Chapter 10
Anti-terror judge Jean-Louis Bruguière spent 30 years at the top of the world of counter-espionage. The man variously known as ‘the cowboy, ‘the Admiral’ and ‘the Sheriff’ and often seen wearing his .357 magnum pistol, revelled in large scale terror suspect round ups that would see police swoop to arrest more than 160 people in a single night. Born in 1943 in the central French town of Tours, he has used links built up over three decades working with the shadier side of French intelligence and the secret service, to build a reputation for hard hitting methods that pushed human rights laws and the boundaries between justice, truth and politics to the very edge. His arrest of ‘Carlos the jackal’ in 1994 made him a national hero, and later work targeting suspected Islamic terrorists brought him to the attention of the American secret services as a man they could do serious business with.
In November 2006, the anti-terror judge released, to a great fanfare and media build-up, his much anticipated 64-page report into the plane crash that killed Habyarimana on 6 April 1994. Started way back in March 1998, and much leaked in the intervening years to cause maximum political capital in the French government’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with the Rwandan leader Paul Kagame, the Bruguière report has become in many ways as controversial as the crash itself. Its release marked the ‘official’ start of what the Belgian journalist and author Colette Braeckman has termed a ‘war by public proxy.’ In effect, it shifted the media debate from alleged French complicity before, during and after the genocide, to one specific incident – the plane crash – where argument and counter argument could happily provide a highly successful smokescreen to the reality of the horrific genocide and its authors.
The timing of its release in November 2004 came when French military were being called to testify on behalf of the accused at the ICTR (see Chapter 9). Bruguière’s conclusion – that the plane had been shot down by the RPF on instruction from Kagame and with the connivance of several of the now leading political and military leadership in Rwanda, sent an explosive political charge through relations between the two countries.
The report was seized on by an assortment of anti Kagame dissidents, genocidaire in exile or on trial at the ICTR and their ideologically supportive defence teams – as well as by elements in Chirac’s government which could now focus the argument firmly on 6 April 1994 almost as if the million deaths that followed had not occurred.
Journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry noted about the French judge’s inquiry that, ‘Bruguière only saw French ex-soldiers, only saw people who were indicted for genocide on trial in Arusha, only renegades and mercenaries. That’s the basis of the Bruguière investigation.’1 ‘The Sheriff’ remarkably failed to visit the ‘crime scene’ or indeed Rwanda, to commission any ballistics, avionics or topological reports or to interrogate in depth as a suspect the man most likely to assist in finding the truth – the mercenary Paul Barril. Instead his report is based in large part on witness testimony from four RPF defectors, Emmanuel Ruzigana, Jean-Pierre Mugabe, Aloys Ruyenzi and Abdul Ruzibiza.
The initial political ramifications of the report’s publication was devastating. Within days Bruguière had applied for international arrest warrants to be issued against nine Rwandan officials, including Rwanda’s current Chief of Staff Brigadier-General James Kabarebe, army chief of staff Charles Kayonga, ambassador to India, General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, Samuel Kanyamera MP and Director-General of State Protocol, Rose Kabuye. Bruguière followed this up by stating that Kagame himself should be indicted before the ICTR in Arusha and he would write to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to request this. As a head of state President Kagame had immunity against prosecution by France. This cry was swiftly taken up by Peter Erlinder, the head of the Defence Lawyers Association [ADAD] at the ICTR, with demands that accused members of the RPF and its leader should be arraigned for alleged war crimes. ICTR acting Deputy Registrar Everard O’Donnell responded by saying: ‘Judge Bruguière can write to Santa Claus if he likes. The ICTR is independent. Its prosecutor does not take instruction from Kofi Annan or anyone else.’2
On 27 November Kigali reacted as Bruguière had anticipated, with anger and sanctions. The French ambassador was expelled, his embassy shut, along with the French cultural centre while France radio, RFI was taken off air. Diplomatic meltdown had been reached with Rwandan foreign minister Charles Murigande telling the media, ‘France is trying to turn the blame around to salve its own very damaged conscience over the genocide and the role of high-ranking French officers in it.’3
While on the political front the Sheriff had dealt a body blow to French Rwandan diplomatic, economic and judicial relations and cooperation, the evidence he had used to reach his conclusions was starting to unravel as soon as the report was released. Bruguière’s reliance on RPF defectors was the first area to come under intense scrutiny. Former RPF Lieutenant Abdul Ruzibiza had fled Rwanda after being convicted of embezzling funds and sentenced to ten years in prison. In a 2008 interview this key witness, who the judge said had told him that he was with an RPF assassination squad in 1994 and had personally seen a four man ‘network commando’ team shoot down the plane, denied his earlier response.
