Compassion in truth, Charles Onana’s struggle for historical justice
- Nicoletta Fagiolo
- 19 hours ago
- 26 min read
A trial was held in Paris from the 711 of October 2024 against investigative journalist and historian Dr Charles Onana and his editor Damien Serieyx, accused of genocide denial concerning a book The truth about Operation Turquoise: when the archives speak,[i] published in 2019, on the UN mandated French-led Operation Turquoise in Rwanda 1994. The complaining parties are seven French-based NGOs : Ibuka-France, Survie-France, the International Federation for Human Rights FIDH, the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism LICRA, the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda CPCR, the Human Rights League LDH, and the Rwandan Community of France. Both Dr Charles Onana and his editor Damien Serieyx were convicted in December 2024.
A French law passed in January 2017 - an amendment introduced to article 24 bis of the law on freedom of the press - can today condemn anyone who questions the Tutsi genocide narrative when analyzing the Rwandan tragedy: denying, trivializing or contesting the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda is punishable in France by one year of imprisonment and a fine of up to 45,000 euros.
As the appeal gets underway in Paris this autumn, we thought it useful to summarize the content of the 662-page book - The truth about Operation Turquoise, when archives speak – which is also the fruit of a doctoral thesis obtained by Charles Onana in 2017 at the University of Lyon and endorsed by an international panel who recognized its scholarly value. Why is it being legally attacked for genocide denial and do the allegations hold?
By analyzing a variety of archival documents from different countries, as well as the UN archives, Onana paints a picture of recent Rwandan history from the October 1990 invasion, the Arusha peace accords, the military buildup of the Rwandan Patriotic Front RPF and its US and Ugandan-backed regime change ambitions ; the aftermaths of the Presidential assassination on 6 April 1994; the psychological warfare lashed out mainly via media against France by the RPF and its allies; the political and military situation preceding the deployment of the Operation Turquoise and the invasion of Zaire (then Congo).
By letting the archives speak for themselves a different version of recent Rwandan history, more complex and nuanced, surfaces. The relentless cease-fire requests and UN intervention requests on the part of the interim government so as to halt the massacres, forces one to ask the question if such requests fit the dominant narrative. The factual evidence which surfaces also debunks the false allegations of French involvement in the Rwandan genocide. A position recently vindicated, six years after the book’s publication and 8 years after the PhD was held, by a Paris Court of Appeal[ii] in December 2024, where the French soldiers of the Operation Turquoise, who had been accused by some of the same NGOs acting as plaintiffs in the Onana trial, saw all charges against them dismissed.
After 18 years of judicial proceedings this sentence, decided just a few days after Onana’s and Serieyx,’s convictions in December 2024, vindicates Onana’s research on Operation Turquoise.
Rwanda 1994: Complex patterns of violence on the ground
Onana and his editor have been charged of denying, minimizing or downplaying the genocide against the Tutsi for stating, in 19 sentences chosen from the book by the plaintiffs, that, summarizing the main points : all ethnic groups, Hutus, Tutsis and Twa, died in the massacres; Rwanda 1994 has been read almost exclusively by looking at a 100-day genocide whereas the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s RPF long term regime change ambitions, which began prior to 1990 and later extended to include eastern Zaire (today’s Congo), a policy that developed over years, is a more efficient lens to understand the tragic events; the evidence of a plan for genocide which the Habyarimana regime was organizing that the RPF stated they had on 12 April 1994, one week after the commencement of the massacres,
was unfounded and the conspiracy and/or planification of the genocide was barely proven at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ICTR ; many scholars (in particular the sentence refers to the two American sociologists Allan Stam and Christian Davenport) [i] working on Rwanda have been called genocide deniers; judicial notice for genocide decided at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ICTR in 2006 is not a healthy legal precedent; and focus on the French-led UN-mandated Operation Turquoise has led analysts and journalists to look at France and overlook grave RPF crimes or the involvement of other countries in the Rwandan tragedy. None of the affirmations above reflect genocide denial, and are backed up by hard archival evidence.
