Rwanda on Thursday presented seven objections to a UN report accusing its troops of committing atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) and said publishing it could threaten regional stability.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report details some 600 serious crimes committed by various forces from a number of nations in the DR Congo from 1993 to 2003.
In August, Rwanda threatened to pull its 3,500 UN peacekeepers out of Sudan’s western Darfur region, following the leaked report’s accusations that the crimes committed could be construed as genocide.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame later decided to keep his troops in the conflict-torn territory after consultations with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Rwanda government spokeswoman and Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo described the draft document that was to be released yesterday as flawed and dangerous.
Its official publication will include comments from concerned countries, including Rwanda.
“Our comments to the UN today demonstrate how the Mapping Exercise has been a moral and intellectual failure — as well as an insult to history,” Mushikiwabo said in a statement.
UN peacekeepers were widely criticized for failing to prevent the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda that ended only after Tutsi-led fighters under current President Kagame retook control of the country.
Rwanda’s army then invaded DR Congo, ostensibly to hunt down Hutu fighters who had taken part in the killings and fled into eastern Congo along with more than 1 million Hutu civilians.
The UN probe accused Rwanda of systematically killing tens of thousands of Hutu refugees — crimes that it said could be considered as genocide if proven by a competent court.
In its objections, Rwanda said the leaked draft lacks historical context, in particular the “immediate and serious threat posed by armed and ideologically charged refugees” living just over the border.
Rwanda said the report used flawed methodology, “the lowest imaginable evidentiary standard” and relied too much on the use of anonymous sources.
It said the UN had been manipulated to rewrite history and that the draft contradicted eyewitness accounts saying Hutu fighters, often posing as civilians, used the refugee camps as cover.
The genocide charge also contradicts Rwanda’s efforts to repatriate, resettle and reintegrate several million Hutu refugees, the statement said.
“Given these objections, it seems clear that no amount of tinkering can resuscitate the credibility of this fundamentally misguided process,” Mushikiwabo said.
Neighboring Uganda and Burundi have also raised objections to their being mentioned as having taken part in the abuses outlined in the report.
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