Report Says Us And Others Allowed Rwanda Genocide-ny Times

July 8, 2000

Report Says U.S. and Others Allowed Rwanda Genocide By BARBARA CROSSETTE

The United States and other nations that failed to prevent or stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 should pay a ''significant level of reparations,'' an independent panel said today. The seven-member international panel, assembled by the Organization of African Unity, also singled out France and Belgium as well as the United Nations and the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches as those most guilty of not doing enough to prevent or stop the atrocities that killed up to 800,000 people. The group acknowledged that Rwanda's Hutu-led government was behind the killings, in which Hutu militias rampaged through the country, massacring ethnic Tutsi and moderate or antigovernment Hutu who defended them, but it added that ''external forces'' had also had a responsibility for what has happened to Rwanda in a century of crisis. The panel asked Secretary General Kofi Annan to establish a commission to formally identify the countries that owe Rwanda the money to rebuild the devastated country, and to set an appropriate scale of compensation. It also demanded that Rwanda's international debts be canceled. In its report, ''Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide,'' the panel said that the events of 1994 cannot be forgotten, and that Rwanda should no more be assigned to ''ancient history'' than the Holocaust. It also noted that the long-term effects of those weeks of horrific violence and brutality continue to be felt throughout the region, especially in Congo. ''The 1994 genocide in one small country ultimately triggered a conflict in the heart of Africa that has directly or indirectly touched at least one-third of all the nations on the continent,'' the report said. The report reviews the same issues and reaches many of the same conclusions as another independent experts' study commissioned by the secretary general. But it also takes a deeper look at the roots of the ethnic conflict in Rwanda, beginning with 60 years of colonial rule, first by Germany and then Belgium, when ethnic divisions were exacerbated if not manipulated. It is also far harsher in its criticism of Security Council members, especially France and the United States, saying France could have prevented the genocide and the United States could have stopped it. ''Of course there would have been no genocide if certain Rwandans had not organized and carried it out; there is no denying that fundamental truth,'' the report said. ''But it is equally true that throughout the past century external forces have helped shape Rwanda's destiny and that of its neighbors.'' The report does not absolve the current Tutsi-led government in Rwanda of sometimes failing to meet challenges it inherited, despite the ''resilience and vigor'' shown by the survivors now rebuilding the country and their lives. Rwandans still confront human rights abuses under the Tutsi-led government formed from the Rwanda Patriotic Front, which seized power in the summer of 1994. The country, struggling with refugee resettlement, is still at war in Congo, where ethnic Hutu militias remain a menace, the Rwandan government says.

Those militias instigated the genocide in April 1994, after the president, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed in a plane crash in Kigali that was possibly caused by a missile attack. The report characterizes the four-year period leading up to the outbreak of violence as ''the triumph of ethnic radicalism'' among the majority Hutu population that set the scene for the nightmare that followed. At this point, the report said, France had ''unrivaled influence at the very highest levels'' of the Hutu-led government in Rwanda and chose not to exercise it to derail well-laid plans for the genocide. At a news conference today, Ambassador Stephen Lewis, a Canadian member of the Organization of African Unity panel and a former deputy executive director of Unicef, said that the new report chose to focus more heavily on the role of the Security Council, especially France and the United States, than the report prepared for Mr. Annan last year. Mr. Lewis said that French behavior was particularly indefensible. ''We repudiate the position of the government of France, the position that asserts they had no responsibility,'' he said. ''They were closer in every way to the Habyarimana regime than any other government. They could have stopped the genocide before it began. They knew exactly what was happening.'' Worse, he said, the French peacekeeping mission eventually sent to the region allowed a huge number of Hutu attackers to flee the country to neighboring Congo, then known as Zaire, ''thereby ushering in the larger Great Lakes catastrophe.'' ''There is almost no redemptive feature to the conduct of the government of France,'' Mr. Lewis said. As for the United States, which blocked the Security Council from sending peacekeepers to Rwanda once the massacres had begun, Mr. Lewis said the American role was ''an almost incomprehensible scar of shame on American foreign policy.'' Speaking personally, he said, ''I don't know how Madeleine Albright lives with it.'' Secretary of State Albright was then the United States representative at the United Nations. President Clinton, on a subsequent visit to Africa, apologized to Rwanda for the lack of international response, as has Belgium, the former colonial power. France has never expressed remorse or accepted blame. The report was very critical of the Roman Catholic Church. ''We were shocked by the role of the church,'' Mr. Lewis said today. Although priests and lay Catholics were among those who tried to save Tutsi, there were other church officials who did not; some helped lure Tutsi to their deaths. There were ''leaders of the church who did not speak out strongly and take stands,'' Mr. Lewis said. ''Since Rwanda is a very Catholic country, we felt we had to say something.'' Anglican Church authorities have apologized for ignoring human rights abuses or for acts that encouraged Hutu death squads. The Roman Catholic Church has not, the report said. In addition to Mr. Lewis, who introduced the report here today, the panel consisted of Sir Ketumile Masire, a former president of Botswana and the panel leader; Amadou Toumani Toure, former president of Mali; Lisbet Palme, a Swedish child psychologist and expert on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child; Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former finance minister of Liberia; P. N. Bhagwati, former chief justice of India's Supreme Court; and Hocine Djoudi, an Algerian judge and diplomat.