Jason Stearns — over at Congo Siasa — has written a very thoughtful run-down of the leaked UN report on human rights abuses committed by various groups in Zaire/DRC between 1993 and 2003. With regard to the role played by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, he says:

The striking conclusion is that the crimes committed by the RPA/AFDL against Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutu could constitute a crime of genocide. This will be a bombshell for Paul Kagame’s government, which prides itself of having brought an end to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and has built its reputation and its appeal to donors on it promotion of post-genocide reconciliation. This report will rock the internet for months and years to come, its political importance is hard to overstate.

A few words of caution. The report was not based on the standards [of] a judicial investigation; it was intended to provide a broad mapping of he most serious human rights abuses between 1993 and 2003. Indeed, the report says that an international court will have to be the final arbiter whether the RPA/AFDL did actually commit acts of genocide. Verbatim: “The systematic and widespread attacks described in this report, which targeted very large numbers of Rwandan Hutu refugees and members of the Hutu civilian population, resulting in their death, reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide.”

Nonetheless, the mapping team’s mandate was to documents crimes of genocide, and it were [sic] rigorous: In total, the team gathered evidence on 600 incidents of violence between 1993 and 2003. Their standard was two independent sources for each incident. They interviewed 1,280 witnesses and gathered 1,500 documents. Many of the reports of killings of Congolese and Rwandan Hutu civilians were corroborated by eyewitnesses. While we always knew that there had been large massacres of Hutu refugees in the Congo, this is the first rigorous investigation, and the first time an international body has thrown its weight behind charges of genocide.

Another word of caution: This is the preliminary draft. The report is due to be released on Monday, but it has been leaked, I gather because the Secretary General Ban Ki Moon - or othr UN officials - has pressed for the charges of “acts of genocide by the RPA/AFDL” to be removed. The Rwandan government has reportedly threatened to withdraw its troops from the AU mission in Darfur and the UN mission in Haiti. I imagine that it is to prevent such editing that the report was finally leaked.

Clearly, this is powerful information that has been leaked and it will get a lot of attention for some time. Stearns is right about this — at least with regard to the impact it will have with those already interested in the region — and he is right in the caveats he sets out about the report. He is also right to note, in a subsequent post, that “the UN mapping report is not a report on the Rwandan genocide of Hutu refugees in the Congo. The sections on the massacre of refugees is a small part of a 565 page report that chronicles many different mass atrocities between 1993 and 2003.”

But I think there’s something more to say about this information and its release:

Whatever we think about Paul Kagame and however pleased we might be to see some attention paid to a neglected element of the terrible tragedy that’s taken place in the Great Lakes region of Africa over the past fifteen years or so, it’s important to avoid speaking about any of this in triumphalist language for at least two reasons that come immediately to mind:

1. A great many people have been killed and, while it’s important to have an accurate accounting of what occurred and to hold those responsible to account in order for transitional justice efforts to move forward, no one ought to be celebrating;
2. The lives of a great many Rwandans have been markedly improved by the development programs undertaken by the Kagame government and funded by a variety of international donors; if he is linked to genocide, especially after having bought so much credibility by effectively controlling the narrative regarding the Rwandan genocide, Western governments and aid organizations might shy away from the entire messy region — effectively punishing ordinary Rwandans for the sins of the RPA.

Kagame will undoubtedly have answers to the charges set out here and while most people will be hard-pressed to believe him, especially those who have long suspected that he has dirty hands, it’s important to consider what the future might look like without Kagame at the helm in Rwanda.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a clear picture of this future in my mind and I suspect most people who comment on Rwanda — and on the region as a whole — also do not.

Stearns’ entire post on the leaked UN report is here. He is now starting to post a series of highlights from different periods of time covered by the report. The first, from 1993-1996, is here.

A couple of mainstream media articles on the leaked report are here and here [English], as well as here [French].

Philip Gourevitch — a long-time friend of Kagame’s — pushes back a bit here (HT: Laura Seay).