KIGALI - The United Nations Human Rights Mapping Report on the Democratic Republic of Congo is an act of hostility towards Rwanda and it is clear that the report might have a destabilizing effect on the entire region, Aldo Ajelo, a former European Union Representative in the Great Lakes Region has said.

In a recent interview with Belgian Journalist, Collette Braeckman, of Le Soir Newspaper, Ajelo, who was an envoy in the region in the 90’s, said that while people could have died, what happened in the DRC could not be referred to as Genocide.

"That report was changed into an academic discussion on Genocide, without taking into consideration what really happened in Rwanda in 1994... There was one Genocide, planned, conceived and executed in Rwanda, meant to eliminate a whole ethnic group.”

"Using that term is a colossal mistake and also an unfairness, which amounts to support the double Genocide theory, and this retards development in the region”.
Ajelo said that using the term "Genocide” is really a serious mistake and that he is surprised that the UN could produce a document of that nature, adding that it removes credibility from the entire report.

"The figures quoted in the report have nothing to do with reality: People have talked of 200,000 people, but where does such a figure come from?” Ajelo told the Belgian newspaper.

"There is a point that everybody seems to have forgotten: nobody has succeeded in carrying out a census of the exact number of refugees who were in the camps. Every time the High Commission for Refugees sent its specialists to carry out a census, they were chased away by stone throwers,” he adds.

According to Ajelo, the extremists who had taken control of the camps received food and aid on the basis of inflated numbers and they could resell part of what they received to buy arms and prepare another war.

He adds that the hierarchy that existed on the hills was repeated in the camps, the chiefs who had organized the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, had taken command of the camps and the census was always impossible.

Ajelo stresses that the Human Rights report could shutter the good understanding between the countries in the region and is dangerous for regional stability.

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