This World s11e10 Episode Script
Rwanda's Untold Story
Rwanda-- a country dominated by its dark history.
The senseless barbarity of the genocide still shocks us.
We think we know the story, but do we? What the world believes and what actually happened are quite different.
Rwanda is ruled by President Kagame, regarded by many as the saviour of his country.
But what kind of man is Paul Kagame? We have a dictator, we have a man who is a serial killer, who enjoys killing his citizens.
He's a man with powerful friends.
The President of Rwanda is someone I've got a lot of respect for, a lot of time for, and I think he has a vision for the country.
Their closeness is a closeness with what I call the most important war criminal in office today.
20 years on from the genocide, what is the truth about Rwanda? October 1st, 2014 In this stadium in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, thousands of people once hid from an ethnic slaughter.
Rwandans have come to remember, and watch a symbolic re-enactment of the genocide 20 years ago.
The ceremony's presided over by Rwanda's President, Paul Kagame.
We did not need to to experience genocide to become a better people.
It simply should never have happened.
The international community is represented by many supporters of Paul Kagame.
Among them, a former British Prime Minister.
A Foreign Secretary.
The head of the United Nations is also here to apologise for the failure of the UN to intervene and save innocent lives.
We could have done much more.
We should have done much more.
Memories of the killing are still raw.
It's all too much for some in the audience to bear.
The genocide reveals humanity's shocking capacity for human cruelty.
Rwanda's choices show its capacity for renewal.
Today, the streets of Kigali-- where people were once cut down with machetes-- are buzzing with life.
Rwanda's made a remarkable recovery.
Today, it's one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, a model state loved by Western leaders.
The streets are spotless, the people enjoy free health care.
There's even free WiFi on the buses.
This tiny nation is no bigger than Wales, but the whole world knows its tragic story.
- What is happening? - They're killing everyone.
Hollywood dramatized the Rwandan genocide.
A million slaughtered while the UN stood by.
Today, the real Hotel Rwanda, where terrified people once sheltered, is a tranquil place for tourists and businessmen.
This is the story the world knows-- how President Paul Kagame's forces stopped the genocide of their own people, the Tutsis.
Now, some-- once in Kagame's inner circle-- question this account and his role in it.
But I couldn't talk to them in Rwanda.
I went to South Africa, to Johannesburg, to meet a man in secret.
General Kayumba Nyamwasa once led Paul Kagame's armed forces.
He's now living in exile, under tight security, in fear of his life.
And he paints a very different picture of his former boss's actions.
Kagame's intention was not to stop the genocide.
Never.
Kagame's intention was to win the war, so that he can be in power.
To him, the question of those who were dying in the genocide and those who were being killed To him, all that was not an issue.
In America, in Washington, I met another Rwandan exile.
The task was stopping the massacres Theogene Rudasingwa was Paul Kagame's chief of staff-- his press spokesman during the genocide.
He later became Rwanda's ambassador to Washington.
Now he's sought political asylum here.
He says Rwanda today is, in reality, a repressive state.
Within the system and outside the system, you survive by simply keeping silent.
The mood in the country is one of fear.
A fearful nation on edge.
That's really the climate in the country right now.
To discover what the truth is about Rwanda, the genocide and Paul Kagame, you have to understand the history of ethnic conflict here.
Rwanda's colonial masters favoured the Tutsis-- just 15% of the population.
The majority, the Hutus, were denied their basic rights.
After independence in 1962, the majority Hutus came to power and hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were driven out.
These Tutsi refugees fled to neighbouring countries-- the Congo, Tanzania and Burundi.
But most of them settled in Uganda.
This large group of excluded people, Tutsi refugees This was a time bomb.
They decided that they were going to return to Rwanda no matter how-- if need be, by armed force.
The Tutsi exiles created an army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
The RPF was backed by the Ugandans.
Paul Kagame was a young major in the RPF.
He'd grown up in Uganda and become an intelligence officer in their army.
America spotted his potential, too, and gave him military training in the States.
As I grew up, as I became older, together with others we felt we were right to try and do anything to liberate our country, to restore our race to our country.
By the early '90s, Paul Kagame commanded the RPF.
They invaded Rwanda and fought a guerrilla war, eventually taking over a large swathe of the north.
The largely Tutsi RPF threatened to take the capital.
A million Hutus fled from their homes.
Marie Bamutese was a Hutu schoolgirl living in Kigali.
I was 12.
We were at school and we were told the country was being attacked by enemies from Uganda.
They were killing lots of people.
People started to get scared of the RPF, fearing for the future.
Some of the events that led to the genocide are not disputed.
Rwanda had been ruled for 30 years by the majority-- the Hutus.
But now the Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was under pressure from the West to end the war, embrace democracy and share power with the RPF.
In 1993, Habyarimana signed the Arusha Peace Accords-- although hardline members of his own government opposed it.
When the RPF agreed the deal, Paul Kagame was at the table.
But they only represented the minority-- the Tutsis.
And some now question their motives.
They felt that they were not going to be able to take power through the ballot and I think by the end of 1993, the RPF had decided it was going to take power by the bullet.
Despite the peace talks, Kigali was on edge.
There were political murders on both sides.
By now, a small United Nations peacekeeping force had arrived to oversee a ceasefire and the implementation of the peace accords.
Luc Marchal was in command of the Belgian UN troops.
It was a tense situation.
Every night in Kigali, the background noise was of weapons shooting and grenades exploding.
Then events in neighbouring Burundi sent shockwaves through the country.
Following an election there, Tutsi army officers killed the Hutu President and massacred Hutu civilians.
Refugees fleeing to Rwanda brought horror stories with them.
The stage was set for violence to be unleashed on Rwanda's Tutsis.
The slogan "Hutu power" is launched and the reference to what happened in Burundi was extremely clear-- this is the proof that Tutsis will never accept democracy.
The Tutsis cheered as hundreds of RPF soldiers arrived in the capital, Kigali, under the ceasefire agreement.
But many more troops were smuggled in.
Kagame was talking peace but it's now alleged he was preparing for war.
Within the RPF circles, they knew the Arusha Peace Agreement was not going to work.
But the RPF had succeeded in infiltrating close to 2,000 military officers and men and had infiltrated lots of arms across the country.
On the other side, hardline Hutu militias were training and secretly stockpiling arms.
Radio broadcasts and newspapers whipped up hatred against the Tutsis.
Rwanda was ready to ignite at the slightest pretext.
On April the 6th 1994, President Habyarimana was returning to Kigali from a summit.
With him was the chief of the army and the new President of Burundi.
I heard two or three very violent explosions.
First, I thought it was a munitions depot exploding.
Then, after 15, 20 minutes, there was confirmation that the President's aeroplane had been attacked.
'04 hours Greenwich Mean Time.
The Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in Central Africa have been killed in a plane crash.
The circumstances are unclear.
Rwandan officials say the plane was shot down.
Parts of the plane still lie where they fell, just outside the President's own compound.
Everyone on board, including the French crew, was killed.
It seems extraordinary that the President's plane was shot down literally within yards of his own house.
His children were waiting in the garden and they heard it.
It was the spark that lit the fire of the genocide.
The peace accord was dead.
Within hours, units of Hutu soldiers were on the rampage.
Hutu militias quickly set up road blocks, hunting down and murdering thousands of Tutsis.
It is widely accepted that the plane crash was the trigger for the genocide-- the killing of a million people in three months.
But who pulled the trigger and what was their motive? It quickly became part of the accepted story that Hutu extremists shot down the plane.
They wanted to unleash a wave of ethnic killing and rid the country of Tutsis.
But over the years, more and more evidence has come to light that questions that assumption.
In France, I met a former bodyguard of Paul Kagame's-- now in hiding.
Aloys Ruyenzi claims he was in a meeting with his boss a week before the plane was shot down.
President Kagame chaired a meeting in which Colonel Lizinde brought him a map showing where the plane could be shot down from.
The President approved the plan and ordered it to be implemented.
Ruyenzi says the RPF smuggled anti-aircraft missiles into the capital and that he was with Kagame when they heard the plane had been shot down.
It was around 8pm on the 6th of April.
Some soldiers were watching football, including Kagame.
What was his reaction when he was told about the plane? Kagame was happy.