‘If Bruguière is basing his investigation on me, then I have the right to say that he is a big manipulator… he is saying what I have not said. I let him manipulate me. He was desperate – he had conducted an enquiry for five years and didn’t get any tangible information about the downing of that plane or that accident…[Bruguière] ‘needed someone to manipulate for political needs and aspirations, but at first had to prove that now they know who did it.’ He added that France ‘tried to deny the genocide because they knew what their role was in the genocide.’ Ruzibiza, who had fled Rwanda to the French embassy in Kampala, Uganda, said he had agreed to cooperate with French secret service agents and testify in exchange for a French visa.4
Previously, another Bruguière ‘key’ witness, Emmanuel Ruzigana who wanted to move abroad after leaving the Rwandan army, had been contacted by Ruzibiza and promised a Schengen visa and a comfortable life in Europe in return for co-operating with the Judge. The French embassy in Tanzania gave him a visa and ticket and he arrived in Paris in 2001 where Bruguière awaited. Within days of the Bruguière report being published, Ruzibiza went public on 30 November in an open letter denying his alleged testimony.5
His letter detailed that members of Bruguière’s team collected him from the airport in Paris to bring him to the judge’s office, even though he had no idea what their inquiry was about. He was asked if he could elaborate on his part in Network Commando, to which he replied he did not even think such a group existed. His response to a second question about who shot down the plane caused Bruguière, who had joined the interview, to explode in rage. ‘I told him I had no knowledge of who had shot down the plane and moreover I was not in the vicinity of Kigali at that time.’ The judge then had him thrown out telling him he would get no refugee status. Bruguière however would not take ‘non’ for an answer, and page 23 of his report still attributes Ruzibiza as part of this Network Commando team and two pages later, that he knew those who had shot down the plane.
Another key witness Innocent Marara has also come under fire. Bruguière accepted that this man had joined the army in 1991 and had been present at meetings in 1993 when it was alleged that RPF leaders had taken the decision to assassinate Habyarimana. Marara had fled Rwanda after being sentenced in 2001 for his role in organizing armed gangs of robbers in Kigali and his un-corroborated hearsay evidence was taken without question at face value by the French judge.
The other witnesses assembled by Bruguière seem to have been picked not for what they actually witnessed first-hand but for their political animosity to the Kagame government. For example, former Head of Cooperation Bernard Debré, the first French military officer on the crash site Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, convicted genocide mastermind Theoneste Bagosora and Emmanuel Habyarimana, a dissident ex-Defence minister sentenced to five years for desertion and later head of opposition party the FDU-INKINGI. The report featured a number of mis-spelt names, fabricated evidence and discredited information, for example on the missiles themselves which the Quilès inquiry of 1998 had already dismissed. More worrying was its language which betrayed the political stance of the author, with the RPF variously described as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, ‘Tutsi’, ‘Tutsi Anglophones’ and ‘English speaking’.
The release by Wikileaks of confidential diplomatic cables elaborates how Bruguière presented his findings to French officials, including Jacques Chirac (who succeeded Mitterrand as president from 1995 to 2007). A cable sent by the American ambassador to Paris Craig Stapleton on 26 January 2007 to the US State Department shows Bruguière warning New York against closer ties with Kagame. It also confirmed that the judge had had talks with Chirac at the Élysée as to the best timing for the release of his report and the expected backlash from Rwanda against the issuing of the arrest warrants. The ambassador noted Bruguière ‘did not hide his personal desire to see Kagame’s government isolated. He warned that closer U.S. ties with Rwanda would be a mistake.’6
After his politically-inspired report came grassroots politics for ‘The Sheriff’ as he announced he would run for election for the right wing UMP party of Nicolas Sarkozy in June 2007 in the south west department of Lot-et-Garonne. When elected, he told reporters he would quite like to become Minister of Justice. His ambition was short lived after he was soundly defeated by his Socialist opponent.
