Aloys Ntiwiragabo: A suspected genocidaire living in France sues a journalist for tweeting about an ‘African Nazi’
March 2023
Colonel Aloys Ntiwiragabo – from his Rwandan id card c.1994
Background to the case
At 1.30pm on January 19, the Paris Correctional Court at Porte de Clichy heard a case brought by Aloys Ntiwiragabo, former head of military intelligence during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which he is suspected of playing a key role, against Maria Malagardis, a journalist at national newpaper Libération. Malagaris, a very well respected expert on the African continent, the author of the 2012 book ‘on the trail of the Rwandan Killers,’ has worked for many years covering the failure of French justice to bring to book the dozens of high profile suspected genocidaires living in the country. Ntiwiragabo is demanding 10,000 Euros compensation for ‘public insult’. While Maria Malagardis was present in court and took the stand to answer questions, and was supported by many prominent French press (pdf) and researchers, Ntiwiragabo chose to stay away and let his lawyer speak for him.
The case revolves around a tweet published by the journalist in response to the publication of an article on the web journal Médiapart.fr by investigative journalist Theo Engelbert. Engelbert, sensationally revealed that Ntiwiragabo, a longterm genocide suspect who had ‘disappeared’ from public view after an arrest warrant was issued for him by the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTR) in the late 19990s, had been found. He was living covertly in a suburb of the central French town of Orleans. It is thought he had been in France for at least 17 years. Like genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga, who was found living in central Paris in 2020, Ntiwiragabo’s dramatic ‘uncovering’ gives rise to suspicions that senior ‘sympathetic’ French security, military and/or political figures were fully supportive of his presence in the country and had assisted in shielding him from public eyes.
Maria Malagardis: had previously written a book ‘On the trail of Rwandan killers’
Public insult?
On 20 July 2020, replying to a tweet from Edwy Plenel, editor of Médiapart, Malagardis commented in a link to the Mediapart article concerned: ‘An African Nazi in France? Anyone going to react?’
An African Nazi in France? Anyone going to react? @EmmanuelMacron @justice_gouv #Rwanda #Genocide and well done @TheoEnglebert_ https://t.co/kyPu1gvpTO
— Maria Malagardis (@mariamalagardis) July 24th, 2020
As a result, Ntiwiragabo, though under active police criminal investigation for his alleged involvement in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, launched a case against the journalist alleging ‘public insult’.
At the hearing on 19 January, the journalist told the Paris court : ‘I reacted after reading the article, it was a spontaneous reaction, that matched this extraordinary discovery [that finding the whereabouts of Aloys Ntiwiragabo represented]. He has not been tried and is therefore presumed innocent, but the position he held in 1994 raises questions.’
The phrase ‘Tropical Nazi’ had been used for the first time in an article published in Libération by the academic Jean-Pierre Chretien as the genocide against the Tutsi reached its height in late April 1994. It has been a term used about Rwandan killers many times since. The Belgian newspaper ‘Le Soir’, for example noted the Rwandan killers were ‘as efficient as Nazis,’ while English and French journals freely compared Hutu hate magazine Kangura to the Nazi anti-semitic paper Der Sturmer, while RTLM director Ferdinand Nahimana was referred to as the ‘Goebbels of Africa.’
Aloys Ntiwiragabo background
After fleeing Rwanda in July 1994, Ntiwiragabo, as with many former interim regime political and military figures, ended up living in Nairobi. Here they were initially protected from prosecution by the sympathetic Kenyan regime of President Arap Moi. However in 1997 the International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) issued an arrest warrant (pdf) for Ntiwiragabo. The request notice sent by the ICTR to the Kenyan authorities on 21 July 1997 to arrest Ntiwiragabo, noted, with some irony given what happened later, that ‘the prosecutor finds that this person may become aware of his investigations at any time and also finds that he may immediately abscond, attempt to place himself beyond the reach of the international tribunal by going into hiding, and evade justice.’
According to the painstaking tracking effort of investigative journalist Engelbert, Ntiwiragabo had evaded the ICTR warrant for his arrest – which was dropped in 2004 after the ICTR had failed to make progress in finding him – and had travelled to France where he joined his wife, Catherine Nikuze, who had arrived in 1998. Nikuze had changed her name in 2005 to Catherine Tibot, after becoming a French citizen. It seems that the couple have lived at the third floor apartment in a suburb of Orleans since at least 2006. Her husband’s application for a visa was denied in 2001 by a court in Nantes. The Nantes Court of Appeal noted that his application for citizenship was refused ‘because, within the interim government in office at the time of the genocide, he was involved in the massacres perpetrated at that time.’ After he was rediscovered in Orleans in 2020, Rwanda swiftly issued a warrant for his arrest and he is now on an Interpol Red Notice.