The other commanders were happy, too.
From that moment, we started to move.
For Kagame and the RPF, the plane crash was an opportunity to restart a full-scale war and seize power.
And some UN officers knew it.
In my opinion, the conclusion to draw is crystal clear.
The attack on President Habyarimana's plane was the trigger to begin the military operation and the armed takeover by the RPF.
Two years after the genocide, the UN began to investigate the plane crash.
They found three RPF informants who claimed to be involved.
Jim Lyons, a former FBI agent, led the UN team.
These informants told us there was a network of operatives that were put together by Paul Kagame with the specific instructions to shoot down the Presidential aircraft.
It wasn't surprising to me because there was never any evidence that the Hutu government was behind the shooting down of the aircraft.
It was like a general open secret within our ranks.
Kagame told it to me and, in his mindset, he said, the way the power structure in Rwanda was, if you took out the head, in that kind of dictatorial system, the whole system would come crumbling down.
Ten years later, a French judge investigated the deaths of the plane crew.
He concluded Paul Kagame and the RPF were responsible and indicted nine officers.
Paul Kagame declined to be interviewed for this programme.
But he's always denied shooting down the plane and his government's report concluded Hutu extremists were responsible.
If RPF had been responsible for Habyarimana, I would have taken responsibility for it.
Even now, I have no problem saying I am not apologetic that Habyarimana died.
To be honest, I don't care.
France says that? I don't give a damn.
The man I met in South Africa knows all about the plane.
General Nyamwasa is one of the RPF officers indicted by the French judge.
Who do you believe was behind the shooting down of the plane? Paul Kagame, undoubtedly.
- Paul Kagame? - Oh, yes.
Oh, yes, - You know that? - 100%.
- Were you at meetings when it was discussed? - I know.
I was in a position to know and he knows I was in a position to know, and he knows that.
General Nyamwasa has offered to cut a deal with the French judge to testify.
If you discuss these matters with the judge and it implicates you yourself, are you willing to do that? Oh.
Obviously, if they implicated me why not? Because I think the truth is what matters.
The presidential compound of Habyarimana-- ransacked during the mayhem that engulfed Rwanda-- is a museum today.
But if his plane hadn't been shot down, would there have been a genocide? And what responsibility should Paul Kagame bear if he ordered the attack? What if President Habyarimana had not died? In those types of circumstances, I do not think there would have been the genocide as we know it.
I think Kagame and the RPF bear responsibility.
They are a factor in what happened in Rwanda thereafter.
The Hutu extremists indeed had planned to exterminate the Tutsis.
There is no doubt about that in my mind.
But Paul Kagame should also accept that while that was going on, he was also having his own plans that also contributed to what took place.
- Contributed to the genocide? - Oh, yes.
Because if you know that this is a dry season and you just strike a match and put it on the grass, would you expect that grass not to burn? Rwanda burnt for 100 days as the genocide raged.
RPF forces advanced through a decimated land.
In later years, Paul Kagame took credit for putting an end to the slaughter of his fellow Tutsis.
Are the massacres still continuing? Yes, the massacres are still continuing, though on a lower scale, and this is not because the killers have stopped killing but because, I think, they have killed quite a big number of those they are supposed to kill.
Today, on the green hills of Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis live side by side.
Ethnic labels have been banned.
Everything in Rwanda is founded on the official history of the genocide-- a story almost solely of Hutus killing Tutsis.
The world knows what happened in Rwanda during the genocide against the Tutsis.
But when two American academics came to the country and conducted exhaustive fieldwork up and down Rwanda, they found a different side to the story.
In 1998, Allan Stam and Christian Davenport from the University of Michigan travelled to Rwanda to research the genocide.
We would start going out to different villages, a lot of sites of political violence, to get some general sense of what was taking place.
They found the government's version of events was repeated everywhere.
Every person we talked to, their story was exactly the same.
That told us something was wrong with the story-- that the story was made up.
Finally, the academics got beneath the surface, using local researchers and official Rwandan government statistics.
As we looked more closely, a totally new understanding of what had taken place became very clear.
There's a claim that the RPF-- and Kagame in particular-- put forward with regard to their stopping violence.
Our research very much puts that in question.
The Americans created detailed maps, plotting the killing against the front line of advancing RPF forces.
The maps showed the murder of Tutsis had largely come to an end before Kagame's troops arrived in each area.
Most Tutsis were already dead or had fled the country.
The information we have from the Rwandan government clearly shows that the killing began and ended throughout the country before the RPF arrived, location by location by location.
And what's the significance of what you found? Paul Kagame-- his ability to stay in power, to hold on to that country-- depends on all of us believing that he was the one that saved Rwanda, instead of invading and conquering Rwanda.
So if Paul Kagame's forces didn't actually stop the genocide of the Tutsis, what was really happening as they advanced through the country? When the killing began, many innocent Hutus were caught up in the violence.
Amongst them was Marie, the Hutu schoolgirl from Kigali.
It was the Easter holidays.
We saw people coming around midday.
They came and killed our neighbour because she was Tutsi.
We hid her children because they were our friends.
Marie and tens of thousands of Hutus fled, through the roadblocks where the Interahamwe-- the Hutu militias-- were killing Tutsis.
But Marie says the advancing RPF made no distinction between innocent and guilty Hutus.
It was only really 10% of what we call the Interahamwe who committed massacres, who killed Tutsis.
But when the RPF arrived, they wrought havoc on everyone.
Even the innocent Hutus that I knew, they were killed too.
Are you saying that the RPF did carry out killing of civilians, of refugees at that time? Yes, they were killing us.
The General in South Africa has been indicted for war crimes.
He admitted to me, the RPF did kill Hutu civilians.
There was this kind of anger from the soldiers and some of them took it upon themselves to start revenge killings.
There was a number of exercises that were unjustifiable but weren't planned.
It's not a rumour, it's a fact.
The UN knew Kagame's RPF forces were killing Hutu civilians.
Their survey of Hutu refugees found 30,000 between five and 10,000 a month had been systematically killed in just a third of the country.
But the UN considered the report too sensitive for publication.
It was suppressed.
The British Government and the United States Government and this is for a fact, were instrumental in actually preventing that to happen.
It isn't just Rwanda bears the scars of the past.
Feelings of collective guilt still haunt the West.
These barracks are a memorial to 10 Belgian UN peacekeepers, killed on the first day of the genocide by vengeful Hutu troops.
Belgium quickly pulled its soldiers out and the UN failed to send in enough reinforcements to stop the killing.
It's true the international community always feels guilty and rightly so, because it didn't do anything.
But that's no excuse to keep silent to justify all the massacres that Paul Kagame himself is responsible for.
In Rwanda today, it all seems peaceful on the roads where the militias once separated out and killed the Tutsis.
But Paul Kagame keeps the flame of genocide burning at memorial sites across the country.
These places reinforce the official story that it was overwhelmingly Tutsis who died and Hutus who killed them.
They forced them to come here from different sides, to concentrate them at the same place for their extermination.
This was a college at Murambi, where, I'm told, 50,000 Tutsis were rounded up by local Hutu officials and massacred.
The director of the Museum, Gaspard Mukwiye, is a genocide survivor.
So, yes.
Here's one of the rooms in which bodies of victims.
Many of them, were killed by machetes and clubs.
Nothing can prepare you for the site of room after room of mummified bodies, preserved in the agony of death.
In the museum, fading photographs of the people these bodies once were.
You see these children who are trying to hide their face.
This baby died decapitated.
You see one of the women who has been raped before being killed.
Why is it important to keep these bodies? People would find this macabre and strange.
There are those who don't want proof to be seen, so these are tangible proofs of the genocide committed, perpetrated against the Tutsi in 1994.
Questioning the official story of the Tutsi genocide, is now a crime in Rwanda.
It's called genocide denial and those found guilty can be imprisoned for many years.
It's widely accepted that around a million Rwandans died in the genocide in just three months and the Government says over 90% were Tutsis.
But some academics have questioned this official version.
The violence was committed in 1994, by almost every side and every participant in this war and breakdown of social order.
Random violence happened and 100s of 1,000s of people died for no particular purpose.
The population records, at the time of the genocide and in the troubled years before, were not always reliable.
But the American academics claim they used the most accurate figures available.
