VZCZCXYZ0002
PP RUEHWEB
DE RUEHLGB #0292/01 1150808
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 240808Z APR 08
FM AMEMBASSY KIGALI
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 5257
INFO RUEHJB/AMEMBASSY BUJUMBURA 0293
RUEHDR/AMEMBASSY DAR ES SALAAM 1107
RUEHKM/AMEMBASSY KAMPALA 1876
RUEHKI/AMEMBASSY KINSHASA 0428
RUEHLO/AMEMBASSY LONDON 0215
RUEHMD/AMEMBASSY MADRID 0017
RUEHNR/AMEMBASSY NAIROBI 1195
RUEHFR/AMEMBASSY PARIS 0471
RUEHTC/AMEMBASSY THE HAGUE 0177
RUCNDT/USMISSION USUN NEW YORK 0117
1. (C) Summary. The Spanish indictment of 40 Rwandan
military officers offers an unrecognizable version of some of
the most painful and violent episodes in Rwanda's history,
distorting the established record, inventing mass killings,
placing the blame for any misfortune Rwandans have suffered
(including the 1994 genocide) on the Kagame government. It is
a bloated political tract, sloppily organized and endlessly
repetitive, and, ultimately, a disservice to those Rwandans
who suffered real losses from revenge killings by the Rwandan
Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed forces of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF). End summary.
2. (SBU) Mission has reviewed an unofficial English language
version of the Spanish indictment of 40 Rwandan military
officers (several of whom are now dead) issued by Judge
Fernando Andreu Merelles in February. This translations was
produced by the Rwandan government; we are also in possession
of a French language version of unknown provenance. While we
do not claim extensive knowledge of the alleged abuses
imputed to the RPA/RDF during the 1994 genocide or in the
years before or after, we can offer a number of comments on
the overall tone and structure of the document, as well as
the overarching political theme offered by the Spanish judge.
3. (SBU) The thematic approach of the Spanish judge is
evident from the opening paragraphs. The Rwanda Patriotic
Front was founded, according to the judge, not as is
conventionally understood as a political organization of
refugees, unable to return home and finally deciding upon
using military force to do so -- to regain a homeland -- but
as a criminal organization consecrated to the elimination of
Hutu civilians, the raping of women and girls, abduction, and
terrorist acts. According to the judge, the three-fold aim
of this terrorist organization was the elimination of the
entire Hutu ethnic group, securing of power by force, and the
establishment of a Tutsi criminal hegemony over all the Great
Lakes region. Those assisting the RPF-RPA included various
western powers, principally the United States. In fact, the
RDF operated as an instrument of American power, took
instructions from American officials in pursuing its criminal
and genocidal assault on the Great Lakes region, and fought
side by side with American Green Beret troops in Rwanda, the
DRC and elsewhere in the region.
4. (SBU) To this entirely fanciful account of the origins
and directing agencies of the RPF, we now turn to the judge's
wildly inaccurate, not to say repugnant, description of the
origins of the genocide and the carrying of mass slaughter of
civilians in 1994. At no point in the judge's narrative is
the Habyarimana regime or extremist elements within that
government at fault -- there is no planning for genocide, no
carrying out of prepared massacres, nary a mention of the
insidious and all-encompassing psychological preparation of
mass killing by media outlets controlled by extremist
elements. No, in fact, according to the judge, everything is
the fault of the RPA. If there were large massacre of Tutsis
anywhere in the country, it was the spontaneous reaction of
an aggrieved Hutu population to organized killings
perpetrated by the criminal Tutsi band of terrorists,
killings intended to both terrorize the Habyarimana
government and its Hutu supporters, and to provoke just such
a reaction. If a moderate Hutu political leader was killed
anywhere in the country (while the RPA occupied a small
sliver of territory in the far north), according to the
judge, in each and every instance it was the terrorist Tutsi
band of evil-doers, intent upon slaughtering moderate Hutu
political leaders and attributing responsibility to the
Habyarimana regime. The larger goals the PRF/RPA had in mind
in carrying out such actions, according to the judge, were to
"demonize the Habyarimana regime," and "awaken and
strengthen inter-ethnic hatred Hutu-Tutsi." In the judge's
mistaken view, the Habyarimana regime was a peaceful,
law-abiding government, intent upon bringing good to all
Rwanda's people, if only left alone by the Tutsi hegemonists.
