A plane crash in Rwanda on 6th April 1994 led to the most rapid genocide in recorded history. The killing began that night and was almost over six weeks later. Some 800,000 people were murdered, mostly with spears, knives and machetes. Two weeks into the slaughter the US, supported by Britain, pushed the UN security council to reduce the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to just 270 men, despite the pleas of its commander, who insisted that a UN military presence could make a difference.
With hindsight it is obvious that the world's political leaders and opinion-formers failed Rwanda in 1994. Bill Clinton, then US president, and Madeleine Albright, his representative at the UN, later secretary of state, have recognised this and expressed regret for their part in withdrawing the UN force from Rwanda as the genocide started. Despite being accused of wilful neglect of their obligations under the genocide convention, their British equivalents, John Major, the prime minister, Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary, and Lynda Chalker, the minister responsible for Africa, have been less forthright.
No one resigned and nobody's career was even blighted by Rwanda. Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping at the UN, who dealt with the dispatches from the UN force commander in Kigali, has become secretary general. Annan's deputy in peacekeeping, Syed Iqbal Riza, is now his chef de cabinet.
The media failed too. In 1994 I was Africa editor of the Independent and, like most other western journalists who covered the story, I did not realise its significance until the killing was almost over in early May. So I do not write to pass judgement, but to recall the thinking of the time and revisit the context in which decisions about Rwanda and Africa were taken.
I visited Kigali in January 1994 on my way to Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was called then. All the diplomats, politicians and aid workers I spoke to in Kigali talked about the fragile but functioning Arusha peace accords, the power-sharing agreement between the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), the Hutu-dominated Habyarimana government and several smaller parties. After two years of fighting, an agreement had at last been reached. The delicate task of implementation was then reaching its final stages. Only one person in Kigali warned me that there could be genocide: Philippe Gaillard of the Red Cross. He told me that the government was arming militias and that plans were being laid to promote mass killings of Tutsis across the country.
I thought long and hard about writing a story that said: "Genocide Looms in Rwanda." It might have made the front page, but I had only one source and everyone else I had spoken to sounded confident about the Arusha peace process. I did not sense anything sinister on the streets of Kigali that might have made me sceptical. And, as a world-weary diplomat said, the worst that would happen if the agreement did not work would be another round of fighting. To write a story about impending genocide would have been irresponsible. It might even have helped to promote genocide. So I wrote nothing and went to Zaire.
On 6th April I was in London packing my bag for South Africa to cover the impending election. The Independent's foreign editor, Harvey Morris, phoned to tell me that a plane crash near Kigali had killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. It appeared that the plane had been shot down. After some discussion we agreed that I should continue to South Africa but watch developments in Rwanda. I wrote a background article about Rwanda and caught the plane to Johannesburg. For three weeks the newspaper carried agency reports on Rwanda. As the South African polls closed at the end of April, I flew to Kampala to try to find out what was happening in Rwanda.
Getting there was not easy. There were no flights to Kigali or anywhere else in the country. The route from Zaire to the west was impossible since President Mobutu Sese Seko only allowed journalists into the country by special invitation. To try to get in from the south through Burundi might be dangerous, since that country, too, had been destabilised by the death of its president. The other routes were through Tanzania to southeastern Rwanda - a journey of three days - or across the Uganda border, which was officially closed. However, the World Food Programme (WFP) was running a cross-border operation to eastern Rwanda. This was encouraged by the Tutsi-led RPF who controlled the border there.
The WFP lent me a vehicle and a driver and we drove into Rwanda. Once we were inside, the RPF kept me waiting near the border for two days. Eventually they gave me a guide and bodyguard and on 2nd May we drove down through Rwanda to the Kagera river on the Tanzanian border. The country was almost completely deserted. Africa's roads, especially in a crowded country like Rwanda, are usually dotted with pick-up trucks, walkers and cyclists. In two days of driving we saw no more than a dozen people. On the banks of the Kagera river I watched bloated corpses being carried downstream. At the rate I saw them - one every five minutes - I estimated that hundreds of people were being killed every day. It was hard to get close enough to see the cause of death but some seemed to have their hands tied.
From there we drove across to the refugee camps on the Tanzanian side, leaving our RPF guide and guard in Rwanda. Here, thousands of Hutus who had fled eastern Rwanda told us that RPF Tutsis were murdering Hutus and they had crossed the border to escape. Some journalists acc-epted this story at face value. Although we had seen few people on the way, I had seen no evidence of killing and I did not believe them. My instincts were confirmed when two people separately drew me aside and whispered that what I was being told was untrue. They were clearly frightened but desperate to tell their story. They said that it was these refugees who had done the killing and they had fled to escape RPF revenge.
Back in Rwanda I visited some of the massacre sites. The sheer number of corpses began to convince me that something extraordinary had happened - it was clear that this was not just an "ordinary" massacre. We turned west to Kigali and joined the RPF front line in the hills overlooking the city from the northeast. From a distance it looked peaceful. It was impossible to know what was happening there.