If one million people died in Rwanda in 1994 and that's certainly possible, there's no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi.
How do you know that? Because there weren't enough Tutsi in the country.
The academics calculated there had been 500,000 Tutsis before the conflict in Rwanda.
300,000 survived.
This led them to their final controversial conclusion.
If one million Rwandans died and 200,000 of them were Tutsi that means that 800,000 of them were Hutu.
That's completely the opposite of what the world believes happened in the Rwandan genocide.
What the world believes and what actually happened, are quite different.
Estimates of the number of Tutsis and Hutus killed during the genocide vary greatly.
The Rwandan Government asserts there were far more Tutsis in the country to begin with and that nearly all of those who died were Tutsi.
When Stam and Davenport presented their findings, they were told to leave Rwanda, accused of being genocide deniers.
We've never denied that a genocide happened.
We don't deny a genocide happened but that's only part of the story.
If you believe the only story in Rwanda in 1994, was that there was a genocide, that would be like saying, in World War II, the only thing that happened of interest was the holocaust.
The RPF took over a shattered country.
There was officially a coalition Government, but in reality, the Tutsis were in power and Paul Kagame was pulling the strings.
The killing didn't stop.
A year after the genocide, 100,000 displaced people were crammed in a camp at Kibeho in southern Rwanda.
These Hutus were afraid of retribution.
The new Government couldn't get them to go back to their villages.
RPF troops surrounding the camp opened fire.
A camera caught part of the attack.
It was all witnessed by United Nations peacekeepers, including one British officer.
I saw one woman, quite obviously reacting to a shout.
She stopped, she turned, she put her hands high in the air.
I took my eyes off her for a moment, as an RPF soldier walked towards her.
He carried on walking and ultimately he shot her and she fell dead where she tried to surrender.
Paul Kagame came to Kibeho, but his Government would only admit 338 refugees had been killed.
The official UN death toll was 2,000.
But UN medics counted nearly 5,000 people massacred here.
The evidence that is there, I don't think anyone would doubt it, except those who want to protect the RPF against that accusation, that the RPF has committed, on a massive scale, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
He's one of the world's leading experts on Rwanda, but Filip Rentgens can no longer go there.
He too has been accused of genocide denial.
Someone criticising the RPF for its human rights records, is immediately accused of being a genocide denier.
Rwanda has been benefiting from what I call a genocide credit.
That gives the RPF such a high moral ground, that they are nearly unchallengeable.
In the prison in Kigali, there are still 1,000 people found guilty of mass murder during the genocide.
They're all Hutus.
Gregoire Nyilimanzi, a former local official, was involved in the killing of at least 2,000 Tutsis.
I took part in the activities that led to the killing of many Tutsi.
I held meetings and distributed weapons used to kill them.
Gregoire, why did you do what you did? Power is sweet, it feels good.
So as leader, I had to protect my area against the people invading the country.
Everything that was said about the RPF, was a threat to this power of mine.
Gregoire's one of the smaller fry.
People like him are tried and imprisoned in Rwanda.
The big fish have been dealt with outside the country in neighbouring Tanzania.
The UN's response to the slaughter in Rwanda, was to set up the world's first genocide tribunal.
Its mandate was to try anyone guilty of genocide, but also war crimes and crimes against humanity, as Paul Kagame once acknowledged.
Those who are implicated in violations of human rights, even our soldiers as well who have been involved in such acts, should be answerable, there's no doubt about that.
In 1998, a tough Italian judge took Kagame at his word when she became Chief Prosecutor at the Tribunal.
No-one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice.
Carla del Ponte had once tackled the Mafia.
Now she had unearthed evidence of war crimes committed by the RPF.
At a conference recently, she revealed what happened when she informed President Kagame.
He started looking at me a little bit like this, not badly, but he said, "Oh you've got enough to do with the Hutu genocide of the Tutsis, so why now?" And I said, "Look the evidence is there and I wouldn't be doing my job as a prosecutor if I just left it in a drawer.
" As long as she investigated Hutu crimes, Carla del Ponte says she had Kagame's co-operation.
But when she persisted in pursuing the RPF, she found her next meeting with the President wasn't so cordial.
He yelled at me, "How dare you continue Madam Prosecutor.
How dare you persist with these investigations.
" He said, "You're finished being Prosecutor at the Rwanda Tribunal.
" Carla del Ponte appealed to UN headquarters not to let Kagame block her investigation.
I spoke to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan.
He said, "Listen to me, Carla, it's all politics.
You're totally right but it's the Security Council, it's made a political decision.
" So the US didn't back me up, the UK followed suit, as always, and my mandate was not renewed.
Kagame didn't want it and Kagame made sure the Americans and British understood that he didn't want it and so Carla del Ponte was simply frustrated.
Carla del Ponte wasn't the only UN official prevented from investigating Kagame's RPF.
Six years earlier, Jim Lyons' team had tried to find out who'd shot down the President's plane.
We had an act of terrorism, we were in a time frame where we were covered and we felt that it was absolutely within our jurisdiction to investigate that act.
But then evidence emerged Paul Kagame ordered the attack.
The Chief Prosecutor at the time had supported the investigation.
But then, it seemed, Louise Arbour decided her mandate didn't cover the plane crash.
Louise Arbour had just done a 180 degree turnaround.
Someone above her was telling her that this was not a good idea to be investigating Paul Kagame.
That was it.
That was the end of the investigation.
We asked Louise Arbour for an interview, but she didn't respond.
The Tribunal is about to close.
It's found 63 people guilty of crimes committed during the genocide.
They're all Hutus.
This has become, unfortunately, a pathetic instance of victor's justice.
Those who have won the war have enjoyed total impunity, that's the RPF and those who've lost the war have been prosecuted.
Kagame's impunity has reached scandalous proportions.
As you can see in the case of Congo, his impunity has really gone beyond the borders of Rwanda.
Two years after the genocide, Paul Kagame extended his reach into neighbouring Congo.
There were, by then, two million Rwandans living in vast refugee camps in the Congo, mainly Hutus afraid to return home.
Amongst these Hutu civilians were members of the FAR, the former army and militias responsible for the genocide.
General Nyamwase was by now Kagame's army chief of staff, responsible for dealing with this threat.
The principle objective was justifiable, because the ex-FAR and militias were across the border and were planning to attack Rwanda and a number of incursions had already taken place from the camps in the Congo, into Rwanda.
This morning, nobody had accepted responsibility for the mortar attack, though most observers feel it was fired by the Rwandan patriotic front.
The pursuit of the Hutu militias by Kagame's forces would lead to a further tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions.
By now Marie, the girl from Kigali, had reached one of the camps in the Congo.
After they bombed Bukavu, they came to our camp and that's when we left and ran into the forest.
Marie fled deep into the heart of the Congo where families on the run were dying of disease and starvation.
I can't explain what it's like to see children dying like flies.
One day, I sat beside two dead children.
I felt nothing, I felt dead with them in the forest.
Marie was raped like thousands of women and girls.
She witnessed Rwandan forces and their local allies, Congolese Tutsi militias, trying to wipe out the Hutus.
Refugees were being killed everywhere and killed systematically.
They killed everyone.
It meant killing as many Hutu refugees as possible to reduce their numbers.
Paul Kagame's invasion of the Congo began a decade of conflict.
Other African countries were drawn into what became a vast regional war.
Hutu civilians, both Rwandan and Congolese, were killed in their hundreds of thousands.
By 1998, General Nyamwase says he opposed the war in the Congo.
He was sidelined by Paul Kagame.
There was a disagreement between me and him.
I told him there was no justification for us to go to Congo.
All of a sudden, he had his own people and they started the war.
What happened thereafter is something that is very unjustifiable.
From the outset, the international community knew about the slaughter, but the UN seemed powerless to stop it.
And so Marie spent three years in the forests of the Congo before being airlifted out.
She never returned home to Rwanda.
It was the apocalypse, it was like the end of the world.
I wondered if the world still existed, if the international community existed.
Why were we dying like that without any help? The UN team were sure they would find something.
Journalists too reported the atrocities in the Congo.
They were horrified not a single refugee, just a totally stripped camp.
Marie's account was confirmed when the UN surveyed 600 alleged massacre sites.
