18 01 13 Global Observatory – Interview with Steve Hege, Former Coordinator, UN Group of Experts on the DRC
Mancini, IPI Director of Research, over email.
Francesco Mancini: In the Group of Experts
final report published in November 2012, you and your colleagues concluded that
the government of Rwanda, with the support from allies within the government of
Uganda, created, equipped, trained, advised, and directly reinforced and
commanded the M23 rebellion. Can you explain how you reached that conclusion?
Was it simply based on “human intelligence” alone?
Steve Hege: As with all Groups of Experts
for sanctions regimes, we adhered to a rigorous methodology approved by the
Security Council. If by “human intelligence,” you are referring to first-hand
witnesses to events, then yes, indeed, we prioritized these sources, primarily
ex-combatants, but only as the starting point of our investigations. We
interviewed individually over a hundred former M23 members, including 57 who
claimed to be Rwandan citizens. All gave detailed accounts of Rwandan support to
the rebels that they personally observed during their time with
M23.
We then worked to corroborate this massive
amount of information with a larger network of over a hundred others
sources—some eyewitnesses and others considered to have credible access to the
rebellion. These included local leaders, businessmen, border agents, simple
peasants, as well as former Rwandan army officers and former officers of M23’s
predecessor, the CNDP, who maintain frequent contact with their family and
friends who joined the new rebellion. We also developed our own active sources
within the M23 who themselves acknowledged the support of Rwanda and Uganda to
their movement.
To further confirm the patterns and
categories of external support being provided to M23, we sought out as many
tangible pieces of evidence as possible throughout our investigations, including
text messages, emails, and photos of meetings held in Rwanda to mobilize support
for the rebels, money transfers to M23 and its allies, Rwandan military uniforms
and ammunition cartridges found on the battlefield, recordings of radio
communications between the rebels and Rwandan and Ugandan army officers, phone
call logs made by individuals linked to armed groups, as well as satellite
images showing very clearly the footpaths connecting M23 headquarters with
Rwandan military bases, corresponding perfectly to descriptions of many ex-
combatants (Annex 6).
In addition, to complement the information
we had collected on the supply of arms by Rwanda, we also documented M23’s
possession of heavy weapons traditionally used by the Rwandan army. When the
Rwandan intelligence argued they had already destroyed all of these heavy
weapons in their arsenal, they could only show us some old AK-47s as proof and
tried to convince us that 75mm cannon rounds we inquired about were hidden
beneath them. We later obtained documents demonstrating not only that Rwanda had
not destroyed any heavy weapons in the last decade, but that it even made a
formal request for technical assistance in August of this year to destroy
precisely the same 75mm and 120 mm rounds we cited in our
reports.
Furthermore, we also relied on our own
observations during frequent field missions to M23 territory, where we confirmed
rebel use of Rwandan army radio equipment and uniforms. We personally witnessed
close cooperation between the rebels and special forces of the Rwandan army
(officially deployed in the DRC at the time) as well as deliveries of military
equipment from Uganda. Despite the physical threats made against us and our
collaborators, we also made seven trips to Rwanda in order to corroborate the
details provided by ex-combatants, including a visit to Bosco Ntagnda’s Hotel
Bushokoro in Kinigi, which not only perfectly matched their descriptions but was
also surrounded by soldiers of the Rwandan army to protect the recruitment
site.
Finally, we confirmed our information with
intelligence agencies such as those of Uganda, Burundi, Western countries and
the Congolese government, even though the latter had refused to cooperate with
our investigations prior to the publication of the addendum to the interim
report. We later received more official support from the Congolese authorities,
but their information never constituted the foundation of any of our inquiries.
Although they deny it now, senior Ugandan officials not only confirmed our
findings on Rwanda, but also acknowledged that M23 received extensive support
from within their own security services, promising us there would be
investigations and arrests which never materialized.
FM: A 131-page response from the government
of Rwanda to your earlier interim report claims that the Group did not give
Rwanda a right of reply and did not talk to Rwandan officials. Is that correct,
and can you give us more details about your engagement with
them?
SH: We gave the Rwandan government several
opportunities to respond to the results of our investigations. They first
refused to receive us during an official visit to Kigali in May, later defending
that our presence in Rwanda had nothing to do with the arms embargo; a rather
odd argument given that the embargo is the raison d’être of the Group of
Experts. Then, when the sanctions committee explicitly asked us to delay the
submission of our addendum to the interim report to give the Rwandans an
additional opportunity to reply formally, the Rwandan minister of foreign
affairs declined to give me any response when I personally briefed her on our
conclusions even before submitting the final document to the sanctions
committee. A few hours after our meeting, at a UN press conference, the minister
claimed that no one had shared with Rwanda the results of our
investigations.
Regarding the official Rwandan rebuttal you
mentioned; it is a document that we studied and which we responded to
exhaustively in Annex 3 of our final report, but the major premise of their
argument was that the Group was the victim of a huge conspiracy orchestrated by
the Congolese government. Not only as experienced investigators would this have
been impossible, but the Congolese government could not have been capable of
fabricating hundreds of false witnesses, documents, radio communications, emails
scattered across three provinces, particularly when, at the outset of the M23
rebellion, it was not even cooperating with us. If true, that would have been
the sign of a very effective state, not the “black hole” in need of radical
governance reform that Rwanda has consistently tried to portray the Congo
as.
