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ETO Kicukiro Massacre: The Ruling That Did Not Survive (Cold Files 023)
About two thousand people walked to a Catholic technical school in the southeast of Kigali in April 1994 towards one thing: ninety Belgian soldiers in blue helmets standing in the grounds. The United Nations inquiry that examined it five years later put the reason in writing. They had come believing the UNAMIR troops would be able to protect them.
On the early afternoon of 11 April the ninety Belgians drove out through the gate. Most of the people they left behind were dead by nightfall.
Twenty-four years later a Brussels appeal court brought down the final judgment in the two lawsuits filed over that afternoon. It did not decide whether leaving had been wrong. It decided that the question was not Belgium's to answer, and it stopped there.
Part of the Cold Files series.
Two thousand people and ninety men
The Ecole Technique Officielle at Kicukiro was a technical school run by Catholic Salesian priests, in buildings owned by the church. People began arriving on 7 April, the day after the presidential plane came down, as soldiers and militia moved through the neighbouring sector of Gatenga. Human Rights Watch, in Alison Des Forges's account, counts roughly two thousand there by 10 April, at least four hundred of them children. African Rights counts more than two thousand five hundred. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in its judgment against the Interahamwe official Georges Rutaganda, says only "several thousand".
What they had come to stand behind was a detachment called Groupe Sud: ninety men, part of the roughly four-hundred-strong Belgian battalion Kibat. Tom Ruys, reviewing the litigation in the American Journal of International Law, gives both figures. The officer at the school was Luc Lemaire, a lieutenant in April 1994 and a captain by the time he testified about it.
What the ninety were permitted to do is narrower than the civilians believed. Security Council Resolution 872 of October 1993 authorised 2,548 troops on a Chapter VI mandate, tasking the force to contribute to the security of the city of Kigali. The force commander, Romeo Dallaire, had written an operational directive stating that UNAMIR would use all available means to halt crimes against humanity. New York never approved it. When Kigali proposed raiding arms caches in January 1994, Kofi Annan's peacekeeping department replied that the operation went beyond the mandate, and on 7 April Iqbal Riza reconfirmed to Dallaire the instruction not to fire until fired upon. The operative permission at the gate was self-defence.
The afternoon of 11 April
At about half past ten on the morning of 11 April, French troops came to the school and took out the expatriates and the Rwandan clergy. Boniface Ngulinzira, Rwanda's foreign minister until 1993 and the man who had led his government's delegation at the Arusha talks, asked the French to evacuate him. The Carlsson inquiry records that he was refused. He stayed, and was killed.
At 1:45 in the afternoon Lemaire left with his ninety men. Human Rights Watch, working from the Belgian military log, notes what his radio report mentioned: two unusable vehicles and a generator. He did not repeat the two thousand people. African Rights puts it at two o'clock. Ruys records that the detachment left firing shots in the air to stop the refugees from impeding its departure, and that no measures were taken for their safety.
The Interahamwe were already outside. The Rutaganda judgment finds them gathered around the compound, armed with guns, grenades, machetes and clubs, effectively surrounding it. When the UN troops left, it finds, the Interahamwe and members of the Presidential Guard entered and attacked. Some were killed at once. Most were herded out towards the hill at Nyanza.
Those who got out set off for the Amahoro stadium and the rebel lines. The tribunal's findings follow them: stopped on the road by soldiers, gathered near the Sonatube factory, diverted, and then about four thousand people, the group having grown on the way, marched to Nyanza flanked on both sides by Interahamwe. Ghanaian UN soldiers passed them and did not respond. The killing on the hill ran from the late afternoon of 11 April into the evening.
Here is the number that matters, and it is not the one that gets printed. The tribunal found that approximately two hundred people survived the massacre at Nyanza. It is the one survivor figure a court has established.
One court has published a count. On appeal in 2003 the tribunal put the ETO and Nyanza dead at more than three thousand. The two thousand that circulates as the toll is not that count: it is the estimate of how many were standing in the school grounds, silently converted.
