we must at all costs take into consideration only those lists furnished by the legal Representatives of the Political Parties.
2. Everyone who would question these lists furnished by the legal Representatives of the Political Parties must do so in a court of law, as set forth in Article 28 of the Law on Political Parties. One could also be referred to a particular court with authority over that party, in accordance with the law, so that justice is done.
3. I hope all this is wrapped up no later than Thursday, 20 January 1994. Thus, we will be able quickly to set up these Transitional Institutions, while respecting the law and the statutes of the parties. This would not keep anyone who felt wronged from continuing to seek redress in the courts, but would also promote the reconciliation of the opposing tendencies within the Political Parties.”
The Assertion of Continental Magazine:
“A number of witnesses testified that at the beginning of 1994, the plan to assassinate President Habyarimana was an open secret among the elite units at Camp Kanombe. The threat became so direct at this point that various officers even announced, in a premonitory fashion, that President Habyarimana would be killed in an attack on his plane.”
However, if this information was circulating in a premonitory fashion within these units at Kanombe, the Camp Commandant and the units based at Kanombe would have informed the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army in an Occasional Security Report [OSR]. But no one indicated such a situation existed. On the contrary, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army received a good deal of information from other sources, which gradually increased in intensity after 21 November 1993, all of it suggesting a plot was being cooked up by the RPF, but never of one coming from inside the FAR. Some examples:
--Information from 21 November 1993 indicated that there was a squad of RPF that had infiltrated the Capital, Kigali, to kidnap and assassinate the President.
--Information from 5 January 1994 indicated that the RPF battalion encamped on the CND was in possession of SAM 7 missiles. The day the RPF arrived in Kigali, 28 December 1993, the infiltrators who were by then spread throughout the city of Kigali, according to the report of the Commandant of the MP battalion mentioned above, were certainly not all secretly briefed and told that the RPF had brought in unchecked and unauthorized arms. The population understood and spoke, and the information got to the military intelligence services of the Rwandan Army.
--The intelligence report of 12 January 1994 showed that the RPF was trying to kill President Habyarimana on all his road trips, but that since it failed because of the security measures taken by the Presidential Guard, President Habyarimana would be killed aboard his plane and that it would go unnoticed.
--In January 1994, a letter addressed to Kagame and intercepted in Muhura-Byumba, from a certain Zubere of Nyamirambo in the city of Kigali, stated that it would not be easy to assassinate President Habyarimana without at least 100 men in civilian cloths. The courier had avoided the main route between Kigali and Mulindi and was using side roads to get this report to Kagame.
--On 14 Februaruy 1994 a soldier of the UNAMIR indicated with certainty that the RPF had SAM missiles on the CND.
--The last information dated 2 April 1994 reported on the assortment of assassinations of civilian and military authorities and leaders of the political parties close to the MRND and proposals to eliminate the President and the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, while simultaneously launching a general offensive and invading Kigali. These attacks were expected between 3 and 9 April 1994. This information from a European source suggested that President Habyarimana should not make the trip of 6 April to Dar es Salaam.
It is certain that this information came from soldiers who were misinformed or who were deliberately tricking it out and turning it against the troops of the Rwandan Army to create confusion, if it was really getting around Camp Kanombe. Finally, if during the reception at the Hotel Meridian on 4 April 1994, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora ‘declared that he was opposed to the Rwandan president’s taking the trip to Tanzania and that the plane in which he was traveling would be shot down,’ it certainly followed from the information of 3 April 1994. His declaration shows that Colonel Bagosora was concerned for the safety of President Habyarimana rather than planning his assassination. To interpret this declaration as if Bagosora said he was going to order the assassination of President Habyarimana is to pervert his thinking. If he had planned to shoot down President Habyarimana’s plane, and this trip would have been the perfect opportunity to do so, Bagosora would not have opposed it and would never have stated as much. It is antithetic to attribute the attack to him.
Ordering, shipping, stocking and handling of the SAM missiles.
The former Rwandan military authorities do not deny the different orders that were made. The need to acquire anti-aircraft weapons certainly existed and is only normal. However, there were no such deliveries.
The Mutsinzi Commission seems to have misrepresented the letter from the Russian Embassy. ‘“On 13 July 1992, the Russian Ambassador to Rwanda sent a positive note verbale to the Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs” bearing notably on the furnishing of anti-aircraft weapons including SAM-16 missiles.’ The second part of this extract, which speaks of furnishing arms, seems to be an add-on by the Commission, as it is not contained within the quotes. In any case, the diplomatic note conveying the agreement to furnish arms is different from the note or memorandum of delivery from the manufacturing plant, the warehouses of another army or another contracted supplier, with the list of materials and their serial numbers. Does this note verbale from the Russian Embassy contain this list?
They should have looked for the former chief of administrative services and supplies for the Ministry of Defense and asked him if there had been any deliveries of the SAM missiles ordered and from which suppliers. They should have looked for and heard the claims of the former Commandant of the Rwandan Army base who administered the armaments to know if he had received the SAM missiles, from where, if he had stocked them in his depots and to which unit they were delivered.
As to the stocking and handling of the SAMs, they should have looked for and questioned the former Commandant of Camp Kanombe, Colonel Mayuya, and the Commander of the Operational Sector of the City of Kigali, the Commander of the Artillery Company and the former officers of the Anti-Aircraft Battalion. They should, especially, have asked if this specialized unit, which had to have had the anti-aircraft missiles if the FAR was actually in possession of them, had even one soldier who knew of these anti-aircraft missiles, had seen and worked with them, had received any training on them and where he had received it.