Four years later in May 2011, Bruguière found himself under civil investigation for perjury, obstruction of justice and withholding evidence in relation to other cases he headed where French political and financial interests were involved. The murder of 14 people, 11 of them French workers in Karachi in 2002 was blamed by Bruguière on Islamic extremists. A later reinvestigation by a new judge found several key files that Bruguière had relied upon for his finding, were now missing. These included vitally important autopsy reports that Bruguière was now unable to locate. New research supports the view that the attack may well have come from Pakistan’s own intelligence services in retaliation for the decision by politicians in France to halt kickback payments promised in exchange for Paris obtaining a near $1 billion contract in 1994 for selling submarines to Islamabad. The kickbacks, if proven, could have spelt the end for figures at the top of the French political establishment from the mid 1990s onwards and suppression of the scandal was vital. The new investigation has been blocked in its efforts ‘to consult classified documents on the submarine sale in question that might clarify the terms of that transaction, and how French intelligence services initially reacted to the Karachi attack’.7
The brutal murder and beheading of seven French Trappist monks in Algeria in 1996 was also blamed by Bruguière on Islamic extremists. The story of the religious, made famous by the 2010 film Of Gods and Men, took a new twist when recent re-investigation unearthed video testimony by repentant Algerian extremists that ‘purportedly contains sworn assurances that the monks were in fact accidentally killed by the Algerian military during a raid on a jihadist camp’; a view that was later cemented by interviews with former French and Algerian officials. Like Bruguière’s other judicial inquiries, this one also suffered from being more concerned with protecting his conservative political backers than finding the truth.8
When the leaders of La Francophonie met in Cannes in early 2007, Rwanda’s place was empty among the African heads who had come to listen to Chirac’s final bow before retirement. More importantly, Bruguière’s report had given impetus to Rwanda to finish its own investigation into the role of France in the genocide. In 2004 an independent national commission was sanctioned, and its members selected and agreed on 5 April 2005. ‘The Commission was required to collect and examine documents, hear testimonies and any other evidence showing the involvement of the French State in the 1994 genocide as well as its role in the period after the genocide. This was particularly in the area of politics, diplomacy, media, judiciary and military.’9
The public commission, chaired by former Prosecutor General Jean de Dieu Mucyo, heard 166 witnesses between May 2006 and July 2007. Victims of rape and sexual crimes were able to give their highly distressing evidence to the inquiry behind closed doors. The commission also traveled abroad where it met with a mixed reception in its bid to gain archive documentary and witness evidence. In Belgium, a recent law blocked any interviews with serving military or political figures, though information was gathered from those who were no longer serving. In France, given the severed diplomatic relations between the countries, it was of little surprise that Michele Alioti-Marie, the French Defence Minister gave a directive that stopped any cooperation. In Germany and at the ICTR Mucyo had greater success in accessing records and witnesses.
On Tuesday 5 August 2008 in a crowded and highly charged Ministry of Justice in Kigali the Mucyo report was released. Tharcisse Karugarama, the Minister, drew silence from the awaiting public and journalists as the explicit accusations against a western nation and permanent member of the UN Security Council were read out. It was a unique occasion. This was not a former colony bemoaning crimes that had been committed hundreds of years before during the slave trade or in colonizing zeal. These were the most serious allegations of acts said to have happened in the last years of the twentieth century. And certainly the findings made grim reading for those viewing the 337 pages and detailed annexes.
A vital theme that runs through the Mucyo report from diverse witnesses, Rwandan and foreign, is the way the French political and military leadership had very quickly characterized the Rwandan crisis as a purely ethnic one. There had been no intrinsic attempt to understand the political and financial reasons that lay behind the Akazu’s desperate attempt to stay in power and their use of ethnicity as an easy tool of division and control of the population. The endemic high-level corruption and cronyism so widely perpetuated in the country pre-1994 were accepted without quibble by Paris. Then again, why should Mitterrand care any more about how much Habyarimana and the Akazu network were economically plundering Rwanda than other Francophone-supported kleptomaniacs that included Mobutu in Zaire, Bongo in Gabon or Eyadéma in Togo.
