"Genocidaire" on UN Payroll

In recent years, human rights activists agitating on behalf of a permanent UN International Criminal Court have coined a new epithet - "genocidaires" - to refer to individuals who are implicated in political mass murder. The Sunday Times of London reported on February 4th that for several years the UN had an accused genocidaire on its payroll: Callixte Mbarushimana, who worked in the UN Development Program (UNDP) office in Kigali, Rwanda, during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed the lives of between 800,000 and 1.1 million people.

"Mbarushimana was a Hutu extremist who allegedly collaborated with death squads, organizing the killing of a number of fellow UN staff members," reported the Times. "Their only crime was that they belonged to Rwanda's Tutsi ethnic minority." Gregory Alex, an American UN official who was stationed in Kigali during the massacre, recalled seeing Mbarushimana slam his fist into his palm and say of the Tutsis, "We shall eliminate them all." "The image of the eyes, the hatred that they spoke, I shall never erase from my memory," recalls Alex.

The Times points out that Mbarushimana "was seen by UN officers on several occasions carrying an AK-47 assault rifle and a pistol. He circulated freely and fully armed throughout Kigali . and forced one UN Tutsi staff member to sign over her house 'free' to a Hutu army officer." After the genocide a list of Tutsi UN employees was found in the drawer of his abandoned desk; it is believed that the people on that list had been earmarked for extermination. By then, Mbarushimana "had fled to Kenya, where he continued to work for the UN, making no attempt to hide his Hutu extremism," reports the Times. He was later given a senior position with the UN in Angola, where he worked from 1996 to 1999. The UN insisted on keeping Mbarushimana on its payroll despite the "mounting evidence that they could be harboring a war criminal," comments the Times.

As previously reported in these pages (see "A Silent Accomplice to Mass Murder" in our Insider Report for June 8, 1998), weeks before the Rwandan genocide erupted the on-scene commander of UN peacekeeping troops, Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, sent a detailed fax to the head of the peacekeeping division warning of the impending tragedy. General Dallaire was forbidden to pre-empt the massacre, but was informed that he could provide his intelligence to the same Hutu regime that was planning the bloodletting. The official who issued those orders is Kofi Annan, the incumbent secretary-general.

"I have difficulty accepting that the UN, which is supposed to stand for righteousness and justice, could allow this man to get away," declares Alex. In fact, "genocidaires" have always been welcome at the UN's General Assembly, where they are generally greeted with standing ovations. What makes this case distinctive is that the butcher in question was not a policy-maker, but a hands-on practitioner of genocide - and that fact did not prevent him from finding a job within the bureaucracy of "man's last, best hope for peace."

Source: The New American, Vol. 17, No. 6 March 12, 2001