Unsolved Mystery

Stefanie Rumple/02/18/08/8:05AM/Global Crime/Unsolved Mystery

One of the most impactful murder mysteries of the 20th century has taken a new turn. President Kagame of Rwanda, along with 55 other top officials of the current Rwandan government, has been indicted for crimes of genocide by a judge in Spain in regard to the ethnic massacres in 1994 in Rwanda. The catch is, these are the people who are credited with having ended the Rwandan genocide, in the glaring absence of any assistance from international forces and governments. Paul Kagame belongs to the Tutsi tribe, of whom between 800,000 and 1 million were slaughtered by extremist Hutus in a 100 day period in 1994. He led the RPF, an armed Tutsi coalition force, to victory over the bloodthirsty Hutu extremists, thus ending a reign of terror from which there had been no escape. Judge Fernando Andreu has utilized a provision of the Spanish court system which provides universal jurisdiction in the case of crimes against humanity or war crimes. However, Kagame and his government angrily denounce the judge as having listened to people who would deny the genocide and continue to work to destabilize the country. They urge the international community as well as Interpol to ignore these indictments.
Then-President of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarima, an ethnic Hutu, is credited with having planned and organized the genocide, but before he could see it to fruition his plane was shot down and he was killed. To this day it is not known who shot down his plane; ethnic Tutsis were originally blamed, which had the effect of inflaming extremist Hutus against them and cementing the planned genocide into reality. The Hutus themselves have also been accused of it, with the motive of instigating the genocide by throwing blame on the Tutsis. International forces have been alternately blamed as well, for less obvious motives of destabilizing the country in the same way that other developing countries with vast resources are often undermined. It may never be known who brought down that plane on that fateful day, but the end result can never be forgotten. Perhaps we as an international community have learned a lesson from this. We did not want to get involved, and yet we justify other military actions on the basis of getting involved in order to protect innocents. Perhaps that is not our real motive for getting involved after all.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200802110193.html
http://www.newtimes.co.rw/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7238646.stm