https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/03/06/roger-winter-was-a-shadowy-figure-at-the-heart-of-the-1994-rwandan-genocide/
Roger Winter Was a Shadowy Figure at the Heart of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide
Winter operated as an intelligence agent under cover of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and served as a paid propagandist for the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a criminal organization that developed open-air crematoria to dispose of all the bodies of the people they killed.
Much has been written on the Rwanda Crisis of 1990-1994. However, some questions pertaining to the role of humanitarian organizations remain to be explored. For example, what was the relationship between the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR)? What kind of support did the USCR provide the RPF?
To answer those two questions, I analyzed Roger Winter's communications to international news media in relation to what I witnessed in Rwanda before April 1994.
Winter, who is suspected of operating as an undercover intelligence agent, was the head of the USCR. He was very close to RPF leader Paul Kagame and sponsored intellectual journals of the diaspora Tutsi that helped to mobilize support for their reconquest of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, which triggered the conflict that culminated in the Rwandan genocide.
The RPF and the USCR
While in Washington attending the meeting of the Association of Banyarwanda Diaspora (USA) in August 1988, at no time did I realize that an invasion supported by the USCR and Uganda was in the planning and that it would turn upside down Rwanda and the region of the Great Lakes of Africa. I did not question the presence of Roger Winter, the USCR executive director, at the conference as I thought the organization he headed was fulfilling its role of assisting refugees.
In June 1988, when the president of the Association of Banyarwanda Diaspora (USA) announced the convocation of the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda Refugees in Impuruza no. 11, the Magazine of All Rwandans from Around the World, he briefly said;
"I would like to conclude my remarks by expressing my and the Association's deep-felt gratitude and thanks to Mr. Roger Winter in his individual capacity and in his [capacity] as Executive Director for the United States Committee for Refugees. Those of you in Uganda and elsewhere may already know his efforts in documenting the terrible conditions you were in from 1982-1985. But what you don't know is his daily contacts with the leaders of the American government in trying to get pressure to bear against Obote and his government because of his treatment of Banyarwanda in Uganda, and how invaluable his help has been in keeping us informed, in absence of a communication mechanism, about our people's conditions in various countries, as well as sparing no effort to see that our conference is a success. We are eternally grateful to his efforts."
At the conference, George Rubagumya introduced the most important guests: Winter, two diplomats from the U.S. Department of State (all white), a diplomat from the embassy of Uganda in Washington, D.C., and Jason Clay from Cultural Survival, Inc., a non-profit organization based in Boston.
Clay had authored a paper on refugees in southwestern Uganda. Rubagumya thanked Winter for providing coordination for the conference, such as airplane tickets, hotel accommodations for the participants, and the venue for the conference. He expressed his gratitude to the U.S. Department of State for sending two representatives, the representative of the embassy of Uganda who was also present, and Clay for his support to the activities of the Rwandan diaspora.
Then the representatives of refugees took the floor to describe the plight of Tutsi refugees in the host countries. The representatives of the Tutsi refugees in Uganda informed participants that they had an army capable of taking power in Kigali and asked for support and unity. They all spoke in Kinyarwanda. As people spoke, Winter moved around the room visibly annoyed, complaining loudly that there was no interpretation. I then wondered how the USCR would financially support refugees who were claiming to have an army.
The USCR as the RPF Crisis Communication Center
In February 1995, the School of Public Health of the University of Illinois at Chicago convened a conference titled "Understanding the Crisis in Rwanda." When I arrived at the conference room, I saw Winter there. He handed out documents prepared by the U.S. Committee for Refugees: Two of them were "A Selected Chronology of the Rwandan Crisis, April 5, 1994-September 30, 1994," and "Genocide in Rwanda: Documentation of Two Massacres during April 1994." A third contained a list of the composition of the RPF government headed by Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu.
On the cover of the documents the motto of the mission of the USCR read, "USCR is a public information and advocacy program of the American Council for Nationalities. Established in 1958, it encourages the American public to participate actively in efforts to assist the world's refugees." What puzzled me was the stated mission of the USCR and the support it gave to the RPF, an armed organization that had terrorized and massacred people in Rwanda. Winter did not deliver a presentation; instead, he sat there and did not even comment on presentations.
I became curious about Winter and tried to find out why he was there. I learned that the dean of the School of Public Health thought it was a good idea to organize a conference at which people knowledgeable about Rwanda could speak and answer questions from the public. A flyer was then sent out and somehow the Rwandan embassy in Washington, D.C., came across it and called the College of Public Health to ask whether Winter could attend. There was no objection.
