France-Rwanda/Genocide
 
Testimony of Professor Linda Melvern to the Rwanda Commission investigating France’s role in the Genocide in 1994.
 
I have been asked here today to talk to you about the influence of France at the United Nations in the decision making, 1993-1994, over Rwanda.
 
The failure of the UN Security Council to act in accordance with the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime of genocide, before the genocide of the Tutsi 1994, to prevent its occurrence and then for three months while one million people were murdered, is for me one of the greatest  scandals of the twentieth century.
 
The Security Council of the UN is central to the application of the Genocide Convention and in the circumstances of Rwanda this raises a fundamental question – why in 1994 was the Council seemingly incapable of implementing the convention.
 
It was attempting to answer this question that I was to discover the importance of the role played by France, a permanent member of the Council and the then Secretary General of the UN, the Egyptian diplomat and scholar Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
 
French policy towards Rwanda, and expressed in the Council, was run by a circle of Franco-African experts and businessmen. This policy, which centered on the Africa Unit in the Elysée Place, was unaccountable to parliament or the French public and it was in the control of the then French President, Francois Mitterrand. This is why an exact account of the decision making is hard to expose. But in both my books, A People Betrayed and Conspiracy to Murder I have tried to show the influence over UN policy towards Rwanda by French diplomats.  
 
It is of note that the then Secretary-General of the UN, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a personal friend of President Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand had supported the candidacy of Boutros Boutros-Ghali for Secretary-General, the only permanent member of the Council to do so. It is also of note that Boutros Boutros-Ghali was more knowledgeable about Rwanda than any other senior member of the UN staff. He had first visited Rwanda in1983 and most of the high-level Egyptian-Rwandan diplomatic dialogue went through him. 
 
He had facilitated the first secret arms deal between Rwanda and Egypt in October 1990 when he was deputy Foreign Minister of Egypt. The initial deal of US $ 5.889 million was for grenades, some two million rounds of ammunition, 18,000 mortar bombs, assault rifles and rocket launchers. As a gesture of “goodwill” Egypt had given Rwanda two field ambulances for free. Eventually, over the next three years, Egypt would provide some US $ 23 million arms to Rwanda.
 
The information in my books is based on access to UN records, to the files of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). I have read all the cables sent from the field by the Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Lt. Gen Roméo Dallaire and all the replies to those cables from UN headquarters in New York. Further, an anonymous source at the UN gave me a document containing the details of what was said in the secret and informal meetings of the Council to discuss Rwanda – both before the genocide and while it was taking place. The decision making in the Council had a decisive effect on what happened. Had this decision making been different then the genocide of the Tutsi, 1994, may never have taken place.
 
The decision in October 1993 to send a small peacekeeping mission to Rwanda and fail to reinforce as violence worsened was a terrible error. France – a permanent member of the Council knew more about Rwanda than any other member of the Council. Yet what the document on the secret Council meetings shows us is that France largely sat silent in Council meetings.  Lt. Gen Dallaire believes that the failure by France to share intelligence information cost the lives of his peacekeepers -- and had a determining effect on the decision making. The French ambassador on the Council Bernard Merimee, would later blame the US and the UK for the failure over Rwanda – and although both states did play a decisive role, the failure of France is special and particular.
 
I will start with the decision making of the Secretary-General.
 
It was Dr. Boutros-Ghali who personally appointed as UN Special Representative for Rwanda a friend, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, a former Foreign Minister of the Cameroon. Booh-Booh was not considered to be impartial – he was close to ministers in the regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana. And as special representative he would gather around him officials from Franco-African countries.
 
From the outset of the mission the Force Commander of UNAMIR, Lt-General Dallaire, sent to New York detailed and lengthy cables about the situation in Rwanda. Some of these cables directly contradicted the information sent to New York by Booh-Booh.  Some weeks into the mission and Dallaire began to lose credibility at UN headquarters – and he blamed Booh-Booh for this situation. The French government wanted Dallaire’s removal as Force Commander. Dallaire’s concerns about the CDR party – the extremist Hutu Power grouping, were not put to the Council. Nor was Dallaire’s long list of military requirements for his force lacked the barest essentials – he even had to borrow money from another part of the UN, the agency UNICEF to pay his local staff. He lacked sufficient petrol, water and food for his troops.
 
Why was the Council not informed of these realities? I would later discover how Boutros-Ghali had insisted on controlling the flow of information from Secretariat officials—in receipt of Dallaire’s cables – to the Council chamber. Only Boutros-Ghali could decide what the Council was told and Dallaire’s detailed cables about the risks and dangers in Rwanda never reached Council members. Boutros-Ghali said that he did not want the ambassadors in the Council to micro-manage peacekeeping missions. There was constant tension between the Secretary-General and the Council. He even forbid Kofi Annan, then the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) from appearing before the Council. The warnings that genocide was in preparation and particularly the January 11 cables with detail from an Interahamwe informer about the lists prepared of Tutsi with a view to their extermination, were not given to Council members.  
 
I have been told by two Council members that the Council was not shown this information – on this they are certain. Yet in the official UN history of the mission for Rwanda there is a claim that the Council did see the cable. One can only assume that the official record of events has been tampered with.
 
Eventually Dallaire was told by Secretariat officials that it was not his job to write detailed reports.
 
In February 1994 an account written for UN headquarters by Booh-Booh claimed that there was no evidence that the increasing violence was ethnically motivated. And yet by now the UN had opened centers for Tutsi to take shelter at night. One of the peace keepers would tell me later how “genocide hung in the air” at this time.
 