They should also have sought out the former officers of the Presidential Guard who were outside the country and asked them if someone in their unit had received any training in these anti-aircraft missiles, if this unit was equipped with such weapons, since when and from where they had come. But the Mutsinzi Commission also seems not to have questioned Colonel Evariste Murenzi, a former officer with the Presidential Guard who distinguished himself by being deleted from the Mucyo Commission report against France. Anyway, he had the courage to say that the Presidential Guard never had the SAM missiles and his testimony was just simply not included.
They should have sought out the former G1 (chief of personnel) of the Rwandan Army and the former chief of services in the Department of Military Cooperation of the Ministry of Defense and asked them if there were any ex-FAR soldiers who received training in anti-aircraft missiles. They might just have questioned the last chief of personnel of the Ministry of Defense and asked him if there was even one soldier in the FAR who had received such training.
The Document: Rwanda’s Downward Spiral
“From 8 April 1994, the US State Dept. received information from the High Command of the Rwandan Army according to which a missile fired by extremist Hutus from the Presidential Guard shot down the plane carrying the Presidents . . . in accordance with the Embassy in Kigali and the DAO (Defense Attaché Officer) in Yaoundé. It is significant that no one within the Rwandan military Command accuses the RPF of being the source of the attack,” the document specifies.
This report seems to be disinformation meant to direct the decisions of the American authorities. It is important to know just when the US Embassy in Kigali and the DAO in Yaoundé received this information and from whom. One must know if this information was directly delivered to the US Ambassador, himself, or if he was informed by one of his agents, and if this information was sent on to Washington by his own agency! Did the DAO Yaoundé receive the information directly from the same source (person) at the “High Command of the Rwandan Army”? If so, how did this foreign-based service directly receive this information from the “High Command of the Rwandan Army”? If not, was he informed by the US Embassy in Kigali?
What is meant by “High Command of the Rwandan Army,” since this terminology was never used by the Rwandan Army? If it refers to the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, this supposes that the information was delivered to the US Embassy by an appropriate authority for it to be accepted. If the information came from the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army and that it is dated 7 or 8 April, for this to be remotely probable, it must have come from Colonel Joseph Murasampongo, who replaced the Chief of Staff at that time. Colonel BEM Marcel Gatsinzi, who was designated as Interim Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, did not arrive in Kigali until 8 April around 17.00 hours and took up his duties that night.
If, instead, “High Command of the Rwandan Army” refers to the Command of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), a term used to designate the Command of the Rwandan Army and the National Gendarmerie unified within the Ministry of Defense, the information must have been delivered by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, Cabinet Director of the MINADEF, 7 April 1994, before noon, to have been accepted as coming from the FAR, because he was the appropriate authority to speak for the FAR (see, especially, all the communiqués sent out that were signed by Bagosora). If the information was dated from the afternoon of 7 April, it must have been delivered by the president of the Crisis Committee created at a meeting of the High Command of the FAR held at the ESM (the Military Academy) on 7 April 1994 at 10 am, that being Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana (Chief of Staff of the National Gendarmerie). Was this information conveyed to the Embassy physically by an appropriately identified Rwandan military authority who went to the Embassy, or to the Ambassador’s envoy who then went to see the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. Was it transmitted by telephone by an authorized representative of the Rwandan Army’s Chief of Staff, which regularly telephones the Embassy and whose voice would be recognized to verify the just who was on the phone? But if the information came from someone else, it could only have been a diversionary tactic initiated and carried out by elements of the RPF presenting themselves as being from the High Command of the Rwandan Army or by an element of a fifth column. No soldier, regardless of rank or duty, would be able to take it upon himself to communicate with the Embassies. This observation applies as well to the theory suggested by the French Ambassador to Rwanda in his note to Paris from 25 April 1994. From whom had he received this information according to which “the shots came from Kanombe where the Presidential Guard has a camp.” There was no camp of the Presidential Guard at Kanombe. There was only one detachment committed to the defense of the grounds of the presidential residence, deployed to the perimeter there.
The Command of the FAR suspected the RPF as soon as the attack was announced because of the intelligence discussed above, which indicated there was a plot afoot by the RPF to hit the president. This was the view of those in attendance at the emergency meeting of the superior officers of the FAR held by, and at the site of, the Command of the FAR by the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army on the night of 6 and 7 April 1994, thus before the information was communicated to the US Embassy in Kigali. So it is wrong to report that “no one within the High Command of the Rwandan Army accused the RPF of being behind the attack.” It was also quite surprising to hear General Roméo Dallaire push his version of the events as an accident when the plane was brought down by a surface-to-air missile strike.
The number of witnesses (557)
It is not the number of witnesses that counts, it is the quality of the real information they hold and not the information that has been suggested to them. Some of their testimony needs commentary.
According to Jean Marie Vianney Gasana, “The Extremists in the military resented Habyarimana for being too friendly with the Tutsis.” When a witness uses the term ‘Extremist,’ it shows that his or her testimony was ordered, or suggested to the witness, by the RPF.