In the first chapter, entitled The context and construction of a prosecution case file, irrefutable factual details surface from the variety of archival documents consulted by Onana: the unpreparedness of Rwandan army and government officials in facing events following the 6 April airplane assassinations, many seeking security in foreign embassies or the UN mission; the repeated cease- fire calls on the part of the Rwandan interim government since the first day it was sworn in on 9 April and the RPF’s repeated refusal of all cease-fire proposals; the general disarray and chaos and non- existent administrative authority the government faced, a fact denounced by foreign diplomats and Rwandan officers; the army and gendarmerie trying to stop rouge elements from the presidential guard and/or militia attacks; the FAR Rwandan national army repeatedly calling for the RPF to lay down its arms and negotiate; the Rwandan interim government seeking an international intervention force to help halt the massacres and the RPF’s refusal of any deployment of a peace keeping force.
These factual details do not depict a government that had meticulously planned a genocide.
Furthermore, just one week after the beginning of the massacres the RPF called for regime change, as well as already defining the events as a Tutsi genocide, all while refusing to return to the negotiating table: these facts all point to a different and more nuanced story that the simplistic, Manichean one internationally known as the dominant narrative on Rwanda 1994 that the RPF invaded Rwanda so as to stop the genocide unleashed and pre-planned by the Habyarimana regime and carried forth by the interim government..
RPF’s chief representative to North America and the United Nations in New York Claude Dusaidi demanded to call the massacres a Tutsi genocide as early as 12 April 1994, Onana finds in a press release in the United Nations Security Council UNSC archives. It’s an astonishing detail. Dusaidi also stated at the end of April 1994 that the RPF had irrefutable proof that the Habyarimana government had planned the genocide. Onana calls out the RPF’s claims at such an early stage, calling it a scam. Misleadingly, most French newspapers, when reporting on the Onana conviction wrongly write[ii] that for Onana the genocide was a ”scam.” This deliberate falsification was presented by the plaintiffs as proof of genocide denial, and upheld by the Judges sentence.
Yet the question of when and by whom the events in Rwanda 1994 were endorsed by the United Nations as a Tutsi genocide is a historically important question to answer.
We thus learn that it was via RPF’s press releases at the United Nations and US foreign policy stances that pushed for the term to be officially endorsed at the UN Security Council. Madeleine Albright, serving as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton, pushed with Argentina and the Cech Republic, for the terms’ acceptance within the United Nations Security Council. Other members strongly disagreed stating that the patterns of violence on the ground in Rwanda did not resemble a genocide: for example, Nigeria’s UN Ambassador Ibrahim Gambari insisted the situation was a tragic escalation of a two-sided civil war between the Rwandan army and the Tutsi-led RPF rebels, rather than a systematic, one-sided extermination. Yet the term genocide was eventually endorsed, without asking for prior on the ground investigations to take place.
As early as 18 May 1994 the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Toby Trister Gati distinguished between the Rwandan interim government and the RPF crimes: only the first were considered genocidal, whereas the RPF had, according to Gati, not violated the Geneva conventions. Also at this point in time no investigations had been conducted.
Thus, the framing of the patterns of violence on the ground were established prior to any international investigation. This is what mainly concerns Onana and why, when the legal implications of the term could not have been established at that point in time, the term is placed in quotation marks in the text. Placing the word in quotation marks is a common and effective way to show one means a loose, political, or social use of the term, rather than the strict legal definition under international law. Yet, the use of quotation marks on the part of Onana, when for example discussing the timeline on the terms’ introduction into UN official language, was one of the main accusations used by the plaintiffs in their case, equating their use to genocide denial.
