Robert Gersony , a freelance American consultant who had extensive experience in war zones in Africa , particularly Mozambique and Somalia , was hired by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to conduct a refugee survey in preparation for encouraging Rwandans who had fled the country in the wake of the Rwandan genocide and rebel victory in the Rwandan Civil War to return home . Gersony and his assistants began the work broadly sympathetic to the new government of the mostly-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front ( RPF ) , as was common among those who saw the effects of the genocide . In the course of their fieldwork , the three-person team became convinced that the RPF had carried out " clearly systematic murders and persecution of the Hutu population in certain parts of the country . " The team were granted free travel by the RPF , who expected the refugee study to help their efforts to repatriate refugees , and saw more of the country and talked to more people than any other foreigners in Rwanda at that time . Specifically , between 1 August and 5 September 1994 the Gersony team visited 91 sites in forty-one of the 145 communes of Rwanda , mostly in the areas of Kibungo , Gisenyi and Butare . They further gathered information on about ten other communes and carried out interviews in nine refugee camps in surrounding countries . Over the course of their work , the team conducted more than two hundred individual interviews and conducted another one hundred small group discussions
Rwandan genocide
Rwandan genocide
Gersony Report