Subject: 'Did Annan shut down terror investigation?' 'Phone call from Rwanda' and (leading article) 'One minute of silence' (Danish daily Information April 6, 2004) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 15:52:10 +0200 Unfortunately, a number of people on my mailing list did not receive the below three pieces last night. Apologies if you receive this e-mail twice. If you have problems reading the articles in this mail, they can instead be read at www.willum.com. Regards, Bjørn Willum DID ANNAN SHUT DOWN TERROR INVESTIGATION? It appears that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was himself implicated when a UN chief prosecutor shut down an investigation of the terrorist attack that ten years ago to the day sparked the Rwanda genocide. Annan spokesman rejects claims By Bjørn Willum, Danish daily Information, April 6 2004 '! Somebody' twisted the arm of then UN Chief Prosecutor of the UN tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia Louise Arbour in early 1997 and made her close down a top-secret investigation of the murder of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. And that 'somebody' could very well have been UN Secretary General Kofi Annan himself. This is what former International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda investigator Michael Hourigan believes. "I cannot imagine that she made that decision on her own," Hourigan told Information. In deepest secrecy, Hourigan supervised a tribunal investigation aiming to identify the perpetrators that shot president Habyarimana's jet out of the sky late on April 6, 1994. An event that almost immediately set in motion the genocide of nearly one million people in the small Central African country. For one year, Hourigan said, "she followed the investigation [and] I briefed her". But when his team finally made a breakthrough, Ms Arbour closed down the case. ! "Why encourage a group of professional investigators, spend a year, co mmit resources and then get the information - and then shut it down?" The answer is probably that the case became politically explosive because the investigation, unexpectedly, pointed an accusing finger at the current Rwandan regime. A US ally. And there are indications that Mr Annan was involved in the suspension of the investigation. According to Hourigan, the then deputy chief of the UN Security and Safety Services, Micheal Hall, a few days after Hourigan in a confidential encrypted phone conversion had briefed Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour about the investigation breakthrough, turned up to see Hourigan in Kigali. Mr Hall made it clear to Hourigan that the UN secretary general had personally instructed him to see to it that Hourigan got out of Rwanda fast. Carrying a secret memorandum about the investigation, Hourigan was escorted by Hall to the airport and put on a UN flight. Hourigan then flew to the Hague in the Netherlands where Arbour had her office. In Arbour's of! fice, Hourigan handed over the memorandum. But although Arbour, according to Hourigan, until then had backed the investigation for a year, she suddenly claimed during the meeting, which took place around the end of February and beginning of March 1997, that the downing of the presidential jet was not within the jurisdiction of the Rwanda tribunal. Despite the fact that terrorism is clearly listed as one of the offences the tribunal is mandated to prosecute. "She had taken advice, she said," according to Hourigan. But not from Annan, Farhan Haq, a spokesman of the secretary general, said. "The prosecutor of the tribunal is independent," Mr Haq told Information. "Neither the secretary general nor anyone in his office encouraged Judge Arbour not to investigate the April 6 air crash." Both Micheal Hall and the spokesman of Arbour, who is today a Canadian Supreme Court judge and whom Annan has appointed UN commissioner for human rights as of July this year, responded to Informat! ion with the phrase "no comments". PHONE CALL FROM RWANDA The day Mich ael Hourigan borrowed the US embassy's phone to tell his boss about the breakthrough in the investigation into the terrorist act that triggered the greatest mass murder of modern times, he probably set in motion a chain reaction he had never dreamt of. A few weeks later the investigation had been suspended. The powers above him in the UN had decided that the truth of the Rwandan genocide could not bear the light of day By Bjørn Willum, Danish daily Information, April 6 2004 He needed a secure phone. That much was clear to team leader Michael Hourigan of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that day at the end of February 1997. 12 years of service as a policeman and 5 years as a lawyer with the Crown Prosecution in his native Australia left Hourigan in no doubt that the government of the tiny Central African country Rwanda would not be pleased to hear what he had to tell his very topmost superior about the unexpected turn, the investigation had taken. And if the ! Rwandan government were to listen in on the UN's open phone lines, it would do everything in its power to obstruct subsequent investigation, while the lives of witnesses would be left hanging by a thread. Accompanied by a colleague, he drove down to the US embassy to borrow the embassy's STU-III, a third-generation Secure Telephone Unit developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as a means of safe encrypted communication. But he was to regret the conversation. Today, he is certain that someone listened in on the call. It all began at 8.21 P.M. on April 6, 1994, when the pilot in the exclusive Falcon 50 radioed the control tower and received permission to land in the tiny state of Rwanda. VIPs were onboard: the president and chief-of-staff of the country returning home from peace negotiations in neighbouring Tanzania with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel group. But during descent to the runway, two missiles came whistling towards the aircraft. The news hit the! radio in no time: The president has been murdered, fetch your weapons , eliminate the culprits. A few hours later, roadblocks had been scattered throughout Kigali, death squads dispatched, while Hutu extremist politicians were busy exploiting the situation by hatching a coup. During the ensuing 100 days, the new Hutu extremist government slaughtered towards a million people. 