Arms shipments and the Rwandan Genocide
From Never Again
This page seeks to piece together a coherent chronology of the production, shipment, and payment of weapons used in the the Rwandan Genocide, arisen by the following statement made by Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire at Moving from Words to Actions:
A DC-8 aircraft loaded with ammunition and weapons landed in Kigali a couple of weeks before the genocide, and we seized it under the mandate I had. The Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army came to me and said I was not allowed to seize the munitions because they were ordered before the ceasefire and peace agreement, so the U.N. wasn't allowed to have it. The Rwandan Army was preparing to demobilize and integrate. The Officer came back two days later with paperwork, and the paperwork reflected banking arrangements, production, and transport of these weapons in Israel, Belgium, France, the UK, Holland, and Egypt: all participant in that load of ammunition and equipment.
Dealers managed to circumvent not only the national arms-control regulations of several of the most powerful states in the world, but also a mandatory UN arms embargo. Documents from the military archives of the regime that planned and carried out the genocide in Rwanda, as well as interviews with some of those involved and evidence cited by the subsequent UN commission of inquiry, help piece together an incomplete yet shocking picture of what transpired. The main foreign brokers and shippers involved in arming the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide were based in the UK, France and South Africa. They employed networks of collaborators in other countries, including Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Israel, Seychelles, former Zaire, and various offshore financial centres. The dealers evaded the inadequate national arms control laws in their home countries and disguised the routes of their deliveries, choosing to operate where there were shaky customs, transport and financial regulations so as to make their activities as ‘legal’ as possible.
None of these brokers has been indicted for the crime of complicity to genocide.
On 17 May 1994, one month after the genocide began in Rwanda, the UN Security Council imposed an international arms embargo. It was generally agreed that this embargo also applied to the ousted Hutu Rwandan regime-in-exile—although the UK government later denied this was the case, in order to avoid prosecuting known arms brokers acting from UK territory for the exiled armed forces and militia.
Up to the outbreak of the genocide, the Rwandan government had secured its main arms supplies from companies in China, France, Egypt and South Africa, with a smaller role for Israel, Greece and Poland. France, the biggest supplier of heavy military equipment, had sent troops to Rwanda in 1990 to help repel a military offensive by the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front against the Habyarimana regime. Both sides committed atrocities. The French authorities were accused of using the supply of arms to control the regime. During that time, Kigali was used a hub by French arms dealers for the supply of Iran and other countries. Thus it was hardly surprising that the regime would try to use such dealers to obtain alternative sources of supply, at least for smaller weapons.
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Delivery from France (January, 1994)
In the early morning of January 22, 1994, a planeload of arms from France, including 90 boxes of 60 mm mortars made in Belgium, was confiscated by UNAMIR at the Kigali airport. The delivery was in violation of the cease-fire clauses of the Arusha Accords, which prohibited introduction of arms into the area during the transition period. General Dallaire put the arms under joint UNAMIR-Rwandan army guard. Formally recognizing this point, the French government argued that the delivery stemmed from an old contract and hence was technically speaking legal. Dallaire was forced to give up control over the plane.
The Seychelles Agreement (March 1993-June 1994)
The Arrangements (March 1993)
In March 1993 a ship called the Malo, laden with Serbian small arms and ammunition on its way to Somalia, was inspected and held by Seychelles authorities. On 4 June 1994, Wilhelm Tertius Ehlers (known as Ters Ehlers)—a former senior official in the apartheid government—and Colonel Theoneste Bagosora—a senior official of the Rwandan Ministry of Defence of the Hutu government-in-exile—went to the Seychelles to negotiate the purchase of the arms. When interviewed in Goma in February 1995 by a Human Rights Watch researcher, Bagosora said he had met with South African officials at the end of May and early June 1994 to arrange weapons shipments to the former Rwandan military. These officials had refused to consider direct South African arms shipments but had offered to help to arrange shipments by other parties.
Shipments to Goma (June 1994)
On the nights of 16–17 and 18–19 June 1994, two planes of Air Zaire flew the weapons from the Seychelles government-controlled stockpile to Goma airport. These weapons were then transferred to the ex-FAR military forces in Gisenyi just across the border inside Rwanda. The weapons included anti-tank and fragmentation grenades and high-calibre ammunition. According to Human Rights Watch, an Air Zaire DC-8 aircraft with the call sign 9Q-CLV had transported the arms from the Seychelles to the Zairian town of Goma in two separate flights. On arrival in Goma, the arms were reportedly handed over for use by the ex-FAR armed forces that were still holding Gisenyi prefecture in Rwanda.