Just how well informed the French were in Rwanda is evident from Belgian intelligence reports prepared at this time for these reports claim that the French had installed listening devices on Rwanda’s telephone network. Documents show a French military presence in the para-commando battalion, at the airport, and at military training centers.
 
By February 1994 the US, French and Belgian officials were preparing an emergency evacuation of their nationals.
 
  
By March the French were lobbying hard for the political grouping, the CDR to have a place in the governance of Rwanda. But under the 1993 Arusha Accords the CDR was to have no role – it was racist in the extreme, like the Klu Klux Klan – and it called for a “pure Hutu state”. Booh-Booh had favored the presence of the CDR. He reported to New York at this time that the violence in Rwanda was due to “common banditry”.
 
In March in New York at a private meeting between Boutros-Ghali and the Rwanda politician Andre Ntagerura, the Secretary-General said that because of the delays in the peace process it was clear that the “Rwandans did not deserve the help of the UN” and that the mission in Rwanda would pull out.
 
On April 5 the UNAMIR mandate was due for renewal. The report on the mission for Rwanda that Boutros-Ghali provided that day was optimistic in tone.  It did not include a 10 page assessment highlighting the serious deficiencies in UNAMIR written by Dallaire.
 
“We were kept in the dark” the New Zealand Ambassador Colin Keating would later tell me. The members of the Council came to see Rwanda as a small civil war, not the smoldering volcano it really was. It was much more dangerous that was ever reported to the Council.
 
I now turn to the genocide of the Tutsi and the decision making in the Council post April 6, 1994.
 
On Friday April 8, after the death of the President and the systematic elimination of Rwanda’s political opposition, a so-called Interim Government was created.  The French ambassador in Rwanda Jean-Philippe Marlaud claimed that this government had prevented a coup d’etat. But the Belgian ambassador Johan Swinnen realized that all the members of this government came from the Hutu Power wings of the political parties.
 
In New York French diplomats were suggesting a complete withdrawal of the peacekeepers from Rwanda. A French diplomat approached the Belgian UN Ambassador, Paul Noterdaeme to warn him that on no account should the Belgians reinforce UNAMIR. However, said the French diplomat, the Rwandans would most likely adopt a “more lenient” attitude should the French wish to intervene.
 
On Saturday April 9 a French C-130 aircraft landed in Kigali and an astonished peacekeeper watched as ammunition was unloaded and in perfect co-ordination was put in Rwandan army trucks.
 
That day in Gikondo the Chief Delegate of the ICRC Philippe Gaillard, who had gone there to find survivors in a massacre at the church, told a French journalist that genocide was underway. The French journalist Jean-Philippe Ceppi wrote a story published in Liberation on Monday April 11 that genocide was underway in Rwanda.  But the word genocide – as far as I can ascertain – disappeared for the next three weeks.
 
Boutros-Ghali at this time refused to cancel a scheduled tour of Europe – to the consternation of his senior officials. On April 12 the Foreign Minister of Belgium Willy Claes met Boutros-Ghali in Bonn to tell the Secretary-General that his country was withdrawing its peacekeepers from UNAMIR. Claes claimed that Boutros-Ghali agreed that the entire force should be withdrawn although he would later deny this. But a UN document which I quote in Conspiracy to Murder shows that Boutros-Ghali had agreed that the entire UN should leave Rwanda. Indeed he telephoned Dallaire to tell him to prepare total evacuation and Dallaire had refused. He was by then protecting some 14,000 people who had taken refuge in the Amahoro stadium.
 
 
On April 21 in a report to the Council Boutros-Ghali blamed the violence in Rwanda on “unruly Presidential Guard” and claimed that only massive reinforcement to coerce the opposing “factions” could make a difference.  But Dallaire had not asked for massive reinforcements. He had asked for 5,500 troops not to stop civil war but to protect the thousands of Rwandans trapped in concentration camps.
 
That day the vote was taken to reduce UNAMIR to 240 soldiers. Later I would ask the UK ambassador Lord David Hannay about his support for this resolution. “We believed that the French were telling us” he told me.
 
The document on the secret discussions in the Council shows that in the first weeks of genocide the fact of civilian slaughter was hardly discussed. Instead 80 per cent of Council time was taken up discussing what to do about the peacekeepers and the remainder about the possibility of a ceasefire in the renewed civil war.
 
On April 29 the Council finally addressed the question of genocide in an eight hour debate on whether or not to use the word in an official UN document – a Presidential Statement.
 
Only then did Boutros-Ghali sent a letter to the Council asking for more forceful action. This was greeted in the Council by a stunned silence for the letter contained no options for action—and yet by then there were options available within the Department of Peacekeeping Operations based on information provided by Dallaire.
 
In June the French suggestion of a military “humanitarian” operation for Rwanda action was greeted with enthusiasm by Boutros-Ghali. Dallaire believes that the Interim Government, Boutros-Ghali and the French had connived behind his back to secure this intervention known as Operation Turquoise. He believes that the intention was to divide Rwanda in two. If the French had been genuinely concerned about the people of Rwanda then they would have reinforced his pathetic garrison of volunteer peacekeepers who were trying to save as many people as they could.
 
For three months of genocide the French government continued to confer legitimacy on the Interim Government of Rwanda – even welcoming to Paris the Foreign Minister in this government. This foreign minister, Jerome Bicamumpaka, was even allowed to address the Council in New York where he reinforced the French claims that the large number of dead in Rwanda were due to civil war and the activities of the RPF.
 
No reason has ever been given why Rwanda kept its non-permanent seat on the Council for the duration of the genocide – why the Interim Government was represented in the Council.
 
Linda Melvern,
Kigali, Rwanda
July 2, 2007