According to Lt. Makuza, “Certain among us knew that there was something going to happen on 6 April—without knowing exactly what.” By specifying the date as 6 April, this witness shows that his testimony was forced to give it credibility.
The plot hatched by the FAR
The insinuation of a plot hatched by members of the FAR and especially Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and the commanders of the Presidential Guard, the Para-Commando battalion and the Reconnaissance battalion, seems unfounded, since no information relevant to such a plot was ever brought to the attention of the Command of the Rwandan Army, either officially or unofficially. In fact, if it was being spoken of in all the units at Camp Kanombe, as the witnesses before the Mutsinzi Commission have alleged, military intelligence would certainly have known about it. But there was not a word of it there!
To allege that every Battalion Commander at Camp Kanombe was a member of the AMASASU (Alliance des Militaires Agacés par les Séculaires Actes Sournois des UNARistes [Alliance of Soldiers Annoyed by the Underhanded Secular Acts of the UNARists {those behind Arusha and in favor of uniting the Hutu and Tutsi forces}]) organization is an aberration. There were only three Battalion Commanders at Camp Kanombe: the Para-Commando Battalion, the Anti-Aircraft Battalion and the Artillery Battery of that Company assimilated into a battalion. The other units were Companies. How could a witness who was not even aware of this organization give credible testimony? If the members of this AMASASU organization were known to be at Camp Kanombe, the Camp Commander would have reported it to the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. But no information on this organization ever came out. Except for two leaflets that this organization issued at the beginning of 1993, AMASASU did not demonstrate its existence. This is what made it difficult to identify its members, if there were any and if it was not just one guy calling himself an organization! The AMASASU base at Camp Kanombe was not in the hypotheses of the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army.
The spot from which the missiles were fired
The precision with which a half dozen ex-FAR “declared that the missiles were fired from inside the enclosed grounds of the president’s residence or very nearby” indicates that these witnesses were in the place where the missiles were fired. Does this mean they were part of the detachment of Presidential Guards deployed to defend the perimeter of the residence?
Other witnesses have said that the shots came from inside the camp or from the area very close to the camp without indicating which side. This sort of testimony is vague, which shows that it is faked. None of this testimony specifies the direction of the missiles. But the plane could not have fallen like a stone into the garden of the presidential residence if it had been shot down by missiles fired on it at that altitude from the enclosure of the residence. The same applies if the plane was hit after it had passed over the Nyarugunga Valley, as Silas Siborurema testified. As the crow flies, this would be 200 or 300 meters from the presidential residence. When a plane is hit by a missile, it does not fall straight down from the point of impact, or even just a few hundred meters from it. It will fall further along its course from the point of impact depending on its altitude, its air speed, its flight path and its weight. Consequently, if the plane was struck by the missile while it was approaching the places cited, it would have crashed either between the presidential residence and the military hospital at Camp Kanombe, or at the top of the Camp on its northern side, or in the middle of the Camp in the section of the Military Buildings Company and the Quarter Master or of the Transport Company, or else on the very eastern end of the runway or on the runway itself. In any case, this testimony gathered 15 years after the attack from witnesses who are in the claws of the RPF cannot replace that which was taken first hand from the people of Masaka, Rusororo and Ndera, who were freely deposed the day after the attack.
Access and egress by the RPF Commando Unit to Masaka
It is good to remember that traffic was moving freely. There was no curfew, no FAR units deployed in the zone, no checkpoints or roadblocks on the route joining Kigali-Musha-Rwamagana. The RPF moved around freely throughout the zone under the control of the UNAMIR. Masaka was in this zone. RPF elements in civilian cloths would not have been recognized because the usual checking of IDs by the Gendarmerie had been stopped by Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. After the missile strike, the commando unit buried the missile launchers in the bush where they were discovered on 25 April 1994 by displaced persons from the East who were building shelters. The commando unit could have gotten back to Kigali in a civilian vehicle; it could have headed toward Rwamagana and disappeared into the countryside; it could have blended in with acquaintances in Masaka, Rusororo, Kabuga, Musha, etc. . . . and rejoined the RPF in its march on Kigali.
Very important elements!
a) The fake black box.
Did the Mutsinzi Commission investigate the origins of the fake black box that was attributed to the presidential Falcon jet and was hidden in the offices of the United Nations in New York until its discovery by judge Jean-Louis Bruguière? According to the article by Partrick de Saint-Exupery in Le Monde of 8 April 2009, this black box came from an Air France Concorde 209, marked F-BVFC. It was found by the UN (i.e., the UNAMIR) on 27 May 1994, abandoned near the crash site. So it was 7 weeks after the attack that the UNAMIR found the fake black box. The plane came down in the garden of the presidential residence, not in the bush, the forest, the swamp or in a lake. All the visible debris from the wreckage was in the garden. Nothing could have been hidden. No piece the size of a matchbox or even smaller could have gone unnoticed. The FAR held the site until 20 May 1994 and was moved out during the night of 20-21 May 1994. The RPF took over this position in the early morning of 21 May 1994, and the UNAMIR was on the site the same day, according to Patrick de Saint-Exupery. The fake black box was found on this location one week after it was occupied by the RPF, who surely must know how it got there!
b) The missile launchers
Did the Mutsinzi Commission try to recover the two missile-launchers found on 25 April by the people living in the bush of the Masaka Valley? They were turned over to President Mobutu, then in charge of their security if needed for an investigation. When Laurent Désiré Kabila took power in Kinshasa on 15 May 1997, they were in the warehouses of the military camp at Kokolo. The commandant of Camp Kokolo was Commander John Numbi, the current Inspector General of the Congolese Police. General James Kabarebe, currently the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces was the Chief of Staff and a Major General of the Congolese Armed Forces. The two missile-launchers disappeared from these warehouses at Camp Kokolo during their commands. John Numbi refused to testify on this subject. These two men are responsible for the disappearance of the missile-launchers!
