Intent to Deceive by Linda Melvern

Author:Linda Melvern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

10

Infiltration

The 11 January 1994 cable was difficult to ignore. As a piece of material evidence in court, it caused serious problems for defence lawyers. It was, perhaps, the most famous fax in UN history.1 Sent from Kigali to the UN Secretariat in New York by Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, it gave details of preparations then under way to register all Tutsi families in Kigali with a view to their extermination.

The information it contained came from an informer, a coordinator with the Interahamwe militia who claimed an intimate knowledge of the activities of the Hutu Power movement. He said lists of Tutsi were being compiled in each secteur, going from house to house, noting every family member. Following this intelligence gathering, every secteur was provided with a militia of forty operatives trained to kill at speed.2 Each group had been secretly trained in weapons, explosives, close combat and tactics. Within twenty minutes of receiving the order to kill, the militia in each secteur had the capacity to immediately murder 1,000 people. There were hidden stockpiles of weapons all over the city.

The informer warned that President Juvénal Habyarimana had lost control over his old party, the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND). Furthermore, the informer told of plans to goad the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in order to scupper the peace agreement and restart the civil war. In violent, coordinated and preplanned demonstrations, the Interahamwe would provoke Belgian peacekeepers and kill some of them in order to guarantee the withdrawal of the contingent, the backbone of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR).

For two years, the cable with its warnings from the informer they called Jean-Pierre lay buried in the archive of the force commander which had been brought back from Kigali, with copies of the cable kept in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) at the UN in New York. The UNAMIR archive had been shipped back from Kigali to a storage facility in New Jersey.

However, the story of the informer’s dire warnings broke not in New York but in Belgium. It emerged in an investigation by two journalists who wrote a series of articles in De Morgen in November 1995. They intended to reveal the extent of government information that was hidden from scrutiny and lost in archives. This was a way to deceive the public, they argued. One of the two journalists, Walter De Bock, gave an interview to the BBC World Service about his work.3 He gave as an example how in January 1994 a man had warned UN officers of ‘an April war, and genocide’. The UN had prevented Dallaire from dismantling the killing structure, he revealed in the interview.

‘You are saying the UN had evidence that there was potentially going to be genocide in Rwanda, and they did nothing?’ the interviewer asked. That is perfectly correct, the journalist replied. Bock revealed the Belgian military possessed the same information as UNAMIR. The faxes and cables sent from Kigali to the UN had found their way to

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