“Leave Mbarara alone,” aiding and abetting a covert regime change operation
One of the main contested topics the plaintiffs criticized is Onana’s insistence on adding an additional layer of explanations, namely the US, Ugandan backed RPF regime change operation and its implications in the tragic events, is corroborated by a variety of archival evidence.[iii]
In The darker side of an accusatory campaign, the third chapter of Operation Turquoise, the RPF Sacramento meeting where it laid out its policy and military options; the attacks in October 1990 and the various cease-fire breaches on the part of the RPF since its initial invasion are covered. Furthermore the chapter reveals countless archival documents and testimonies clearly revealing the regime change ambitions of the RPF Bernard Debré, who served as the French Minister for Cooperation between 1994 and 1995, recalls a meeting at the RPF headquarters in Kigali where the RPF spoke to him of coming to power through blood three month before the war began in April 1994; a former lieutenant and defector from the Rwandan Patriotic Front Abdul Ruibiza underscores that the RPF acted as a part of Uganda’s national army NRA, since specific military orders had to be signed by Ugandan authorities; the June 1992 anti-Habyarimana coalition in Brussels which had legitimate grievances, ended up derailing the Arusha peace process since soon after its signature, the RPF again broke the cease-fire.
During Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire initial 1993 deployment in Rwanda he led the United Nations Observer Mission Uganda-Rwanda UNOMUR. Before commanding the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda UNAMIR mission inside Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, he was tasked with monitoring the border from the Ugandan side. His mission was to ensure that no covert military assistance or weapons were flowing from Uganda to Paul Kagame’s rebel forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Front RPF.
During the ICTR “Military I” trial proceedings (where Dallaire testified intensively from January 19 to 27 2004, defense lawyers cross- examined him heavily regarding the UN’s monitoring of the Uganda- Rwanda border. Defense attorneys for the former Rwandan military officers explicitly used the issue of Mbarara to argue that the UN turned a blind eye to RPF violations. When defense counsel confronted Dallaire with intelligence reports showing that the RPF
was loading weapons, training troops, and operating freely out of the Mbarara military base, Dallaire admitted to the court that his hands were tied. Mbarara was a major transport hub and Ugandan military base located about 80 miles north of the Rwandan border. Dallaire had received intelligence that a massive weapons arsenal in Mbarara was being actively used by the Ugandan army to supply and train the RPF but did nothing.
Dallaire testified that when he raised alarms about Mbarara and requested permission to extend the UNOMUR investigation zone beyond the strict 20-kilometer border limit to inspect the base, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations DPKO[iv] in New York denied the request. They instructed him to strictly adhere to the established border mandate and terms agreed upon with the Ugandan government, effectively telling him to “leave Mbarara alone.”
In the ICTR trials, this specific admission from Dallaire was utilized as a fact by the defense teams: they used his words to establish that the UN Secretariat and Western powers deliberately ignored the RPF’s logistical pipeline in Uganda. They argued that by forcing Dallaire to “leave Mbarara alone,” the UN allowed an illegal flow of troops and heavy artillery to cross into Rwanda completely unchecked.
The very least one can say today is that there was no rigorous border verification enforced by the UN on the Rwandan-Ugandan boarder and that the RPF was allowed to reinforce itself. Onana provides ample archival and testimonial evidence for this fact : countless UNOMUR reports; Canadian UNAMIR commander Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, and military intelligence officers Lieutenant Marc Nees,[v] and Amadou Deme ; former RPF lieutenant Abdul Ruibiza; Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General SRSG and civilian head of the UNAMIR Jacques Booh Booh and professor emeritus at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and witness at the ICTR André Guichaoua all underscore that the United Nations had failed in keeping the RPF’s rearmament in check. Belgian professor emeritus of law and politics at the University of Antwerp and a prominent, long-standing Western expert on Rwanda, Filip Reyntjens speaks, amongst others, of an unusual state of alert that the RPF had imposed on its rebel army as early as the 3 of April 1994. To deny the international war of aggression which Rwanda faced since 1 October 1990 and its direct implications in the one million refugees living on the outskirts of Kigali by 1993, and in the events that followed, is a historical obfuscation which has huge legal and social-political repercussions.
Onana simply asks his readers to look at the genocide by expanding the time frame beyond the 100-day genocide and placing it within a socio-political and geopolitical context, a context that the archives reveal in their naked restitution of the events.
Two US convert regime change operations
Only one of the sentences the plaintiffs chose to attack Dr. Onana’s writings concerns the books topic, the Operation Turquoise, and it reads: “ The regular media offensive of accusations leveled by Paul Kagame’s regime against Operation Turquoise is simply intended to divert attention from the massacres committed by both sides and, above all, to conceal the obsession with seizing power through arms and violence.”