Any investigation into the attack against President Habyarimana that does not deal with the fake black box (its origins, how it got onto the crash site and its use to record the flight data of the Falcon 50 on 6 April 1994), the disassembly and disappearance of the real black box, and the missile-launchers, can only be biased.
Victory to the Truth, and down with lies, manipulations and disinformation!
27 December 2009
Kanyarwanda Veritas
But, as with the Muyco Report before it, our translation from the French of this rebuttal of Mutsinzi should serve. Though from the looks of his body of knowledge on these events, I wouldn’t expect Gourevitch to pick up on it. Hell, I guess if The New Yorker’s got your back, you don’t have to get it right—ever. –mc]
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A Rebuttal of the Mutsinzi Commission Report
The 6 April 1994 Attack: Focusing on elements of the Jean Mutsinzi Report
by Kanyarwanda Veritas
Rwanda/Attack of 6 April 1994—The investigation that accuses Extremist Hutus:
Continental Magazine
Friday, 4 December 2009
On reading parts of the Mutsinzi Report without any historical analysis, the uninformed might find themselves as overwhelmingly convinced as they were with the sensational Jean de Dieu Mucyo Report on France’s involvement in the Rwandan Tutsi genocide of 1994. But readers who are familiar with the methods and strategies of the RPF, especially those used by the commissions created by the current Kigali regime, will notice right away that the Mutsinzi Report is batched testimony that was either made-to-orders or scripted and given to ‘rehearsed witnesses’ to present, a potpourri of tricked-out situations and information and of documents interpreted in such a way as to turn them into disinformation for manipulating public opinion. In short, the Report of the Mutsinzi Commission is a diversion!
My focus will be partly on the Commission, itself, and partly on extracts from certain testimony and documents.
The Mutsinzi Commission:
Continental Magazine presents The Mutsinzi Commission as an ‘Independent Committee of Experts’ presided over by Jean Mutsinzi, Chief Justice of the African Court of Human Rights and Peoples and the former Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court. This Committee, composed of members of the RPF, cannot be considered independent, impartial or even credible, since it was created by the RPF, which is a party to the matter that the Commission is charged with investigating. Furthermore, the appointment of an international functionary to head this Commission smacks of chicanery. Since Mutsinzi is Rwandan, the Rwandan government should not have assigned him a mission that conflicts with his functions with the Commission of the African Union. This was done to project greater credibility onto the Report. The Commission is not independent because it answers to the Rwandan government and cannot report its findings to the public, something it has twice tried to do and has twice been thwarted by the Rwandan government. The Commission cannot deliver its findings or judgments, but must convey only the views of the RPF.
The Rwandan government should have asked either the UN or the African Union to create a truly independent Commission, one that the Rwandan government would not have been able to control, made up of foreign investigators, including, especially, representatives of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the insurers of the presidential Falcon 50 executive jet. The report of such a Commission would not need to be modified in any way, nothing added or deleted or touched up, by the Rwandan government. Such a Commission would not only be independent but also, and more importantly, impartial. It would be able, for example, to look in foreign countries for witnesses who hold important positions of responsibility that provide them the opportunity to know of situations and possess information the likes of which a simple soldier, or non-com or any other kind of officer, like those available to the Mutsinzi Commission, would not have access.
It should have been a Commission free from that prejudice that considers all Rwandan refugees to be people with something to hide or for which to be condemned. These people fled death at the hands of the RPF. If the FAR had surrendered, all their officers would have been executed on the battlefield, and the current debate would never have taken place because ‘no witnesses would have survived.’ The proof of this is that many ex-FAR officers who turned themselves over to the RPF or those who returned to the country or were repatriated, were killed along with their families. For details on this go to http://www.virungavision.com/, and look at the document
“Situation des Ex-FAR” to see the names of those killed by the RPF. So it is tendentious to assume that those witnesses who are in exile cannot bear fair witness and, on the basis of such prejudice, cast suspicion on the investigation of French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière.
The RPF makes false accusations against these potential witnesses in exile to discredit them. Yet these are the very people whom a truly independent investigatory commission should contact, paying no attention to the false accusations from Kigali. Furthermore, it should be understood that people living inside Rwanda cannot even discuss the idea that the RPF, often referred to just as Paul Kagame, were implicated in the assassination of President Habyarimana, making them responsible for the catastrophe of April 1994, at a time when one cannot even accuse an individual RPF soldier of having killed a parent or a close relative.
Continental Magazine reproaches Judge Bruguière for having issued arrest warrants against Rwandan suspects without having heard their side of the story. However, all the prisoners of the ICTR have been subjects of arrest warrants without trying to locate them, bring them before investigatory commissions or hear their stories before issuing these warrants. Even Kigali makes up lists of ‘suspects’ that are used like arrest warrants without ever bringing them before an investigatory commission. Kigali has even convicted certain refugees of contempt without ever going to their countries of asylum to depose them. Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze are cited in the Mutsinzi Report though no one from this investigation ever went to the UN prison in Arusha where they have been held for almost ten years to interview them.
