US knew Rwandan army was taking part in genocide - documents

Newly declassified documents show that three weeks into the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a US official telephoned one of the men later indicted as a mastermind behind the genocide and urged him to stop the killings, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Monday. According to the documents, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Prudence Bushnell, confronted Rwandan army Colonel Theoneste Bagosora on April 28, saying the US knew the Rwandan military was taking part in the killings. “She said that, in the eyes of the world, the Rwandan military engaged in criminal acts, aiding and abetting civilian massacres,” AP quoted one document, a summary of the conversation that was later cabled between US embassies as saying. Bagosora claimed the mass killings of Tutsis then under way were being conducted by the populace, without support of the newly installed extremist Hutu military government.

The document and 15 others concerning US actions during the Rwandan genocide were released on Monday by the National Security Archive, a private group which collects declassified US military and diplomatic documents, AP said. “We knew who to call. We knew how to call them, and we did call them,” a researcher with the archive, William Ferroggiaro, was quoted as saying of a conversation between Bushnell and Bagosora. The killings went on as the US lobbied for the removal of what few UN forces were in the country. They ended that July, when Tutsi rebels captured the Rwandan capital, Kigali. Some 800,000 Tutsis had been massacred in the 100-day campaign. Bagosora is currently waiting trial at the Arusha-based ICTR facing charges of being one of the masterminds behind the genocide. Bushnell is now US ambassador in Guatemala.