Rwanda to keep its peacekeepers in place

...United Nations (madnews) -- Rwanda will not pull its troops from U.N. peacekeeping missions despite a leaked draft report that accused Rwandan soldiers of genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwandan President Paul Kagame told the U.N. secretary-general Sunday.
Ban Ki-moon said that he and Kagame spoke about the Democratic Republic of the Congo Mapping Report, which is to be released in October.
Kagame complained to Ban about the leaks from the report, which alleges that the Rwandan military and an allied rebel group massacred ethnic Hutus in Congo between 1993 and 2003. The president put his troops on alert for a possible departure from Darfur, the troubled region of Sudan where a Rwandan general leads the U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission.
"Tens of thousands of Hutu civilians were slaughtered with knives, bludgeoned with hammers and burned alive as the Rwandan army and the Allied Democratic Liberation Forces swept across Congo -- then called Zaire -- leading to the toppling of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko," the draft report says.
Kagame, who called the allegations "fraudulent" and "absurd," and Ban met in Kigali, Rwanda, earlier this month to discuss the report, agreeing to meet later on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting.
The United Nations said that Ban "was very satisfied" after Sunday's meeting "to learn that Rwanda would continue its important role in U.N. peacekeeping operations, and particularly in the strife-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur."
The United Nations delayed release of the report by 30 days and agreed to allow nations named in it to add comments before publication.

Kagame first took power on 1994 after the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In the 100-day genocide, militias made up of ethnic Hutus slaughtered ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus nationwide. The killing ended when Tutsi-led militias backing Kagame ousted the Hutu government supporting the massacre.