Delayed UN report links Rwanda to Congo genocide

The United Nations today finally released a delayed report implicating the government of Rwanda in genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite a vigorous campaign by Kigali to quash the allegations.

The report by the UN human rights commission calls for a judicial investigation of possible war crimes after cataloguing years of murders, rapes and looting by various armed forces during a decade of conflict in Congo from 1993.

But the most serious accusations centre on the Rwandan army's pursuit of Hutu militia and refugees following the genocide of Tutsis in 1994. The report says the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of Hutus without regard to their age or gender could amount to genocide.

Rwanda angrily denounced the report, known as the Mapping Exercise, and warned that it posed a threat to regional stability. "Rwanda categorically states that the document is flawed and dangerous from start to finish," said the Rwandan foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo.

She added: "Our comments to the UN centre around seven specific areas of objection that clearly demonstrate how the Mapping Exercise has been a moral and intellectual failure as well as an insult to history."

The country is particularly angered by the accusations because it is headed by the leaders of forces that brought an end to the genocide of the country's Tutsis in 1994.

But the government of Congo is expected to press for the creation of an international tribunal to investigate war crimes and try those responsible.

Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, attempted to get the genocide charge withdrawn by issuing a threat – later withdrawn – to pull his country out of UN peacekeeping assignments, including the mission it leads in Darfur. But after the report was leaked in August it became politically difficult to significantly alter it without being seen to bow to pressure from Rwanda. Although some of the wording has been modified, the thrust of the accusations remains the same.

The report details more than 600 specific incidents of war crimes. In some of them the Rwandan army and its local militia allies in what was then called Zaire are accused of rounding up hundreds of men, women and children at a time and butchering them with guns and grenades, hoes and axes.

Among the attacks detailed in the report is one on 21 October 1996 by the Rwandan and Burundian armies and local militia on a Hutu refugee camp that killed about 370 people.

"The soldiers threw the bodies of the victims into the latrines. They also killed several dozen people [refugees and Zairians] at the villages of Luberizi and Mutarule. After the killings, the bodies of over 60 victims were found in houses in the two villages," the report says.

The next day the same forces went in pursuit of refugees who had escaped the earlier massacre.

"On 22 October 1996, in the Rushima ravine between Bwegera and Luberizi, units of the [Rwandan, Burundian and Zairian rebel forces] killed a group of nearly 550 Rwandan Hutu refugees who had escaped the Luberizi and Rwenena camps a few days before. Soldiers intercepted the victims at the checkpoints set up in the surrounding area. Between 27 October and 1 November 1996, under the pretext of repatriating them to Rwanda, units of the [Rwandan, Burundian and Zairian rebel forces] led an unknown number of additional refugees into the Rushima ravine and executed them."

The report said that the victims appear to have been targeted because they were Hutu and that points to genocide.

"These crimes will be re-examined in the analysis of the specific question of the existence or not of an intention to partially destroy the group of Hutu refugees, which is the essential element in the crime of genocide as defined in international law," the report says.