Nick McKenzie
February 10, 2007
MICHAEL Hourigan reviewed his orders as the car pulled into Rwanda’s main airport. He had finished a memo on the intelligence gathered by his Rwandan war crimes investigation team. Check. He had saved it onto a disk placed in a secure UN diplomatic bag. Check. He had ordered his investigators to leave Rwanda. Check.
For the Australian policeman-turned-lawyer, everything appeared to be going smoothly.
But airports are unreliable places and the bullet-scarred Kigali terminal in the African state of Rwanda was no exception. As Hourigan prepared to board his plane, he was approached by the flight manager. “You cannot board this flight, Mr Hourigan. I am afraid it is already full.”
It is early 1997. Just days before, Hourigan has used a secure phone in the US embassy to brief the head of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Judge Louise Arbour, about his team’s discovery. They have obtained incendiary information linking the Tutsi rebel leader and now Rwandan President Paul Kagame to the incident precipitating the Rwandan genocide — the shooting down in April 1994 of a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira.
Hours after the crash, extremists from the Hutu ethnic group begin slaughtering ethnic Tutsis and moderate members of their own clan, unleashing one of the most notorious massacres of the late 20th century. FULL STORY