Panel blames UN, US for Rwanda massacre

Panel blames UN, US for Rwanda massacre
PRESS TRUST OF INDIA

UNITED NATIONS, JULY 8: An Organisation of African Unity (OAU) panel, which had former Supreme Court Chief Justice P N Bhagwati on it, has criticised the UN, US, France, Belgium and the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches for failing to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda which left an estimated 800,000 Tutsis dead.

The seven-member panel also demanded that those guilty of inaction pay a "significant level" of reparations to Rwanda and asked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to appoint an independent commission to determine the guilty countries and appropriate the compensation each should pay.

Set up by the OAU in 1998 to probe the genocide, the panel on Friday in a report called `The Preventable Genocide' said that these countries could have prevented, halted or reduced the 90-day carnage during which small bands of Hutu extremists killed thousands of Tutsis.

It accused French peacekeepers, who were eventually sent to Rwanda, of allowing a large number of Hutu killers to escape into Congo. "The 1994 genocide in one small country ultimately triggered a conflict in the heart of Africa that has directly or indirectly touched one-third of all the nation on the continent," the report said.

The report blamed the US for not acting through the Security Council, France for not using its influence with the Hutu Government to stop the massacres, Belgium for withdrawing its peacekeepers and Roman Catholic and Anglican churches for not denouncing the carnage.

The United States, Belgium and Anglican church have accepted their fault and apologised but France and the Roman Catholic church have not done so.Releasing the report, Canada's Ambassador Stephen Lewis and former deputy director of UNICEF, said France' behaviour was "particularly indefensible".

"We repudiate the position of the Government of France, the position that asserts they had no responsibility. They could have stopped the genocide before it began. There is no redemptive feature to the conduct of the government of France," he said.

The genocide followed killing of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, in a plane crash at Kigali at the height of the ethnic conflict. The plane was said to have been shot down by a missile and Hutus blamed minority Tutsis for this. The United States, Lewis said, blocked the Security Council from sending troops after the massacres had begun and described Washington's role as "an almost incomprehensible scar of shame on American foreign policy".

The United States, which had lost 18 soldiers in the Somalian peacekeeping operation in October 1993, had opposed the Council authorising any new peacekeeping missions. The Council, the report said, "unremittingly led by the US simply did not care enough about Rwanda to intervene appropriately."