A Brief History: Justice and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
Rwanda Justice 4 Genocide
An Overview: International justice and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
Col. Theoneste Bagosora – architect of the Tutsi genocide
Within three months of the genocidal interim regime of Prime Minister Jean Kambanda being defeated and fleeing Rwanda in July 1994, the international community, which had solidly stood by whilst more than one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered, came together to vote through the formation of a special tribunal to bring the leading organisers and planners to justice.
The message from the ‘international community’ was, for once, unambigious: we may have failed to prevent a genocide that our intelligence services in France, Belgium, the USA and UN had warned was being prepared for more than a year before it took place; we may have cut the UN peacekeeping force (UNAMIR) rather than reinforce it and give it a mandate to stop the genocide in its very first days; we may have allowed our UN mandated French operation (Turquoise) to fail to arrest any of the interim genocidal regime or its military and militia who had carried out the slaughter and instead helped usher them safely across the border into Zaire to rearm and retrain for another attempt to come back and ‘finish their work.’ We may have helped feed, clothe and pay this army of killers now living in the refugee camps and fail to recognise this was not just a humanitarian crisis but a military and political one. But….
…. we will now authorise a hugely expensive international tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that will seek to track down and try and bring some small element of justice and accountability to show the world does (slightly) care and Rwandans (and Africans) do matter.
However, the cogs of international justice, besides being overwhelmed by administrative inefficiencies, corruption, legal ambivalence and ineptitude especially in the early years of the ICTR, also vitally relied on the ‘good will’ of member countries to arrest, extradite or put on trials themselves those suspected of this most appalling of crimes. Despite countries ratifying the 1948 Genocide Convention and its demands that they ‘prevent and punish’ genocide, the years following the horror in Rwanda were marked by delay and avoidance in putting such rhetoric into action. Countries such as Gabon, Togo, Zaire (DRC), Libya, Congo Brazzaville, Zimbabwe, Kenya – and of course France – all with very close ties to the former president Juvenal Habyarimana and wife Agathe, allowed the genocide’s ideologues, generals, financiers and administrators a safe place to retire away from the clutches of the nascent Tribunal’s tracking team.
Moving on
When President Arap Moi of Kenya was finally pressured by western partners to clamp down, at least in part, on the cosy, safe, retirement from crime he had offered the genocidaire in downtown Nairobi and Mombassa in the late 1990s, the race was on to move to new countries where, like Holocaust perpetrators post world war two, politics, and friends and finance could be relied on to solve any difficult questions about past genocidal actions.
Hundreds of perpetrators, enriched from the looting of Rwanda’s aid monies, banks and economy in the years before 1994, chose with careful deliberation to move to those same western countries that was now bathed in guilt at what had occurred in Rwanda. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandanavia, the USA and Canada, the UK – they all offered not just a better standard of living than staying in an African exile, but, with no little irony, safety from the very justice the west had so roundly lectured other countries about. It is one of many ironies of the situation that the very countries who were funding the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda which was trumpeted as bringing an end to impunity, were the very same countries offering no-questions asked retirements to the killers.
Just as a survivor from genocide and war crimes, from state persecution and abuse, flees to a country where they most feel they will have a safe and hopefully prosperous future, so too perpetrators of those abuses, of genocide and war crimes are equally strategic in where they seek to find that same safe, prosperous future. Unlike the victims however, they often have the considerable advantage of being well financed, educated and well connected from their former lives in power and can easily obtain the necessary documentation, employment and legal support to begin again.
So, what were the strategies/alternatives for perpetrators in deciding where to move?
Move to countries where political antipathy/animosity towards the new, post genocide, Rwandan government outweighed considerations of the horrific personal crimes of the perpetrators of the former regime. This, notably, has been the case of France and Italy. Francois Mitterrand and later Jacques Chirac were key political, military and financial backers of the Rwandan genocidal regime, before, during and after 1994; close to Agathe Habyarimana and sharing her acute animosity towards the anglophone RPF, it was never in doubt that they would grant her, her family and the Akazu network a safe haven in France. French courts refused all extradition requests, citing the fact that as Rwanda had no law against genocide in 1994, the suspects could not be sent back to face trial for a crime that did not exist in the country – at least legally. The result was unsurprising: After 1994, dozens of high-profile organisers, planners and participants in the genocide moved to France to enjoy its Gallic ‘impunity safety net.’
20 years after the genocide against the Tutsi, in March 2014 France finally put its first genocidaire on trial – Pascal ‘the tortuerer’ Simbikangwa. Pictured: On the first day of the case, a long queue outside the Paris Assize Court formed to see French justice finally overcome political interference and apathy.