Paul Dijoud announced at the Quilès inquiry in 1998 that ‘the failure to obtain peace can ultimately be attributed to the RPF, a movement predominantly comprising Tutsis, an intelligent and ambitious Nilotic people inhabiting deep Africa.’ The Mucyo commission makes tellingly clear the deep-rooted, archaic ‘position one’ on Africa by Mitterrand’s government, where the corruption and human rights abuses of the heads of state and their regimes always came second to the need for ‘political stability’ and keeping a francophone leader in power.
Mucyo specifically named 33 members of Mitterrand’s government, 20 military and 13 political figures – whom he accused of being complicit in the genocide. These included Mitterrand himself, his son Jean-Christophe, Dominique de Villepin, Edouard Balladur, and Alain Juppé.
In Paris the report was slated as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘intolerable’ and critics dismissed it as being purely an attempt by Kigali to cover its tracks after the Bruguière findings – a ‘tit-for-tat’ move after its own leaders were indicted by the French judge. The Mucyo report does contain inaccuracies and shows signs of being unnecessarily rushed and the political motivation for its commissioning is clear and is an undoubted weakness. It included a clearly fabricated letter on page 295, which purportedly showed links between the French Special Operations Command of General Yves Germanos with three individuals including Leon Habyarimana, the son of the deceased Rwandan President. The letter is riddled with errors and is a poor attempt at a forgery. But despite such anomalies, the methodology of the report, the public interviewing of most of the witnesses, and documentary archive evidence provide important new details to accompany what is already known.
Justice Minister Karugarama made clear the report was not making criminal charges per se against the 33 people explicitly mentioned, but that such charges ‘could’ follow. The bottom line was if France was going to use legal and political means to push its ‘account’ of what had occurred in 1990–94, then Kigali was going to play the same game.
On 9 November 2008 Kagame’s aid and Head of Presidential Protocol, Rose Kabuye was arrested by German police at Frankfurt airport, having travelled to Europe without carrying her diplomatic passport as she was entitled to do, in the full knowledge of what awaited. Kabuye, a 57 year-old former mayor of Kigali and army colonel, had been on Bruguière’s list of nine wanted suspects. The arrest swiftly led to Rwanda expelling Christian Clages the German ambassador in Kigali, and to noisy protests from irate Rwandans outside its embassy. Kabuye agreed to be extradited immediately to Paris. Here it became clear that her action had given the Rwandan government one thing it needed – access to the judicial charges and findings against the nine indicted by Bruguière.
Rwandan Information Minister Louise Mushikiwabo told journalists, ‘these indictments are an abuse of international law. It is political and judicial bullying that Rwanda will not accept. Rose agreed to be transferred to France because she wants to prove her innocence. Both for her and for the government, this is really the moment of truth with France. We would like her arrest to be an opportunity to show how shallow and unfounded these indictments are. France is using these indictments to cover up its own responsibility. France aided and abetted the genocide planners. It has continued to shelter genocidaires. We’re hoping that not all French judges are Bruguières.’10
With the retirement of Bruguière in June 2007, new judges were put in charge of the Rwandan investigation – Marc Trevidic and Philippe Coirre. Trevidic, a former ‘pupil’ of Bruguière, found himself left a number of files by his former boss including Rwanda and Karachi which were both incomplete and dangerously unbalanced. The difference in method and mentality between the two French judges could not have been starker. Instead of trying to fit the necessary political ‘truth’ to the crime, Trevidic, known for his tough and unwavering anti-interference mindset, began to reinvestigate the files after the Kabuye arrest showed clear evidence that Bruguière’s investigation was highly flawed.
Bernard Maingain, an affable, highly capable Belgian lawyer, based in Brussels, had been approached by the RPF to represent them since their formation in the late 1980s. He had rushed to Paris on 19 November 2008 to see Kabuye, along with her lawyer Leon-Lef Forster, after her transfer to France. At 2am the lawyers met with Trevidic in a bid to get the Rwandan aide released on bail, after the judge had refused an initial application. For three hours the evidence from Bruguière against her was taken apart – and vitally a whole raft of new information about the crash and suspects put to Trevidic who was clearly unsettled by what he was viewing for the first time. The following morning, faced with her first appearance before an examining magistrate, Rose Kabuye was granted bail. The news was greeted with open rejoicing in Rwanda and by supporters in Paris who hugged and kissed the emotional and clearly relieved Rwandan ‘heroine’.