A former Rwandan diplomat who served at the Washington Rwandan embassy after the RPF took power told me that while at the embassy between 1994 and 1996, Winter held meetings in his office with RPF representatives to discuss advocacy strategies to frame events occurring in Rwanda and later in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), when Rwanda invaded that country in 1996. Winter made frequent visits to the Rwandan embassy, working closely with Joseph Mutaboba, the chargé d'affaires in Washington, D.C.
During my research I learned that Winter served as the shadow RPF ambassador and public relations agent in the United States of America before the RPF took power in Rwanda. That information led me to Winter's communications to international news media.
I found one sound-bite from an interview he gave to Radio France International (RFI) and two articles he wrote, one appearing in The Washington Post and the other in The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada). They contained what I believe to be the talking points of his RPF advocacy campaign.
A "Suicidal" Invasion
The RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda on October 1, 1990. On October 2, 1990, Winter told RFI:
"Those rebels were Rwandan refugees in Uganda who were mainly Tutsi. They were led by Fred Rwigyema, former deputy commander of the Ugandan army who had been demoted the year before under pressure from the Rwandan government which regarded him as dangerous because he was a Tutsi. The military attack was a suicidal gesture undoubtedly provoked by the refusal by Tutsi refugees to definitely integrate into Ugandan society."
In July 1990 the representatives of the Rwandan government, the Ugandan government, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed an agreement on the peaceful return of the Tutsi refugees. Following the agreement the representatives of the refugees were scheduled to visit Kigali in October 1990 to assess the logistics of their return. The military invasion was not the only remaining option.
The Oppression of the Banyarwanda/Batutsi and the Search for a Homeland
In 1991, the USCR published a commissioned paper titled "Exile from Rwanda: Background to an Invasion," written by Catherine Watson, a British journalist based in Uganda,
which advocated the legitimacy of the RPF invasion of Rwanda. The major theme was the oppression of the Banyarwanda, people who speak Kinyarwanda, particularly Tutsi in the region of the Great Lakes of Africa and their search for a homeland. The issue paper laid out the main grievance of the RPF which was the struggle for the right to return home.
The Perpetrators of the Assassination of President Habyarimana
In April 1994 Winter published an article in The Globe and Mail titled "Power, not tribalism, stokes Rwanda's slaughter/To halt the bloodshed, Rwanda needs to carry out last year's peace agreement and install a transitional government." In this article Winter designated the perpetrator of President Juvénal Habyarimana's assassination and the bloodshed that followed. He wrote:
"A privileged clique of extremist military and political leaders is ruthlessly determined to block negotiated reforms that would loosen their exclusive grip on power. They have demonstrated again in the past week that they are willing to kill members of their own ethnic group to achieve their own naked political ends."
To Winter, there was one villain: "a privileged clique of extremist military and political leaders." He did not mention that the RPF had blocked what he called the "negotiated reforms" by refusing the inclusion of the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) in the national transitional assembly.
To establish credibility, he recalled his visit to Mulindi, the headquarters of the RPF. He wrote:
"I spent four days in northern Rwanda just a few days ago investigating the conditions of some 65,000 civilians who had spontaneously moved back into the RPF sector during the last few months. I had unhindered access to all territory controlled by the RPF—the same rebels who are now simplistically alleged to have killed the President as a prelude to a planned military attack. During my visit, rebel soldiers were not mobilized. They were clearly not preparing to launch a military offensive."
Northern Rwanda comprised two zones: the zone occupied by the RPF and the demilitarized zone (DMZ). He had "unhindered access." What did Winter see in northern Rwanda? He did not say.
I spent three months in DMZ of Byumba from June to August 1993 as a member of a joint commission comprising RPF and political parties' representatives tasked with resettling internally displaced people (IDPs). I did not cross into the zone occupied by the RPF.
Commission members held meetings at the sub-prefecture of Kinihira. Here, the buildings had been looted; furniture, windows and toilet seats had been taken away. All the archives had been ripped off and destroyed. When RPF representatives were not present, some residents informed us of kidnappings and disappearances committed by the RPF. These residents thought we could do something to help. But our job was only to organize elections and to create an administrative structure through elections.