The media offensive the sentence refers to is meticulously analyzed by Onana in Operation Turquoise and we see emerge a hefty and coordinated psychological warfare campaign on the part of the USA and the RPF against France on the Rwanda dossier. Allegations were made that were unfounded, yet when repeated ad nauseam in English speaking media and eventually picked up by French media, became part of the dominant narrative. Speaking against the French intervention was also picked up by the French left, who interpreted all intervention on the part of France in Africa as suspicious of French neocolonial policies. Especially when Operation Turquoise was about to be deployed the allegations went from arming and helping the interim government exfiltrate Rwanda, to actually participating in the genocide.
Onana analyzes the discussions and policy decisions on the Operation Turquoise within the French cohabitation government, revealing stark differences concerning the humanitarian mission between the Quai d’Orsay Foreign Ministry, Alain Juppé), Matignon (Prime Minister, Édouard Balladur) and the Elysée (office of the President of the French RepublicFrancois Mitterrand). The genocide complicity allegations are easily debunked when digging through the archives and reading the cabinet meetings on the topic, as well as other primary sources.
Onana also debunks Captain Guilliaume Ancel’s unsubstantiated media statements: a former soldier with Operation Turquoise, Guilliaume Ancel gave a testimony 20 years after the fact, in 2014, claiming France allegedly planned to raid Kigali, that the humanitarian intervention was a cover up whose aim as actually to stop the RPF from taking over and at the same time helping (also by arming) and exfiltrating the interim government. The first debunking of these affirmations is the timing, as they were made two decades later. Reading his own report from December 1994, Ancel contradicts what he is stating decades later.
Furthermore, Onana notes that “his statements are totally incoherent with the political-military reality of the moment.” Namely the then cohabitation government Balladur-Mitterand and the striking differences they had on the Rwandan dossier: memos of cabinet meeting show preoccupations and decisions that needed to be made prior to the deployment on which not all present agreed: the time frame, the UN mandate, the area of intervention, etc.
The claims by Ancel can be further easily debunked by hearing the testimony today of former Rwandan Minister of the Interior of the interim government Jerome Bicamumpaka, who underscores that France was at that moment isolated on the world stage and they as Rwandans were aware the country could not do much for them, all while the RPF was advancing militarily. The statements from this interview can be corroborated by a memo of the interim government dating 2 July 1994 by Minister of the Interior Édouard Kamerere that France had no intention of helping them, their priority was setting up a safe zone and he also underlined they seemed to be keen on mainly protecting Mobutu from the exploding refugee crisis in eastern Zaire; no sign of an offensive order on the part of Operation Turquoise can be found anywhere in various archives. The memo written on 27 June by General Christien Quesnot, Chief of Staff of the Armed Services Ancel’s boss) also indicates other logistical preoccupations.
One of the main aspects that come forth from the above and other primary sources is that France wanted at all costs to avoid coming into contact with RPF forces
On 2 July 1994 three military options are laid out by Admiral Jaques Lanxade for France and the one focusing on establishing a secure zone was maintained ; we learn from a Rwandan government memo that France did not consult Rwandan authorities on their deployment.
Then Minister of Cooperation Bernard Debré says with hindsight that President Mitterrand would maybe have liked to extend the operation to cover all of Rwanda, but the Prime Minister refused; the cohabitation government from February 1993 radically changed French policy in Rwanda, moving it towards disengagement. The troops of Operation Noroît [vi]that had come to help the Habyarimana government defend itself from the RPF invasion in 1 October 1990 had left in December 1993. General Didier Tauzin also underlines the internal political division in France that weekend its policy decisions on Rwanda.
The Operation Turquoise did stabilize over one million people which did not flee to Zaire immediately, Zaire where the cholera epidemic was exploding and thousands of Rwandan refugees were dying; the tragic moment where mass graves had to be dug to stop the cholera epidemic from spreading rapidly, is recalled in Operation Turquoise, via harrowing testimonies of what it means to burry 45,000 Rwandan refugees.