To wrap up this subject, the Rwandan government of the RPF, being a party to the events under investigation, has no moral authority to create any kind of commission whatsoever to investigate the Rwandan drama, especially one composed solely of members of the RPF. At the very least, members of the victims’ families should have been included. There must be an independent and impartial International Commission, made up of real experts, capable of contacting without prejudice those people likely to have credible information and not just those whose knowledge is dubious, who have been rehearsed and trained to give the testimony they give or be forced into the kind of situation where there is no freedom of expression, but only fear for one’s life.
Focus on Extracts from the Mutsinzi Report
The Arusha Accords
“The Arusha Accords were supposed to go into effect at the end of 1993. But under pressure from extremist Hutus in his inner circle, President Habyarimana postponed the due-date several times.”
This is a lie and a piece of brazen disinformation.
In fact, the signing of the Arusha Peace Accords took place on 4 August 1993, and the Accords were supposed to go into effect 34 or 37 days later, either on 7 or 10 September 1993, after the swearing in of the members of the Broad Based Transitional Government (to include the RPF). The Accords distributed the government ministries among the various political parties and the RPF, and gave a number of phantom seats in the Transitional Parliament to each party. It is the political parties and the RPF who were supposed to designate their representatives in the Transitional Institutions and give their lists to the Prime Minister and to President Habyarimana to organize the swearing in ceremonies. President Habyarimana’s party was ready by the due-date. But the other political parties and the RPF had not yet finished designating their representatives.
In November or early December 1993, the UNAMIR organized a meeting between the governing party and the RPF in Mulindi, at the headquarters of the RPF, to discuss this delay. The governing party was represented by Minister Félicien Gatabazi, chief of the delegation, Minister Frédéric Nzamurambaho, the Chief of Staff of the National Gendarmarie, the then Colonel BEM Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a high official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amri Sued, and others. Paul Kagame led the RPF delegation, which included, most notably, the RPF’s Presidential Counselor for political affairs, and others. The meeting decided that the delay was not due to the ill will of any of the parties involved, and acknowledged that two of the parties experienced real internal difficulties in sticking to the schedule. The RPF was ready on 28 December 1993, and it sent its representatives to Kigali. With the swearing in of President Habyarimana to open the ceremony, the inauguration of the other Transistional Institutions was to take place on 5 January 1994. The other Institutions could not take the oath because of conflicts resulting from the implosion of certain political parties, the polarization of their fringe elements, and the impossibility of agreement on the lists of names to be submitted. The RPF blended in and demanded that those fringe elements that were allies of theirs be sworn in, opposed the participation of the CDR in the Transitional Institutions because it did not have the right, and boycotted the swearing in ceremony for the members of Parliament. The status quo persisted until the Habyarimana assassination. Here is an extract from his last speech, broadcast on the radio 15 January 1994.
“I would like you to remember, once again, that the Arusha Peace Accords allot extensive power in the political parties before they participate in the Transitional Institution. This agreement makes them, in fact, responsible for naming their representatives to the Transitional National Assembly. It determines the number of ministerial portfolios each party will hold, as well as the number of members each will send to the Transitional National Assembly. From there, no one, no institution, can strip these parties and political groupings of the rights conveyed to them by the Arusha Peace Accords.
So, we have to respect the proposals of the Peace Accords and avoid interfering in the internal affairs of the parties. We have to let the political party officials make their decisions independently, in accordance with the by-laws of their parties.
In this way we will respect the laws and rules that we all chose when we put our names to the Peace Accords.
Consequently, we have to insist that the political forces who have not yet achieved it among their own memberships, come to a consensus on the lists of their representatives to the Transitional National Assembly and the Broad-Based Transitional Government, so that every effort can be made to remove all obstructions to helping our country get beyond this impasse and permit us to set up those institutions laid out by the Arusha Peace Accords.” [. . .]
“For this reason, on learning of the negotiations impasse in which the parties found themselves, I became of the opinion that we must impose the course to be followed and the timetable that will bring us by next week to a point where we can set up the two remaining Transitional Institutions, the Transitional National Assembly and the Broad-Based Transitional Government.
1. We cannot, in any event, by-pass either the Arusha Peace Accords or the law on Political Parties or the by-laws governing each party. To do so would not solve anything because it would go dangerously against our resolution to base our conduct on the principles of a State of laws. This is why we must at all costs take into consideration only those lists furnished by the legal Representatives of the Political Parties.
2. Everyone who would question these lists furnished by the legal Representatives of the Political Parties must do so in a court of law, as set forth in Article 28 of the Law on Political Parties. One could also be referred to a particular court with authority over that party, in accordance with the law, so that justice is done.
3. I hope all this is wrapped up no later than Thursday, 20 January 1994. Thus, we will be able quickly to set up these Transitional Institutions, while respecting the law and the statutes of the parties. This would not keep anyone who felt wronged from continuing to seek redress in the courts, but would also promote the reconciliation of the opposing tendencies within the Political Parties.”
The Assertion of Continental Magazine:
“A number of witnesses testified that at the beginning of 1994, the plan to assassinate President Habyarimana was an open secret among the elite units at Camp Kanombe. The threat became so direct at this point that various officers even announced, in a premonitory fashion, that President Habyarimana would be killed in an attack on his plane.”