Three answers to one question
Who ordered the ninety men to leave two thousand people? Three bodies have examined that, and they have given three different answers.
The United Nations inquiry chaired by Ingvar Carlsson reported in December 1999. Its conclusion on the failure to protect civilians is careful and damaging: the order "would seem to have been taken by the Belgian command within UNAMIR", and if such a momentous decision was taken without orders from the force commander, that shows grave problems of command and control within UNAMIR.
The Brussels Court of First Instance reached the opposite side of the same sentence on 8 December 2010. In Ruys's rendering, it held the evacuation a decision taken under the auspices of the Belgian State and not those of UNAMIR. Its reasoning rested on Dallaire's own evidence that whole sections of the Belgian forces had in fact been removed from UNAMIR's authority, and on the absence of coordination between the Belgian sector commander and Dallaire while consultation with Belgium's own general staff was permanent.
That 2010 ruling is routinely described as a finding that Belgium was liable. It was not. It was an interlocutory judgment. It ruled on limitation and on attribution, made preliminary findings on fault and causation, then reopened the debates and deferred blameworthiness and damages to a later stage that never produced a final judgment. No damages were awarded. The court also sent the parties away to come back after a screening of the feature film Shooting Dogs, which it treated as an aid to establishing the facts.
The Brussels Court of Appeal gave the third answer on 8 June 2018, in the consolidated appeals numbered 2011/AR/292 and 2011/AR/294. The withdrawal was imputable only to the United Nations. UNAMIR, it held, had retained ultimate control over the Belgian battalion, and it was not demonstrated that the battalion had obeyed direct and precise instructions from Belgium. Dallaire's failure to approve or order the withdrawal expressly, which Carlsson had treated as evidence of a Belgian decision, the appeal court considered irrelevant.
The factual chain the Human Rights Watch account narrates sits awkwardly between all three. Lemaire asked to move his men. Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Dewez checked with Colonel Luc Marchal and authorised it. Both were Belgian officers holding UNAMIR appointments. Dallaire had ordered regrouping in general and learned the detail of this later.
That ambiguity is not a gap in the record. It is the record.
The question the appeal court did not reach
What the 2018 court decided is less remarkable than what it declined to come near. Ruys's summary is the plainest statement of it: the court dismissed the case without examining whether the retreat from the school entailed a wrongful act. It held the three officers sued alongside the Belgian State, Marchal, Dewez and Lemaire, immune from its jurisdiction under UNAMIR's statute, on the ground that they had acted exclusively under UN orders.
Nothing was found about Belgian fault, because fault was never reached. The claimants had filed in 2004. No appeal was lodged with the Belgian Court of Cassation. In 2024 one of Ngulinzira's daughters told a Rwandan paper that the family had chosen not to go further because they believed they would not get justice, and that they had never lost the battle of history.
The case for the appeal court being right is strong and the file should print it. UNAMIR was a subsidiary organ of the United Nations, created by Security Council resolution, its force commander reporting to the Secretary-General. Under the International Law Commission's articles on the responsibility of international organisations, conduct of such an organ is attributed to the organisation, and that presumption is rebutted only by proof that a state exercised effective control over the specific conduct. The burden sat on the claimants and the court found the proof absent. In Behrami and Saramati, decided in 2007, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights had held that because the Security Council retained ultimate authority and control, the conduct of a delegated force was in principle attributable to the UN. Scholars detest that judgment. It has never been overruled. The harder objection is simpler still. Attribution comes first: a court that finds the conduct belonged to the UN has no jurisdiction left to rule on Belgian fault.
And the comparison that has to be conceded is the Dutch one, because Dutch courts went further than Brussels ever did. In Nuhanovic and Mustafic, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands held in September 2013 that the state was responsible for three specific deaths at Potocari, and that the same conduct can be attributed to the UN and to a troop-contributing state at once. In Mothers of Srebrenica, in July 2019, it held the state liable for ten per cent of the damages suffered by the relatives of about 350 men. Those are final judgments against a troop contributor with money attached. Brussels is not the high-water mark of anything.