The Kabuye case, despite initial antagonistic headlines in Kigali, achieved an ‘unblocking’ of relations between the two countries that had, behind the scenes been thawing since the arrival at the Élysée of Nicolas Sarkozy in May 2007. Here was a president that Kagame finally felt he could ‘do business with’ and who was anxious to put past animosities behind in favour of the realpolitik that meant both countries would benefit from relations being normalized. In December 2007, Kagame had met Sarkozy at the EU summit being held in Lisbon. ‘We want to turn the page, we want to look to the future,’ Sarkozy said, describing the meeting as ‘the start of a normalisation’ of ties.11
The presidential rapprochment followed an earlier September meeting in New York between the foreign ministers of the two countries, Bernard Kouchner and Charles Murigande. Kouchner, a former head of MSF, had been a go-between with Kagame in May 1994, and was a man the Rwandan president both knew and respected. Despite the release of the Mucyo report and the arrest of Rose Kabuye, it was clear that both Rwanda and France were beginning to accept the stand-off was in the best interest of neither country.
In an interview in London in early December 2008 during one of his frequent business trips to Europe and North America, Paul Kagame, was upbeat about relations with Paris. ‘President Sarkozy has been a huge departure from that past of a horrible relationship between Rwanda and France. I think Sarkozy is someone to do serious business with in terms of improving these relations. [Foreign Affairs Minister] Bernard Kouchner I have known for quite some time and I know he understands the history of Rwanda, the genocide and the history around it. Of course, maybe they all find themselves in certain difficulties. They have to act between recognising this wrong and helping all of us to get over it, but at the same time there is a feeling that that makes them feel guilty and culpable for what happened in Rwanda so that up to now they have felt very defensive. I can understand the constraints they have. I have seen Kouchner on the one hand say what happened in Rwanda was so on and so forth but on the other hand saying ‘no’, to accuse France of being involved in this was an exaggeration. He knows what the issues are but his hands are tied by something else. However there is a recognition – we can see that. But we are hopeful under President Sarkozy and probably new faces in his administration of people not directly involved with this history, that we can have some way forward.’12
The problem for Kagame was not the ‘new guard’ in France but those whose mindset had not changed in the previous two decades. Despite a number of ‘new dawns’ being announced by Paris in its relations with Africa, throwing aside the neo-colonial approach was still seen as a betrayal by some senior members of the government and military. For internal political reasons neither the French president or foreign minister could afford to fully admit what had occurred in Rwanda.
The quest to discover the truth about French government and military complicity in Rwanda’s genocide became entangled with geo-politics, where issues of finance, trade and diplomatic realpolitik became increasingly more important than issues of justice and truth. On 29 November 2009, Sarkozy managed a victory of sorts against those who still resisted any kind of ‘rapprochment’ with Kagame’s Rwanda as both countries announced that relations were to be normalized. The deal came after months of behind the scenes negotiations, with Kigali demanding France get tough on the alleged genocidaires, notably Agathe Habyarimana, who remained free on French soil; and to take action against others who were continuing to support and fund the FDLR – a military group formed from genocidaires who had fled into neighbouring Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo in August 1994.
In an ironic coincidence, the previous day, 28 November, Rwanda became only the second francophone country to be formally received into the Commonwealth. It was a massive volte-face by a country that under Habyariamana only a few years before had been at the very heart of la Francophonie. The move above all showed a confident government in Kigali, ready to push aside archaic political alliances in favour of current financial, trade and political needs. It cannot have been an easy pill for those at the Élysée and French military to swallow given their enduring battle to keep this key part of Africa within the Francophone zone only 15 years before.