U.N. International Commission of Inquiry (March 1996)
In its final report, the Commission found that a "highly probable" violation of the arms embargo had taken place in June 1994 involving more than 80 tons of weapons purchased in Seychelles by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, a high-ranking officer of the former Rwandese government forces. Since Colonel Bagosora had bought the weapons on the authority of an end-user certificate apparently signed by the Zairian Vice-Minister of Defence, had signed for the weapons on behalf of the Forces Armées Zaïroises and had chartered an Air Zaire DC-8 aircraft to transport them to Goma airport in Zaire before delivering them to the Rwandese army in Gisenyi, the Commission also concluded that the Government of Zaire, or elements within it, had aided and abetted in this violation of the embargo.
Oriental Machineries Supplies (1995)
On 15 April 1994, around the same time as the Mil-Tec deal, Colonel Gratien Kagiligi signed a $4.7 million contract for rifle ammunition, grenades, rockets and mortars with Oriental Machineries Inc. of Hong Kong and China. The contract specified that the arms would be delivered in C130 or Antonov 12 aircraft to destinations decided by the purchasers. Europe, too, continued to be used as a platform as if nothing had happened. The Russian-Israeli owner of TIG Bulgaria and Phoenix Air Bulgaria later admitted in a UK news programme that a British company based at Gatwick had chartered his aircraft to fly arms to Goma in 1995. He said that he assumed it was a government-to-government delivery: ‘We fly if the documents are right. We don’t check the papers…we just check the export certificates.’
Government of National Unity Arms Acquisition (1996-1997)
In 1996 and 1997 the new government armed forces of Rwanda acquired significant quantities of arms from Romania, using a broker in Israel. The Tutsi-dominated government also took delivery of arms from Bulgaria, China and South Africa, as well as US military combat training, while carrying out numerous arbitrary killings of civilians, especially in eastern Zaire, where an estimated 200,000 Rwandan refugees were reported disappeared. Officials in the supplying countries attempted to justify these arms shipments on the grounds that the armed opposition, including the perpetrators of the genocide, was still killing and abusing defenceless Rwandan civilians.
Mil-Tec
Throughout April and May, 1994, with the mass murder already underway, the interim government purchases at least $4 million in weapons from Mil-Tec, incorporated in Douglas, the Isle of Man. Mil-Tec acquired grenades and ammunition in Eastern Europe and Israel and transferred it to Rwanda. On April 14, 1994, Mil-Tec received $1,621,901 via Bank Belgolaise in Brussels. On April 19, 1994, through its Cairo Embassy, Bagosora's interim government paid Mil-Tec $667,120, through the National Westminster Bank, now owned by Royal Bank of Scotland. Once the genocide was underway, $13 million in Rwandan government money passed through the Banque Nationale de Paris.
UK brokers and traders used a host of sub-contracting companies based in offshore tax havens to conceal their Rwanda activities. This was revealed by interviews conducted by investigative journalists in late 1994 and 1995 with UK-based aircrew who were directly involved or who knew about arms deliveries to the exiled Rwandan armed forces and Hutu militia.
Cargo aircraft registered in Africa but based in Europe helped conceal the arms trail. For example, a UK pilot and loadmaster stated that in May 1994 an aircraft managed by a company in the UK flew empty from Oostend in Belgium to Tirana in Albania, where small arms were loaded under the supervision of Israeli officers; the plane then flew to Goma in the former Zaire with no customs checks on documentation and cargo, despite a refuelling stop in Cairo. The crews said they were initially unaware that their flight was to carry arms cargo; they then thought that it was a government-to-government deal, until they saw there was no paperwork carried out in Kigali. Each pilot and loadmaster expressed remorse about what he had done, but claimed that his involvement was unintentional. They recalled other flights from Albania, as well as Bulgaria and Israel, during that period, and gave names of persons and companies they thought were managing the operation.
On November 16, 1996, as armed clashes escalated in eastern Zaire, two journalists working for the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera discovered military procurement documents from a lorry belonging to the exiled Rwandan Ministry of Defence near a refugee camp at Mugunga. These documents corroborated the UK aircrew claims of a secret series of arms flights from Albania and Israel into Goma and Kinshasa airports brokered by agents in Western Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom. Seven large cargoes of small arms worth $6.5 million were flown from Tirana and Tel Aviv between mid-April and mid-July 1994 to the forces as they carried out the genocide, even during the time when the mass killings were being reported daily by the international news media.