During a second visit to Kigali in July,
Rwandan officials briefed us personally on their rebuttal, but appeared much
more interested in interrogating us as to the identities of our sources and
individuals collaborating with our investigations. Even though they acknowledged
that, indeed, M23 recruits could have been coming from Rwanda, no investigation
was ever even conducted.
From the beginning of August through the end
of the mandate in December, the government of Rwanda repeatedly refused to meet
with us or cooperate with any of our investigations.
FM: The Rwandans appeared to have conducted
a "campaign" against you personally based on an article you had published in the
past. Why did they claim you were biased against Rwanda, and did this undermine
your work?
SH: When it was clear we were not going to
alter the addendum to our interim report, the Rwandans orchestrated a character
assassination campaign against the Group and me in particular, claiming that I
was “genocide-denier” and sympathizer of the Rwandan rebels of the FDLR. They
based this solely on an internal discussion paper, for which I had been named as
the point of contact, inadvertently placed on a document-sharing site on the
Internet. The paper sought to analyze the internal thinking and possible
reactions of the FDLR against the civilian population during military operations
planned in early 2009, as well as reflect on the their demobilization and
repatriation within the historical and political context of the region,
including the same massacres subsequently documented by the UN’s "mapping"
report, which are critical to the ideology of the FDLR. It does not deny the
Rwandan genocide, and it even refers directly to the involvement of some FDLR
commanders in the genocide. This analytic exercise also encompassed other
discussion papers on other armed groups in eastern DRC, including the CNDP at
the time, but that does not mean that I defend their perspectives either. I
personally requested that this document be removed from the Internet because
none of the discussion papers were meant to be made
public.
On the basis of this document, the
government of Rwanda and their media surrogates published countless articles and
blog posts against me, incited genocide survivors to call for my dismissal,
hired US lawyers to repeat their same arguments as well as a French-Israeli
“cyber-warfare” specialist to incessantly attack us, claiming that I wanted to
take over the mineral wealth in the eastern Congo. They also made up information
about my family and a supposed “ex-wife and child” and created blood-stained
caricatures of me shredding files about the Rwandan genocide claiming that I
“can only live in in a world with no Tutsis.” President Kagame himself told
journalists that I “had been advocating the genocide for years,” and members of
his close staff even spent months preparing false testimonies of FDLR officers
about how I provided them weapons. Fortunately, I was able to personally
interview one of them before he was to return to Rwanda and hold a press
conference. He obviously had no idea who I was, and once confronted with the
truth, he eventually acknowledged that he was paid to make these detailed false
claims about “Steve Hege.”
Despite these attacks, the government of
Rwanda is fully aware of my objectivity as an investigator on the armed groups,
including the FDLR. During previous mandates, although the Rwandan intelligence
services were not entirely satisfied with our conclusions regarding the links
between the FDLR and the political dissident Kayumba Nyamwasa, they had, at the
time, respected my objective approach in systematically documenting the support
networks of the Rwandan Hutu rebels, particularly in the 2011 final report,
which did include links to other Rwandan dissidents. I have also cooperated with
German prosecutors in the ongoing trial against the former president and vice
president of the FDLR, and in 2006 and 2007 with the UN peacekeeping mission, I
conducted numerous missions into the dense jungles of South Kivu to convince
FDLR combatants to voluntarily disarm and return peacefully to their
homes.
But these types of false accusations—maybe
not so hostile and personal— are to be expected with this type of work
(investigating support to armed groups) particularly given that those violating
the arms embargo obviously do not want this to be known, much less appear in an
official document of the Security Council. In 2010 and 2011, I had already been
accused by members of the Rwandan and Burundian political oppositions of
supposedly being too sympathetic to their governments. It’s simply the natural
reflex to claim the alleged bias of an investigator against those who appear in
the conclusions of a rigorous and independent
investigation.
Fortunately, diplomats are able to see
beyond these frequent accusations against Group of Experts members, as despite
Rwanda’s repeated demands for my removal, no member of the sanctions committee
of the Security Council ever asked me even a single question about my so-called
"partiality."
FM: How were your conclusions received by
members states from the sanctions committee? Will the election of Rwanda to the
Security Council affect the work/reports of the Group of
Experts?
SH: The Security Council was very supportive
of our work, and the language of resolutions 2076 and 2078 reflect a strong
consensus regarding the overwhelming nature of external backing to the M23
rebellion. Not only did we hold numerous meetings bilaterally and multilaterally
with many Security Council members to discuss our methodology and findings, but
engaged member states confirmed our findings on their own. The organogram in
Annex 22 of the final report, which places Rwandan Minster of Defense James
Kabarebe as the rebellion’s supreme commander, is just one illustrative example
of the information that many countries hold in addition to our findings and that
of several other independent inquiries.
From our perspective, it would of course be
great if the sanctions committee immediately accepted our conclusions, but they
do indeed thoroughly scrutinize our findings and attempt to corroborate them
with their own information gathering. None of our reports alone would ever
outweigh the internal reporting of a member state, particularly those who took
unilateral measures in suspending aid to a development partner as important as
Rwanda due to its blatant violations of the arms embargo. They may refer to our
report publically, but important policy decisions are always based first and
foremost on their own evidence base.
Despite Rwanda’s recent arrival to the
Security Council, the Group’s mandate had already been renewed, and a new
six-member team appointed by the Secretary-General. However, any member of the
Security Council can block candidates for sanctions as well as proposed members
for future mandates of the Group of Experts, a fact Rwanda’s mission to the UN
has boasted about.
About the photo: A map from the November
2012 report shows RDF and M23 infiltrations towards Masisi
territory.