Within six weeks the new ‘rapprochment’ was put to the test with Kigali publishing its own report into the plane crash. The investigation by Jean Mutzinzi’s Committee of Independent Experts had been launched on 1 December 2007, and was completed in April 2009. The 169 page report was published on 11 January 2010. To the surprise of no one, the 71 year-old Judge’s report came to a totally different conclusion than that of Bruguière – namely ‘the Falcon 50 plane of President Habyarimana was shot down from Kanombe military barracks by elements of the Rwandan Armed Forces which controlled that zone’.13 The investigation was a far more comprehensive affair, but vitally sought to gain an air of independence by bringing in experts from the National Defence Academy at Cranfield University in the UK. The report aimed not only to show that the perpetrators of the attack were Hutu extremists or working for them, but, in its own words to ‘lay bare the shoddy and politically-motivated work of those who have sought to render judgement from afar.’ This thinly veiled allusion was to Bruguière and the growing band of Western academics, lawyers and journalists who were fully paid up members of the revisionist fraternity that questioned not just the crash but whether there was a genocide at all.
By January 2010 the debate over the truth of the plane crash and the genocide, its origins and causes had become totally polarized according to support or not for the current government in Kigali of Paul Kagame. It’s notable the Mutsinzi report, which had been finished in the spring of 2009, which also marked the dropping of all charges against Rose Kabuye, was not published until after France and Rwanda had restored diplomatic links. And its publication was marked by an underwhelming response from the French government with none of the ‘unacceptable’ rhetoric that had greeted the Mucyo report two years earlier.
Six weeks later on 25 February 2010 President Sarkozy arrived in Kigali on a much-hyped state visit, the first time a French President had set foot in Rwanda since the days of Habyarimana. In a whistle-stop three hours he visited the genocide memorial at Gisozi where more than 250,000 are buried, met with President Kagame to agree ‘trade, investment, education, health and cultural exchanges,’ before appearing at a press conference alongside the Rwandan leader. Here he declared that France had indeed made ‘grave errors of judgment’ in the genocide and, reiterating the Quilès inquiry of 1998, pleaded that there had been a ‘form of blindness to not have seen the genocidal dimensions’ of the former Hutu government. But there was to be no apology and both leaders insisted that it was the future that was now important and a ‘page had to be turned.’14
One year later in February 2011, that page turned out to be one rather further back in the book as Rwanda’s nemesis from 1994, Alain Juppé was promoted by Sarkozy back into the role of Minister of Foreign Affairs. Juppé’s history of antipathy towards Kagame meant that the years of Kouchner’s quiet diplomatic success were brought to a grinding halt. Despite public assurances between the two governments that it was business as normal, it was clear in Kigali that this appointment was both unwelcome and unlikely to lead to future trust and trade that had been at the core of the rapprochment policy. When Kagame finally made his much postponed visit to Paris on 12 September 2011 to lunch with Sarkozy, realpolitik was again at the forefront. For the French head, it was perhaps a way to prove that he was still seeking to move the argument away from the old military and political ideas of Africa as a backyard of France. Juppé made sure he would not have to be present by arranging a visit to the Pacific, as did the National Assembly Speaker. Senate Head Gerard Larcher also refused to meet the Rwandan leader as protocol required after citing a ‘lack of time,’ while the French military made it very clear Kagame was not welcome after the allegations the Mucyo report had made about them.15
The internal and external row over Kagame’s much delayed visit betrayed divisions that continued within the Élysée about modernizing policy towards Africa and how countries where flagrant human rights abuses were taking place should now be handled. While the appointment of Juppé threatened to revive animosities that had been politically covered, if not buried, the side-lining of unashamed Francafrique enablers such as Robert Bourgi was some form of move forward.16 In February 2012 Juppé’s attempt to replace the French ambassador to Rwanda, Laurent Contini, with his own nominee and close associate Hélène Le Gal was torpedoed when Kigali refused to accept her. Contini, a man respected in Rwanda and close to former Foreign Affairs Minister Kouchner was seen as taking too soft a line towards Kigali. He was recalled to Paris and for several months until the new presidential election on May 2012 Rwandan-French relations were yet again on hold despite the best efforts of both governments to put a positive spin on the diplomatic rift.17
