It is a little noticed fact that the International Commission for Missing Persons [ICMP] which has been a key component of the prosecution’s Srebrenica case at the Hague, was completely absent from the investigation of the Rwandan slaughter, which had taken place around the same time. The issue to our knowledge has never been raised and there exists no satisfactory explanation for that anomaly.
In 1996, the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) was founded, as its name implies, to forensically assist international bodies in locating and identifying victims of catastrophic events resulting in large loss of human life. That at least was the official task envisaged for it. In practice however its resources have been devoted disproportionately to assisting the Prosecution at the Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to document its Srebrenica genocide charges. The ICTY Prosecution Srebrenica case, it should be recalled, rests almost entirely on the results of ICMP’s field work and forensic analyses completed between 1996 and 2001.
ICMP asserts, however, that Bosnia and Herzegovina (Srebrenica, for all practical purposes) is not by far the only site where it performed valuable work within the scope of its mission. On its website it refers to a wide range of geographically dispersed activities, claiming that “ICMP has been active in some 40 countries that have faced large numbers of missing persons as a result of natural and man-made disasters, wars, widespread human rights abuses, organized crime and other causes”. In the world map attached to the “Where we work” section of ICMP’s website, those countries are clearly marked. Yet oddly, Rwanda, where another highly publicized genocide is said to have occurred, but with a death toll of incomparably greater magnitude than Bosnia’s, is not to be found on ICMP’s operational map. The closest African country where ICMP admits to having been active is Kenya.
By any reasonable standard, ICMP should have been tasked with conducting a forensic investigation of mass murder in Rwanda, as it was in Bosnia. The more so since the high estimate of Rwanda victims (800,000 to 1,000,000) is about one hundred times Srebrenica’s. Crimes committed in Rwanda were adjudicated by an ad hoc court analogous to the Hague Tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Both tribunals employed similar procedures and proper evaluation of competently produced forensic evidence should have been essential to the deliberations of both. That is why ICMP’s presence in Bosnia, coupled with its notable absence in Rwanda — no explanation having ever been offered — is highly perplexing.
The mystery is magnified by the testimony of former UN civil servant and official of the Rwanda Tribunal, French-Canadian lawyer Andre Sirois. Essentially, Sirois maintains that the popularly asserted Rwandan death toll figure is an arbitrary construct, without any empirical foundation:
“Combien y a-t-il eu véritablement de victimes? 800 000 ou un million? Si l’auteur utilise un de ces chiffres, il faut s’inquiéter tout de suite : cela veut dire qu’il n’a fait que reprendre n’importe quoi sans rien vérifier ni critiquer. On ne connaît pas le nombre de victimes; personne n’a jamais pu l’établir. Depuis 20 ans, à tous ceux qui me mentionnent un chiffre à ce sujet, je demande méthodiquement d’où ils le tiennent. Il est impossible d’avoir une réponse.”
If that is correct, failure to contract ICMP’s services to investigate the killings in Rwanda and to help establish a more reliable forensic picture, by simply transferring the skills and techniques acquired in Bosnia, is puzzling indeed. In the absence of properly acquired forensic data, how did the prosecution in Rwanda go about proving its case? Andre Sirois goes on to offer an explanation which is bound to sound oddly familiar to those who have followed the “numbers game” in Bosnia:
“La seule explication qui semble assez près de la réalité, c’est que, pendant les massacres, un employé de la Croix-Rouge internationale a fait un calcul approximatif des personnes disparues de son agglomération, Hutus et Tutsis confondus, puis il a fait une extrapolation pour l’ensemble du pays qui l’a amené à dire qu’il pourrait y avoir eu à ce moment-là environ 200 000 morts au Rwanda.
“Quelques jours plus tard, le ministre des Affaires étrangères d’Allemagne affirmait qu’il y en avait 500 000. Personne n’a jamais pu savoir d’où il tenait ce chiffre. Puis, des ONG américaines –pour amener le gouvernement américain à parler de génocide, ce qui, en droit américain, l’aurait obligé à intervenir– ont commencé à affirmer qu’il y avait un million, non pas de disparus de toutes origines, mais un million de victimes tutsies.”
Aside from ICMP’s Srebrenica forensic data, which on closer examination largely turned out not to support all the conclusions assigned to it (here and here), Sirois’ account of how Rwanda death figures were concocted, or perhaps more accurately cobbled together, matches perfectly George Pumphrey’s incisive analysis of the equally contrived origins of the Srebrenica victims count.
In an attempt to clarify the mystery of ICMP’s complete absence from a crime scene that should naturally have been within its remit, we consulted three attorneys with experience before the Rwandan Tribunal and asked them two fundamental questions. First, by what method the victim figures charged to their clients were generated and, second, whether the field work which led to the acceptance of those figures by the tribunal was conducted by ICMP or, indeed, by anyone else. We received very interesting replies.