Investigations and trials did begin in France in 2014, a full 20 years after the genocide, after a partial political rapprochement between Paris and Kigali. However, the years 1994-2023 have seen a meagre five cases before the French courts. And these have all been the result of the insistent, determined action of civil society groups pushing the French government into taking highly reluctant action. Individuals still living openly in France and wanted for genocide include the president’s wife, Agathe Habyarimana (who was ‘at the heart of the genocide’ according to the judgements of the French refugee office and the Council of State), Col. Laurent Serubuga, Claver Kamana, Cyprien Kayumba, Callixte Mburishimana, Sosthene Munyemana, Stansilas Mbonampeka, Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, Hyacinthe Nsengiyumva, Pierre Tegera, Charles Twagira and Venuste Nyombayire and Aloys Ntiwiragabo. Civil society groups put the number of genocidaire in the country at more than one hundred.
From a first complaint – in most cases made by one of a number of NGOs or survivor organisations than through police investigation – to a trial can be at least 20 years.
At the present rate of conviction of one completed case every two years, it can be expected most of the above, who are already into their 60s and 70s, will escape justice and live out comfortable retirements and die peacefully in bed untroubled by the French state they now call home.
In the case of Italy, the Vatican, another strong supporter of the genocidal regime, including former Rwandan archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva, has repeatedly sheltered priests and religious from justice even when they are accused of complicity in the genocide. Catholic religious orders have given financial and physical support and Rwandan priests who took part in the genocide have been assigned new parishes in Europe where their crimes can be quickly and quietly ‘forgotten.’ Italy has refused to extradite or to put on trial a single accused individual, sadly replicating its attitude to senior Nazis at the end of World War Two when senior clergy assisted notorious Holocaust perpetrators such as Franz Stangl and Adolf Eichmann to escape to South America.
Agathe Habyarimana and husband President Juvenal Habyarimana enjoy the attentions of Catholic prelates – notably here the ethnic divisionist and apologist Archbishop Andre Perraudin.
Even when monks, nuns and priests have been convicted of the horrendous crimes of genocide, rape and extermination, they have not been suspended or defrocked by the Vatican and have continued to say mass in prison and be restored to new parishes after release. Genocide, it seems, for the Roman Catholic Church – which has never apologised for its institutional racism over many decades in Rwanda and support for the genocidal regimes of Kayibanda and Habyarimana from the 1960s to early 1990s – is not a ‘crime’ of significance.
(Left):The Catholic priest Anathase Seromba – who bulldozed his church onto thousands of Tutsis taking refuge inside and then was ‘hidden’ by the Catholic Church in a new parish in Italy to avoid prosecution. (Right): Fr. Marcel Hitayezu fled to France with help of the White Fathers and worked as a priest in Saintes. France in 2016 refused to extradite him on genocide charges. He is currently yet another alleged killer in the country under investigation but enjoying his freedom.
The one thing in common between French presidents since 1994 and the Pope besides the complicity of the French state and Vatican in the genocide against the Tutsi respectively is the lack of any apology. Sadly, justice for survivors in these two countries continues to be gravely compromised by political considerations.
Move to countries where there was a history of total apathy towards international justice, and where human rights laws and legal protections are actively and effectively used to protect the accused rather than the victims. Countries here include the United Kingdom, which since 1945 has made clear its opposition to extraditing war criminals in a number of cases on the grounds that the accused would not receive a fair trial; and for political and financial reasons, has shown equally strong opposition to holding war criminals residing in the UK to account by putting them on trial domestically. Other countries, included the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and Germany, have allowed extradition or domestic trials but at a very slow pace with justice dragging behind domestic considerations much of the time.
(Left): Interahamwe leader Marie Vianney Mudahinyuka (‘Zuzu’) arrives in Kigali after he was deported from the USA in 2011. He is one of several suspects US immigration authorities have deported back to Rwanda. (Right): Leon Mugesera – extradited by Canada in 2011 after a long legal battle to avoid return to the country where his genocidal speech in 1992 played a significant role in killings of Tutsi even before 1994.
Move to large western countries with a good standard of living where they can ‘hide’ in plain sight, often by changing their names and histories. The USA was a chosen destination for several genocidaire, as knowledge of Rwanda and the events of 1994 here was very limited, the diaspora small and dispersed, and there was an excellent chance of ‘disappearing’ and starting a new life without being recognised. Many genocidaire deliberately changed their names and/or their personal histories during 1994 in order to qualify for asylum or citizenship. The USA has a policy of deportation for suspected war criminals/genocidaire back to the country where their crimes were committed rather than putting them on trial for genocide before its own courts.