The trench looks like a grave in waiting and refugees don't have bulldozers? The UN report concluded the apparent systematic and widespread attacks on Hutu civilians, if proven, could be characterised as genocide.
Paul Kagame vehemently denied it.
The whole idea of thinking that there was a genocide in the Congo is flawed, where the genocide was is clear.
A million had died in Rwanda.
An estimated five million died in the decade of war begun by Paul Kagame's invasion of the Congo.
The fact that everyone seemed to condone these crimes has of course emboldened the regime, has given the regime the impression that it could do anything without the risk of prosecution.
Were you surprised there wasn't more protest from the international community over what was happening in Congo and Rwanda's part in it? No, I wasn't surprised.
He's got very powerful people who protect him.
He does a lot of things and he thinks he can get away with impunity, including killings, including invasions, it's simply because he feels he is protected.
Go outside, please.
Outside, please.
Go outside, please.
On the 20th anniversary of the genocide, foreign dignitaries wait for the Paul Kagame to arrive.
His actions in the Congo, the evidence of war crimes in Rwanda, don't seem an obstacle to their close relations.
The streets of Kigali have been cleared for them all to walk to the stadium, to remember the genocide.
British and American politicians are right at the front.
They see Kagame as a strong leader who has prevented further ethnic violence.
Nearly half Rwanda's government spending comes from foreign aid.
470 million a year.
Britain's the largest donor.
Tony Blair's charity works with Kagame's government.
And he's an unpaid advisor to the President.
I honestly do not know what motivates Tony Blair.
On the issues of Rwanda, he is dead wrong.
When history is written in the future, Tony Blair will be seen as the British man who actually sided with the dictatorship that was killing Rwandan people.
Mr.
Blair declined to be interviewed for this programme but has often spoken of his support for Paul Kagame.
Rwanda shows just what is possible under the leadership of Paul Kagame.
It is making huge strides forwards.
It has made enormous progress.
Now, the fact is it has made that progress under Paul Kagame's leadership.
The President of Rwanda is someone I've got a lot of respect for, a lot of time for, and I think he has got a vision for the country.
Well, he's certainly too close for comfort.
He has consistently defended Kagame, Bill Clinton has been another of those defenders of Kagame.
Kagame is their hero.
I think they should revisit their relation with Kagame.
Because actually their closeness is a closeness with what I call the most important war criminal in office today.
On the surface, Rwanda seems like a role model for African development and democracy.
But according to some human rights organisations, this is really a repressive, authoritarian state.
Paul Kagame has won two presidential elections with a landslide.
Maybe I should win, I have no reason not to believe I should come out of this well.
But those in the know told me the 2003 election had been fixed.
What happened is that we just gave out numbers.
And I was involved.
So you mean you discussed between you what percentage of the vote should be apportioned to Paul Kagame? Oh, yes, yes, exactly.
Kagame maybe wanted 100% and some people were saying, no, we don't need that much and eventually he settled for 95%.
He knows he never got those numbers and the people of Rwanda know they never gave him those numbers.
Elections have been totally flawed, have been totally fake.
When I say fake, I mean fake.
Ballot box stuffing, false counting procedures.
Everyone knows that and the international community in Kigali knows it.
Kagame may have banned ethnic identity, but the Tutsi minority dominates his government.
All power rests in his hands.
He does not need to account to anybody.
Combine it with control of the military and the intelligence, with the control of the party and the Hutus, marginalising them, that has enabled him really to have absolute power.
Many in the west would say he's a strong leader, he's an effective leader.
Rwanda is a success story.
So was Gaddafi, so was Saddam Hussein.
They cannot have a strong dictator in Britain and America and they think that is what is good for Rwanda.
Rwanda does not need a strong leader, we need strong institutions.
Rwanda's institutions have been used by Paul Kagame to stifle dissent.
Hutu opposition leader, Victoire Ingabire, returned from exile in 2010 to stand against the President in the last election.
There is no justice in Rwanda, there is no democracy in Rwanda, people are not free to say what they think.
We have to talk about what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Ingabire never made it to the polls.
She asked why there were no memorials to the Hutus who died.
She got eight years in prison for genocide ideology.
The price of being able to express a view that is even mildly critical or dissenting in Rwanda, the price is very high.
Those who've tried, journalists have been killed and others imprisoned or simply banished into exile.
In recent years, more and more of Kagame's inner circle have fled abroad and formed an opposition party to challenge him.
Amongst them his former intelligence chief, Colonel Patrick Karegeya.
He had been accused of threatening state security, and sentenced to 20 years in jail.
Karegeya sought refuge in South Africa, where he gave a rare interview.
All the basic freedoms don't exist.
When you find there is no freedom of association, there's no freedom of speech, there's no justice system to talk about But those who fall out with Paul Kagame have found that exile is no guarantee of safety.
This is a taped phone conversation allegedly between a top Rwandan intelligence officer and someone he thinks can arrange a contract killing.
In secret, outside Rwanda, I met the man who made these recordings, former army officer Robert Higiro.
He's saying that the most important thing is to get the job done, for the money there is no problem.
And by the job, what does he mean? He means if you succeed in killing General Nyamwasa and Colonel Patrick Karegeya, then there's no question about the price.
They don't care about the price.
Higiro says he was told to find a way to assassinate the former officers in South Africa.
Karegeya and Nyamwasa were suspected of plotting a coup against Kagame.
Who is the superior? The superior is General Kayumba Nyamwasa.
- He's the superior? - Yes.
Exiles say Kagame fears Nyamwasa most of all.
He's been sentenced to life imprisonment in Rwanda for threatening state security.
"If they agree to do it first, I can negotiate that million with the bosses.
With Mr.
Kagame now.
" That's what he says, one million is OK.
But instead of organising the murders, Higiro tipped off the targets and recorded the calls as evidence.
He says he then became a target and fled to Europe.
But that wasn't the end of it.
Last New Year's Eve, one of the men identified as a target on the tapes drove to this hotel in Johannesburg.
The former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya parked his car and made his way to a room for a meeting, he thought, with a Rwandan businessman.
He was never seen alive again.
I got a call and went immediately to the hotel where he had been strangled.
It was very, very brutal, it was gruesome.
He had been sharing a meal and some drinks.
One person wouldn't have strangled Patrick, he wouldn't have killed him alone.
There must have been other people.
Patrick Karegeya was buried with tight security in South Africa.
Rwandan diplomats were expelled from the country, suspected of involvement in his killing.
When I talk about Patrick being a man of principle General Nyamwasa has survived four assassination attempts and been badly wounded.
Four men, two from Rwanda, have been found guilty in South Africa of trying to murder him.
The judge said the attack was politically motivated.
A dozen prominent exiles have been killed or just disappeared in the past 15 years.
We have a dictator, we have a man who is a serial killer, who enjoys killing his citizens, and he thinks he can keep himself in power by killing and imprisonment.
Shortly after the killing of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame made some off-the-cuff remarks at a prayer meeting.
It's a matter of time.
The message coming from Kigali's prison is very different.
Reconciliation is the theme of the service here to commemorate the genocide.
Hutu mass murderers like Gregoire have been punished for their crimes against the Tutsis.
But the Hutu politician, Victoire Ingabire, is also in here for challenging the official story of the genocide.
You cannot talk about reconciliation and healing until and unless you redress the question of crimes committed against the other side.
Rwanda is not going to heal when people are telling lies.
We are not going to be a country on the basis of killing our own citizens.
You can only heal and reconcile when you tell the truth.
We're here to commemorate an unspeakable tragedy.
They're holding a candlelit vigil in the stadium.
A new generation listening to the official genocide story.
10,000 a day.
Western governments may support Kagame's claim to have ended ethnic conflict.
But others fear he is storing up trouble for the future.
The danger for eruption right now is a question of when, not if, and the danger for another conflict is looming large on the horizon of Rwanda.
Rwanda is a volcano on which the RPF tries to keep a lid.
I am afraid this lid will eventually go.
Paul Kagame was given the opportunity to respond to the allegations raised in this programme, but declined.
It's been 20 years since one young girl fled from Rwanda.
She can't go home, Marie says, until the truth about Rwanda is told.
I must speak out because I saw people dying.