Journalists and analysts by focusing on France’s role and Operation Turquoise, overlooked other operations in the same period, such as Operation Support Hope USA, Operation Gabriel UK, Operation Scotch and Passage Canada) and Interns Hope Israel) that were all non-UN-mandated deployments, unlike the French operation. Onana analyses the US Operation Support Hope via the declassified Clinton archives and the US State department archives, which reveal much about Washington’s close relationship with the newly installed Tutsi- led RPF regime. Onana asks that further archives be opened in other countries to examine their role in the Rwandan tragedy.
Judi Rever writing in Rwanda’s 30-year assault on Congo, on the US Operation Guardian Assistance, deployed from November 13 to December 27, 1996, to Entebbe, Uganda, with a smaller forward element operating in Kigali, underscores: “under the guise of helping repatriate refugees, the United States legitimized Kagame’s pretext for invading Congo and then provided his army with logistics and intelligence for overthrowing Mobutu. Washington therefore used a humanitarian operation as a ruse to conduct regime change.” [vii]
Lawfare on steroids
The new French press law bases its analysis of the genocide as an exclusively Tutsi genocide on preceding judicial hearings, both international at the ICTR and national under universal jurisdiction. However, a closer look at how some of these proceedings unfolded calls for serious concern.
Charles Onana and his editor Damien Serieyx at trial Paris Courthouse, October 2024.
Criticism of the ICTR procedures, and in particular the use of judicial notice for genocide was another sentence under attack, however many scholars have been critical of its use : having a critical opinion on international justice procedures or the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR in general, as Onana has having already published an investigation in 2005, The Secrets of International Justice: Rigged Investigations into the Rwandan Genocide (Les secrets de la justice internationale: Enquêtes truquées sur le génocide rwandais), or on the courts grave shortcomings, is not covered by the new French press law on genocide denial.
Furthermore, several legal scholars strongly condemned or criticized the ICTR for its expansive use of judicial notice, particularly following the landmark June 16, 2006, Appeals Chamber decision in Prosecutor v. Karemera. In that ruling, the tribunal took judicial notice of the Rwandan genocide as an indisputable “fact of common knowledge,” meaning prosecutors no longer had to prove in every individual trial that a genocide had occurred.
Scholars argued that using judicial notice bypassed essential legal principles, threatened the rights of the accused, and compromised the historical record. In his seminal and widely cited paper, Taking Judicial Notice of Genocide? The Problematic Law and Policy of the Karemera Decision, legal scholar Ralph Mamiya argued that the Appeals Chamber’s decision was both “illogical and unwise.” He asserted that “genocide,” because it requires proving specific intent (dolus specialis), is a complex legal and historical conclusion rather than a simple “fact of common knowledge.” Mamiya also argued that taking judicial notice threatened the rights of defendants and short- circuited the creation of a meticulous, evidence-backed historical record that international tribunals are mandated to produce. He instead proposed treating it as a “previously adjudicated fact” under Rule 94B to preserve judicial flexibility, further asserting that “genocide,” because it requires proving specific intent (dolus specialis), is a complex legal and historical conclusion rather than a simple “fact of common knowledge” ; Professor and scholar Kevin Jon Heller was highly critical of the Karemera decision arguing that by taking judicial notice that a genocide occurred, the ICTR fundamentally relieved the prosecution of its burden to prove a core contextual element of the crime. He contended that this infringed upon the defendant’s right to a fair trial, noting that even “obvious” historical facts must be legally proven when they form part of a criminal charge; a human rights law scholar and expert on international legal clinics, Richard J. Wilson raised concerns regarding how the tightening of trial procedures—such as the expansive use of judicial notice—impacted the tribunal’s overall impartiality, noting that such measures left the ICTR open to defense claims of “victor’s justice” and compromised the court’s ability to assemble an unassailable, neutral historical archive; Prominent international legal professional and senior executive specializing in International Criminal Law, transitional justice, and human rights Laetitia Husson, in her rigorous academic analysis published in the Revue québécoise de droit international argued that the Appeals Chamber used the doctrine of judicial notice in a novel and problematic manner asserting that the court sacrificed the rights of the accused in favor of bureaucratic and efficiency concerns, thereby risking the institutional legitimacy of the Arusha tribunal. She maintained that legal conclusions and facts closely tied to the elements of a crime should remain prohibited subjects of judicial notice; an expert on mass atrocity sentencing and international tribunals, Mark Drumbl has frequently critiqued the structural “clumsiness” of applying traditional legal doctrines to mass-crime scenarios. While understanding the impulse behind the Karemera ruling, Drumbl’s broader critiques emphasize that when international courts use procedural shortcuts to satisfy historical narratives, they inadvertently stifle defensive legal maneuvers and compromise strict adherence to adversarial fairness; Prominent ICTR Defense Counselors such as Christopher Black and Peter Robinson, heavily influenced the scholarly discourse on this issue, vehemently arguing both in court and in subsequent legal forums that judicially noticing the genocide amounted to a directed verdict on a critical element of the prosecution’s case. They asserted it established an irrebuttable presumption of context that severely prejudiced the defense; British political scientist and author John Laughland argues that judicial notice in international tribunals is weaponized to transform highly controversial historical and political narratives into irrefutable state dogmas.