(Left) Fabien Neretse: A genocidaire who fled to France but was eventually tried in Belgium in 2019, 19 years after the CPCR first filed its complaint against him. (Right): businessman and Akazu Alphonse Higaniro found guilty in Belgium 2001 in one of the first genocide trials in Europe.
By contrast, some accused killers elected to head to a country like Belgium with its large Rwandan diapora, where there would be ‘strength in numbers’ and a presumption, that proved solid, that the state would neither stomach extradition nor have the judicial capacity or financial resources to put the large number of suspected killers before its own courts. In Francophone countries, especially France and Belgium, NGOs and Rwandan political opposition groups/networks made excellent use of media and political support, portraying any arrests as due to current political considerations not historic genocide/war crime charges. By astutely mixing past and present as a strategy to blur responsibility, and promoting the ‘double genocide’ myth, perpetrators and their supporters have been able to shelter behind an agenda of disinformation and lies. Such networks in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany have also been actively involved during the past decade with organising financial, military and organisational assistance to the terrorist group the FDLR, made up of former genocidaire still living in eastern DRC. Impunity has a cost – not just to justice denied – but in lives continuing to be lost and ruined by killers in the DRC being funded and sheltered by their European colleagues.
Rwandan legal reform
As national courts in western countries wrestled with an influx of the perpetrators of genocide and war crimes from the mid 1990s, Rwanda began to reform its own moribund legal system that had almost totally ceased to exist post genocide, to conform to standards that would allow extradition to happen. In 2007 Rwanda abolished the death penalty, and extensive funding from the Netherlands, among other western states, allowed it to overhaul its whole judicial system, including upgrading the detention facilities for detainees sent back to Rwanda. As a result of the changes, in April 2012 the ICTR extradited its first detainee to stand trial in Kigali having accepted the suspect would receive a fair trial there. Six months earlier a landmark European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgement ruled it could find no bar to the extradition of individuals to Rwanda to stand trial.
While such legal and judicial reforms has allowed a trickle of extradition cases from a number of countries – including Scandinavian countries, the USA, Canada, the UN, Netherlands and Germany, the wheels of justice for victims of genocide continue to turn at a snail’s pace. The most serious of all crimes known to humanity is still treated with the greatest indifference and apathy by an international community focused purely on its own domestic concerns rather than the wider picture of global judicial wellbeing. Since 1994 there have been a number of other horrific state-inspired genocides/policies of targeted mass extermination/incarceration in Darfur (Sudan), Myanmar (Rohingyas), Yazidis (Northern Iraq), in Syria and the Uyghurs (China). For these crimes too, very few perpetrators who have moved to the west have faced any accountability.
Justice delayed and denied
As of late 2021, around 1,108 wanted perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi are still on the run from justice. Of these around 900 are thought to be in hiding in African countries – many in countries neighbouring Rwanda or in countries where political divisions have stopped judicial cooperation, for example South Africa.
During the past 25 years, only 41 arrest warrants sent by Rwanda have been acted upon and have resulted in alleged perpetrators either being extradited or tried in their host country.
The Cost of Justice denied
The French, Belgian, UK and other western governments that harbour genocidaire may argue, in private if not in public, that:
As the crimes of the genocidaire, however heinous, were not committed in their country or against their own citizens, there is no ‘immediate’ necessity to take action against them as they pose no risk to the population as they ‘keep their heads down’ and try to integrate.
The financial cost of putting each individual on trial domestically runs into millions of Euros/Pounds and can put a large burden of time and resources on already over-stretched legal and judicial systems. Inaction, where ever possible, is the most practical solution – it means important cost savings and frees up time and resources for other domestic judicial cases.
Politically, trials may reveal very uncomfortable truths about financial/diplomatic/military complicity of their own country with the genocidal regimes. Such knowledge is best kept out of the public arena. Many former political and military ‘friends’ of the accused in countries such as France are still suspected of important support for their proteges. The currant case of Aloys Ntiwiragabo, the continuing presence of Agathe Habyarimana in Paris, as well as that of Felicien Kabuga for several years until his belated arrest has made many civil society and academic figures suspect a continuing and important degree of collusion between senior French figures and the accused.
Genocidal denial that is inevitably spread from harbouring killers can be combatted, as far as a government is concerned, with good public relations presentations which testify to a state commitment to the Genocide Convention and to universal justice, even if this is really just lip-service.
