This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.
In a sharp reversal of policy, the United Nations has stopped encouraging Rwandan refugees to return and is refusing even to assist those who wish to go home because of a report that the new, Tutsi-dominated Government in Rwanda has killed thousands of members of the Hutu ethnic group.
The report, which has been prepared by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees but has not been released, has set off a bitter dispute within the world organization and led the Secretary General to demand that United Nations officials refrain from discussing it.
The report concluded that there was "an unmistakable pattern of killings and persecution" by soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the victorious rebels who now form the Rwanda Government, "aimed at Hutu populations."
What is not clear is the extent to which the killings described in the report occurred during the Rwandan civil war, as opposed to the period since the new Government came to power in July.
In an effort to quell the controversy and to protect against the possibility that the Rwandan Government, which has reacted angrily to the report, might expel all United Nations forces from the country, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has ordered a "thorough investigation" into the allegations made in the report and has issued "strict instructions" to all United Nations officials not to discuss it.
Continue reading the main storyAccording to the refugee agency, the report was based on a five-week investigations that included interviews of some 300 Rwandans in 41 of Rwanda's 145 communes and at nine refugee camps.
"I'm disappointed that other U.N. organizations won't accept these reports and say this is something that needs to be examined, instead of trying to undermine their credibility," Daniel Spiegel, the United States representative to the United Nations in Geneva, said in an interview today. "There doesn't need to be this type of acrimony between U.N. agencies."
The report, which has not been shared with other United Nations agencies, has dealt a severe blow to efforts to persuade more than a million Rwandans who fled to Zaire and Tanzania to return home.
Repatriation efforts are further hampered because the United Nations has been slow in getting human rights monitors to Rwanda. A primary mission of the monitors is to deter, by their presence, the kind of abuses described in the report.
The United Nations has said that 147 monitors are needed in Rwanda. Only 20 are there, however, and they have no vehicles of their own and no communications equipment. Of the $10 million that the United Nations has requested for the human rights program in Rwanda, only $2 million has been pledged.
"Until human rights monitors are in the provinces, there won't be any massive repatriation," Mr. Spiegel said today. He said that most of the delays in getting the monitors in place are attributable to "inexperience" and bureaucracy.
Privately, however, some United Nations officials are saying they doubt there will ever be 147 monitors in Rwanda. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Rwanda has put together a list of more than 40 other former volunteers ready to act as monitors. Their applications are now being considered by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, but some officials expressed frustration that approval is taking so long.
Though officials at the human rights agency said that the list of potential monitors is not being given to the Rwandan Government for their approval, the Government has reportedly vetoed at least two monitors, according to United Nations officials.
Publicly, United Nations officials are doing their best to keep the feud over the report out of the public eye. "We are one house," the spokeswoman for the United Nations Commission for Human Rights, Therese Gastaut, said at a news briefing this morning. But in the corridors and when speaking on background, United Nations officials are bitter in their recriminations of the refugee agency.
Much of the criticism stems from concerns that in issuing a human rights report, the refugee agency is infringing on the mandate of other United Nations organizations. "There are turf questions, which are unfortunate," Mr. Spiegel said.
But Mr. Spiegel and officials of the High Commissioner for Refugees said the agency set out to establish the mechanisms for returning Rwandans to their country, not to investigate human rights abuses.
The author of the report has not been publicly named, but United Nations officials and American diplomats confirmed that he is Robert Gersony, an employee of the United States Agency for International Development who is on loan to the high commissioner's office.
In the mid-1980's, Mr. Gersony documented human rights abuses by the Renamo, the guerrilla group in Mozambique, and his report had a major influence on the international view of that organization. A few years later, he issued a report on Government killings in Somalia.
In Kigali, the Rwandan capital, an official with the United Nations Emergency Office, criticized the refugee agency report as being based on "uninvestigated rumors."
Continue reading the main story