2,500 UN peacekeepers in Rwanda charged with monitoring a truce between President Habyarimana's armed forces and those of the RPF were instructed to stand by. Hostilities resumed and in the end, the Hutu extremists were driven from power by the militarily superior RPF. Afterwards, by way of consolation, the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and charged it with investigating and prosecuting the masterminds. The tribunal mandate covered a long range of crimes - and all parties involved. In article 4 in the statute of the new tribunal, a crucial word was listed: terrorism. In Kigali, Michael Hourigan had in 1996 set up a special invest! igations team that in deep secrecy had begun taking a closer look at the event that triggered the genocide. The assumption from the outset was that it had been the Hutu extremists that shot down the aircraft in order to use the assassination as an excuse to seize power. A hypothesis shared widely with most academics and media. But at the beginning of 1997, the investigation of the small team began pointing in the opposite direction: that it had been the RPF that by means of a well-calculated terrorist attack had attempted to destabilise the country - in order to have an excuse to resume hostilities and seize power. An explosive conclusion in a country ruled ruthlessly by the RPF. But, nevertheless, a conclusion that Hourigan felt obliged to communicate to the chief prosecutor of the tribunal, Canadian Louise Arbour, who worked out of the Hague in the Netherlands. Problem was, the UN had no STU-III phones. And it was well known that UN investigators in Rwanda were snooped up! on by the new regime both in private and at work - "sometimes I could hear them talk in the background," as another former investigator told Information about the eavesdropping. But US embassies are equipped with STU-IIIs. Michael Hourigan's colleague and good friend, Jim Lyons, a retired FBI officer, knew people at the US embassy. If they were able to borrow the encrypted phone for an important conversation? No problem, the embassy replied. So Lyons and Hourigan drove from the former posh Chinese sports hotel at the outskirts of town that house investigators' offices to a grated building displaying Stars & Stripes in downtown Kigali. At the embassy, the staff willingly helped the two UN investigators and set up the STU-III to connect with the US embassy in the Hague where Louise Arbour had likewise turned up. "It was a warm call," Hourigan remembers today, when asked by Information about the approximately ten minutes he spoke on the phone with Arbour. Your news that it appeared to be the RPF that shot down the aircraft fits with other inf! ormation, I have received, Arbour replied. "It was clear to me by listening to the conversation that she was pleased with the progress of the case," Jim Lyons tells Information today. Hourigan and Arbour did not exchange details but ended the call by agreeing that Hourigan was to make his way to the Hague to discuss the exact course of the future investigation of the matter. She was a kind lady. Competent, professional, respected and well-liked by investigators in Kigali. "She was very pleasant, very easy to talk to. I kind of liked her. She was not snobbish like many high-ranking judicial officers," Hourigan recalls. But the day he and two colleagues were let into her office in the Hague, barely two weeks after the warm phone conversation, it appeared as if she had undergone a complete change. "She was very aggressive from the outset, not friendly like before," he recalls. "Very confrontational." The tribunal is only mandated to investigate the genocide as such - and that ! did not begin until just after the presidential plane had been downed, Arbour charged. Hourigan objected that the tribunal was mandated to investigate and prosecute crimes committed throughout 1994 and that terrorism was explicitly mentioned in the statute - and that she had, moreover, already known of the investigation for about a year. But his opinion did not interest her. She had taken advice on the matter, she said, according to Hourigan. Hourigan had authored a three-page memorandum on willing witnesses that he passed on to Arbour. If that was the only copy, she inquired. Yes, Hourigan replied. Good, she retorted, leaving the table to file the document. Adding that Hourigan was welcome to leave. But what had happened during the less than two weeks in between the phone call and the meeting at Arbour's office in the Hague? And from whom had Arbour been taking advice? Just as is the case at national courts, UN prosecutors must be entirely independent from other authorities, including the UN secretary-general, but much suggests that someone i! n the UN system had involved him- or herself in the decision-making process, both Hourigan and Lyons think. We rewind a few days. A few days after the phone conversation at the US embassy, Hourigan found himself in a one-to-one meeting with Micheal Hall, the deputy chief of the UN Security and Safety Services. Micheal Hall was in Rwanda to review the tribunal's security system, but it quickly emerged that influential people had instructed Hall to make sure Hourigan were to leave Rwanda as quickly and safely as possible. When the day of Hourigan's departure dawned, Hall escorted Hourigan to the airport. And then that happened, that should not have happened. The small UN aircraft had been fully booked and by way of a mistake, Hourigan's name was not on the passenger manifesto. In the bureaucratic UN tradition, this normally means that the frustrated traveller stands a snowball's chance in hell of getting onboard. The ground aviation official refused to give in. The situation ! turned tense, while Hall made it abundantly clear that he did not care who was to get bumped off that airplane. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had personally instructed him to see to it that Hourigan was to leave on that plane. If the official would care himself to call Kofi Annan and ask? The man felt no urge. Another passenger had to give up his seat, before the plane with the Australian investigator was able to taxi for the runway. Today, Hall has "no comments" to offer Information about the abovementioned chain of events. But how could Kofi Annan have gotten wind of the investigation? There are two options: "I think she called New York, UN headquarters, and they said ah ah, we don't wanna get into that," Lyons says, adding that the UN leadership was fully aware that neither the Rwandan government nor its ally the US government would appreciate the investigation, which he for the very same reason never told his own government in Washington about. "It supported the RPF financially and with training. If I told my government that, they would ! go straight back to [Rwandan President Paul, ed.] Kagame." Hourigan nevertheless believes that the most likely scenario is that the US intercepted the phone call and then persuaded Annan to put pressure on Arbour to close down the enquiry. "I realise now that it was a terrible mistake, because that call was not secure," Michael Hourigan says. "She and I were not the only ones on the line that day." This eavesdropping theory is not regarded as credible by Lyons. But it is definitely technically possible, according to Wayne Madsen, a former employee of the NSA's communications security branch, who today works as an intelligence analyst for the intelligence publication geopolitique.com. As issuer of the encryption keys used to scramble conversations in one end of the call and unscramble them in the other end, NSA has what is termed a 'backdoor' for STU-IIIs; the agency's technicians know the master encryption key and are thus able to decode conversations between any STU-III ph! ones, Madsen explains. In September 1999 Louise Arbour was appointed t o the Canadian Supreme Court and replaced by Swiss Carla Del Ponte. At that time, the tribunal had indicted quite a few Hutu extremists, but - as is still the case - no RPF soldiers. In an interview with the Danish daily Aktuelt in March 2000, Del Ponte revealed that she shortly after she took office had appointed a special team to specifically investigate RPF war crimes. (http://www.willum.com/articles/aktuelt17april2000_2/index.htm) And Del Ponte also took an interest in the terrorist attack against Habyarimana's jet, she said in the same interview. But any documents covering the previous terrorist investigation had apparently disappeared. "I have no information, no documents, nothing." (http://www.willum.com/articles/aktuelt17april2000_1/index.htm) Instead, she had begun cooperating with Jean-Louis Bruguière, a French anti-terror magistrate who at the request of the late President Habyarimana' s family, which lives in exile in France, had asked him to investigate the circ! umstances around the downing of the aircraft. Habyarimana's family wanted to sue RPF leader and Rwandan President Paul Kagame for murder. And Del Ponte wanted to await the result of Bruguière's investigation, before she decided whether to reopen the case, she said. But things never got that far. In September 2003, the UN Security Council decided to split the job as chief prosecutor, which had until then covered both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, into two: one for each country. Del Ponte received one of the two new jobs, but although she made it clear to Kofi Annan that she would have preferred continuing in Rwanda and leave the former Yugoslavia to someone else, "unfortunately, I was not given the luxury of choosing," she explained in an interview with the non-profit news service Hirondelle - and "yes, pressure from Rwanda contributed to the non-renewal of my mandate". These days everybody is busy forgetting the shooting down of the small Falcon 50. "We cannot be divert! ed by those who want to make this an issue. I don't think it's importa nt for the survivors to find out who shot down the plane," Washington Post was recently told by Emmanuel Ndahiro, one of President Kagame's advisers, whose government have prepared a weeklong USD 7,5 million string of mainly donor-financed commemoration ceremonies set to commence tomorrow. "We should be helping the people who are still alive, not worried about something that happened in the past." Louise Arbour takes pleasure in talking about human rights issues. But if questions are asked about the small jet, the spokesman of the Canadian Supreme Court is instructed to say "no comments". "The official line is no comments," is also the message to Information from tribunal spokesman Roland Amoussouga. Last month French paper Le Monde succeeded in obtaining a copy of the French anti-terror magistrate's preliminary report, which concludes that RPF was behind the downing of the Habyarimana jet. When the official report is due, Bruguière's office would not reveal to Information. ! But all the same, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda noone is waiting any longer for the French magistrate's report. The shooting down of the aircraft, said the new chief prosecutor for Rwanda, Gambian Hassan Bubacar Jallow, on a press conference in January, "that is not a case that falls within our jurisdiction." ONE MINUTE OF SILENCE LEADING ARTICLE By Bjørn Willum, Danish daily Information, April 6 2004 One minute of silence. That is what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wants