In a second article devoted to Aloys Ntiwiragabo and published on 23 February 2022, Médiapart noted that the state refugee agency OFPRA had, on 17 August 2020, rejected his asylum request. ‘The refusal came six months after he had filed his application, and was justified on the grounds that there was serious evidence that he was guilty of both “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” perpetrated during and after the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi people.’ A later appeal to the National Court for the Right to Asylum (CNDA) also failed. In its summary, the report noted that ‘in interviews with him by both it and the OFPRA, he “never pronounced the term ‘genocide’, preferring the term ‘regrettable catastrophe’, and showed no regrets about his path in life, having affirmed before the Office [OFPRA] that he did not reproach himself for anything”. The court underlined his “total adherence to the political ideas” of the principal Hutu political party that organised and oversaw the genocide in Rwanda.’
Questions of French State protection for alleged genocidaire
In the late 1990s, French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere had been tasked by President Chirac with issuing a report with the conclusion that the RPF had shot down Habyarimana’s plane. Bruguiere had to find ‘witnesses’ and ‘evidence’ that fitted this conclusion. Unsurprisingly he chose a motly array of Hutu extremists and mercenaries like Paul Barril to provide his report with its findings. The fact that a man like Ngiwiragabo, wanted by the international criminal court at the time and suspected of being a key player in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi – was able to work with Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere with no regard to his security calls into question whether any deal was done to secure his ‘cooperation’ with the investigation. Other Rwandans interviewed by Bruguiere later noted they had been promised visas to come to France in return for making specific (and false) accusations. The question remains whether Ntiwiragabo was given an official French residency card as was granted to the genocidaire (and son-in-law of Felicien Kabuga) Aloys Ngirabatware by the then Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine. Vedrine refused to comment when asked about the issue by Mediapart in August 2020.
Ntiwiragabo – out and about in France today photo: Engelbert
A founder and enabler of Hutu extremist groups RDR and FDLR
After the defeat and flight of the genocidaire in July 1994 into neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC), Ntiwiragabo played a leading role in ‘rebranding’ the discredited former genocidal interim regime/military into a new, ‘untarnished’ organisation, the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy to Rwanda (RDR). It was hoped the RDR could regain international support for the Hutu cause, while still carrying out genocidal attacks across the border into Rwanda in the immediate years after the genocide. Ntiwiragabo was part of the military attempts by the ex FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) and militia to plan an invasion of Rwanda in late 1994-96, which in the event never took place. In 2000, Ntiwiragabo was involved in the creation of the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), a militia made up of many former interahamwe and genocidal killers from 1994, and became its first President. He has also risen in military ranking during his time with FDLR, and now commands the rank of General. (link to currant cases/Aloys Ntiwiragabo pdf)
The FDLR has been involved in extensive human rights abuses including the targeted killing of civilian men, women and children, mass rape and the illicit trade in minerals. In 2021 the FDLR was blamed for killing the Italian ambassador to the DRC. FDLR has more recently been supported by other Hutu supremist militias such as the FLN (led by and operating with financial support from its founder, Paul Rusesabagina) and the DRC armed forces.
FDLR is classified as a terrorist organisation by the USA, and santioned by the UN, condemned in media reports and NGOs working in the region such as the Enough Project and Amnesty International. In 2019 an investigation by the Pole Institute which works in the region noted the FDLR now controls the highly profitable charcoal trade in the Virunga National Park, which nets it around $45 million, of which the militia takes around $11.6 with the rest paying off Congolese businessmen, military and political figures who are part of the racket. The Congolese military (FARDC) are accused of assisting the FDLR with weapons and equipent according to an August 2022 report by Human Rights Watch. Even the fact that its former leader, ex FAR officer Sylvestre Mudacumura who was wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and atrocities – until he was killed in September 2019 – has not convinced France that the organisatioin should be santioned.
It is suspected Ngiwiragabo is still very actively involved in FDLR affairs from his safe and comfortable home in Orleans, and moves within extremist networks in France and Belgium.
Given the dozens – or even hundred plus genocidaire living freely in France, many of whom like the president’s wife Agathe Habyarimana and Aloys Ntiwiragabo have had official refugee status refused on the basis they were suspected to be at the heart of the 1994 genocide, it can only assumed that France continues to put politics and past relations firmly before justice and the future. Its ratification of the Genocide Convention is, like so many countries, purely there for public relations purposes. Punishing its former close friends in Habyarimana’s regime – even when such friends committed genocide – is not on the agenda anytime soon.
In May 2021 President Macron arrived at the Gisozi memorial in Kigali, where 250,000 victims are buried, and noted ‘our efforts to fight impunity for alleged Rwandan genocidaires residing in France are beginning to bear fruit, they will be further strengthened in the coming months because there can be no lasting reconciliation without justice.’ The reader can decide whether this worrying case of Aloys Ntiwiragabo, his continued impunity along with others supected genocidaire in France, and the ever increasing network of killers and FDLR operatives working in the country with no judicial attempt to stop them, makes Macron’s words daily seem ever more deeply disingenious and absurd. Alas, there are no votes to be gained from holding suspected genocidaire to account.