• by IPS Correspondents (united nations)
• Friday, December 16, 1994
• Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Dic 16 (IPS) - A three-member commission of experts sent to Rwanda has verified the charge that the genocidal acts committed there this spring were planned.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali this week handed over to the U.N. Security Council the group's final report on Rwanda, where as many as one million people, including the Tutsi minority, were slaughtered by the former Hutu regime this year.

The commission, led by Atsu-Koffi Amega of Togo, says in the report to Boutros-Ghali that "overwhelming evidence indicates that the extermination of Tutsis by Hutus had been planned months in advance of its execution."

It declared the killings "concerted, planned, systematic and methodical," and found the former Rwandan regime guilty of several breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The commission received tapes from informants "proving the existence of death squads called 'Network O,' established by the staff of the former head of state (President Juvenal Habyarimana), who was assassinated."

Network O was planned as early as 1992, when Leon Mugesera, a top official in Habyarimana's National Republican Movement for Development and Democracy (MRNDD), explicitly said at a party gathering that Hutus should kill Tutsis and dump their bodies in Rwanda's rivers.

Mugesera's speech, along with many radio broadcasts inciting Hutus to ethnic violence, have been recorded and kept by the commission as evidence in forthcoming genocide trials.

The commission also supported previous charges that MRNDD officials for months had trained the 'Interahamwe' militias now deemed responsible for some of the most brutal massacres.

The experts also shed light on the suspicious Apr 6 death of Habyarimana in a plane crash. Although the MRNDD said the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), which now heads the nation's new government, shot down the plane, the commission said the Hutu forces began their massacres within minutes of the crash.

According to the final report, "within 30 to 45 minutes of the crash, even before the news could be spread by national radio, barricades were erected on certain major thojoughfares."

"Perhaps even more damning, the Rwandese Presidential Guard set up roadblocks that prevented (U.N.) troops from reaching the airport to investigate the president's assassination," it says.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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