By the time Arusha was set up one version of the Rwandan events had already triumphed. For example, Thierry Cruvellier, who covered the Arusha tribunal for five years, in Court of Remorse states that the defense lawyers at the ICTR moved from an initial general stance of not accepting the Tutsi genocide narrative and its planification, to eventually accepting it, as otherwise their clients risked being condemned a priori.
As early as end of April 1996 the ICTR register announced that the Office of the Prosecutor would not exhume any more mass graves following Tutsi survivor association demonstrations. This halt forced the Office of the Prosecutor to rely much more heavily on eyewitness testimonies rather than physical forensic evidence to build its historic genocide cases moving forward. Yet Cruvellier underscores that most of the Prosecution witnesses’ testimonies were anonymous, thus often equivalent to hearsay, as no defense cross-examination can take place. Cruvellier speaks of bad judicial habits which became the norm in Arusha.
It was the Jean-Paul Akayesu judgement in September 1998 that further enforced that one part of the population, the Tutsis, were targeted by another part of the population, the Hutus.
Criticism of the way the ICTR trials were handled from following due process, to the right of the defense to a fair and speedy trial, to outright harassment and torture of the accused, all point to what one ICTR defense lawyer Jan-Marie Biju-Duval identified as “judicial methods and behavior that are contradictory to the rules of justice.”[viii] The prime minister of Rwanda’s interim government Jean Kambanda’s thirty-six report – Manifesto about the truth of the apocalypse in Rwanda, was withheld from the Judges by Kambanda’s own defense lawyer in 1998. Again, an extraordinary breach of due process that should, but did not, have judicial consequences. Kambanda had been held in incommunicado in a separate prison for nine months following his arrest in July 1997and was denied a lawyer of his choice. According to British political analyst John Laughland, Jean Kambanda was subjected to psychological torture. In Laughland‘s A History of Political Trials he heavily critiques the ICTR and details how Kambanda’s confession was obtained: keeping Kambanda in complete isolation for nine months in a secret villa in Nairobi and Dodoma constituted severe psychological torture designed to break his will; Kambanda was intentionally denied independent legal counsel of his choice during this period, leaving him entirely at the mercy of prosecutors. The book asserts that Kambanda’s guilty plea was not a free admission of guilt but a travesty manufactured under intense psychological duress and deceptive promises of protection for his family. “In the days after Kambanda was sentenced to life in prison in 1998, the few members of the prosecution team who had worked directly on the case readily admitted their discomfort with the way the case had been handled. Off-the-record conversations revealed a mixture of embarrassment, shame, anger, sarcasm, not to mention deep, moral vexation after reading the documents that Kambanda had written while in detention, writes Cruvellier. He continues: “ by saving itself from having to hold a trial , thanks to a deal struck by the prosecutor and the accused, the tribunal also created an illusion of justice. In no longer serving the interests of truth, it allowed the interests of the institution to dominate.” [ix]Cruvellier writes here that the Arusha tribunal was not serving justice, one cannot help but ask: what and whom was the court thus serving?
