By Irwin Arieff
PARIS, March 31 (Reuters) - The
deaths of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in a 1994 genocide were motivated
not by tribal hatred but by a naked desire for political survival, said
a new report on the slaughter released on Wednesday.
At least half a million people died during the 13 weeks of killings in the central African nation in mid-1994, said the report of over 900 pages, entitled "Leave None to Tell the Story".
The death toll mentioned in the report drawn up by the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues and U.S.-based Human Rights Watch is well below estimates by others, including U.N officials who spoke of up to 800,000 slaughtered.
The report is based on four years of research in Rwanda, hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents never before made public, according to its authors.
Its key finding disputes the notion that the genocide, which began on April 6, 1994, after Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down by unknown assailants, was "an explosion of rage...motivated by old tribal hatreds".
It stemmed in fact from "a deliberate choice by a modern political elite to incite fear and hatred to keep itself in power".
Rather than being "possessed by demons", Rwandan Hutus "chose to do evil" in slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
"Many (Hutus) expressed pleasure in inflicting horrible suffering on their victims (while) hundreds of thousands of others hesitatingly joined in the genocide," the report found.
The dead represented three-quarters of Rwanda's Tutsi population, the report said.
Throughout the period soldiers, veterans, police and local administrators encouraged the killings by spreading fear and rumours about the Tutsi population.
The Hutu authorities also gave food, drinks, drugs, military uniforms and small sums of cash to Rwanda's hungry and jobless Hutu young people to encourage them to kill.
Hutu farmers were encouraged to plunder fields and steal crops and animals from Tutsi farms while business owners and local officials were given houses, vehicles, televisions and computers to encourage their support and participation.
The report documents dozens of warnings about the impending killings sent to officials in France, Belgium and the United States and the U.N. between November 1993 and April 1994.
Yet none took the necessary steps to prevent the massacres though a relatively modest force would have been sufficient to stop them at the start, the report concludes.
Paris, Brussels and Washington were probably about equally aware of the danger, the report says.
U.N. peacekeeping troops were pulled out of Rwanda rather than ordered into action to prevent the genocide.
While France's later armed intervention, dubbed Operation Turquoise, saved some lives, it also allowed the massacres to continue, the report found.
Although the French operation's 2,500 soldiers saved an estimated 15,000 to 17,000 lives, a poorly equipped U.N. force was able to save twice as many lives before it was withdrawn, the report concluded.