by Kanyarwanda Veritas
09-01-2010

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 that if they continued to allow the majority Hutu intellectuals to propagate their anti-monarchic, even communistic ideas, 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.
But, as with the Mucyo 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]




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.”