Any terrorist network (e.g. for the FDLR) that grows as a result of harbouring genocidaire but does not threaten their own country can be disregarded. There is some element of cynical hypocrisy of course involved. When a developing world country harbours an individual or network (eg an Islamist terrorist) who is regarded as a threat to a western country, moves are made to ‘eliminate’ the risk by demanding their immediate extradition or simply using a drone attack to ‘nullify’ them. When it is the western country that harbours the terrorist (eg FDLR), then it seems, under human rights and free speech//association laws, they are free to continue to finance, plan and organise attacks that kill/rape innocent civilians and decimate communities in Africa.
Such cynical actions by western governments towards war criminals living freely on their own soil has become commonplace. In France and Belgium especially, where genocidaire move freely between networks now long established in the two countries, the failure of justice has exacerbated the growth of genocide denial and active support for terrorist groups such as the FDLR in eastern DR Congo. As the French and Belgian governments have no concerns for populations here, neither do they have concerns to stop the genocidal groups that are daily terrorising the local population with mass rape, robbery, killings and torture as detailed in a number of UN and NGO reports.
Kabuga listens intently at his on-going trial in the Hague, 15 February 2023. Photo: courtesy of UNMICT
The arrest of Felicien Kabuga in 2020 briefly made global headlines – less because of the horrific crimes he is alleged to have enabled during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, but more because he was found living in central Paris where he had been for several years. Sheltered by his family based in France, Belgian and the UK, the alleged genocidaire was also sheltered by the apathy – or worse – of these governments. If it takes a global pandemic to find the will, resources and time to locate a major genocide suspect living for several years in the heart of a major European capital city then the auspices for future judicial break-thoughs look bleak.
Also in 2020, the French investigative organisation Mediapart tracked down the former head of Rwanda military intelligence during 1994, Aloys Ntiwiragabo. This alleged genocidaire, was linked to an extremist network in Rouen, long known as the ‘European capital of genocidaire.’ Like Kabuga, questions are raised about how he entered France and was – and is – able to live without the authorities taking any action against him.
Aloys Ntiwiragabo, (above) is also co-founded of terrorist group FDLR, formed in DRC from fugitive elements of the genocidal militia and military with the aim of returning to Rwanda to ‘finish the work’ of 1994 after overthrowing the current government. He was joined in France by many other FDLR supporters – including Colonel Christophe Hakizabera and Colonel Augustin Munyakayanza.
2024 and the future
2023 began with two trials on-going which can be read about elsewhere on Justice 4 Genocide: two suspected genocidaire and long-time fugitives from justice: one (Felicien Kabgua) is in the dock defending himself, the other (Aloys Ntiwiragabo) acting as the innocent wronged party. Perhaps such a complete nonsensical state of affairs is symptomatic of how the approach of western nations to war criminals living in their midst is no longer fit for purpose. For many decades most denied this was the case. But when it became clear such individuals had indeed breeched their immigration systems the result has been feeble, at best, and is perhaps best summed up by just hoping somehow such individuals will just ‘go away’ or at least stay out of media and public consciousness.
On the positive side, 2023 will finally see the notorious Dr. Sosthene Munyemana stand trial in France – 28 years after the crimes he is alleged to have committed. That he has been able to live and work for years as a medical doctor in France, where he fled after the genocide, while the French legal system buried itself in the judicial sands of time rather than bring him before justice, speaks volumes of how important his adopted country takes the crimes he is accused of carrying out. Philippe Hategekimana will also stand trial in summer 2023 in Paris. Two cases, out of hundreds.
Fulgence Kayishema: alleged genocidaire finally arrested in South Africa in May 2023 after years of political wrangling held up justice.
In his address to the United Nations Security Council on 12 December 2022, UN Mechanism prosecutor Serge Brammertz noted that his tracking team were making progress in the case of fugitive Fulgence Kayishema – one of the last four key perpetrators the tribunal was tasked with bringing to justice. This individual, suspected of the murders of more than 2,000 men, women and children, was finally arrested in South Africa where he has enjoyed impunity and political protection from those trying to arrest him.
What happens when impunity wins out? Brammertz noted that in Belgrade there are already 150 murals honouring the Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladić. ‘The glorification of war criminals and revisionist denials of recent atrocities have been mainstreamed’. Moreover, his office, from receiving around 100 annual requests for assistance ten years ago, is now receiving an average of 364.
The issue of genocidaire and war criminals fleeing from the scene of their crimes needs to be recognised and judicial systems put into place to make sure they, and their crimes, are fully recognised and dealt with.