However, if this information was circulating in a premonitory fashion within these units at Kanombe, the Camp Commandant and the units based at Kanombe would have informed the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army in an Occasional Security Report [OSR]. But no one indicated such a situation existed. On the contrary, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army received a good deal of information from other sources, which gradually increased in intensity after 21 November 1993, all of it suggesting a plot was being cooked up by the RPF, but never of one coming from inside the FAR. Some examples:
--Information from 21 November 1993 indicated that there was a squad of RPF that had infiltrated the Capital, Kigali, to kidnap and assassinate the President.
--Information from 5 January 1994 indicated that the RPF battalion encamped on the CND was in possession of SAM 7 missiles. The day the RPF arrived in Kigali, 28 December 1993, the infiltrators who were by then spread throughout the city of Kigali, according to the report of the Commandant of the MP battalion mentioned above, were certainly not all secretly briefed and told that the RPF had brought in unchecked and unauthorized arms. The population understood and spoke, and the information got to the military intelligence services of the Rwandan Army.
--The intelligence report of 12 January 1994 showed that the RPF was trying to kill President Habyarimana on all his road trips, but that since it failed because of the security measures taken by the Presidential Guard, President Habyarimana would be killed aboard his plane and that it would go unnoticed.
--In January 1994, a letter addressed to Kagame and intercepted in Muhura-Byumba, from a certain Zubere of Nyamirambo in the city of Kigali, stated that it would not be easy to assassinate President Habyarimana without at least 100 men in civilian cloths. The courier had avoided the main route between Kigali and Mulindi and was using side roads to get this report to Kagame.
--On 14 Februaruy 1994 a soldier of the UNAMIR indicated with certainty that the RPF had SAM missiles on the CND.
--The last information dated 2 April 1994 reported on the assortment of assassinations of civilian and military authorities and leaders of the political parties close to the MRND and proposals to eliminate the President and the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, while simultaneously launching a general offensive and invading Kigali. These attacks were expected between 3 and 9 April 1994. This information from a European source suggested that President Habyarimana should not make the trip of 6 April to Dar es Salaam.
It is certain that this information came from soldiers who were misinformed or who were deliberately tricking it out and turning it against the troops of the Rwandan Army to create confusion, if it was really getting around Camp Kanombe. Finally, if during the reception at the Hotel Meridian on 4 April 1994, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora ‘declared that he was opposed to the Rwandan president’s taking the trip to Tanzania and that the plane in which he was traveling would be shot down,’ it certainly followed from the information of 3 April 1994. His declaration shows that Colonel Bagosora was concerned for the safety of President Habyarimana rather than planning his assassination. To interpret this declaration as if Bagosora said he was going to order the assassination of President Habyarimana is to pervert his thinking. If he had planned to shoot down President Habyarimana’s plane, and this trip would have been the perfect opportunity to do so, Bagosora would not have opposed it and would never have stated as much. It is antithetic to attribute the attack to him.
Ordering, shipping, stocking and handling of the SAM missiles.
The former Rwandan military authorities do not deny the different orders that were made. The need to acquire anti-aircraft weapons certainly existed and is only normal. However, there were no such deliveries.
The Mutsinzi Commission seems to have misrepresented the letter from the Russian Embassy. ‘“On 13 July 1992, the Russian Ambassador to Rwanda sent a positive note verbale to the Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs” bearing notably on the furnishing of anti-aircraft weapons including SAM-16 missiles.’ The second part of this extract, which speaks of furnishing arms, seems to be an add-on by the Commission, as it is not contained within the quotes. In any case, the diplomatic note conveying the agreement to furnish arms is different from the note or memorandum of delivery from the manufacturing plant, the warehouses of another army or another contracted supplier, with the list of materials and their serial numbers. Does this note verbale from the Russian Embassy contain this list?
They should have looked for the former chief of administrative services and supplies for the Ministry of Defense and asked him if there had been any deliveries of the SAM missiles ordered and from which suppliers. They should have looked for and heard the claims of the former Commandant of the Rwandan Army base who administered the armaments to know if he had received the SAM missiles, from where, if he had stocked them in his depots and to which unit they were delivered.
As to the stocking and handling of the SAMs, they should have looked for and questioned the former Commandant of Camp Kanombe, Colonel Mayuya, and the Commander of the Operational Sector of the City of Kigali, the Commander of the Artillery Company and the former officers of the Anti-Aircraft Battalion. They should, especially, have asked if this specialized unit, which had to have had the anti-aircraft missiles if the FAR was actually in possession of them, had even one soldier who knew of these anti-aircraft missiles, had seen and worked with them, had received any training on them and where he had received it.
They should also have sought out the former officers of the Presidential Guard who were outside the country and asked them if someone in their unit had received any training in these anti-aircraft missiles, if this unit was equipped with such weapons, since when and from where they had come. But the Mutsinzi Commission also seems not to have questioned Colonel Evariste Murenzi, a former officer with the Presidential Guard who distinguished himself by being deleted from the Mucyo Commission report against France. Anyway, he had the courage to say that the Presidential Guard never had the SAM missiles and his testimony was just simply not included.
