UN finds black box lost in Rwandan genocide probe
By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS, March 11 (Reuters) - A red-faced United Nations acknowledged on Thursday that an aircraft black box possibly linked to an air crash that triggered the 1994 genocide in Rwanda had turned up in a U.N. filing cabinet.
The Paris daily Le Monde reported this week that a black box from the Falcon 50 aircraft that was shot down by a rocket on April 6, 1994, killing the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, had been sent to U.N. headquarters in New York and was never seen again.
The newspaper accused the United Nations of obstructing a French investigation into the crash, which was widely blamed at the time as the incident that sparked the 1994 slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the French-backed Hutu regime then in power in Rwanda.
The genocide has been a major embarrassment for the United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who headed its peacekeeping department at the time, as U.N. peacekeepers on the ground at the time were unable to prevent the slaughter.
Asked about the article on Tuesday, U.N. chief spokesman Fred Eckhard flatly dismissed charges the United Nations had obstructed the probe or had the black box, joking, "I've got it right under the table here."
But two days later, an embarrassed Eckhard said the world body had indeed found a black box locked in a filing cabinet.
He said the black box had been sent by diplomatic pouch to U.N. headquarters from Rwanda at the time. But U.N. air safety experts had put it in the filing cabinet after concluding it was not from the crashed plane because it was undamaged.
"When it was received in the Peacekeeping Department's air safety unit 10 years ago, the officials in charge at that time apparently concluded that it could not have been the black box because its pristine condition indicated that it had not been in a crash," Eckhard told reporters.
"And because of that judgment, the air safety experts, after unsuccessfully trying to identify its source, put the black box in the file cabinet and did not report it up the chain of command."
Ordinarily, the United Nations does not conduct air crash investigations.
OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION NOW PLANNED
U.N. officials would now give the device to outside experts to see if it may have come from the downed Falcon after all.
The U.N. inspector general would also investigate whether the matter was handled correctly at the time, Eckhard said.
The newspaper report was based on a six-year inquiry by French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who was asked to investigate by relatives of the plane's French crew.
Bruguiere faulted the United Nations for failing to open its own investigation into the plane's downing and trying to prevent the truth from coming out, the newspaper reported.
Bruguiere's main conclusion, according to the newspaper, was that Rwanda's current president, Paul Kagame, had ordered the downing of the plane near Kigali airport with Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian head of state Cyprien Ntaryamira on board.
The deaths plunged central Africa into a decade of war, an upheaval that is only now slowly abating.
Kagame's government has flatly denied the report as "shameful and baseless."
Rwandan U.N. envoy Nicholas Shalita, in an interview, accused the French government, which has had strained ties with Kagame's government, of leaking Judge Bruguiere's findings as "a smoke-screen to detract attention from their own culpability and their own role in the genocide."
He said that French officials had cordoned off the crash site and had controlled access to the aircraft's black boxes.
03/11/04 15:15 ET
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
