This link is an English translation of the article from Le Monde implicating current Rwandan president and former rebel leader Paul Kagame in the 1994 attack that killed then President Juvenal Habyarimana. Kagame, who is currently on a state visist to Belgium, is adamantly denying the charge.
The politics which would explain this is confusing. It was thought previously that the attack was the work of Hutu extremists who used it as a pretext to launch their murderous genocide against the Tutsi minority. Romeo Dallaire's account is discussed in this Guardian article:
The junta that took control immediately afterwards, he wrote, ordered the presidential guard to seal off the crash site and allowed no independent inspection. Several senior members of the junta smirked when told that some of the wreckage had landed in Habyarimana's garden.
The Le Monde article includes the following explanation from a "key witness", a RPF dissident who claims to have taken orders for the attack from Kagame himself:
When questioned, this key witness gave details concerning the monstrous hypothesis that the RPF, the rebel movement originating in the Tutsi Diaspora, was ready to sacrifice, in order to seize power, the "interior Tutsis," that is to say relatives who remained in the country, in 1959, following the end of political domination by the ethnic minority in Rwanda. "Paul Kagame had little regard for the interior Tutsis whom he viewed almost as Hutus," stated Captain Abdul Ruzibiza. "The interior Tutsis were potential enemies that had to be eliminated along with the Hutus to regain power, that was Paul Kagame's essential objective."
The French reporter who broke the story, Stephen Smith, was interviewed tonight on As It Happens. He speculated that Kagame's inability to convince moderate Hutu's to side with the RPF in peace negotiations lead him to conclude that there was no political way to gain power. The attack and subsequent chaos provided a pretext for continuing military action.
Besides LGen Dallaire, there's another Canadian connection. An article in the National Post includes a mention of Louise Arbour, then a war crimes prosecutor, currently a Canadian Supreme Court judge, ordering an end to an earlier UN-sponsored investigation in to the crash.
Curiously, the April 1994 crash has made the news via another thread: the black box recovered from the plane was lost and then recently found "in a locked filing cabinet in the U.N. Peacekeeping Department's Air Safety Unit."
Posted by alokem at March 11, 2004 11:43 PM