They should have sought out the former G1 (chief of personnel) of the Rwandan Army and the former chief of services in the Department of Military Cooperation of the Ministry of Defense and asked them if there were any ex-FAR soldiers who received training in anti-aircraft missiles. They might just have questioned the last chief of personnel of the Ministry of Defense and asked him if there was even one soldier in the FAR who had received such training.
The Document: Rwanda’s Downward Spiral
“From 8 April 1994, the US State Dept. received information from the High Command of the Rwandan Army according to which a missile fired by extremist Hutus from the Presidential Guard shot down the plane carrying the Presidents . . . in accordance with the Embassy in Kigali and the DAO (Defense Attaché Officer) in Yaoundé. It is significant that no one within the Rwandan military Command accuses the RPF of being the source of the attack,” the document specifies.
This report seems to be disinformation meant to direct the decisions of the American authorities. It is important to know just when the US Embassy in Kigali and the DAO in Yaoundé received this information and from whom. One must know if this information was directly delivered to the US Ambassador, himself, or if he was informed by one of his agents, and if this information was sent on to Washington by his own agency! Did the DAO Yaoundé receive the information directly from the same source (person) at the “High Command of the Rwandan Army”? If so, how did this foreign-based service directly receive this information from the “High Command of the Rwandan Army”? If not, was he informed by the US Embassy in Kigali?
What is meant by “High Command of the Rwandan Army,” since this terminology was never used by the Rwandan Army? If it refers to the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, this supposes that the information was delivered to the US Embassy by an appropriate authority for it to be accepted. If the information came from the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army and that it is dated 7 or 8 April, for this to be remotely probable, it must have come from Colonel Joseph Murasampongo, who replaced the Chief of Staff at that time. Colonel BEM Marcel Gatsinzi, who was designated as Interim Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, did not arrive in Kigali until 8 April around 17.00 hours and took up his duties that night.
If, instead, “High Command of the Rwandan Army” refers to the Command of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), a term used to designate the Command of the Rwandan Army and the National Gendarmerie unified within the Ministry of Defense, the information must have been delivered by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, Cabinet Director of the MINADEF, 7 April 1994, before noon, to have been accepted as coming from the FAR, because he was the appropriate authority to speak for the FAR (see, especially, all the communiqués sent out that were signed by Bagosora). If the information was dated from the afternoon of 7 April, it must have been delivered by the president of the Crisis Committee created at a meeting of the High Command of the FAR held at the ESM (the Military Academy) on 7 April 1994 at 10 am, that being Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana (Chief of Staff of the National Gendarmerie). Was this information conveyed to the Embassy physically by an appropriately identified Rwandan military authority who went to the Embassy, or to the Ambassador’s envoy who then went to see the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. Was it transmitted by telephone by an authorized representative of the Rwandan Army’s Chief of Staff, which regularly telephones the Embassy and whose voice would be recognized to verify the just who was on the phone? But if the information came from someone else, it could only have been a diversionary tactic initiated and carried out by elements of the RPF presenting themselves as being from the High Command of the Rwandan Army or by an element of a fifth column. No soldier, regardless of rank or duty, would be able to take it upon himself to communicate with the Embassies. This observation applies as well to the theory suggested by the French Ambassador to Rwanda in his note to Paris from 25 April 1994. From whom had he received this information according to which “the shots came from Kanombe where the Presidential Guard has a camp.” There was no camp of the Presidential Guard at Kanombe. There was only one detachment committed to the defense of the grounds of the presidential residence, deployed to the perimeter there.
The Command of the FAR suspected the RPF as soon as the attack was announced because of the intelligence discussed above, which indicated there was a plot afoot by the RPF to hit the president. This was the view of those in attendance at the emergency meeting of the superior officers of the FAR held by, and at the site of, the Command of the FAR by the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army on the night of 6 and 7 April 1994, thus before the information was communicated to the US Embassy in Kigali. So it is wrong to report that “no one within the High Command of the Rwandan Army accused the RPF of being behind the attack.” It was also quite surprising to hear General Roméo Dallaire push his version of the events as an accident when the plane was brought down by a surface-to-air missile strike.
The number of witnesses (557)
It is not the number of witnesses that counts, it is the quality of the real information they hold and not the information that has been suggested to them. Some of their testimony needs commentary.
According to Jean Marie Vianney Gasana, “The Extremists in the military resented Habyarimana for being too friendly with the Tutsis.” When a witness uses the term ‘Extremist,’ it shows that his or her testimony was ordered, or suggested to the witness, by the RPF.
According to Lt. Makuza, “Certain among us knew that there was something going to happen on 6 April—without knowing exactly what.” By specifying the date as 6 April, this witness shows that his testimony was forced to give it credibility.
The plot hatched by the FAR
The insinuation of a plot hatched by members of the FAR and especially Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and the commanders of the Presidential Guard, the Para-Commando battalion and the Reconnaissance battalion, seems unfounded, since no information relevant to such a plot was ever brought to the attention of the Command of the Rwandan Army, either officially or unofficially. In fact, if it was being spoken of in all the units at Camp Kanombe, as the witnesses before the Mutsinzi Commission have alleged, military intelligence would certainly have known about it. But there was not a word of it there!