Author and investigative journalist Judi Rever in her recent book Rwanda’s 30-year assault on the Congo, the crimes, the criminals and the cover-up, also depicts a disparaging image of what she calls “judicial malfeasance” on the part of the ICTR : “the tribunal was aware of the industrial level massacres” on the part of the RPF but at the “behest of the United States”, had been intent on protecting Kagame by denying “Kagame’s victims the dignity of telling their stories and preserving memory for future generations”. (... ) “Any individual who has had a part in obstructing, dismissing or hiding evidence of Kagame’s crimes to protect this powerful criminal has blood on their hands, as do US officials who conducted regime change in Congo in 199697. And while the international courts remain rigged in Kagame’s favor, there may be other ways to seek justice by targeting Westerners who have been criminally complicit.”
Judi Rever asks the difficult question if President Paul Kagame had been indicted during the initial Arusha proceedings could the war and genocide in Congo have been avoided? : "There is no doubt that if the ICTR had prosecuted Kagame and his senior commanders, it could have stopped Kagame’s dark crusade in Congo.” Rever underscores that in her previous book In paise of blood she pointed to the grave shortcoming of the ICTR and “argued that the United Nations had protected an elite group of mass murderers and allowed the court to become an instrument of injustice.” Rever also cites more recent ICC shortcomings such as going after low-level suspects arrested for the DRC crisis, or worse refusing to examine the issue of command responsibility for Rwandan warlord Bosco Ntaganda, thus again protecting Kagame by only going after his proxies.[x]
Brainless genocide
Lawyer Raphaël Constant, who will be representing Onana in the appeal proceedings this upcoming September, worked for the ICTR defending Théoneste Bagosora, the former Director of Cabinet in the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, who was widely regarded as the chief mastermind of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Bagosora.
“ This lawyer from Martinique had a passion for history of a merry, militant, communist separatist from the French west indies and the level-headedness that intelligence bestows on men who have managed to accept failed revolutions without becoming bitter. His professional integrity, coupled with a strong sense of human indulgence, often led him to play the role of a sage in the restless ranks of the defense lawyers[xi], ”writes Cruvellier on Constant.
Constant dedicated his entire career at the tribunal exclusively to the defense of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora. His involvement spanned from his formal appointment in 1997 through the extensive Military I[xii] trial and up until the final Appeals Chamber judgment in December 2011. Aside from his core duty as lead defense counsel, his broader presence in Arusha included serving as the Deputy Secretary General of the Association of Defense Lawyers at the Tribunal (ADAD), where he advocated for procedural equity and the rights of all defense teams operating at the ICTR.
On this trial Cruvellier writes: “The carelessness with which individual cases were handled at the UN tribunal did not differ much from that characterizing the body of work, research, investigations, and reports that had been done since the end of the genocide. Hundreds of people had seen their names freely offered up to pubic suspicion.”[xiii]
Bagosora waited six years for his trial to begin. At trial the prosecutor said he had identified a Hutu equivalent of the Nazi Wannsee conference where the final solution was planned. A tape was said to exist but never materialized. Lots of the evidence for proving planning was based on a commission from December 2 to 21 1991. Yet “this was the first snag in the theory advanced by prosecutor Chile Eboe- Osuji. How could the criminal conspiracy have originated within a commission whose members included some of the most famous senior officers in the government army who opposed the massacres in 1994?” asks Cruvellier. Colonel Felicien Muberuka, Commander Pierre Claver Karangwa, Colonel Marcel Gatsinzi, major Augustin Cyiza. They either never testified or as is the case with Commander Pierre Claver Karangwa, whose contract as a prosecution witness was terminated by the Court on charges that he was somehow involved in the genocide. Eerily more recently in the Netherland he was arrested on 3 October 2023 and is currently under detention on genocide charges. The court’s official judgment and verdict are scheduled to be released on 28 August 2026. Differing voices go unheard.