For our work, commission members rode together in a government-owned van. Even though we did not enter the zone occupied by the RPF, we reached its edge, for instance, at Miyove and Ngarama. At Miyove, we picked up and dropped off the RPF representatives in the morning and in the late afternoon. I remember that one day we went to hold a public meeting in Ngarama and, when we arrived at the site of the meeting, we were met by six kadogos, or child soldiers, who told us we could not hold a meeting there. So we left.
A documentary on the zone occupied by the RPF, produced in July 1992 by journalist Joseph Mudatsikira with RPF approval, showed the destruction of businesses, public buildings, records, and child soldiers. It showed that some residential homes built near main roads were occupied by the RPF and the entire northern Rwanda had been turned into a bush.
What was the condition of the "65,000 civilians"? Winter did not say. There was a camp the RPF had set up at Gishambashayo in the commune of Kivuye. The RPF showcased it as a success and a paragon of its future administration. Westerners who traveled to the occupied zone to socialize with RPF representatives were driven there to meet its residents. A former resident said "abazungu," or white people, were regular visitors. The camp was an open prison, an indoctrination and torture site. Did Winter not notice?
Peace and Business Investments
Winter argued that the rebels were not responsible for triggering the resumption of the war. He contended that "the rebels were, in fact, preparing for peace. The RPF was holding an 'investors seminar' to attract business investments into the country in expectation that peace was at hand. The day after I left—two days before the assassination of the President—the RPF held a fund-raising picnic for almost 700 civilian guests. It seems to me in retrospect that the RPF was clearly not an army on alert for a major operation, as some would allege. I am confident that I would have seen signs if it had been."
To him, the rebels were peace-loving people whose interest was implementing liberal economic policies attractive to investors. I interviewed a person who attended this type of seminar at Mulindi, the RPF headquarters; this participant told me that RPF supporters from around the world met there to raise funds for war. At the gathering, a wealthy Rwandan woman married to a European bought a large photograph of Rwigyema for $4,000. Businesspeople who attended and gave money to the RPF were rewarded with government contracts after the victory of the RPF. This participant mentioned to me Manasse Karangwa and Venuste Rwabukamba, two of the businesspeople who were there. Winter was right to speak of investment as these businesspeople were rewarded with government contracts after the RPF victory.
The Replication of the Jewish Holocaust
Winter published an article in The Washington Post on June 5, 1994, describing a trip to Rwanda. What he saw was the replication of the Jewish Holocaust:
"From May 15 to May 18, I traveled extensively inside the country and managed to reach locations previously unseen by the outside world since the massacres began on April 5. What I found there was the detritus of genocide."
He added,
"During my 300 miles of travel inside a country I have known well and visited regularly for years, I saw that thousands of families died trapped and cowering in village churches, to which they had instinctively fled for protection."
Winter then described what he saw in a church in the village of Musanze:
"Men, women, children, and infants of ethnic Tutsi origin were rounded up and forced to strip. Then they were slaughtered—by bullets or machetes rather than by gas showers—leaving behind in a scattered heap their clothes, their shoes, their water buckets and their straw sleeping mats as a final testimony that they ever existed. I sifted through the strewn personal effects, examining private letters, family photos and identity cards for clues. It seemed as if the inanimate items were desperately trying to cry out, much like the piles of shoes and spectacles left behind by Jewish genocide victims that are now on display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington."
Winter's outrage is understandable. What he saw was savagery and perpetrators should be condemned and severely punished. However, there is another savagery he did not see. When the Hutu militia Interahamwe killed Tutsi at a location and withdrew from it fearing the RPF military advance, the RPF killed Hutu and even Tutsi who had stayed and piled up the bodies of those killed on top of the bodies of those who had already died and called international media to see. That is exactly what happened at Kabuga and Nyarubuye.
At Kabuga, the RPF killed villagers and put the bodies on the top of the bodies of those killed by Hutu militias, then called a journalist from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to see. When RPF soldiers arrived at Nyarubuye, the Hutu Interahamwe militia had killed Tutsi and political opposition members. RPF soldiers then killed every Hutu they could find and threw them on top of the pile of the bodies killed before their arrival.
Before the assassination of President Habyarimana, the RPF implemented a scorched-earth strategy in northern Rwanda, and I saw its impact during the three months I spent in the DMZ. Had Winter been a true humanitarian, he would have seen the devastating consequences of this strategy and denounced it. Given his friendship with rebel leaders, the catastrophe that befell Rwanda in 1994 could have been averted.
