In a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council yesterday, Human Rights Watch called for reactivating a commission to investigate arms flows to Rwanda, and extending the commission's mandate to include Burundi.
The International Commission of Inquiry into arms trafficking to the former Rwandan government and allied militias, known as UNICOI, was established in September 1995 in the wake of revelations, published by Human Rights Watch, about the role of states and private traffickers in arming the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In its one-year life, the commission prepared three reports, the final one of which was submitted to the U.N. Secretary-General in October 1996 but only released in January 1998, more than a year later.
That report showed the extent of international involvement in the proliferation of arms in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, and--by extension--governments' complicity in the serious abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law that have taken place there. An addendum to the report, which was released on January 26, sheds further light on arms deliveries to the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, naming the government of the Seychelles, a member of the former Rwandan government who is currently awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, a South African arms broker, and the Banque Nationale de Paris as being implicated in one possible violation of the Rwanda arms embargo.
In its own research on Burundi, Human Rights Watch has exposed how international actors have continued to provide weapons to both the government and rebel forces, thereby compounding the killings and mass displacement of civilians that have characterized the civil war. We have therefore called repeatedly for an arms embargo on both sides of the war, and for the extension of UNICOI's mandate to include Burundi, in partial response to the tragic humanitarian crisis in the region. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Burundi, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, has likewise drawn attention to the problem of arms proliferation in the Great Lakes region, calling urgently for an arms embargo on the two sides in Burundi. In December 1997, the European Parliament passed a resolution that also called for an arms embargo on the two sides, and for UNICOI to resume its work in the region and investigate arms flows into Burundi and to Burundian citizens in neighboring states.
In light of the highly worrisome situation in the Great Lakes region, including Rwanda, Burundi and eastern Congo, where hundreds of thousands of civilians continue to be at risk of violent attack, Human Rights Watch calls on the Security Council to:
-Impose an arms embargo on both sides of the war in Burundi, and devise mechanisms to ensure the embargo's effective implementation and enforcement.
-Reactivate the International Commission of Inquiry (UNICOI).
-Extend UNICOI's mandate to include both sides in the civil war in Burundi.