It was as if they were saying to me, "Don't forget what happened to us.
"
The senseless barbarity of the genocide still shocks us.
We think we know the story, but do we? What the world believes and what actually happened are quite different.
Rwanda is ruled by President Kagame, regarded by many as the saviour of his country.
But what kind of man is Paul Kagame? We have a dictator, we have a man who is a serial killer, who enjoys killing his citizens.
He's a man with powerful friends.
The President of Rwanda is someone I've got a lot of respect for, a lot of time for, and I think he has a vision for the country.
Their closeness is a closeness with what I call the most important war criminal in office today.
20 years on from the genocide, what is the truth about Rwanda? October 1st, 2014 In this stadium in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, thousands of people once hid from an ethnic slaughter.
Rwandans have come to remember, and watch a symbolic re-enactment of the genocide 20 years ago.
The ceremony's presided over by Rwanda's President, Paul Kagame.
We did not need to to experience genocide to become a better people.
It simply should never have happened.
The international community is represented by many supporters of Paul Kagame.
Among them, a former British Prime Minister.
A Foreign Secretary.
The head of the United Nations is also here to apologise for the failure of the UN to intervene and save innocent lives.
We could have done much more.
We should have done much more.
Memories of the killing are still raw.
It's all too much for some in the audience to bear.
The genocide reveals humanity's shocking capacity for human cruelty.
Rwanda's choices show its capacity for renewal.
Today, the streets of Kigali-- where people were once cut down with machetes-- are buzzing with life.
Rwanda's made a remarkable recovery.
Today, it's one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, a model state loved by Western leaders.
The streets are spotless, the people enjoy free health care.
There's even free WiFi on the buses.
This tiny nation is no bigger than Wales, but the whole world knows its tragic story.
- What is happening? - They're killing everyone.
Hollywood dramatized the Rwandan genocide.
A million slaughtered while the UN stood by.
Today, the real Hotel Rwanda, where terrified people once sheltered, is a tranquil place for tourists and businessmen.
This is the story the world knows-- how President Paul Kagame's forces stopped the genocide of their own people, the Tutsis.
Now, some-- once in Kagame's inner circle-- question this account and his role in it.
But I couldn't talk to them in Rwanda.
I went to South Africa, to Johannesburg, to meet a man in secret.
General Kayumba Nyamwasa once led Paul Kagame's armed forces.
He's now living in exile, under tight security, in fear of his life.
And he paints a very different picture of his former boss's actions.
Kagame's intention was not to stop the genocide.
Never.
Kagame's intention was to win the war, so that he can be in power.
To him, the question of those who were dying in the genocide and those who were being killed To him, all that was not an issue.
In America, in Washington, I met another Rwandan exile.
The task was stopping the massacres Theogene Rudasingwa was Paul Kagame's chief of staff-- his press spokesman during the genocide.
He later became Rwanda's ambassador to Washington.
Now he's sought political asylum here.
He says Rwanda today is, in reality, a repressive state.
Within the system and outside the system, you survive by simply keeping silent.
The mood in the country is one of fear.
A fearful nation on edge.
That's really the climate in the country right now.
To discover what the truth is about Rwanda, the genocide and Paul Kagame, you have to understand the history of ethnic conflict here.
Rwanda's colonial masters favoured the Tutsis-- just 15% of the population.
The majority, the Hutus, were denied their basic rights.
After independence in 1962, the majority Hutus came to power and hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were driven out.
These Tutsi refugees fled to neighbouring countries-- the Congo, Tanzania and Burundi.
But most of them settled in Uganda.
This large group of excluded people, Tutsi refugees This was a time bomb.
They decided that they were going to return to Rwanda no matter how-- if need be, by armed force.
The Tutsi exiles created an army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
The RPF was backed by the Ugandans.
Paul Kagame was a young major in the RPF.
He'd grown up in Uganda and become an intelligence officer in their army.
America spotted his potential, too, and gave him military training in the States.
As I grew up, as I became older, together with others we felt we were right to try and do anything to liberate our country, to restore our race to our country.
By the early '90s, Paul Kagame commanded the RPF.
They invaded Rwanda and fought a guerrilla war, eventually taking over a large swathe of the north.
The largely Tutsi RPF threatened to take the capital.
A million Hutus fled from their homes.
Marie Bamutese was a Hutu schoolgirl living in Kigali.
I was 12.
We were at school and we were told the country was being attacked by enemies from Uganda.
They were killing lots of people.
People started to get scared of the RPF, fearing for the future.
Some of the events that led to the genocide are not disputed.
Rwanda had been ruled for 30 years by the majority-- the Hutus.
But now the Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was under pressure from the West to end the war, embrace democracy and share power with the RPF.
In 1993, Habyarimana signed the Arusha Peace Accords-- although hardline members of his own government opposed it.
When the RPF agreed the deal, Paul Kagame was at the table.
But they only represented the minority-- the Tutsis.
And some now question their motives.
They felt that they were not going to be able to take power through the ballot and I think by the end of 1993, the RPF had decided it was going to take power by the bullet.
Despite the peace talks, Kigali was on edge.
There were political murders on both sides.
By now, a small United Nations peacekeeping force had arrived to oversee a ceasefire and the implementation of the peace accords.
Luc Marchal was in command of the Belgian UN troops.
It was a tense situation.
Every night in Kigali, the background noise was of weapons shooting and grenades exploding.
Then events in neighbouring Burundi sent shockwaves through the country.
Following an election there, Tutsi army officers killed the Hutu President and massacred Hutu civilians.
Refugees fleeing to Rwanda brought horror stories with them.
The stage was set for violence to be unleashed on Rwanda's Tutsis.
The slogan "Hutu power" is launched and the reference to what happened in Burundi was extremely clear-- this is the proof that Tutsis will never accept democracy.
The Tutsis cheered as hundreds of RPF soldiers arrived in the capital, Kigali, under the ceasefire agreement.
But many more troops were smuggled in.
Kagame was talking peace but it's now alleged he was preparing for war.
Within the RPF circles, they knew the Arusha Peace Agreement was not going to work.
But the RPF had succeeded in infiltrating close to 2,000 military officers and men and had infiltrated lots of arms across the country.
On the other side, hardline Hutu militias were training and secretly stockpiling arms.
Radio broadcasts and newspapers whipped up hatred against the Tutsis.
Rwanda was ready to ignite at the slightest pretext.
On April the 6th 1994, President Habyarimana was returning to Kigali from a summit.
With him was the chief of the army and the new President of Burundi.
I heard two or three very violent explosions.
First, I thought it was a munitions depot exploding.
Then, after 15, 20 minutes, there was confirmation that the President's aeroplane had been attacked.
'04 hours Greenwich Mean Time.
The Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in Central Africa have been killed in a plane crash.
The circumstances are unclear.
Rwandan officials say the plane was shot down.
Parts of the plane still lie where they fell, just outside the President's own compound.
Everyone on board, including the French crew, was killed.
It seems extraordinary that the President's plane was shot down literally within yards of his own house.
His children were waiting in the garden and they heard it.
It was the spark that lit the fire of the genocide.
The peace accord was dead.
Within hours, units of Hutu soldiers were on the rampage.
Hutu militias quickly set up road blocks, hunting down and murdering thousands of Tutsis.
It is widely accepted that the plane crash was the trigger for the genocide-- the killing of a million people in three months.
But who pulled the trigger and what was their motive? It quickly became part of the accepted story that Hutu extremists shot down the plane.
They wanted to unleash a wave of ethnic killing and rid the country of Tutsis.
But over the years, more and more evidence has come to light that questions that assumption.
In France, I met a former bodyguard of Paul Kagame's-- now in hiding.
Aloys Ruyenzi claims he was in a meeting with his boss a week before the plane was shot down.
President Kagame chaired a meeting in which Colonel Lizinde brought him a map showing where the plane could be shot down from.
The President approved the plan and ordered it to be implemented.
Ruyenzi says the RPF smuggled anti-aircraft missiles into the capital and that he was with Kagame when they heard the plane had been shot down.
It was around 8pm on the 6th of April.
Some soldiers were watching football, including Kagame.
What was his reaction when he was told about the plane? Kagame was happy.
The other commanders were happy, too.
From that moment, we started to move.
