Steven Edwards
National Post
Toronto, Canada
03.27.00
The United Nations has broken its silence about an internal report uncovered by the National Post in an exclusive story on the apparent suppression of leads in the presidential assassination that touched off Rwanda's genocide in 1994.
In a private letter to lawyers representing Rwandans accused in the genocide, the UN not only admits that the report exists, but says that its contents were discussed with Louise Arbour, the former chief war crimes prosecutor for the world body who is now serving as a justice in the Supreme Court of Canada.
The letter, which the lawyers will release today at a UN press conference, also identifies the author of the report but holds back on naming the two senior UN internal investigators who, the Post has reported, received it.
The author, Michael Hourigan, is a former investigator with the UN's war crimes prosecution office but is currently making waves by serving as co-counsel in a separate legal action against them. The action involves two Rwandan women who lost family members in the genocide despite a promise of UN protection.
Mr. Hourigan wrote the report, according to the UN letter, while "retained on a short-term contract" as a UN internal investigator in their Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).
Both Ms. Arbour and Mr. Hourigan were unavailable for comment yesterday. The Post revealed on March 1 that an Aug. 1, 1997, information report marked "confidential" and an internal memorandum marked "secret" speak of vital leads gathered by UN war crimes investigators in the unsolved assassination of Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.
The leads, if true, would reverse currently accepted assumptions that Hutu extremists killed the president, also a Hutu, because he appeared ready to share power with the country's Tutsi rebels.
Instead, the finger would be pointed at the rebels, traditionally thought of as the "good guys" in the Rwandan tragedy because they put an end to the extremist-Hutu massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by snatching power in Kigali, the country's capital, 100 days after the genocide began.
According to the confidential information report and interviews conducted by the Post with war crimes investigators working in 1997, Ms. Arbour abruptly shut down the investigation into the assassination after learning of the new leads.
In addition, the information report was never made available to the lawyers representing Rwandans accused in the genocide.
"This report is essential for the defence of the accused and undermines one premise of the prosecution that the 'genocide' was meticulously planned", say the lawyers in a letter, sent on March 19 to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general.
The letter requests a meeting with Mr. Annan, which is refused in the UN's reply, signed by Bruce Rashkow, director of the world body's legal division.
According to the reply, Mr. Hourigan wrote the Aug. 1, 1997, report based on information "he had obviously acquired when employed by the office of the ICTR Prosecutor."
It adds: "On his own initiative, Mr. Hourigan prepared an unsolicited three-page document ... Such internal memoranda are for OIOS use only and thus the document was not transmitted to the ICTR, although the matters covered in the report were discussed in September, 1997, with Ms. Arbour, and she was seized of this issue."
The letter makes no mention of the "internal memorandum", which the Post reported had been hand-delivered to Ms. Arbour. Not having made them available to defence lawyers could constitute an "abuse of process" on the part of Ms. Arbour, one of the defence lawyers said yesterday.
Both the information report and the memorandum cite informants who told war crimes investigators that they were part of a plot led by Paul Kagame, the current vice-president and de facto leader of Rwanda, to kill Mr. Habyarimana because he had been tardy in implanting the power-sharing agreement with the Tutsi-dominated rebels.
None of the information contained in the documents has been corroborated.