The documents showed that a UK company, Mil-Tec Corporation Ltd, was involved in arms supplies to the Hutu regime at least from June 1993 to mid-July 1994. Mil-Tec had been paid $4.8 million by the regime in return for invoices of $6.5 million for the arms sent. The manager of Mil-Tec, Anoop Vidyarthi, was described as a Kenyan Asian who owned a travel company in North London and was in business with Rakeesh Kumar Gupta. They both fled the UK shortly after the revelations. Mil-Tec documents show that the company had arranged the supply of rifle ammunition using an Israeli shipping agent, Trade and Maritime Services of Tel Aviv. This deal was reportedly handled through Merstone Investments, a company registered in the Isle of Man. Vidyarthi was linked to a UK arms dealer, Paul Restorick, who ran another arms brokering company, Mil-Tec Marketing, situated in Ashford, Kent. Restorick admitted that he had ‘advised’ Vidyarthi in 1993, but he denied any corporate connection with Mil-Tec Corporation and any involvement in arms supplies to Rwanda.
The diffuse and nebulous structure of Mil-Tec Corporation Ltd was deliberate. The company’s letterhead stated that it had ‘Associates in – Europe – Israel – Korea – USA’. Correspondence between Mil-Tec and the Rwandan Ministry of Defence showed that Mil-Tec had continuously used an address in Hove, East Sussex, but was registered in offshore tax havens. Initially, the Hove address was the only one given on Mil-Tec’s letterhead, for example in April 1993 when it was supplying batteries to the Ministry in Kigali from London. Then, as soon as the company was used to supply the ammunition from Israel in May, Mil-Tec’s letterhead showed an address in Douglas, Isle of Man. Vidyarthi had registered Mil-Tec as a company in Douglas in February 1993 through a local ‘off the shelf’ company-formation agent, and then in June 1993 had registered it with two local ‘facilitator’ directors on the Island of Sark. In this way, Vidyarthi and his associates tried to ensure minimum public information about their activities.
Mil-Tec’s ‘offshore’ move coincided with the increasingly controversial trade. While the address in Douglas was retained on the letterhead throughout Mil-Tec’s mid-1994 arms deliveries, the company continued to describe the Hove office as its ‘correspondence address’, and always displayed the Hove telephone and fax numbers. This office was used by a long-established accountancy firm run by Vinod P. Dhiri, who was in partnership with Varinder Singh and Ravinder Jain. The latter had recently joined the firm; he said that Vidyarthi had contacted the accountancy firm in 1992, and that they had met a few times on social occasions, but that no work was provided to Mil-Tec. A handwritten note of the contact in 1992 was in the files, and the firm denied any knowledge or involvement in Mil-Tec’s arms deals.
The shipping arrangements used by Mil-Tec were intentionally obscure. According to the air waybill documents attached to the correspondence, Mil-Tec used the Israeli company, Trade and Maritime Services, which in turn contracted Aeroflot aircraft to supply the ammunition to Kigali in June 1993. For the arms deliveries in mid-1994, however, Mil-Tec used a different shipping agent, one which could set up complicated route and over-flight arrangements in Africa. This was Jet Lease International (Bahamas) Ltd, run from a Jet Lease office in Windsor near London. The manager of Jet Lease, Donald Duke, was described as of Nigerian origin. Although Jet Lease used air waybill documents from a well-known Nigerian company, Okada Air Cargo, for the 1994 deliveries, Okada denied any involvement with the arms flights. Aircrew who flew to Goma claim that Duke and others sub-contracted the Mil-Tec deliveries to small air-cargo companies.
One such company was Peak Aviation, with offices in Hove and then Brighton, Sussex. It operated a Boeing 707 registered in Ghana but based in Kent. A freelance pilot resident in the Channel Islands told UK television researchers that Peak Aviation had flown four arms flights to Goma in mid-1994 – one from Tel Aviv and three from Tirana – and this was broadcast in November 1994. A second pilot said that the loading agent in Tel Aviv had told him the boxes of weapons were to go across the border into Rwanda for the Hutu government. The owner of Peak Aviation, Alan Moffat, used an offshore company in Jersey called D.C. Marketing Ltd. Peak Aviation was dissolved in December 1994, and Moffat left the UK when confronted by the television crew about his involvement in the arms flights.
Financial arrangements make the picture look more complex. Mil-Tec Corporation used a North London branch of the National Westminster Bank to receive payments. Rwandan officials of the extremist regime had facilitated payments to Mil-Tec initially from Kigali in mid-April, then from the Cairo embassy and from two Belgian banks in May, and finally from the Paris embassy in mid-July. Lieutenant-Colonel Cyprien Kayumba, director of financial services in the Rwandan Ministry of Defence, wrote that he had left Kigali on 17 June 1994 to supervise the unloading of the first arms delivery in Goma; then, until the last delivery on 18 July, he had toured Nairobi, Cairo, Paris (where he stayed for 27 days), Nairobi, Kinshasa, Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, Paris, Cairo and Nairobi in order to facilitate the purchases.