For Kagame and the RPF, the plane crash was an opportunity to restart a full-scale war and seize power.
And some UN officers knew it.
In my opinion, the conclusion to draw is crystal clear.
The attack on President Habyarimana's plane was the trigger to begin the military operation and the armed takeover by the RPF.
Two years after the genocide, the UN began to investigate the plane crash.
They found three RPF informants who claimed to be involved.
Jim Lyons, a former FBI agent, led the UN team.
These informants told us there was a network of operatives that were put together by Paul Kagame with the specific instructions to shoot down the Presidential aircraft.
It wasn't surprising to me because there was never any evidence that the Hutu government was behind the shooting down of the aircraft.
It was like a general open secret within our ranks.
Kagame told it to me and, in his mindset, he said, the way the power structure in Rwanda was, if you took out the head, in that kind of dictatorial system, the whole system would come crumbling down.
Ten years later, a French judge investigated the deaths of the plane crew.
He concluded Paul Kagame and the RPF were responsible and indicted nine officers.
Paul Kagame declined to be interviewed for this programme.
But he's always denied shooting down the plane and his government's report concluded Hutu extremists were responsible.
If RPF had been responsible for Habyarimana, I would have taken responsibility for it.
Even now, I have no problem saying I am not apologetic that Habyarimana died.
To be honest, I don't care.
France says that? I don't give a damn.
The man I met in South Africa knows all about the plane.
General Nyamwasa is one of the RPF officers indicted by the French judge.
Who do you believe was behind the shooting down of the plane? Paul Kagame, undoubtedly.
- Paul Kagame? - Oh, yes.
Oh, yes, - You know that? - 100%.
- Were you at meetings when it was discussed? - I know.
I was in a position to know and he knows I was in a position to know, and he knows that.
General Nyamwasa has offered to cut a deal with the French judge to testify.
If you discuss these matters with the judge and it implicates you yourself, are you willing to do that? Oh.
Obviously, if they implicated me why not? Because I think the truth is what matters.
The presidential compound of Habyarimana-- ransacked during the mayhem that engulfed Rwanda-- is a museum today.
But if his plane hadn't been shot down, would there have been a genocide? And what responsibility should Paul Kagame bear if he ordered the attack? What if President Habyarimana had not died? In those types of circumstances, I do not think there would have been the genocide as we know it.
I think Kagame and the RPF bear responsibility.
They are a factor in what happened in Rwanda thereafter.
The Hutu extremists indeed had planned to exterminate the Tutsis.
There is no doubt about that in my mind.
But Paul Kagame should also accept that while that was going on, he was also having his own plans that also contributed to what took place.
- Contributed to the genocide? - Oh, yes.
Because if you know that this is a dry season and you just strike a match and put it on the grass, would you expect that grass not to burn? Rwanda burnt for 100 days as the genocide raged.
RPF forces advanced through a decimated land.
In later years, Paul Kagame took credit for putting an end to the slaughter of his fellow Tutsis.
Are the massacres still continuing? Yes, the massacres are still continuing, though on a lower scale, and this is not because the killers have stopped killing but because, I think, they have killed quite a big number of those they are supposed to kill.
Today, on the green hills of Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis live side by side.
Ethnic labels have been banned.
Everything in Rwanda is founded on the official history of the genocide-- a story almost solely of Hutus killing Tutsis.
The world knows what happened in Rwanda during the genocide against the Tutsis.
But when two American academics came to the country and conducted exhaustive fieldwork up and down Rwanda, they found a different side to the story.
In 1998, Allan Stam and Christian Davenport from the University of Michigan travelled to Rwanda to research the genocide.
We would start going out to different villages, a lot of sites of political violence, to get some general sense of what was taking place.
They found the government's version of events was repeated everywhere.
Every person we talked to, their story was exactly the same.
That told us something was wrong with the story-- that the story was made up.
Finally, the academics got beneath the surface, using local researchers and official Rwandan government statistics.
As we looked more closely, a totally new understanding of what had taken place became very clear.
There's a claim that the RPF-- and Kagame in particular-- put forward with regard to their stopping violence.
Our research very much puts that in question.
The Americans created detailed maps, plotting the killing against the front line of advancing RPF forces.
The maps showed the murder of Tutsis had largely come to an end before Kagame's troops arrived in each area.
Most Tutsis were already dead or had fled the country.
The information we have from the Rwandan government clearly shows that the killing began and ended throughout the country before the RPF arrived, location by location by location.
And what's the significance of what you found? Paul Kagame-- his ability to stay in power, to hold on to that country-- depends on all of us believing that he was the one that saved Rwanda, instead of invading and conquering Rwanda.
So if Paul Kagame's forces didn't actually stop the genocide of the Tutsis, what was really happening as they advanced through the country? When the killing began, many innocent Hutus were caught up in the violence.
Amongst them was Marie, the Hutu schoolgirl from Kigali.
It was the Easter holidays.
We saw people coming around midday.
They came and killed our neighbour because she was Tutsi.
We hid her children because they were our friends.
Marie and tens of thousands of Hutus fled, through the roadblocks where the Interahamwe-- the Hutu militias-- were killing Tutsis.
But Marie says the advancing RPF made no distinction between innocent and guilty Hutus.
It was only really 10% of what we call the Interahamwe who committed massacres, who killed Tutsis.
But when the RPF arrived, they wrought havoc on everyone.
Even the innocent Hutus that I knew, they were killed too.
Are you saying that the RPF did carry out killing of civilians, of refugees at that time? Yes, they were killing us.
The General in South Africa has been indicted for war crimes.
He admitted to me, the RPF did kill Hutu civilians.
There was this kind of anger from the soldiers and some of them took it upon themselves to start revenge killings.
There was a number of exercises that were unjustifiable but weren't planned.
It's not a rumour, it's a fact.
The UN knew Kagame's RPF forces were killing Hutu civilians.
Their survey of Hutu refugees found 30,000 between five and 10,000 a month had been systematically killed in just a third of the country.
But the UN considered the report too sensitive for publication.
It was suppressed.
The British Government and the United States Government and this is for a fact, were instrumental in actually preventing that to happen.
It isn't just Rwanda bears the scars of the past.
Feelings of collective guilt still haunt the West.
These barracks are a memorial to 10 Belgian UN peacekeepers, killed on the first day of the genocide by vengeful Hutu troops.
Belgium quickly pulled its soldiers out and the UN failed to send in enough reinforcements to stop the killing.
It's true the international community always feels guilty and rightly so, because it didn't do anything.
But that's no excuse to keep silent to justify all the massacres that Paul Kagame himself is responsible for.
In Rwanda today, it all seems peaceful on the roads where the militias once separated out and killed the Tutsis.
But Paul Kagame keeps the flame of genocide burning at memorial sites across the country.
These places reinforce the official story that it was overwhelmingly Tutsis who died and Hutus who killed them.
They forced them to come here from different sides, to concentrate them at the same place for their extermination.
This was a college at Murambi, where, I'm told, 50,000 Tutsis were rounded up by local Hutu officials and massacred.
The director of the Museum, Gaspard Mukwiye, is a genocide survivor.
So, yes.
Here's one of the rooms in which bodies of victims.
Many of them, were killed by machetes and clubs.
Nothing can prepare you for the site of room after room of mummified bodies, preserved in the agony of death.
In the museum, fading photographs of the people these bodies once were.
You see these children who are trying to hide their face.
This baby died decapitated.
You see one of the women who has been raped before being killed.
Why is it important to keep these bodies? People would find this macabre and strange.
There are those who don't want proof to be seen, so these are tangible proofs of the genocide committed, perpetrated against the Tutsi in 1994.
Questioning the official story of the Tutsi genocide, is now a crime in Rwanda.
It's called genocide denial and those found guilty can be imprisoned for many years.
It's widely accepted that around a million Rwandans died in the genocide in just three months and the Government says over 90% were Tutsis.
But some academics have questioned this official version.
The violence was committed in 1994, by almost every side and every participant in this war and breakdown of social order.
Random violence happened and 100s of 1,000s of people died for no particular purpose.
The population records, at the time of the genocide and in the troubled years before, were not always reliable.
But the American academics claim they used the most accurate figures available.
