A three-year effort by the Pentagon to raise the standards and discipline of the Rwandan army has failed to deter the Rwandans from "widespread atrocities against civilian populations in Eastern Congo," according to a new report by human rights investigators.
The report, by the Boston-based group Physicians for Human Rights, is to be presented today at a House International Relations Committee hearing on the situation in Congo, where Rwanda's military last winter engineered and helped carry out a successful rebellion against the government of what was then Zaire.
According to Defense and State department officials, no U.S. military personnel participated in any way in the Zaire campaign, but small groups of U.S. Army Special Forces and other units have been providing several forms of training to the Rwandans for some time.
A seven-member Special Forces team from Fort Bragg, N.C., is to leave soon for Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to train officers in "respect for human rights, the laws of war and the role of the military in a democratic society," a Pentagon official said.
Rwandan Defense Minister Paul Kagame recently confirmed in a Washington Post interview that his country's armed forces organized and supported the seven-month rebellion that ended the three-decade rule of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and propelled nominal rebel leader Laurent Kabila to the presidency of the renamed Congo.
Kabila has sought to block investigations by journalists and human rights investigators. But, according to the Physicians for Human Rights report, a three-person team spent two weeks in Rwanda and eastern Congo and "received reliable reports that Rwandan military have committed, and continue to commit, widespread atrocities against civilian populations in Eastern Congo. Reports of robberies, rape and attacks by English- and Kinyarwanda-speaking soldiers are numerous within North and South Kivu [provinces.]"
Those are the languages spoken by many Rwandan military personnel; the language of Congo's military is French. Witnesses to alleged atrocities said the troops committing them wore uniforms and boots found in the Rwandan military, according to the report.
The killings "appear to be systematic attacks" aimed at eliminating the threat to Tutsi-dominated Rwanda from rivals of the Hutu tribe who fled into Zaire after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the report says.
The U.S. training of the Rwandans began after Kagame's rebel army seized control of the country and halted the Hutu slayings of Tutsis in 1994.
At the time, nobody envisioned the role tiny Rwanda would play in bringing down Mobutu, ruler of one of Africa's largest countries.
A senior State Department official described the training program as "a three-year program to professionalize the Rwandan military so they can observe the rules of war. Our position is that the present government there has a leadership committed to a smaller, more disciplined, apolitical army, and we should be fostering that goal."
As for the reports of atrocities, he said, "We think the human rights problem associated with counterinsurgency is an area of serious concern. I am very much aware there are people very uncomfortable with this."
One of the uncomfortable people is Kathi Austin, a field investigator for the human rights group, who has extensive experience in central Africa.
"They say the purpose is constructive engagement with the Rwandan military, to improve their attitudes," she said.
"But it's clear that as long as we let these kinds of things happen where we are present, if there isn't any denunciation of these abuses and no pressure on Kagame, in a sense we're not only aiding the war effort, we're losing credibility. There has been no strong condemnation of these Rwandans" from the State Department or White House, she said.
"The argument that the State Department uses is that these military operations are going to go on, so it's better we should be there to moderate their behavior and teach about laws of war," said Alison Des Forges, another human rights activist who knows Rwanda well. "But my answer is: only if your presence produces measurable results. Our presence has been sufficiently long-standing that we should be seeing some results."