One hundred days of extermination left around 800,000 dead and at least 150,000 women raped in 1994 while survivors continue to demand justice
Millions of Rwandans commemorate this Sunday the 30th anniversary of the 1994 genocide: one hundred days of extermination of some 800,000 people, the vast majority of them Tutsis and moderate Hutus at the hands of Hutu extremists, and between 150,000 and 250,000 women were raped in the midst of a climate of international passivity.
A devastating report by the NGO Human Rights Watch published in 1999 extended part of the responsibility for the massacres to both UN staff and the three foreign governments mainly involved in Rwanda.
To the former, “for not having provided adequate information and guidance to the members of the Security Council”; to Belgium, for having “precipitously withdrawn its troops and for having advocated the complete withdrawal of UN force”; to the United States “for having put saving money before saving lives and for stopping the sending of a relief force”; and France, “for having continued to support a government involved in genocide.”
All of them, Alison Des Forges, the NGO’s main advisor for the African continent for two decades, pointed out at the time, were complicit in the massacres that broke out just hours after the country’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart , Cyprien Ntaryamina, died after the plane they were traveling in was shot down in Kigali on April 6, 1994.
Massacres, NGOs and international experts recall, preceded by decades of deterioration in the relationship between Hutus and Tutsis, marked by the colonialist transformations after the First World War, based in part on the coup d’état of General Habyarimana on July 5, 1973 and barley twenty years later by the hate campaign against the Tutsis championed by the Free Radio and Television of a Thousand Hills, the main loudspeaker of Hutu propaganda.
According to Philippe Gaillard, who was head of the delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Rwanda when the genocide occurred, “all kinds of rumors were circulating, also in diplomatic circles, that something serious was going to happen.” occur”.
Since then, a significant number of people responsible for the genocide, including former high-level government officials and other key figures behind the massacres, have been brought to justice, and more than a dozen prosecutions of genocide suspects are underway. carried out in national courts throughout Europe under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
However, in recent years, several high-level alleged genocide masterminds have died or, in the case of one alleged planner, been declared unfit to stand trial. This is the case of Felicien Kabuga, considered the “patron” of the genocide, accused of having financed through his great fortune the massacres of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias and owner of the Thousand Hills Radio.
Last year, the judges of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals decided to indefinitely suspend his trial for genocide and war crimes due to his state of health, to the absolute astonishment of the families. “This ruling continues to surprise us and shows a lack of justice, which in itself is painful. The judges have not taken the issue of justice seriously,” lamented Philibert Gakwenzire, a member of the Ibuka association, in charge of ensuring and connecting the different aid groups for victims of the Rwandan genocide.
CONMEMORATION
To the national marches that will tour the country this Sunday we must add the great commemoration that will take place in the capital, Kigali, in the presence of dozens of African dignitaries and with the particular assistance of former US president Bill Clinton and the president of the Republic Czech, Petr Pavel, representing a country that tried to contain the massacre, as the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, recalled a few days ago. Ambassador Karel Kovanda was the first diplomat to publicly use the word “genocide” before the United Nations.
Clinton and Pavel will support Kagame and leaders such as the president of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina; Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed; the president of Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, the president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir; the president of Congo, Denis Sassou N’guesso, the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, or Faustin-Archange Touadéra, president of the Central African Republic.