belgium should lay chares against u.n.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
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URL: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s20012.htm


Broadcast: 1/03/99
When Good Men Do Nothing
This buy-in from BBC Panorama is a story about the price to be paid when good men do nothing. A former Australian war crimes investigator blows the whistle on a United Nations coverup of the holocaust in Rwanda. In a follow up interview he claims that the cover-up continues today.

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Reporter: Steve Bradshaw
Producer: BBC: Mike Robinson. ABC: Neheda Barakat
Research:

Chris Masters interviews former Australian war crimes investigator Michael Hourigan.

Chris Masters:
A haunting memory for one Belgian journalist and for all of us who looked in on the Rwanda genocide of five years past. Now it's hard to know what was worse -- the cries for help or the appalling silence that answered them.

Hello and welcome to Four Corners.

Michael Hourigan, a former Adelaide Crown Prosecutor, led a United Nations team investigating the crime of genocide and the crime of silence. We'll talk with Michael about his findings on who instigated the massacre that took a million lives in a hundred days, and how he came to the view that the United Nations, his own employer, continued to conceal its own culpability.

We begin with a BBC Panorama report which is unavoidably confronting in its detailing of the warnings, the killings, and the subsequent probing into the causes and the conscience of all those good men who did nothing. The reporter is Steve Bradshaw.

[Steve Bradshaw's report, "When Good Men Do Nothing".]

Chris Masters:
Michael Hourigan, a former Adelaide Crown Prosecutor appointed to the United Nations investigation team, has returned to Australia with his own unfinished report.

Q: Michael it was about five years ago virtually to the day that the killings went on?

A: Yes, that's right.

Q: So, when you look back, what can you say, I mean how confident can you be that the United Nations could've prevented the genocide when you consider the practical difficulties of protecting those million people as spread across the thousands of villages?

A: Well the evidence is emerging now that, firstly, the United Nations was in a unique position, that it had received a timely intelligence months in advance of the outbreak of fighting on the sixth of April of 1994, warning that mass extermination of the Tutsi population was going to occur. That information was also significant because what it told the United Nations was that it was going to be a state-driven program with kill teams, with death lists, and targeting people en mass. To answer your question about whether the United Nations could've perhaps prevented or contained the killings, we can only speculate now. But I think it's fair to say that, given the unique position and the intelligence information that they received, that they should've been in a far better position to deal with the catastrophe once it broke out.

Q: So, was there a practical, workable rescue plan?

A: The Canadian General Romeo Delaire, who was in charge of the United Nations forces on the ground in Rwanda in the months before the outbreak of fighting, and on the day fighting broke out in April of 1994, had under his command two-and-a-half-thousand troops. He put together a rescue plan for Rwanda and I understand now in the years since then that plan has been examined by military experts who've said, and in their view confirmed, that that plan, if implemented, would've seen 5,000 western combat troops with armour sent to Rwanda in the first few weeks of the genocide. And the view is that - if that plan had been implemented, that the genocide could've been contained. Many hundreds of thousands of lives could've been saved.

Q: But the violence couldn't be contained in Somalia, so what was different about Rwanda?

A: Rwanda was going to be a state-driven program. It was going to have kill teams run from a central operations rooms in Kigali itself. As I said, we can only speculate now how successful the United Nations could've been to deal with that. But I think that what critics are saying now in the years later is that the Rwanda genocide was not the total disarray as has been suggested to the world community. I think that because it was being run by the state and being run by a central authority by conspirators, that it would've been possible to target them specifically very quickly.

Q: What have you learned about who was behind the genocide?

A: My team discovered clear evidence that there was a ring of conspirators in senior positions in the former Hutu government across the community -- they are in armed forces, they are in business, in banking, and in government. That small group of people set in place the genocide. They, they managed it, funded it, armed the people, and basically set it in motion on the sixth of April.

Q: And you know who these people are?

A: Yes.

Q: They were Hutus presumably, and it was a grab for power?

A: Yes.

Q: The famous warning of January 11 is acknowledged by the UN, but how many warnings were there?

A: My team discovered evidence that there were more than that January 11th cable. We now know that in mid to late 1993, a delegation of Rwandans went to the UN headquarters in New York, regarding the peace efforts. We now know that that delegation warned diplomats and the UN about an impending disaster in Rwanda.

Q: Was the attack on the Presidential plane calculated you think to inspire the violence?

A: What I can tell you about that crash is that for a long time the world community had a view that it was connected with the outbreak of fighting -- that it was part of the genocide plan. And it's still a very sensitive matter and people are exposed to risk if I speak about it just generally. But I can tell you that we received accurate information about who was responsible for that plane crash, and that the information was very detailed and involved a good number of people.

Q: So what was the UN's reaction to your handing over this information, which presumably you did?

A: Initially, the senior members of the war crimes tribunal were very excited by it. But within a week there was great concern about it and my inquiry was stopped.


Q: So, do you think you were meant to succeed at it, or you were just window-dressing?

A: I had been told by a number of heads of missions, diplomats in Rwanda, that the tribunal that I was working on was meant to fail -- that we were not meant to discover the culpability of the western community.

Q: But Michael, what practically can the UN achieve, how do you try and punish 100,000 murderers?

A: There're 130,000 Rwandans still in custody, facing the domestic justice system there. That justice system, it's absolutely bereft of resources. They don't have typewriters, vehicles, investigators, judges, magistrates, that system is totally on its -- on its knees. I was part of a tribunal with a massive budget looking at of course the national people, the people that, that basically caused the genocide, but we only had 27 in custody when I was attached to the tribunal. And we could've prosecuted them more effectively and efficiently. As we sit here today five years after the event, there has only been one conviction in the international court, and one guilty plea of the 27.

Q: So what's going to happen to all those thousands of people in those crowded jails? Is that another tragedy in the waiting?

A: It absolutely is, and in fact I can tell you from my experience in Rwanda, the people of Rwanda are disgusted that the vast majority of offenders, the 130,000 people who are still in jail in Rwanda, are not being dealt with. And there's no sense of reconciliation. There's no sense of closing a chapter on Rwanda's grief.

Q: So, what can good men do now?

A: I've been working with an American Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia, and a Belgian Senator, and a number of other concerned people, to put together an independent inquiry into the United Nations' conduct of the 1994 genocide. We are hopeful that an independent truth commission, we're calling it, can look at the causes of the genocide, and also more importantly look at why and how the international community failed Rwanda, and hopefully put in place a series of reforms to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Q: The truth is out isn't it? I mean the UN know the truth, don't they? You're saying they do?

A: I wish that I could tell you today that the full story had been told. But I can tell you with some confidence that my team only discovered a part of the truth. That was a year of significant effort to discover just a smattering of documents.

Q: Michael, thank you. Michael Hourigan, a former UN investigator who can't forget and won't be silent. And that's all from Four Corners for this week. Until next week - Goodnight.