If one million people died in Rwanda in 1994 and that's certainly possible, there's no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi.
How do you know that? Because there weren't enough Tutsi in the country.
The academics calculated there had been 500,000 Tutsis before the conflict in Rwanda.
300,000 survived.
This led them to their final controversial conclusion.
If one million Rwandans died and 200,000 of them were Tutsi that means that 800,000 of them were Hutu.
That's completely the opposite of what the world believes happened in the Rwandan genocide.
What the world believes and what actually happened, are quite different.
Estimates of the number of Tutsis and Hutus killed during the genocide vary greatly.
The Rwandan Government asserts there were far more Tutsis in the country to begin with and that nearly all of those who died were Tutsi.
When Stam and Davenport presented their findings, they were told to leave Rwanda, accused of being genocide deniers.
We've never denied that a genocide happened.
We don't deny a genocide happened but that's only part of the story.
If you believe the only story in Rwanda in 1994, was that there was a genocide, that would be like saying, in World War II, the only thing that happened of interest was the holocaust.
The RPF took over a shattered country.
There was officially a coalition Government, but in reality, the Tutsis were in power and Paul Kagame was pulling the strings.
The killing didn't stop.
A year after the genocide, 100,000 displaced people were crammed in a camp at Kibeho in southern Rwanda.
These Hutus were afraid of retribution.
The new Government couldn't get them to go back to their villages.
RPF troops surrounding the camp opened fire.
A camera caught part of the attack.
It was all witnessed by United Nations peacekeepers, including one British officer.
I saw one woman, quite obviously reacting to a shout.
She stopped, she turned, she put her hands high in the air.
I took my eyes off her for a moment, as an RPF soldier walked towards her.
He carried on walking and ultimately he shot her and she fell dead where she tried to surrender.
Paul Kagame came to Kibeho, but his Government would only admit 338 refugees had been killed.
The official UN death toll was 2,000.
But UN medics counted nearly 5,000 people massacred here.
The evidence that is there, I don't think anyone would doubt it, except those who want to protect the RPF against that accusation, that the RPF has committed, on a massive scale, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
He's one of the world's leading experts on Rwanda, but Filip Rentgens can no longer go there.
He too has been accused of genocide denial.
Someone criticising the RPF for its human rights records, is immediately accused of being a genocide denier.
Rwanda has been benefiting from what I call a genocide credit.
That gives the RPF such a high moral ground, that they are nearly unchallengeable.
In the prison in Kigali, there are still 1,000 people found guilty of mass murder during the genocide.
They're all Hutus.
Gregoire Nyilimanzi, a former local official, was involved in the killing of at least 2,000 Tutsis.
I took part in the activities that led to the killing of many Tutsi.
I held meetings and distributed weapons used to kill them.
Gregoire, why did you do what you did? Power is sweet, it feels good.
So as leader, I had to protect my area against the people invading the country.
Everything that was said about the RPF, was a threat to this power of mine.
Gregoire's one of the smaller fry.
People like him are tried and imprisoned in Rwanda.
The big fish have been dealt with outside the country in neighbouring Tanzania.
The UN's response to the slaughter in Rwanda, was to set up the world's first genocide tribunal.
Its mandate was to try anyone guilty of genocide, but also war crimes and crimes against humanity, as Paul Kagame once acknowledged.
Those who are implicated in violations of human rights, even our soldiers as well who have been involved in such acts, should be answerable, there's no doubt about that.
In 1998, a tough Italian judge took Kagame at his word when she became Chief Prosecutor at the Tribunal.
No-one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice.
Carla del Ponte had once tackled the Mafia.
Now she had unearthed evidence of war crimes committed by the RPF.
At a conference recently, she revealed what happened when she informed President Kagame.
He started looking at me a little bit like this, not badly, but he said, "Oh you've got enough to do with the Hutu genocide of the Tutsis, so why now?" And I said, "Look the evidence is there and I wouldn't be doing my job as a prosecutor if I just left it in a drawer.
" As long as she investigated Hutu crimes, Carla del Ponte says she had Kagame's co-operation.
But when she persisted in pursuing the RPF, she found her next meeting with the President wasn't so cordial.
He yelled at me, "How dare you continue Madam Prosecutor.
How dare you persist with these investigations.
" He said, "You're finished being Prosecutor at the Rwanda Tribunal.
" Carla del Ponte appealed to UN headquarters not to let Kagame block her investigation.
I spoke to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan.
He said, "Listen to me, Carla, it's all politics.
You're totally right but it's the Security Council, it's made a political decision.
" So the US didn't back me up, the UK followed suit, as always, and my mandate was not renewed.
Kagame didn't want it and Kagame made sure the Americans and British understood that he didn't want it and so Carla del Ponte was simply frustrated.
Carla del Ponte wasn't the only UN official prevented from investigating Kagame's RPF.
Six years earlier, Jim Lyons' team had tried to find out who'd shot down the President's plane.
We had an act of terrorism, we were in a time frame where we were covered and we felt that it was absolutely within our jurisdiction to investigate that act.
But then evidence emerged Paul Kagame ordered the attack.
The Chief Prosecutor at the time had supported the investigation.
But then, it seemed, Louise Arbour decided her mandate didn't cover the plane crash.
Louise Arbour had just done a 180 degree turnaround.
Someone above her was telling her that this was not a good idea to be investigating Paul Kagame.
That was it.
That was the end of the investigation.
We asked Louise Arbour for an interview, but she didn't respond.
The Tribunal is about to close.
It's found 63 people guilty of crimes committed during the genocide.
They're all Hutus.
This has become, unfortunately, a pathetic instance of victor's justice.
Those who have won the war have enjoyed total impunity, that's the RPF and those who've lost the war have been prosecuted.
Kagame's impunity has reached scandalous proportions.
As you can see in the case of Congo, his impunity has really gone beyond the borders of Rwanda.
Two years after the genocide, Paul Kagame extended his reach into neighbouring Congo.
There were, by then, two million Rwandans living in vast refugee camps in the Congo, mainly Hutus afraid to return home.
Amongst these Hutu civilians were members of the FAR, the former army and militias responsible for the genocide.
General Nyamwase was by now Kagame's army chief of staff, responsible for dealing with this threat.
The principle objective was justifiable, because the ex-FAR and militias were across the border and were planning to attack Rwanda and a number of incursions had already taken place from the camps in the Congo, into Rwanda.
This morning, nobody had accepted responsibility for the mortar attack, though most observers feel it was fired by the Rwandan patriotic front.
The pursuit of the Hutu militias by Kagame's forces would lead to a further tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions.
By now Marie, the girl from Kigali, had reached one of the camps in the Congo.
After they bombed Bukavu, they came to our camp and that's when we left and ran into the forest.
Marie fled deep into the heart of the Congo where families on the run were dying of disease and starvation.
I can't explain what it's like to see children dying like flies.
One day, I sat beside two dead children.
I felt nothing, I felt dead with them in the forest.
Marie was raped like thousands of women and girls.
She witnessed Rwandan forces and their local allies, Congolese Tutsi militias, trying to wipe out the Hutus.
Refugees were being killed everywhere and killed systematically.
They killed everyone.
It meant killing as many Hutu refugees as possible to reduce their numbers.
Paul Kagame's invasion of the Congo began a decade of conflict.
Other African countries were drawn into what became a vast regional war.
Hutu civilians, both Rwandan and Congolese, were killed in their hundreds of thousands.
By 1998, General Nyamwase says he opposed the war in the Congo.
He was sidelined by Paul Kagame.
There was a disagreement between me and him.
I told him there was no justification for us to go to Congo.
All of a sudden, he had his own people and they started the war.
What happened thereafter is something that is very unjustifiable.
From the outset, the international community knew about the slaughter, but the UN seemed powerless to stop it.
And so Marie spent three years in the forests of the Congo before being airlifted out.
She never returned home to Rwanda.
It was the apocalypse, it was like the end of the world.
I wondered if the world still existed, if the international community existed.
Why were we dying like that without any help? The UN team were sure they would find something.
Journalists too reported the atrocities in the Congo.
They were horrified not a single refugee, just a totally stripped camp.
Marie's account was confirmed when the UN surveyed 600 alleged massacre sites.
