Top fugitive in Rwandan genocide arrested
Man accused of being main financier of groups behind atrocities
PARIS— He was behind the radio station whose hate-filled invectives turned Rwandan against Rwandan, neighbour against neighbour, even spouse against spouse.
He was the man, it was said, who imported the hundreds of thousands of machetes that allowed countless ordinary people to act upon that hatred in one of the last genocides of the past century.
One of the most-wanted fugitives of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Félicien Kabuga, was arrested Saturday morning in a rented home just outside Paris, protected by his children, the French authorities said. The capture of Kabuga, 84, who was living under a false identity, was the culmination of a decadeslong international hunt across many countries on at least two continents.
His arrest — considered the most important apprehension by an international tribunal in the past decade — could help bring long-awaited justice for his actions more than a generation after the killing of at least 800,000 and perhaps as many as one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the small central African nation.
His trial could also help unravel some of the enduring mysteries of the killings, particularly how much planning went into the genocide, which also led to a catastrophic war in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and continues to destabilize much of central Africa today.
Kabuga, one of Rwanda’s richest men before the genocide, is accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of being the main financier and logistical backer of the political and militia groups that committed the genocide. He had been on the run for 23 years since he was indicted on multiple charges of genocide.
“It is historical on many levels,” Rwanda’s justice minister, Johnston Busingye, said in a phone interview from the country’s capital, Kigali. “You can run, but you cannot hide. It can’t be forever.”
A tribunal official said on Saturday that Kabuga had been tracked down in France after investigators followed communications among members of his family who, the official said, had acted as his support network.
“Kabuga has always been seen by the victims and survivors as one of the leading figures,” Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, said by phone on Saturday from The
Hague. “For them, after waiting so many years, his arrest is an important step toward justice.”
Kabuga’s capture could be the most important arrest of a figure wanted by an international tribunal since the 2011 apprehension of Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Serbian military leader who was later convicted of having committed genocide during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, Brammertz said.
The arrest ended a lengthy and often-frustrating search for Kabuga by international investigators across multiple countries.
Stephen Rapp, a former chief prosecutor at the UN Rwanda tribunal, said that immediately after the genocide, Kabuga fled to Switzerland, where he unsuccessfully applied for asylum, and was then seen in other European countries before settling in Kenya for several years. Rapp said the fugitive had used assumed names and several different passports.
Believed to have been one of the most powerful men in Rwanda before the genocide, Kabuga, an ethnic Hutu, made his fortune in trade. Through the marriage of a daughter, he was linked to a former president, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, who was killed after his plane was shot down by a missile over the Rwandan capital in 1994.
Extremist Hutus accused Tutsis of carrying out the assassination, eventually triggering 100 days of killings in which tens of thousands of Rwandans, including civilians, militia and the police, participated. The Rwandan government has tried thousands of people, and the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has tried close to 80, among them senior government figures. After Kabuga’s capture, at least six senior figures suspected of participating in or orchestrating the genocide remain on an international most wanted list.