Winter described the burying of the dead this way:
"The killers in Rwanda, however, are discovering what the Nazis discovered half a century before them: The truth of this ultimate crime against humanity can be difficult to keep buried. Random arms and legs, demanding attention, have somehow managed to pop up through the loose soil of Rwanda's newly dug grave pits."
Similar images remain engraved in my memory as I saw them in Ngarama in March 1993. The RPF broke the cease-fire on February 28, 1993, and advanced toward Kigali. A Radio Rwanda reporter visited a site in Ngarama where there had been a massacre and filed a report attributing it to the RPF. It sparked outrage from pro-RPF Rwandan human rights organizations, political parties, and private print media. The Neutral Military Observer Group (NMOG) sent to Rwanda to monitor the cease-fire organized a visit to the site of the massacre. I participated in the visit.
While at the site of the massacre, I walked around counting the human skeletons buried in anti-erosive trenches of a banana grove of less than one acre. Animals had unearthed the corpses and eaten them up. I could see that the killers had tied their arms behind their backs using improvised dried banana grove tree skins before hitting them on the head with an object smashing the forehead. I could see the ropes and the broken skulls.
Animals had unearthed their bodies and eaten portions. I could see the bones of their legs. I counted more than 70 skeletons. A nauseating smell emanating from a mud house with a corrugated iron roof caught my attention. People had been locked up in it and a grenade had probably been lobbed at them and shredded them. Near the house, there was a pit from which the fingers of a dead person were protruding. The entire site was macabre.
During his trips to Rwanda, Winter never saw or heard about the massacres or killings the RPF committed in northern Rwanda. Probably Winter never heard of either a crematorium the RPF set up in the National Park of Akagera or the massacres it committed using the strategy of calling for public meetings and killing all the attendees.
If Winter had really had free access to the territory occupied by the RPF, he would have talked to people living in the DMZ and the occupied zone and learned about akandoyi and agafuni, two killing methods used by the RPF. Akandoyi consists of tying the arms of a person behind the back and using agafuni, or a small, used hoe, to crush the forehead.
The RPF choreographed his visit and did not see dead bodies on his itinerary in northern Rwanda. He never heard about grenades and mine explosions and assassinations that were frequent across Rwanda before April 1994. If Winter had taken time to visit northern Rwanda with an open mind, his perspective might have changed.
Erasing the Memory
Winter remarked that "the selectivity of the killings is also evident in the patterned destruction of buildings. In locations where thousands died, many homes and businesses of Tutsi. Merely burning those homes was apparently not enough: Many Tutsi residences are utterly flattened, as if the killers were trying to erase all memory of the inhabitants. These are the calculated acts which, one by one, have pushed out of existence up to a half-million Tutsi in less than two months."
Mudatsikira's documentary shows that the RPF destroyed records in all of northern Rwanda at the communes' offices, health centers, credit unions and Catholic parishes. Images from the documentary suggest that the RPF's intent was to erase the past and the people. People's homes located away from the road were looted and destroyed as residences close to the road housed RPF soldiers and its political cadres. Keep in mind that the war had displaced Hutu and Tutsi of northern Rwanda and forced them to survive together in the IDPs. Why did Winter not see what I saw or what Joseph Mudatsikira saw? Did he really have free access to northern Rwanda before April 1994?
Three Awards and Tribute
The RPF government awarded Winter "two national heroes' medals, namely the National Liberation Medal (Uruti) and Rwanda's Campaign Against Genocide Medal (Umurinzi) in 2010" (The New Times, January 31, 2023).
In pre-colonial Rwanda, the king awarded "uruti" to a warrior who killed 21 enemies in war. "Uruti" was the highest medal a hero received. To prove his heroism, the warrior collected the testicles of his enemies as the war unfolded.
Today, Rwanda awards uruti to an individual who participated in what the RPF calls the war of liberation, the war it waged from 1990 to 1994. Symbolically, Winter deserved it for having killed 21 enemies. As to "umurinzi," it belongs to a new category the RPF created. It awards it to an individual who participated in fighting against genocide.
Winter died in January 2023. The pro-Rwandan government newspaper Igihe wrote,
"Roger Winter was a friend of Major General Fred Gisa Rwigyema, and he held conversations several times with him about refugee problems. Thereafter he accepted to publicize them and be the advocate on the Rwandan refugee problem that seemed to have been forgotten." (Author's translation from Kinyarwanda into English)
The New Times, another mouthpiece, memorialized him this way:
"Throughout the RPF armed struggle, and during the genocide, you communicated frequently to the press, organized briefings for American civil society, Washington think-tanks, policy makers and intelligence; and appeared before the United States Congress on many occasions to share your expert knowledge of the situation in Rwanda.
