Rwandan anger at genocide claim threatens UN missions

Published on Tuesday 31 August 2010 17:15

Rwanda is considering pulling out all its troops from United Nations peacekeeping missions, starting with Darfur, after a leaked draft UN report said Rwandan troops may have committed genocide in Congo.

Rwanda contributes thousands of its well-trained troops to peacekeeping missions in Chad, Haiti, Liberia and Sudan.

"Starting with Darfur, we have instructed our force commander to make contingency plans for immediate withdrawal as we wait to see how the UN treats this report," foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo told reporters yesterday.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report details some 600 serious crimes committed by various forces from a number of nations in Congo during the 1990s. However, experts said Rwanda came off worst due to the genocide charge. Rwanda rejected the allegations as malicious and ridiculous.

"The UN can't have it both ways. You can't have a force serving as peace keepers and it is the same force you are accusing of genocide," Mushikiwabo said.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights yesterday said it hasn't come under pressure from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to alter the report.

The leaked draft - extracts of which were first published by Le Monde last week - accuses Rwandan troops and rebel allies tied to the current Congolese president of slaughtering tens of thousands of Hutus in Congo. The attacks allegedly came two years after those same troops stopped Rwanda's 1994 genocide that killed more than half a million Tutsis and some moderate Hutus.

The French newspaper cited unidentified sources as suggesting that Ban wanted UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to change the language of the report to remove the word "genocide".

"I want to make it crystal clear that this is absolutely untrue," Pillay's spokesman, Rupert Colville, told reporters in Geneva. "The secretary general has never put pressure on the high commissioner to alter the text."

But Colville acknowledged that publication of the draft report had thrown earlier plans for its release into disarray.

"The leak has complicated matters," he said. "There's been quite a furore about it. The environment surrounding it affects other parts of the UN."