It was also impossible to get the story out without leaving Rwanda. Telephones did not work and mobile phones did not reach that far in those days. It meant returning to Uganda, a day's journey on very rough roads. Once out it might be impossible to get back in again since the WFP vehicle had to go back to Kampala and no other vehicles were available.
But I decided I had to communicate what I had seen. I crossed back into Uganda and made for Kabale, where there were telephones. But when I tried to write, the words did not come. I had covered 20 wars - most of them in Africa - but the clich?s of death and destruction mocked Rwanda's horrors. The journalist's thrill at telling an important story to the world shrivelled in the face of what I was seeing and hearing. I waited for the rush of adrenaline that comes with hitting the keys when you start a big story. Nothing happened. I felt numb. I started a message to the news editor explaining why the story was late. I began with the words: "I do not want to tell you what I saw today..." I realised that was the story. Why should my aged parents be presented with this vision of hell at their breakfast table? How could I tell my wife what I had seen and smelt? And what if my children should glimpse my name in the paper and read what I wrote as they got ready for school? Why should anyone need to be told these things? I have spoken to other journalists who were there and they recall similar feelings. Some made Rwanda their last African story.
My own notebooks and the early reports of the genocide in the British press give some insight into how the world perceived events in Rwanda at the time. The day after the plane crash, ten Belgian paratroopers, part of the UN force, were disarmed and murdered. Tutsis began to be murdered openly in the streets of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. But these events did not act as a spur, as they might have elsewhere, to international action. The reasons for this lie in the low level of importance attached to Rwanda plus the fact that the west's limited interest in Africa was being monopolised by the tense run-up to the first democratic elections in South Africa.
The words Hutu and Tutsi were not then familiar to many people outside the small world of African specialists. Being a former Belgian colony and Francophone, Rwanda was of little interest to the British foreign office, which had been forced to cut its staffing levels in Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s. Rwanda had no diplomatic, historical or commercial links with Britain. In London, as the crisis developed, Hurd's officials were reduced to telling him what they had seen on CNN that day.
On 7th April all major newspapers reported the plane crash that killed the presidents and followed it with reports of the murder of the Belgian soldiers and then the evacuation of foreigners. There was little attempt to analyse Rwanda's particular politics beyond the fact that there had been a civil war which was frozen by the Arusha accords. Within a few days of the plane crash the Times ran several articles about the fate of Rwanda's rare gorillas. For most newspapers the foreign story of the moment was Bosnia and its coverage was already stretching budgets.
Moreover, many western commentators were predicting a bloodbath in South Africa. They believed that the African National Congress would break its promises and begin a campaign of murder and destabilisation. Others, observing the continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal, predicted a tribal bloodbath. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the Zulu Inkatha movement, had not yet agreed to take part in the election, and more and more people were dying in the warfare between Inkatha and the ANC.
In the event, Buthelezi agreed to take part days before the 27th April election, and the voting was vast and peaceful. The journalists who headed to Durban in search of a bloodbath, including most of the stringers for the world's press based in Nairobi who usually covered east Africa, did not find one. As a result they missed the worst bloodbath of all.
After the plane crash, the Nairobi press corps would, in normal circumstances, have been on the next flight to Rwanda but in April 1994 most were in South Africa. The press could not cover more than one Africa story at a time. Some did not even try. The Financial Times did not send its Nairobi correspondent to South Africa but neither was she sent to Rwanda until a week after the country had collapsed. In Washington, according to Madeleine Albright, not one question was asked about Rwanda at state department briefings throughout that period.
The experience of neighbouring Burundi had offered earlier evidence that the world would not be moved by Rwanda's plight. The first democratic president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, had been murdered the previous autumn. He was also the country's first Hutu president, and his death was followed by the massacre of at least 50,000 people. Some said it was five times that number. According to an international inquiry into human rights violations in Burundi, Hutus and Tutsis were killed in about equal numbers. Reviewing the report, Ren? Lemarchand, a regional specialist, wrote: "A blind rage suddenly seized Frodebu [the predominantly Hutu party that dominated parliament], militants and peasants alike in almost every province, and they killed every Tutsi in sight... the picture that emerges is one of unadulterated savagery. In one commune after another, scores of men, women and children were hacked to pieces with machetes, speared or clubbed to death, or doused with kerosene and burned alive."
Not a single staff journalist from the British press had covered this story. It barely made the headlines and was hardly reported in national newspapers or on national radio in Britain. Any news editor who made a check through the records would have found that massacres of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi were common in the second half of the 20th century. The word genocide was frequently used but no one had ever proposed sending a UN peacekeeping army to stop the massacres. So why should they now? The US, whose airlift and financial muscle are essential to any rapid UN peacekeeping operation, had been traumatised by the death of 18 of its special forces in Somalia on a single night the previous October. As far as Washington was concerned, Rwanda was Africa and Africa was Somalia. President Clinton was not going to allow the UN - let alone the US - to get sucked into local conflicts that might end in another disaster.