However, in a letter to the exiled Rwandan Minister of Defence in December 1994, several months after the genocide, Mil-Tec complained of not having received payment for the ammunition shipment from Israel in June 1993, and of a payment from Cairo for the shipment from Albania in July 1994 being blocked by the Bank of New York:
Your Excellency, as you are well aware, we have been suppliers to your Ministry for over 5 years, and were able to assist you with supplies during your time of need….we were approached for very urgent supplies on the 10th of April, after the tragic death of His Excellency the President, …as you see our first shipment was delivered 8 days later…Payments were made to us from Kigali, Belgium, France and Cairo, we also received 1 payment of 450,000 dollars from one of your suppliers (DYL INVESTMENTS) who was unable to fulfil his delivery commitments to you, but had been paid by your Ministry…A transfer of US dollars 578,654 was effected from Cairo for our last shipment on 18/7/94, we however never received the payment…We believe the blockade was initiated by the U.S. due to the situation in Rwanda at that time … may we also add that we are able to assist you in the future if you so require.
The payment by DYL Investments refers to a French arms brokering company owned by Dominique Lemonnier. In 1991, he began working with arms suppliers in Poland through his Polish father to supply Burkina Faso, and then on 3 May 1993 managed to secure a $12,166 million contract with the Kigali regime to supply a large array of arms. Lemonnier registered his company in the Turks and Caicos Islands on 19 May after getting the contract. Nevertheless, he continued to operate from Cran-Gevrier, Haute-Savoie, in France, and used a cover address in Geneva, where he opened an account with the Banque Internationale de Commerce. Between May and September 1993, DYL received four payments into the Geneva account from Kigali, each for $1,064,525. Deliveries of arms to Kigali were reportedly made from Poland and from the Israeli company, Universal, using East Africa Cargo airlines.
However, Lemonnier made the mistake of including DYL’s French address on the contract instead of only the British offshore tax haven. Unlike the situation faced by Mil-Tec in the UK, DYL was supposed to have obtained prior authorization from the French Ministry of Defence. When his Polish source dried up, Lemonnier tried to activate the Israeli one, but he was unable to secure an air shipping agent or carrier with the right to overfly countries between Tel Aviv and Kigali. When DYL failed make two-thirds of the arms deliveries, Lemonnier faced legal action in France to recover the $1,647,864.66 By early May, DYL had to pay Mil-Tec $450,000. According to Mil-Tec records, this payment met costs for the third arms shipment to Goma. It also brought into play the services of an Afghan agent in Rome, Dr Ghazi Tamiz Ud Din Khan, who signed himself ‘Consulate General Rwanda in Rome’. After meeting Colonel Kayumba in Paris, he promised that the $970,000 order of ammunition and grenades was ‘ready…please wait tomorrow for the next fax, tonight we will listen to the phone’. UK aircrew collecting arms in Tirana at this time said Israeli supervisors had arrived in Tirana from Rome.
Details of arms shipments arranged by Mil-Tec Corporation have sometimes not been accurately reported. They were: 6 June 1993 ($549,503 of ammunition from Tel Aviv to Kigali); 17–18 April 1994 ($853,731 of ammunition from Tel Aviv to Goma); 22–25 April 1994 ($681,200 of ammunition and grenades from Tel Aviv to Goma); 29 April–3 May 1994 ($942,680 of ammunition, grenades, mortars and rifles from Tirana to Goma); 9 May 1994 ($1,023,840 of rifles, ammunition, mortars and other items from Tirana to Goma); 18–20 May 1994 ($1,074,549 of rifles, ammunition, mortars, RPG rockets and other items from Tirana to Goma); 13–18 July 1994 ($753,645 of ammunition and rockets from Tirana to Kinshasa). The date on the air waybill appears first, and the invoice second. The additional costs of delivering batteries ($511,415 in 1993 and $56,000 in 1994) and the cost of airport delay at Kinshasa were added to the above by Mil-Tec, yielding a total sales figure of $6,615,313. To this total, Mil-Tec added interest bank charges of $254,062 due in December 1994 for the failure of the Rwandan MOD to pay $1,708,313 for deliveries in 1993.
Mil-Tec has since undergone a series of acquisitions, and in January 2006 was purchased by Ducommun Incorporated in Los Angeles. Ducommun is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
French Government
UNAMIR's Kigali sector commander, Belgian Col. Luc Marchal, reported to the BBC that one of the French planes supposedly participating in the evacuation operation arrived at 0345 hours on 9 April with several boxes of ammunition. The boxes, about 5 tons, were unloaded and transported by FAR vehicles to the Kanombe camp where the Rwandese Presidential Guard was quartered. The French government has categorially denied this shipment, saying that the planes carried only French military personnel and material for the evacuation.
