Rwanda was an African backwater renowned for its fertile soil and in particular Dian Fossey and her ‘Gorllas in the mist’. Then during 13 weeks in 1994 some 800,000 defenceless citizens were slaughtered, some 8,000
people were hacked to pieces each day. Most of the dead were minority Tutsi in a slaughter perpetrated by the dominant Hutus.
The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has been ordered to finish its deliberations by 2008. To date the ICTR has convicted 30 people at a cost of $1 billion
The tribunal seeks the
arrest of Felicien Kabuga, the millionaire Rwandan financier behind the extermination. Kabuga used his Milles Collines radio station to urge the Hutus to kill their neighbours and imported 50,000 machetes to dispatch them. The UN investigative team has traced Kabuga to Nairobi, Kenya where he is sheltered by the former Kenyan President. President Paul Kigame of Rwanda published a list of the 100 most wanted suspects sheltering in Canada, Norway, France and New Zealand. 4
genocidaires were arrested in the U.K. in 2006.Recent attempts to arrest Kabuga by recruiting Kenyans with the promise of a $5 million reward required warning the Kenyan Police, thereby giving Kabuga an advance warning of his arrest, he duly escaped. The Kenyan Police warned would be informants they would be killed if they repeated their stories.
Kabuga has escaped arrest thereby trivialising the catastrophic effects of the
genocide.
Rwanda and Burundi have a history of genocide. In the 1970’s at least 200,000 people were massacred in these volatile countries. The Francophone Hutus were replaced by Paul Kigame’s Anglophone Tutsi’s, who were exiled in the 1970’s to Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda. The Ugandan trained Tutsis under Paul Kigame have stabilised Rwanda, enduring a major war in the Democratic Republic of Congo when he invaded in 1996 in order to destroy the despised Interhamwe genocidaires.
More summaries about the Rwandan Genocide, 13 years later