The trench looks like a grave in waiting and refugees don't have bulldozers? The UN report concluded the apparent systematic and widespread attacks on Hutu civilians, if proven, could be characterised as genocide.
Paul Kagame vehemently denied it.
The whole idea of thinking that there was a genocide in the Congo is flawed, where the genocide was is clear.
A million had died in Rwanda.
An estimated five million died in the decade of war begun by Paul Kagame's invasion of the Congo.
The fact that everyone seemed to condone these crimes has of course emboldened the regime, has given the regime the impression that it could do anything without the risk of prosecution.
Were you surprised there wasn't more protest from the international community over what was happening in Congo and Rwanda's part in it? No, I wasn't surprised.
He's got very powerful people who protect him.
He does a lot of things and he thinks he can get away with impunity, including killings, including invasions, it's simply because he feels he is protected.
Go outside, please.
Outside, please.
Go outside, please.
On the 20th anniversary of the genocide, foreign dignitaries wait for the Paul Kagame to arrive.
His actions in the Congo, the evidence of war crimes in Rwanda, don't seem an obstacle to their close relations.
The streets of Kigali have been cleared for them all to walk to the stadium, to remember the genocide.
British and American politicians are right at the front.
They see Kagame as a strong leader who has prevented further ethnic violence.
Nearly half Rwanda's government spending comes from foreign aid.
470 million a year.
Britain's the largest donor.
Tony Blair's charity works with Kagame's government.
And he's an unpaid advisor to the President.
I honestly do not know what motivates Tony Blair.
On the issues of Rwanda, he is dead wrong.
When history is written in the future, Tony Blair will be seen as the British man who actually sided with the dictatorship that was killing Rwandan people.
Mr.
Blair declined to be interviewed for this programme but has often spoken of his support for Paul Kagame.
Rwanda shows just what is possible under the leadership of Paul Kagame.
It is making huge strides forwards.
It has made enormous progress.
Now, the fact is it has made that progress under Paul Kagame's leadership.
The President of Rwanda is someone I've got a lot of respect for, a lot of time for, and I think he has got a vision for the country.
Well, he's certainly too close for comfort.
He has consistently defended Kagame, Bill Clinton has been another of those defenders of Kagame.
Kagame is their hero.
I think they should revisit their relation with Kagame.
Because actually their closeness is a closeness with what I call the most important war criminal in office today.
On the surface, Rwanda seems like a role model for African development and democracy.
But according to some human rights organisations, this is really a repressive, authoritarian state.
Paul Kagame has won two presidential elections with a landslide.
Maybe I should win, I have no reason not to believe I should come out of this well.
But those in the know told me the 2003 election had been fixed.
What happened is that we just gave out numbers.
And I was involved.
So you mean you discussed between you what percentage of the vote should be apportioned to Paul Kagame? Oh, yes, yes, exactly.
Kagame maybe wanted 100% and some people were saying, no, we don't need that much and eventually he settled for 95%.
He knows he never got those numbers and the people of Rwanda know they never gave him those numbers.
Elections have been totally flawed, have been totally fake.
When I say fake, I mean fake.
Ballot box stuffing, false counting procedures.
Everyone knows that and the international community in Kigali knows it.
Kagame may have banned ethnic identity, but the Tutsi minority dominates his government.
All power rests in his hands.
He does not need to account to anybody.
Combine it with control of the military and the intelligence, with the control of the party and the Hutus, marginalising them, that has enabled him really to have absolute power.
Many in the west would say he's a strong leader, he's an effective leader.
Rwanda is a success story.
So was Gaddafi, so was Saddam Hussein.
They cannot have a strong dictator in Britain and America and they think that is what is good for Rwanda.
Rwanda does not need a strong leader, we need strong institutions.
Rwanda's institutions have been used by Paul Kagame to stifle dissent.
Hutu opposition leader, Victoire Ingabire, returned from exile in 2010 to stand against the President in the last election.
There is no justice in Rwanda, there is no democracy in Rwanda, people are not free to say what they think.
We have to talk about what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Ingabire never made it to the polls.
She asked why there were no memorials to the Hutus who died.
She got eight years in prison for genocide ideology.
The price of being able to express a view that is even mildly critical or dissenting in Rwanda, the price is very high.
Those who've tried, journalists have been killed and others imprisoned or simply banished into exile.
In recent years, more and more of Kagame's inner circle have fled abroad and formed an opposition party to challenge him.
Amongst them his former intelligence chief, Colonel Patrick Karegeya.
He had been accused of threatening state security, and sentenced to 20 years in jail.
Karegeya sought refuge in South Africa, where he gave a rare interview.
All the basic freedoms don't exist.
When you find there is no freedom of association, there's no freedom of speech, there's no justice system to talk about But those who fall out with Paul Kagame have found that exile is no guarantee of safety.
This is a taped phone conversation allegedly between a top Rwandan intelligence officer and someone he thinks can arrange a contract killing.
In secret, outside Rwanda, I met the man who made these recordings, former army officer Robert Higiro.
He's saying that the most important thing is to get the job done, for the money there is no problem.
And by the job, what does he mean? He means if you succeed in killing General Nyamwasa and Colonel Patrick Karegeya, then there's no question about the price.
They don't care about the price.
Higiro says he was told to find a way to assassinate the former officers in South Africa.
Karegeya and Nyamwasa were suspected of plotting a coup against Kagame.
Who is the superior? The superior is General Kayumba Nyamwasa.
- He's the superior? - Yes.
Exiles say Kagame fears Nyamwasa most of all.
He's been sentenced to life imprisonment in Rwanda for threatening state security.
"If they agree to do it first, I can negotiate that million with the bosses.
With Mr.
Kagame now.
" That's what he says, one million is OK.
But instead of organising the murders, Higiro tipped off the targets and recorded the calls as evidence.
He says he then became a target and fled to Europe.
But that wasn't the end of it.
Last New Year's Eve, one of the men identified as a target on the tapes drove to this hotel in Johannesburg.
The former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya parked his car and made his way to a room for a meeting, he thought, with a Rwandan businessman.
He was never seen alive again.
I got a call and went immediately to the hotel where he had been strangled.
It was very, very brutal, it was gruesome.
He had been sharing a meal and some drinks.
One person wouldn't have strangled Patrick, he wouldn't have killed him alone.
There must have been other people.
Patrick Karegeya was buried with tight security in South Africa.
Rwandan diplomats were expelled from the country, suspected of involvement in his killing.
When I talk about Patrick being a man of principle General Nyamwasa has survived four assassination attempts and been badly wounded.
Four men, two from Rwanda, have been found guilty in South Africa of trying to murder him.
The judge said the attack was politically motivated.
A dozen prominent exiles have been killed or just disappeared in the past 15 years.
We have a dictator, we have a man who is a serial killer, who enjoys killing his citizens, and he thinks he can keep himself in power by killing and imprisonment.
Shortly after the killing of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame made some off-the-cuff remarks at a prayer meeting.
It's a matter of time.
The message coming from Kigali's prison is very different.
Reconciliation is the theme of the service here to commemorate the genocide.
Hutu mass murderers like Gregoire have been punished for their crimes against the Tutsis.
But the Hutu politician, Victoire Ingabire, is also in here for challenging the official story of the genocide.
You cannot talk about reconciliation and healing until and unless you redress the question of crimes committed against the other side.
Rwanda is not going to heal when people are telling lies.
We are not going to be a country on the basis of killing our own citizens.
You can only heal and reconcile when you tell the truth.
We're here to commemorate an unspeakable tragedy.
They're holding a candlelit vigil in the stadium.
A new generation listening to the official genocide story.
10,000 a day.
Western governments may support Kagame's claim to have ended ethnic conflict.
But others fear he is storing up trouble for the future.
The danger for eruption right now is a question of when, not if, and the danger for another conflict is looming large on the horizon of Rwanda.
Rwanda is a volcano on which the RPF tries to keep a lid.
I am afraid this lid will eventually go.
Paul Kagame was given the opportunity to respond to the allegations raised in this programme, but declined.
It's been 20 years since one young girl fled from Rwanda.
She can't go home, Marie says, until the truth about Rwanda is told.
I must speak out because I saw people dying.
It was as if they were saying to me, "Don't forget what happened to us.
"