The language used by the press to describe Rwanda after 6th April reinforced the impression that this was another routine eruption of tribal violence that neither negotiation or force could stop. The local Reuters man, Thadee Nsengiyaremye, reported "gangs of youth settling tribal scores hacking and clubbing people to death." He quoted western diplomats as saying "continuing tribal slaughter between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority in the central African states was feared..."
All this was reported in the context of renewed fighting between the RPF and government troops. After the plane crash, the RPF abandoned the ceasefire and advanced. In Kigali the presidential guard attacked the 600-strong contingent of RPF fighters that had been allowed into the capital to protect the politicians who had joined the government as part of the Arusha accords. The civil war was resumed.
Most journalists accepted the diplomats' analysis that the killing of civilians was an offshoot of the renewed civil war. This interpretation made some sense: Hutus feared the restoration of Tutsi rule if the RPF overran the country. They were attacking their Tutsi neighbours because they saw them as RPF supporters, a fifth column. After the murder of President Ndadaye by Tutsi soldiers in Burundi it was easy to persuade Hutus that there was a Tutsi conspiracy to re-establish Tutsi supremacy in both countries. No one knew for sure who had shot down the plane and killed President Habyarimana, but Hutus could easily be convinced that it was the RPF. Those early reports of "tribal bloodletting" also implied that Tutsis were trying to take over Rwanda and were killing Hutus indiscriminately. The assumption was that the anarchy created by renewed fighting had allowed these "ancient tribal hatreds" to burst forth and that they could only be suppressed by a ceasefire. Iqbal Riza from the department of peacekeeping was giving the UN security council a similar description of "chaotic, ethnic, random killings."
It was not until 12th April that Catherine Bond in the Times stated that "Tutsis were the target plus Hutus who had made the mistake of supporting the Arusha accords." Three days later she wrote: "The majority of the killings are carried out by militias, trained by President Juvenal Habyarimana. The militiamen belonged to two political parties which are opposed to power sharing with rebels from Rwanda's minority Tutsi tribe... Increasingly in the past two days the militiamen have appeared on the streets armed with guns and stick grenades given to them by the remnants of a government led by extremists from the majority Hutu tribe."
There were several references to genocide in Rwanda and Burundi in the media but these referred to past massacres. This - a week after the killings had begun - was the first hint that what was happening was not mayhem but a well organised genocide. The name of the organised death squads, the interahamwe, was not mentioned in the press until 30th April when Reuters started to use it. And only gradually throughout April did the language of newspapers change from describing a civil war to declaring it was genocide.
In a continent not known for the state's ability to command obedience, it is difficult to attribute the genocide purely to government authority. Nor do most Africans believe everything they are told by the state or on the radio. Some Rwandans killed out of fear of being killed themselves. The orders to kill Tutsis resonated with long held fears and feelings. They were accepted as a permission - even welcomed - by vast numbers of Hutus. The Hutu refugees that I spoke with in Goma later in 1994 mostly denied that any killings had taken place. The few that admitted that Tutsis had been killed said that it had to happen. "They were going to do the same to us," one told me.
What would have happened if the media had discovered earlier that the killings were not merely "tribal madness" but murder largely organised by the Hutu government against Tutsis? What if they had portrayed the massacres not as an offshoot of fighting between government and rebels, but as something well organised at a national level? It is hard to judge if leaders such as John Major and Bill Clinton would have taken a different stand had they known what was going on or been pushed to do so by world opinion. In any case, there were few of the television pictures of killings that are usually necessary to create international shock and protest. The genocide story was told in the words of the survivors. Had the world's powerful governments heard those words at the time, would they have accepted sooner that genocide was taking place and ensured that the UN did not withdraw?
As the truth emerged, the UN security council authorised Operation Turquoise, a French expedition to western Rwanda which helped slow the genocide but allowed most of the perpetrators to escape to Zaire. Here they sat in the Goma refugee camps, fed by the UN and NGOs, most of whom did not know or chose not to know who the refugees really were.
Over the next few years, western policy towards Rwanda came to be marked by guilt. The genocide bestowed on the mainly Tutsi victims a moral superiority that gave the new RPF government in Kigali a free political rein. So the world turned a blind eye to the Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of Zaire in 1996. These armies forced the repatriation of thousands of Rwandese and massacred those who did not return. They then marched to Kinshasa and installed a new government in Zaire, now renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two years later they tried to do the same thing again and started a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that is said to have killed more than three times the 800,000 killed in Rwanda in 1994. This was not a second genocide, but it is another link in a chain of violence that stretches backwards to the pre-colonial era and shows no sign of being broken.
But the Rwandan genocide did at least put intervention in Africa back on the agenda. Burundi became a big issue, intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo was contemplated in 1996, Britain intervened in Sierra Leone, France in Ivory Coast. The west did, it seems, learn something from April 1994.