Canadian attorney Christopher Black, who successfully defended Augustin Ndindiliyimana, sent the following response:
“I do not know that lawyer [Andre Sirois] but he is correct that no one knows the true figures of dead. The RPF claim of 800,000 Tutsis killed is ludicrous since there were only 595,000 in the country and they state that 350,000 to 450,000 survived. So the number of dead Tutsis is more like 50,000-100,000. As for the rest of the dead, they have to be Hutus killed by the US supported RPF and RPF officers have told the UN that the RPF killed 2 million Hutus in those 12 weeks. Yet this real genocide is never mentioned.
“The RPF government has never conducted a census to see who was killed in each village and who survived and the reason is they cannot back up their claims. Davenport and Stam, two researchers at the University of Michigan took all the reports they could find and came up with 250,000 dead, the majority of them Hutus, and the report of Robert Gersony for the UN in 1994 stated the RPF was massacring Hutus on a daily basis.
“So it’s Srebrenica writ large.
“But this 800,000 figure was picked out of the air, thrown at the media and that is all they say in every Rwanda story. Some even claim a million Tutsis (or moderate Hutus-whatever they are) but most of us in the defence think two million Hutus were killed — 100,000 Tutsis — but even then we are speculating — no one has any idea of the real figures.”
Another attorney, who represented Georges Anderson Nderubumwe Rutaganda, offered a similar perspective:
“When I arrived in Arusha in February 1997, there was narrative rather than serious estimates even. It wasn’t even a thing to count, it was GENOCIDE and it could have been 76 gazillion dead. At some point, they settled on a shared community fiction of a million, but without anyone having any idea how or why that number had been arrived at, other than I guess it’s a sexy number. In that year expert Filip Reyntjens came out with a 750 000 casualties number, but it was an extrapolation from some communes in a single prefecture. Allison Des Forges (known not at all affectionately by our camp as you can imagine as “Des Forgery”) testified in another case (Akayesu) that between 500 000 and 1 000 000 were killed, and that answer elicited anger from the bench given the ridiculous range, but she was never asked as far as I remember how she’d come to that conclusion.
“Interestingly, in my case, a forensic anthropologist who must be familiar to you, William Haglund, came to testify as an expert for the prosecution in my case with respect to bodies outside my client’s garage mechanics business. Yes, outside the property. The prosecutor disclosed evidence of his misconduct in B-H if memory serves (multiple DUIs, inter alia) but also gross misconduct in carrying out forensics investigations in Rwanda that were reported by disgusted PhD students.
“By then I had hired Dr. Kathy Reichs, the acclaimed forensic anthropologist working for Québec State Police, FBI, and other giant projects. She’d be mentored by a guy I really admired, but who’d passed on, Dr. William R. Maples. She was furious that the man running all these forensics investigations at the ICTR/ICTY was not even a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropologists (and still isn’t: http://theabfa.org/active-diplomates/), and gave me great assistance in both preparing my cross, and testifying herself for the defense. What he did on one of the mass grave examinations, again, if my memory serves, was huge and frankly inexplicable for any professional forensic pathologist whose job and duty is first and foremost to identify human remains. He reportedly separated remains from clothing and had it put in two separate piles over the howls of the volunteer PhD students. The clothing pile included many wallets, many of which in turn, included ID. The other pile had bones. Genius. His evidence in my case was turfed out, by even my horrible judges. And not to mention he tried to claim/suggest/affirm in his report that he had a positive DNA match for a witness who testified and a victim, when in the very small print annex of the report, an educated reader could see that in fact the DNA result had been negative!
“I know, I’m not yet answering clearly on the number guesstimate, but this is important too, as a general indicator of the competence of the operation when bodies were being exhumed.
“If you look at Genodynamics.com you’ll see that Professors Davenport and Stam use quant jock methodology to get their numbers (and inconveniently for the narrative, they come up with far more Hutus than Tutsis killed) by using various sources that happen to be all over the place.
“In 2019, I still don’t think there has been, nor can there be, an accurate accounting, since Kagame kept killing in the following years. Much less any (accurate) ethnic breakdown.”
The comment received from Peter Robinson, who represented Joseph Nzirorera, was in all essentials along the same lines:
“To the best of my knowledge, the figures of the Tutsis killed in Rwanda during the genocide were arrived at by taking the population of Tutsis at the beginning of 1994 and subtracting the population of Tutsis at the end of 1994. The difference was stated as the number of Tutsis that had been killed. There was no effort to conduct forensic analysis of mass graves.”
In combination, these reports submitted by attorneys with professional experience at the Rwanda Tribunal suggest at least two important conclusions. Firstly, that the widely accepted Rwanda victim figure of up to one million has no empirical basis; secondly, that what forensic work may have been done in Rwanda was of limited scope and arguably incompetent, but that in any event in Rwanda the institutional presence of ICMP, the agency that logically should have been summoned to take the lead in the forensic investigation, was not noticed. With respect to the first point, there is an obvious similarity between Rwanda and Srebrenica, the precise figures in question in each case being the only significant difference. With regard to the second point, the odd exclusion of ICMP from Rwanda forensic work and indeed the apparent fact that no forensic activity at all of any significance was even conducted there calls for a coherent explanation. So far, none has been forthcoming.