A U.N. report accusing forces loyal to Congo
President Laurent Kabila and his Rwandan backers of massacring Rwandan
Hutu refugees in 1996/97 has caused embarrassment in Europe and elicited
a thunderous silence in Washington.
The world knew at the time that refugees were being hounded, starved and slaughtered in what was then eastern Zaire, but some major powers chose to look the other way.
Officials who raised the alarm say political support by the United States and Britain for Kabila's drive to overthrow the late Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko was crucial to minimising and ignoring the killings.
"There was a political agenda on the ground which was quite evident -- an Anglo-American agenda which prevailed because the Europeans were divided and those who were denouncing the massacres were regarded as suspect,'' said European Humanitarian Affairs Commissioner Emma Bonino.
The relief organisation Medecins sans Frontieres and the outspoken commissioner began ringing alarm bells in late October 1996 after Kabila's rebel Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or Congo (AFDL), backed by the Rwandan army, attacked refugee camps containing more than one million Rwandan Hutus.
The exiled Hutus included armed militiamen and former Rwandan army soldiers who had taken part in a 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and were using the camps as springboards for raids into Rwanda.
But most of the refugees were civilians, women and children.
"A new genocide is possibly in the offing,'' Bonino told a news conference on October 25, 1996. Three days later, she made her first report to European Union foreign ministers.
"I had waited all day and the agenda point was called at 7.35 p.m. At 7.36 p.m., the discussion was over,'' Bonino told Reuters in a telephone interview.
By early November 1996, she was calling for an international force to protect a relief operation opening "humanitarian corridors'' to the refugees.
She was supported by Belgium, the former colonial power in Zaire and Rwanda, and France, regarded by many countries as untrustworthy because of its long support for Mobutu and for the Rwandan Hutus.
An EU diplomat recalled that France's then-secretary of state for humanitarian action, Xavier Emmanuelli, told his colleagues that French Roman Catholic missionaries on the spot were reporting massacres.
"Nobody contradicted him but you could tell from the absence of reaction that several countries, notably the British, thought this was just the French pushing their own agenda and get an outside force in to shield Mobutu from the rebels,'' he said.
"Nobody ever approached me or my office directly and said I was exaggerating. They simply decided not to get involved,'' Bonino said.
The U.N. Security Council eventually did approve the creation of such an intervention force and appointed a Canadian general, Maurice Barril, to command it.
After dragging its feet, the United States even offered to contribute troops, but after some 600,000 hungry refugees had stampeded back over the border into Rwanda, it declared the problem over and said the force was no longer necessary.
"The multinational force planned by the Security Council melted into the snow without any decision ever being taken to drop it,'' Bonino said.
Barril and a Canadian U.N. special envoy, Raymond Chretien, visited the area but reported back that the big refugee problem was over, officials say.
In fact, another 400,000 refugees were still stranded in Zaire. Some 200,000 are still unaccounted for, according to U.N. figures. Bonino believes those people either starved to death or were massacred.
Reed Brody of the U.S.-based pressure group Human Rights Watch, a former member of the U.N. investigating team, is more cautious on the figures.
"In terms of killings, we're looking in the tens of thousands,'' he told Reuters.
But he too says political differences between the United States and France were the main cause of international inaction over the plight of the refugees.
"My understanding is that the United States and France, which had wildly different agendas, were providing the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and ambassador Chretien with very different satellite photos and estimates of how many refugees there were,'' he said. `"After the attacks on the camps, Chretien was apparently convinced there were no more refugees, that they'd all gone home,'' he said.
Chretien, who is Canada's ambassador to the United States, has not commented on the U.N. report.
Nor has the U.S. government, although it did praise Kabila's Democratic Republic of the Congo this week for freeing opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi after months in internal exile for criticising the president.
The U.N. report recommended an international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for "serious violations of human rights.''
But critics fear that Washington may block any follow-up to the massacres report when the Security Council debates it next week.
Bonino said some aid agencies and media had tended to brand the Hutu refugees collectively as responsible for the Rwandan genocide, minimising concern at their plight, while depicting Kabila's forces as new visionaries.
"Why did we not do more? Partly because there was an enormous sense of guilt about what had happened in 1994. We now have two massacres on our conscience -- 1994 in Rwanda and 1996/97 in eastern Zaire,'' she said.