| http://www.guardian.co.uk/breakingnews/International/0,3561,1119764,00.html
Papers Highlight U.S. Rwanda Actions Tuesday August 21, 2001 4:10 am WASHINGTON (AP) - Three weeks into the slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, a U.S. official telephoned one of the men later indicted as a mastermind behind the genocide and urged him to stop the killings, newly declassified documents show. Prudence Bushnell, deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, confronted Rwandan Army Col. Theoneste Bagosora on April 28, saying the United States knew the Rwandan military was taking part in the killings, the documents said. ``She said that, in the eyes of the world, the Rwandan military engaged in criminal acts, aiding and abetting civilian massacres,'' said one document, a summary of the conversation that was later cabled between U.S. embassies. 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 U.S. actions during the Rwandan genocide were released Monday by the National Security Archive, a private group that collects declassified U.S. military and diplomatic documents. ``We knew who to call. We knew how to call them, and we did call them,'' William Ferroggiaro, a researcher with the archive, said of the conversation between Bushnell and Bagosora. The killings went on as the United States, recently bloodied in Somalia, lobbied for the removal of what few United Nations forces were in the country. They ended that July, when Tutsi rebels captured the Rwandan capital. Some 800,000 Tutsis had been massacred during the 100-day campaign. Since, both the U.S. Congress and the Clinton administration have been widely accused of promoting inaction during the genocide. Bagosora is now awaiting trial by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania. He is alleged to be one of the masterminds behind the genocide. Bushnell is now U.S. ambassador to Guatemala. Other released documents play out the debates in lower-level U.S. policy circles over the killings - including whether to term it genocide. Some at the State Department worried whether using that term publicly would compel the United Nations, and therefore the United States, comply with the 1948 Genocide Treaty's demand for action. In 1998, President Clinton said that ``we did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name, genocide.'' Another such debate was over the use of a military aircraft called ``Commando Solo'' to jam extremist radio broadcasts in Rwanda that were calling for wider killings and, in some case, providing the names and addresses of targets to listeners. On May 5, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Frank G. Wisner wrote to Sandy Berger, then the deputy national security adviser, that jamming would be ``an ineffective and expensive mechanism that will not accomplish the objective.'' Mountainous terrain and concerns the aircraft's safety led to the conclusion it would not work well, the memo said. Instead, Wisner wrote that military aircraft would be best used to move supplies to refugees who had fled to other countries. |
