The Mutsinzi Report

The Mutsinzi report into the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994 has been published. Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, gives his initial reaction to the documents on The New Yorker blog. The report is officially titled, “Report of the Investigation into the Causes and Circumstances of and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/1994 Against The Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidental Aeroplane Registration Number 9XR-NN.”

It looks like a weighty read… Gourevitch has very helpfully uploaded the entire English language version of the report to the The New Yorker blog. Here are some of his initial thoughts,

What makes the Mutsinzi Report most remarkable is the thoroughness and seriousness of the underlying investigation, which covers not only the events leading up to the downing of the plane. It traces the history of earlier investigations into Habyarimana’s assassination and the genocide, and draws on these findings (which have never before been collected and cross-referenced) to build its own…

…The struggle of President Kagame’s regime to establish security, order, and a modicum of justice in Rwanda and to create conditions for economic and political development has always been in large part a struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of an international community that failed—or worse, betrayed—Rwanda during the genocide. In this context, the report on Habyarimana’s plane is the latest in a yearlong string of diplomatic and political moves that show the new Rwandan government achieving a level of sophistication, skill, and effectiveness in commanding international respect that has rarely, if ever, been seen before in Africa.

…The Mutsinzi report is hardly the last word on Habyarimana’s assassination or the events that surrounded it. There are still more questions raised in this report than are absolutely answered. But it marks a dramatic change in the way that Rwanda officially confronts its own history. link

You can download the the report in sections or in it’s entirety

• media guide (179kb pdf)—a brief summary for reporters
• The Falcon Report (1.8mb pdf) is the core of the thing—the sweeping narrative of the investigation and its findings.
• the DASSR Report (18.9mb pdf) is a report on ballistics and aviation details
• Volume I (1.8mb zip folder) contains documents on Hutu Power ideology and the build-up to the shooting down of the plane and the implementation of the genocide.
• Volume II (4.6mb zip folder) contains “Accusations of France,” the absurd drama of the “Black Box,” Hutu Power’s “Blocking of the Investigation into the Assassination Attempt,” the “Coup D’Etat Attempted by Colonel Bagosora,” and “The FAR and the Missiles.”
• This download of a compressed zip folder (29.6mb) contains the entire report.

Thanks to Hodan Yusuf-Pankhurst and Philip Gourevitch for alerting me to the report this morning.

UPDATE: The Mutsinzi Report website is live – it looks like an official Rwandan government site, but uses WordPress and embedded YouTube video analysing the crash (see below)

The picture above is taken from the Kigali Wire Flickr account

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 9:02 am. It is filed under blog, features and tagged with genocide, Habyarimana, Mutsinzi report, Philip Gourevitch, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.