By Eric Vandenbroeck
Having covered this
subject here and here, it is interesting to note that French
police have ended a decades-long hunt for a fugitive accused of playing a key
role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, arresting
84-year-old Félicien Kabuga during a dawn raid near Paris.
Kabuga, who is
accused of financing the killings and frequently listed as one
of the world’s most wanted men, was living under a false identity in the
French capital’s suburbs, local police, and prosecutors said in a statement on
Saturday.
French officials said
Kabuga had been hiding
in an apartment in Asnières-Sur-Seine, north-west of Paris, aided by his
children who had set up an effective system to conceal him.
Kabuga also paid
large sums to
establish the hate radio RTLM. His indictment at the ICTR described a
‘strategy devised by fellow extremists, which included several components,
carefully worked out by the various prominent figures who shared the Hutu Power ideology. Kabuga had a
catalytic role in political violence. The experts found the invoices for arms
expenditures and found evidence of payments for ammunition, grenades, and
landmines. There was a high number of low-intensity weapons, cheap to buy, and
easier to stockpile. The main arms suppliers during the 1990–1994 period were
France, Belgium, South Africa, Egypt, and the People’s Republic of China. These
weapons contributed to the huge numbers of victims in the genocide, and to the
speed of the killing.
Midway through their
work, Pierre Galand and Michel Chossudovsky (in La responsabilité des bailleurs de
fonds, Brussels and Ottawa,1996) put important documents on one side in a vault
locked for safekeeping. These included documents they believed useful for
future prosecutions; they then left Rwanda to fulfill professional commitments
in Brussels. But when they returned to the bank some weeks later, they found
the vault empty, their collection missing. They tried to replace the missing
documents by looking for carbon copies in the Ministry of Defence
and Ministry of Finance.
This was not the only
time evidence disappeared. Sometimes the files they needed went missing or
files were spirited away from them so quickly that those seizing them left a
literal trail of paper on the floor, or they would arrive at the right place
and the documents had vanished days before. They soon worked out that the
disappearances were systematic. Galand believed Hutu
Power moles were all over the new administration.1 He suspected there were
people working at the BNR whose intention was to prevent full discovery.
The Rwandans who had
fled abroad and were implicated in the genocide were trying to protect
themselves and were paying bank staff to get rid of certain records. Both Galand and Chossudovsky urgently appealed to senior
officials in the UN Development Programme to help the
new Rwandan government to protect the archives, but they did not receive an
adequate response.
In the three-year
period studied by these experts, one of the poorest countries in the world
became the third-largest importer of weapons on the African continent. The army
increased from 5,000 to 40,000 across all ranks.
Clear warnings to the
World Bank were found in the documents of the BNR. Rwanda was the subject of a
Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) under an
agreement signed in October 1990. In their eventual report in November 1996, Galand and Chossudovsky pointed out that the austerity
measures imposed on the country had no effect on military spending, but
education, health, and infrastructure were all subject to funding cuts. There
were famine and a dramatic increase in unemployment. The incidence of severe
child malnutrition increased dramatically, as did the number of recorded cases
of malaria.2 In a damning conclusion, the experts showed how money to pay for
the genocide preparations came from quick disbursing loans from Western donors
who entered into agreements with the regime stipulating that funds must be used
not for military or paramilitary purposes but for necessary goods such as food
and equipment.
The experts concluded
that the money to pay for the genocide came from loans granted to the regime in
June 1991, from the International Development Association (IDA), the African
Development Fund (AFD), the European Development Fund, and bilateral donors
including Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the United States, Belgium, and
Canada.
The World Bank
president, Lewis Preston, wrote a letter in April 1992 and raised his
objections with Habyarimana about the militarisation
of Rwanda. It came one month after the Rwandan Ministry of Defence
concluded a further US$6 million deal with Egypt that benefited from a
guarantee from French bank Crédit Lyonnais. The first deal in October 1990 for
US$5.889 million was followed by another in December for US$3.511 million. By
April 1991, the Rwandan government had spent US$10.861 million on Egyptian weapons.
In June 1992, a further US$1.3 million was given to Egypt. A November deal
included 25,000 rounds of ammunition, and in February 1993, 3,000 automatic
rifles, AKM guns and 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and thousands of landmines
and grenades. The largest arms deal in March 1992 was for US$6 million for
light weapons and small arms and included 450 Kalashnikov rifles, 2,000
rocket-propelled grenades, 16,000 mortar shells, and more than 3 million rounds
of small-arms ammunition.
Galand
believed that the international financial institutions owed reparations to the
people of Rwanda as a result of their negligence. Five missions were sent by
the World Bank to follow and supervise the Structural Adjustment Programme between June 1991 and October 1993. Only in
December 1993 did the World Bank suspend the payment of a tranche of money
because certain objectives were not met.
The arrest will raise
questions about how he was able to evade
justice for so long and live so close to Paris, at least in recent years.
Kabuga was indicted
by the UN international criminal tribunal for Rwanda in 1997 on seven counts,
including genocide. Following the victory of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front under Paul Kagame, he fled first to Switzerland but was
expelled. It is thought he then travelled to Kinshasa, the capital of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. He narrowly avoided arrest in Nairobi, Kenya,
in 1996.
The Rwanda tribunal
formally closed in 2015 and its duties were taken over by the International
Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), which also deals with cases
left over from the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The arrest of
Félicien Kabuga today is a reminder that those responsible for genocide can be
brought to account, even 26 years after their crimes.
Following the
completion of appropriate procedures under French law, Kabuga is expected to be transferred to the
custody of the IRMCT, where he will stand trial.
Two others who remain
at large are Protais
Mpiranya and Augustin Bizimana.
On 6 April 1994, a
plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana , a Hutu, was shot down,
killing all on board. Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) an accusation it denied.
In a well-organized campaign
of slaughter, militias were given hit lists of Tutsi victims. Many were killed
with machetes in acts of appalling brutality.
One of the militias
was the ruling party's youth wing, the Interahamwe, which set up road blocks to
find Tutsis, incited hatred via radio broadcasts and carried out house-to-house
searches.
Little was done
internationally to stop the killings. The UN had forces in Rwanda but the
mission was not given the mandate to act, and so most peacekeepers pulled out.
The RPF, backed by
Uganda, started gaining ground and marched on Kigali. Some two million Hutus
fled, mainly to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The RPF was accused
of killing thousands of Hutus as it took power, although
it denied that.
Dozens of Hutus were
convicted for their role in the killings by the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda, and hundreds of thousands more faced trial in community courts in
Rwanda.
1. L’horreur
qui nous prend au visage, Testimony Pierre Galand, 186.
2. L’horreur qui nous
prend au visage, Testimony Eric Gillet, 228.
3. Rapport sur les
financements du génocide au Rwanda: première expérience d’audit. Interview de Pierre Galand
par Renaud Duterme, 29 Novembre 2016. For the
interview and full report: www.cadtm.org/ Le Génocide.
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