AfroAmerica Network has obtained a leaked copy of the report by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights accusing the Rwandan Tutsi Army led by General Paul Kagame of genocide against Hutu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In the report, details are given on how the Rwandan Patriotic Army, controlled by extremists from the minority ethnic Tutsis, allied with congolese rebels of the AFDL and the Burundian Tutsi Army (FAB) targeted and systematically massacred Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutu, including women, elderly, and babies with the intent of exterminating them. The Rwandan Army specially targeted Hutu of masculine gender, including babies, killing them with machetes, metals, knives, hoes, and other instruments. Both Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutu nationals were targeted by setting up checkpoints to identify Hutus, based on their physical traits, from interrogations and torture.
The report specifically documents the premeditated, systematic, and precise methodological approach to exterminate Hutus, which constitutes genocide.
Below are a few paragraphs from the report. AfroAmerica Network will continue to publish more paragraphs as time permits:
Para 513. At the time of the incidents covered by this report, the Hutu population in Zaire, including refugees from Rwanda, constituted an ethnic group as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Moreover, as shown previously, the intention to destroy a group in part is sufficient to be classified as a crime of genocide. Finally, the courts have also confirmed that the destruction of a group can be limited to a particular geographical area. It is therefore possible to assert that, even if only a part of the Hutu population in Zaire was targeted and destroyed, it could nonetheless constitute a crime of genocide, if this was the intention of the perpetrators. Finally, several incidents listed also seem to confirm that the numerous attacks were targeted at members of the Hutu ethnic group as such. Although, at certain times, the aggressors said they were looking for the criminals responsible for the genocide committed against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, the majority of the incidents reported indicate that the Hutus were targeted as such, with no discrimination between them. The numerous attacks against the Hutus in Zaire, who were not part of the refugees, seem to confirm that it was all Hutus, as such, who were targeted. The crimes committed in particular in Rutshuru (30 October 1996) and Mugogo (18 November 1996), in North Kivu, highlight the specific targeting of the Hutus, since people who were able to persuade the aggressors that they belonged to another ethnic group were released just before the massacres. The systematic use of barriers by the AFDL/APR/FAB, particularly in South Kivu, enabled them to identify people of Hutu origin by their name or village of origin and thus to eliminate them. Hundreds of people of Hutu origin are thus thought to have been arrested at a barrier erected in November 1996 in Ngwenda, in the Rutshuru territory, and subsequently executed by being beaten with sticks in a place called Kabaraza. In South Kivu, AFDL/APR/FAB soldiers erected numerous barriers on the Ruzizi plain to stop Rwandan and Burundian refugees who had been dispersed after their camps had been dismantled.
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