He bankrolled a genocide. His arrest now sends a message
Time has a funny way of catching up with people.
Perhaps that thought crossed Félicien Kabuga’s mind when police arrested him over the weekend in Paris. On the run for more than 25 years, Kabuga was finally detained on several charges relating to his role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kabuga is alleged to have bankrolled the Hutu extremists that killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Kabuga’s arrest serves as a warning to all those who aid, abet, fund or do business with despotic regimes. And not just in post-conflict states like Rwanda. Western companies and democracies, including Canada, are also being put on notice.
Committing atrocities doesn’t come cheap. It is often assumed that everything has to go wrong for something like a genocide to occur. In fact, everything has to go right for those with genocidal intent to succeed. It requires careful planning, implementation and, yes, a lot of money.
With some exceptions, like the Nazi industrialists who faced trial at Nuremberg following the Second World War, companies and countries that do business with and fund perpetrators of mass atrocities have historically escaped scrutiny. That is changing.
Today, business human rights is a booming field. International courts and domestic prosecutors have targeted companies for their complicity in international crimes:
French oil giant Lafarge has been indicted for crimes against humanity in Syria.
The chair of Swedish oil company Lundin has been charged with aiding and abetting crimes against humanity in South Sudan, where United Nations investigators have reported that oil companies are complicit in mass atrocities.
In Colombia, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is reportedly exploring an investigation of companies for their role in funding paramilitaries during the country’s civil war with the FARC. Even seemingly innocuous entities like banana companies, such as Dole and Del Monte, have been accused of financing Colombia’s “death squads.”
Canadian entities are far from immune:
SNC-Lavalin, which helped to legitimize the regime of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, was charged by Canadian prosecutors with bribing a leader who was eventually accused of war crimes by the ICC.
More recently, the Supreme Court of Canada paved the way for a British Columbia-based mining company, Nevsun Resources, to be sued for its role in the commission of crimes against humanity in Eritrea.
The case against Hudbay Minerals and its subsidiaries, for human rights violations committed during the eviction of Indigenous villagers in Guatemala, is proceeding through the Canadian courts.
It is not just companies involved in doing business with regimes that commit atrocities that should be worried. The Canadian government has sent mixed messages on its arms trade, insisting that it won’t sell military weapons to human rights-violating regimes. Yet, for some reason, Saudi Arabia is exempt.
Despite the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives, the jailing of human rights advocates and allegations of war crimes committed in Yemen, the Canadian government announced last month that it would continue selling military hardware to Saudi Arabia.
This begs the question: if it’s not enough for a journalist to be slaughtered and disappeared, for atrocities to be perpetrated against civilians, and for rights advocates to be jailed, just how bad do things have to get for Canada to stop selling arms to the Saudi government?
The government insists that all is fine because a Global Affairs Canada investigation found no evidence that the military goods sold to Saudi Arabia are being used to commit atrocities. On the contrary, the investigation concluded that they “contribute to regional security.”
Others have already pointed out how incoherent and contradictory this conclusion is. Even if Canada’s military hardware was used for ostensibly defensive purposes, it should not be sold to a government whose military actions in Yemen have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, including children.
The government will, of course, insist that we must protect Canadian jobs. But that’s not a tradeoff Canadians should have to make. It is up to the government to find business partners that aren’t involved in murdering journalists or bombing school buses. If it doesn’t get it right, time might just catch up with it.