On his 18 December 2008 conviction Cruvellier underlines: “ only as a superior and over three days, from 6 to 9 of April 1994. That was it. The allegations of direct involvement did not hold. All of the charges of conspiracy were essentially dismissed. On the one hand, the judgement was once again an indictment of the appalling quality of the investigations. On the other hand, it showed how, fifteen years later, a reasonable court could no longer support the official, simplistic narrative of the genocide.” [xiv]
Cruvelleir later wrote an article, Brainless genocide,[xv] on the Bagosora case, as the “popular historical clues to the planning of the genocide have not held up in court” , it is the only term he could come up with. Cruvellier felt at the Court there had been an “abdication of responsible, honest work”, such as for example “corroboration was no longer sought by the prosecutor,” which at the very least raises questions if due process was followed at all at Arusha.
Cruvellier writes that “the judges did not offer the explanation for the genocide” (the italics are his). Bagosora was acquitted of intent to commit genocide before 6 April 1994, as the conspiracy theory did not hold. In the sentence the Judges also highlight the importance of looking through a military lens (the war) rather than only a genocide lens to analyze criminal intent . For the Judges the defense meetings or training of militias was not proof of such criminal intent. “ Indeed, these preparations are completely consistent with a plan to commit genocide. However, they are also consistent with preparations for a political or military power struggle” the judges sad. “ It cannot be excluded that the extended campaign of violence directed against Tutsis, as such, became an added or an altered component of these preparations” they concluded. Bagosora judgement ICTR, December 18 2008. (emphasis mine)
Whose history, whose memory?
Out of 21 ministers of the interim government, the one charged of being behind the state-run genocide, nine were arrested and acquitted but spent decades in prison, setting a dangerous legal precedent in international law, a grave shortcoming and breach of the right of the defendant to a speedy trial, which is unfortunately also found at the International Criminal Court in The Hague; ; 8 were arrested and sentenced in Arusha ; one was arrested and sentenced in Rwanda ; 5 were not arrested. Thus 14 out of 21 ,more than half were either acquitted or not arrested. Can it be considered a genocidal government? In pro-RPF propaganda, picked up by most western main stream newspapers, this government was called self- proclaimed, yet it followed the country’s legal constitutional procedures in a crisis and was also recognized as the legal government by the UN on 25 May 1994.
Also considering the relentless calls for a cease-fire, it is hard to phantom that this governments’ aim was to commit genocide. That the enemy was the RPF and their allies is corroborated by the commission document, of which only an extract was presented in Court in Arusha, as it was only fully published for the first time on 5 November 2024. Another reason why much still needs to be explored and researched in recent Rwandan history.
A recent 2022 book Survivors Uncensored, which contains a collection of 106 Rwandan testimonies of survivors of the genocide produced by the Rwandan platform Ribara Uwariraye, wants to put an end to this apartheid of victims in today’s Rwanda. They ask the crucial question: “ Do we have the right to tell survivors to change their stories so that they can fit into the official narrative?”
Many testimonies from Survivors Uncensored place the 1 October 1990 war as a watershed moment in the country’s history: the moment peace disappeared, the moment people began seeing each other through ethnic identities, the moment insecurity was felt in the country or the moment the internal refugee problem began. “Life was never the same since that day (...) in the years to come Kigali would be littered with refugees from the north of Rwanda fleeing the war and atrocities committed by the RPF”, writes Claude Gatebuke in Survivors Uncensored.
Many others have written that the genocide cannot be separated from the war backdrop. Even though pro-Kagame writers treat the war and genocide as separate, unconnected events, American political scientist, author, and professor Lee Ann Fujii found that Rwandans did not see it that way: “The most common word that people used to refer to the period of 199094 is intambara, which means ‘war.’ People seemed to use this word most often despite there being multiple ways to refer to ‘genocide’ in Kinyarwanda, indicating perhaps a shared understanding of how closely linked the two forms of violence were.”[xvi]
Those familiar with Rwanda’s brutal crackdown on dissents from all walks of life are aware that genocide denial is weaponized by the current Kagame regime to silence any form of dissidence. It is a shame that so far France has been aiding and abetting the silencing of those who denounce and demand, with great humility and compassion, the recognition of grave crimes against humanity.
NOTES :
Comments