The most casual of readings in recent Rwandan history would
affirm what everyone in fact knows: ethnic hatred was stoked
for years by Habyarimana extremist elements; however, not for
for the Spanish judge, who apparently believes that ethnic
hatred was never previously seen in Rwanda, not until the
RDP/RPA sought to impose its terroristic ideology.
5. (SBU) With a short acknowledgment by the Spanish judge
that hundreds of thousands of the Tutsis did lose their
lives, somehow, in the mid-year months of 1994 (no
attribution of the killings is hazarded), we now arrive,
courtesy of the judge, at mathematically stupendous killings
by the RPA, following their "criminal" conquest of the
country. Upon "usurping power" (from the genocidal rump
government that tottered from place to place in Rwanda from
April to July, 1994) massive killings began -- from July 1994
to July 1995, "312,726 people were killed in a selectively
and deliberate way." The numbers have an interesting
precision: not 40,000 executed in Gitarama, but 39,912. Not
33,000 killings in Butare, but 33,433. The judge does not
explain how such precision was reached. The bodies were
subsequently disposed of in exactly 173 mass graves, using
different "methodologies," such as hiding corpses, burning
corpses, transporting them in trucks to undisclosed
locations, and using heavy equipment to dig massive communal
graves.
6. (SBU) The judge then proceeds to the time of the
insurgency in northwest Rwanda, and the sprawling refugee
camps in eastern Congo. Again, any casual reader of Rwanda's
history would know that Hutu militias, remnants of the
defeated Habyarimana armed forces and the Interahamwe, fought
tooth and nail with the RPA, and engaged in indiscriminate
killings across the northwest of Rwanda (the RPA engaging in
revenge killings of its own, as the RPF itself acknowledges).
Not so for the Spanish judge. According to the judge, there
were no attacks upon any portion of Rwanda's population by
Hutu militias operating out of the eastern Congo --
everything was staged by the RPF/RPA. For example, "There
were continued attacks on the Hutu civilian population using
a new technique devised by the Office of Intelligence, to
simulate attacks against the civilian population by rebel
infiltrators or (Hutu extremists), by attacking civilians in
the area of Ruhengeri." The purpose of these simulated
attacks by the PRA, according to the judge, was to "justify a
rapid intervention by the RPA," and the accompanying
slaughter of Hutus. According to the judge, the RPA fought
with itself, as a pretext to further planned massacres of
Hutus.
7. (SBU) The judge then cites, at various places, various
immense numbers of killings of Hutus by the criminal Tutsi
regime since 1994. At one point he cites 1.7 million Hutu
victims (thereby doubling the figure of approximately 800,000
victims of the genocide), and at another, 4 million Hutu
refugees and Congolese citizens, "the majority of them
Congolese Hutus." While we cannot evaluate each and every
incident recorded in the massive indictment, and some may
well concern real killings by renegade RPA troops, we find
these numbers, as well as those in paragraph 5, to be
literally unbelievable.
8. (C) Comment. The indictment is very long (182 pages in
the French translation), badly organized, and sloppily
repetitive. The narrative repeats itself over and over,
hundreds and hundreds of separate paragraphs, covering
ground, recovering it, re-recovering it, a Sisyphean
retelling of some of the most painful episodes of Rwandan
history in outrageously inaccurate terms. The indictment
dishonors the actual dead, while conjuring up legions of
ghost victims to blame on the Kagame government. There are
episodes of revenge killings at the hands of the Rwandan
government, the RPA in the field, that have never been
accounted for; yet the overall lack of credibility in the
judge's approach to events undermines his description of
specific actions the Rwandan military allegedly committed.
This document does not move the squaring of accounts forward
one iota -- if anything it is a disservice to those Rwandans
who seek an accounting for their losses at the hands of
Rwandan government troops. End comment.
ARIETTI
fgtquery v.1.9, 9 février 2024