To allege that every Battalion Commander at Camp Kanombe was a member of the AMASASU (Alliance des Militaires Agacés par les Séculaires Actes Sournois des UNARistes [Alliance of Soldiers Annoyed by the Underhanded Secular Acts of the UNARists {those behind Arusha and in favor of uniting the Hutu and Tutsi forces}]) organization is an aberration. There were only three Battalion Commanders at Camp Kanombe: the Para-Commando Battalion, the Anti-Aircraft Battalion and the Artillery Battery of that Company assimilated into a battalion. The other units were Companies. How could a witness who was not even aware of this organization give credible testimony? If the members of this AMASASU organization were known to be at Camp Kanombe, the Camp Commander would have reported it to the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. But no information on this organization ever came out. Except for two leaflets that this organization issued at the beginning of 1993, AMASASU did not demonstrate its existence. This is what made it difficult to identify its members, if there were any and if it was not just one guy calling himself an organization! The AMASASU base at Camp Kanombe was not in the hypotheses of the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army.
The spot from which the missiles were fired
The precision with which a half dozen ex-FAR “declared that the missiles were fired from inside the enclosed grounds of the president’s residence or very nearby” indicates that these witnesses were in the place where the missiles were fired. Does this mean they were part of the detachment of Presidential Guards deployed to defend the perimeter of the residence?
Other witnesses have said that the shots came from inside the camp or from the area very close to the camp without indicating which side. This sort of testimony is vague, which shows that it is faked. None of this testimony specifies the direction of the missiles. But the plane could not have fallen like a stone into the garden of the presidential residence if it had been shot down by missiles fired on it at that altitude from the enclosure of the residence. The same applies if the plane was hit after it had passed over the Nyarugunga Valley, as Silas Siborurema testified. As the crow flies, this would be 200 or 300 meters from the presidential residence. When a plane is hit by a missile, it does not fall straight down from the point of impact, or even just a few hundred meters from it. It will fall further along its course from the point of impact depending on its altitude, its air speed, its flight path and its weight. Consequently, if the plane was struck by the missile while it was approaching the places cited, it would have crashed either between the presidential residence and the military hospital at Camp Kanombe, or at the top of the Camp on its northern side, or in the middle of the Camp in the section of the Military Buildings Company and the Quarter Master or of the Transport Company, or else on the very eastern end of the runway or on the runway itself. In any case, this testimony gathered 15 years after the attack from witnesses who are in the claws of the RPF cannot replace that which was taken first hand from the people of Masaka, Rusororo and Ndera, who were freely deposed the day after the attack.
Access and egress by the RPF Commando Unit to Masaka
It is good to remember that traffic was moving freely. There was no curfew, no FAR units deployed in the zone, no checkpoints or roadblocks on the route joining Kigali-Musha-Rwamagana. The RPF moved around freely throughout the zone under the control of the UNAMIR. Masaka was in this zone. RPF elements in civilian cloths would not have been recognized because the usual checking of IDs by the Gendarmerie had been stopped by Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. After the missile strike, the commando unit buried the missile launchers in the bush where they were discovered on 25 April 1994 by displaced persons from the East who were building shelters. The commando unit could have gotten back to Kigali in a civilian vehicle; it could have headed toward Rwamagana and disappeared into the countryside; it could have blended in with acquaintances in Masaka, Rusororo, Kabuga, Musha, etc. . . . and rejoined the RPF in its march on Kigali.
Very important elements!
a) The fake black box.
Did the Mutsinzi Commission investigate the origins of the fake black box that was attributed to the presidential Falcon jet and was hidden in the offices of the United Nations in New York until its discovery by judge Jean-Louis Bruguière? According to the article by Partrick de Saint-Exupery in Le Monde of 8 April 2009, this black box came from an Air France Concorde 209, marked F-BVFC. It was found by the UN (i.e., the UNAMIR) on 27 May 1994, abandoned near the crash site. So it was 7 weeks after the attack that the UNAMIR found the fake black box. The plane came down in the garden of the presidential residence, not in the bush, the forest, the swamp or in a lake. All the visible debris from the wreckage was in the garden. Nothing could have been hidden. No piece the size of a matchbox or even smaller could have gone unnoticed. The FAR held the site until 20 May 1994 and was moved out during the night of 20-21 May 1994. The RPF took over this position in the early morning of 21 May 1994, and the UNAMIR was on the site the same day, according to Patrick de Saint-Exupery. The fake black box was found on this location one week after it was occupied by the RPF, who surely must know how it got there!
b) The missile launchers
Did the Mutsinzi Commission try to recover the two missile-launchers found on 25 April by the people living in the bush of the Masaka Valley? They were turned over to President Mobutu, then in charge of their security if needed for an investigation. When Laurent Désiré Kabila took power in Kinshasa on 15 May 1997, they were in the warehouses of the military camp at Kokolo. The commandant of Camp Kokolo was Commander John Numbi, the current Inspector General of the Congolese Police. General James Kabarebe, currently the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces was the Chief of Staff and a Major General of the Congolese Armed Forces. The two missile-launchers disappeared from these warehouses at Camp Kokolo during their commands. John Numbi refused to testify on this subject. These two men are responsible for the disappearance of the missile-launchers!
Any investigation into the attack against President Habyarimana that does not deal with the fake black box (its origins, how it got onto the crash site and its use to record the flight data of the Falcon 50 on 6 April 1994), the disassembly and disappearance of the real black box, and the missile-launchers, can only be biased.
Victory to the Truth, and down with lies, manipulations and disinformation!
27 December 2009
Kanyarwanda Veritas
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