You generously provided facilities for members of the RPF in the United States to meet and disseminate much-needed information.
In the 100 days of genocide, at the risk of your own life, you visited the RPF liberated zone several times, were the first foreigner to arrive at sites of mass massacres such as Nyarubuye and continued to act as ardent and vocal eyewitness to what was happening.
You mobilized journalists from major American media to visit Rwanda and report on the crisis and rallied humanitarian organizations to assist survivors."
The excerpts leave no doubt that, since the early 1980s, Winter participated in the planning and the prosecution of the war. The war was a USCR project which came to fruition with massacres and genocide.
Prevention, Not War
Tutsi refugees whom Winter and the USCR supported comprised the descendants of the monarchists who ruled Rwanda until 1959 when a Hutu elite emerged with grievances and overthrew it. The monarchy and Belgian colonizers had subjected the majority of Hutu, but also poor Tutsi, to exploitation. Not all Tutsi were power holders. Most of the Tutsi remained in Rwanda after 1959 and accepted to co-exist peacefully with Hutu. Tutsi aristocrats who left for exile organized without success armed incursions from Burundi, Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda to re-take power. These armed incursions sparked reprisals from Hutu against innocent Tutsi.
In Uganda, the descendants of the pre-colonial royal families, the clans producing queen mothers, chiefs of armies, chiefs of provinces and sub-chiefs, joined the National Resistance Army (NRA) of Yoweri Museveni with the goal of acquiring military skills and building a military arsenal to invade and re-take power in Rwanda. Before invading Rwanda from Uganda, they had already shown brutality and cruelty. Major Paul Kagame, the RPF commander, had served as the chief intelligence of Uganda where he had earned the nickname Pilate because of his glaring cruelty.
Extreme violence in Rwanda resulting from the RPF invasion was predictable in a country where pre-colonial monarchist culture valued and glorified violence. Manhood meant preserving dignity (agaciro) and respect (icyubahiro), killing enemies (kwica umwanzi), cutting off the testicles of an enemy at war (gushahura) to receive military awards, instilling terror (kugira igitinyiro), taking revenge (guca inzigo), extinguishing an entire family or lineage (kuzimya umuryango), looting property (kunyaga), and abducting women and girls to turn them into servants and sex slaves. Although Belgian policies outlawed these monarchist practices, they did not erase them. Massacres and counter-massacres, grenades and mine explosions, scorched-earth strategy, extortion, and population displacement that marked Rwanda's painful period of 1990 to 1994 should be analyzed through the enduring monarchist culture of violence.
Conclusion
The preparation of a war against Rwanda with Winter's and the USCR's knowledge and participation stood in contrast with advocacy for refugees. Winter served as the bridge between the Washington power establishment and an armed group. Through him, the RPF conveyed its narratives about the war it waged in Rwanda to the U.S. press, think tanks, politicians, and intelligence agencies. His partisan advocacy and participation in the prosecution of the war contributed to shaping and misleading public opinion in the United States.
References
Nick Gordon, "Return to Hell," Sunday Express, April 21, 1996.
Alice Kagina," Roger Winter, recipient of Rwandan heroes' medals, dies at 80," The New Times, January 31, 2023.
Ntabareshya Jean De Dieu, "Roger Winter wari inshuti y'u Rwanda yitabye Imana," Igihe. February 1, 2023.
George Rubagumya, The International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda Refugees, Washington, D.C., August 17-20, 1988, in Impuruza 11.
Catharine Watson, "Exile from Rwanda: Background to an Invasion," USCR issue paper, February 1991.
Roger Winter, "Power, not tribalism, stokes Rwanda's slaughter/To halt the bloodshed, Rwanda needs to carry out last year's peace agreement and install a transitional government," The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), April 14, 1994.
Roger Winter, "Journey into Genocide: A Rwandan Diary," The Washington Post. June 5, 1994.
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About the Author
Jean-Marie Higiro was director of the Rwandan Information Authority in Kigali from July 1993 until April 6, 1994.
He has a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Texas at Austin and is Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication, Media and the Arts at Western New England University.
Jean-Marie can be reached at marie-higiro@wne.edu.
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