all human beings to observe Wednesday at noon local time in each time zone in respect of the victims of the most comprehensive and efficient mass murder of modern times. The genocide in Rwanda. And to reflect on how we can all help preventing that something similar ever happens again. It is a given that quite a few issues will be spinning inside the secretary general's own head when the hand strikes noon in the city of New York. He has, of course, already explained to the world how to! break the cycle of violence: justice. That every criminal is brought to justice regardless of his or her political affiliation or position in society. "There can be no peace without justice and there can be no justice without respect for human rights and the rule of law," Mr Annan said when the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in September 1998 issued the first 'guilty of genocide' verdict in the history of mankind. But at UN headquarters, there is a no small discrepancy between what is said and what is done. That is the case both when it comes to the concepts of justice and truth. Already more than seven years ago, Information documented how the UN leadership of then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and then head of the UN peacekeeping department Kofi Annan tried to avoid responsibility by lying about their own actions in connection with the genocide. (http://www.willum.com/articles/information19nov1996/index.htm) Among many other issues, the UN top dogs claimed to have forwarded intelligence on the planning of the genoci! de to the UN Security Council three months prior to April 6, when unknown perpetrators shot down a jet carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. The cold-blooded terrorist act had the desired effect: extremist Hutu militia used the excuse to kill political opponents as well as about a million ordinary people in the most gruesome of ways imaginable. The intelligence, Information revealed back then, had in fact been deliberately suppressed by Annan. (http://www.willum.com/articles/information16nov1996/index.htm) Out of diplomatic consideration of the US government that clearly did not want to face public demands of intervening in yet another African country following the fiasco in Somalia a few months earlier, where the bodies of US elite soldiers had been dragged around the capital Mogadishu in honour of CNN. But it appears that not even truth and justice post mortem is something the UN high-ups believe Rwanda deserves. Only a few months after the genocide, researchers! dispatched by the UN high commissioner for refugees handed in a repor t that documented not only how Hutu extremists but also their opponents, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel group, which seized power in Rwanda following the genocide, had committed horrific war crimes. A report that the high commissioner for refugees, acting under orders of Annan and Boutros-Ghali, chose to declare "non-existent". 11 years, 2.7 billion dollars in compensations, extradition of suspects and a letter to the UN Security Council assuming responsibility of the bombing of the PanAm passenger plane over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in the 1980s. Nothing less was required before the UN Security Council in September last year lifted sanctions against Libya. On the contrary, senior UN officials have been exceptionally busy sweeping the terrorist act that triggered the Rwanda genocide under the carpet - despite the fact that the Security Council as early as the day after the attack instructed Boutros-Ghali to collect all useful information on the subject and rep! ort back to the Council as quickly as possible. An investigations team at the Rwanda tribunal in February 1997 reached the unfortunate conclusion that it had been, from a diplomatic point of view, the 'wrong ones' - the current Rwanda RPF regime, which seized power following the genocide - that had organized the downing of the plane. And not Hutu extremists that at this point in time were on the run. To try issuing an arrest warrant of the leaders of Rwanda's regime was a sure way to plunge the UN bureaucracy into a fierce diplomatic battle with the regime - and it would surely not have improved the world organization's relations with Washington that had allied itself with the military dictatorship in the tiny African country. So yet again, the UN system decided that, alas, considerations of truth and justice weighed as ashes when balanced against smooth diplomatic relations. Then Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, who had for more than a year backed the investigation, suddenl! y closed it down. As is narrated in today's paper, possibly at the adv ice or encouragement of Annan. Perhaps what the diplomat of all diplomats really wants to tell us is that truth and justice are luxury concepts that the world organization can only afford to pay for in Lockerbie, New York and Madrid. But unfortunately not in poor African countries. That is, should one wish, something to ponder tomorrow when the clock strikes 12. __________________________________ If you have received this e-mail directly from Bjørn Willum, it is because you are on his mailing list used for distributing English translations of his articles on Africa, cf. www.willum.com/list. You can unsubscribe or subscribe by sending him an e-mail at [log in to unmask] writing 'unsubscribe to Africa stories' or 'subscribe to Africa stories' in the subject line. Bjørn Willum is the author of 'Legitimizing Inaction towards Genocide in Rwanda: A Matter of Misperception?' published in International Peacekeeping (autumn 1999) (http://www.willum.com/articles/intpeaceaug1999/index.ht! m ) This and other articles on Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda can be accessed at www.willum.com/rwanda and www.willum.com/ictr 


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