What is true is narrower and stranger. The 2010 court did find that the soldiers could have had no illusions about the refugees' fate and that orders are no excuse. The appeal erased it on attribution. No ruling on lawfulness stands.
What answered instead
Belgium's own legislature got closer than Belgium's judiciary, and it got there twenty years earlier. The Senate's commission of inquiry into the events in Rwanda reported on 6 December 1997, with Guy Verhofstadt among its rapporteurs. On the decision to pull the Belgian contingent out of UNAMIR, it concluded that responsibility for the unilateral decision lay with the government, that parliament was also responsible because most groups had supported it without protest, and that in addition to the international community, Belgium was also responsible for what took place.
It is worth being exact about how much of that touches the school, because the answer is less than it is usually quoted as being. The ETO appears in the commission's conclusions in a single clause, noting that the Belgian blue berets had left the Don Bosco school where two thousand Rwandans were under UNAMIR's protection, and that this departure came before the withdrawal decision. No separate fault is attached to the abandonment. Marchal and Dewez are criticised by name, but for misreading the Lotin platoon's danger, not the school's. Lemaire is not named in the conclusions at all. And the commission added that no single authority or individual person was fully responsible for what happened.
Carlsson was blunter, and also more precise than the quotation suggests. The inquiry called the manner in which the troops left, including attempts to pretend to the refugees that they were not in fact leaving, disgraceful. The word attaches to the manner. Of the decision itself the report says it caused enormous pain to the Rwandan people.
In Kigali on 7 April 2000, at the sixth commemoration, Verhofstadt, by then prime minister, said that in the name of his country and his people he begged forgiveness. The man who had helped write the inquiry delivered the apology.
The school campus is now a Rwandan polytechnic. Every 11 April a walk goes from it to the Nyanza-Kicukiro memorial on the hill, where Rwanda's parliament counts more than 105,000 victims from across the capital.
Three bodies looked at one afternoon and could not agree who gave the order. A parliament found a government responsible for a withdrawal. An inquiry found the manner of the leaving disgraceful. A court of appeal found that the question belonged to an organisation it could not summon, and ended the case one step short of the only question the two thousand would have asked. No ruling on whether it was allowed survived.
Sources consulted
UN Inquiry, Rwanda genocide report, S/1999/1257, 1999
ICTR, Prosecutor v Rutaganda, judgments, 1999, 2003
Belgian Senate, Rwanda inquiry report, 1-611/7, 1997
Ruys, Mukeshimana-Ngulinzira case report, AJIL, 2020
Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 1999
African Rights, Left to Die at ETO, 1994
Sprik, A Failure to Protect in Peacekeeping, 2017
Ryngaert, case analysis, Oxford ILDC, 2010
David, L'affaire dite de l'ETO, Justice-en-ligne, 2018
Nedeski and Boutin, peacekeeping responsibility, Asser, 2021
Larsen, ultimate authority and control, EJIL, 2008
Dannenbaum, Dutchbat ruling comment, EJIL Talk, 2013
Hoge Raad, Mothers of Srebrenica release, 2019
Asser Institute, Netherlands v Nuhanovic database
UN Security Council, resolutions 872 and 912
USHMM, Rwanda decision-making rapporteur report, 2015
Hirondelle, ETO killings hearing, JusticeInfo, 2010
Voice of America, Verhofstadt apology report, 2000
The New Times, Ngulinzira family interview, 2024
In February 1979 China sent an army into northern Vietnam, fought for under a month, declared the lesson taught, and pulled back. The shelling across that border went on for another ten years, and the two governments have never agreed on how many died in either phase. Cold Files 024.
More Cold Files: Srebrenica Dutch Liability and If Proven Before A Competent Court
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