While in front of the cameras both Rwandan and French government ministers were putting a brave face on the ‘normalisation’ process, behind the scenes the French Secret Service, the DGSE were still working hard hard to unsettle Kigali. The anti-Kagame media in the UK were delighted to seize upon a story in late May 2011 that seemed to prove at first glance that the current Rwandan government was indeed one filled with menace. The truth was rather simpler, if less satisfying for the media and so was never aired. The story revolved around a female operative of the French Secret Service, the DGSE, who convinced the UK equivalents to believe a story that Kigali had sent a ‘hitman’ to assassinate members of a new politically insignificant party, the Rwandan National Congress that was meeting in London. The UK police chose to take the ‘tip-off’ at face value and issued warnings of the danger of assassination to the RNC, who were delighted to then run to the BBC and other media to allege they were about to be killed by the tyrant in Kigali. No UK newspaper felt it needed to investigate the story further to find out if there was any real threat or if this was just a carefully planned PR stunt aimed at maximising the damage to the government in Rwanda. For the DGSE it was a highly successful ‘disinformation’ campaign which showed that even after political rapprochement between the two governments, there were clearly elements in the French military and intelligence community who were still aiming cause maximum damage to the Rwandan government. The question remained how far up the military chain of command in Paris such views were held.18
In November 2012 the French journal Causette was going to press with the tragic story of a Rwandan woman who had accused French soldiers of repeatedly raping her during Operation Turquoise. ‘Two days before this story was published, the magazine’s computer system was hacked, according to Causette’s director who filed a complaint for “fraudulent access into the informatics system and for deleting files.” The magazine says all the files regarding French military actions in Rwanda disappeared and that a journalist’s emails were broken into.19 The rape case had been started in 2004 but, like the trials of genocidaires, was currently being blocked from taking place for political reasons. According to Stephanie Dubois de Prisque of pressure group Survie, ‘Of course we are used to seeing the military block the trials, but it is also because they are under the orders of the politicians. If the military talked, it could come up to the political involvement of France. It’s the same thing about the trials of potential Hutu killers, as they can say things that could blame some French politicians. It’s easier for everyone if their trials never come to an end’.
After Francois Hollande’s election win on 6 May 2012, Juppé was replaced with former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius at the Quai d’Orsay and finally a new ambassador for Kigali was agreed in December 2012 with Michel Flesch taking over from Contini. Fabius spoke warmly of ‘really normalising’ relations between the two countries’ during a meeting in Paris on 5 September 2012 with his Rwandan counterpart Louise Mushikiwabo. Meanwhile, the woman Kigali had refused to accept as ambassador, Hélène Le Gal, was, somewhat ironically, put into place as Hollande’s new ‘madame Afrique.’
On 10 January 2012 Judges Marc Trevidic and Nathalie Poux produced their eagerly anticipated report into the plane crash. In progress since April 2010 when the anti-terrorist judges effectively dismissed Bruguière’s report, Trevidic appointed five highly professional experts in ballistics, ground surveying, explosives and acoustics in order to try to determine the exact location the missiles were fired from. In September 2010 the team visited Rwanda to investigate the ‘crime scene’. Only the conclusions of their 20 month report were made public – in itself a remarkable shift from the eight year, much leaked effort of Bruguière. The findings reiterated the Mutsinzi view that the missiles had come from one of two possible sites at Kanombe barracks, an area under the control of the presidential guard and that the plane was downed after a missile hit the fuel-tank located on its left side causing an immediate fireball.20
The expert contributors to the report cite audio, visual and technical reasons to exclude any possibility the attack came from the vicinity of Massaka Hill where the RPF were billeted. The report was welcomed in Kigali by foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo who called it a vindication of the Rwandan government stance.
In June 2012 Trevidic ordered a search of Paul Barril’s three residencies – his home, that of his former wife and a business premise. The mercenary, now living in London, and known by police colleagues as ‘l’enfumeur’ or one who ‘smokes out’ his prey, was himself finally being ‘smoked out’ of the elaborate deceptions and lies he put together to protect his previous employees, contacts and himself. Computers, electronic files and a mass of documentation were seized detailing the shadowy world of La Francafrique. The captain himself was shaken and clearly unsettled to be interviewed by the anti-terrorist judges in summer and then again in December 2012. The judges wanted to know why, on page 176 of his 1996 book Guerres secretes a l’Élysée he wrote that he was ‘on a hill’ in central Africa’ in early April 1994. He responded that his book was actually partly fictional and he had not really been there at the time. He then showed Trevidic a passport to prove he was in the USA, but though this has a visa permit, Barril had never entered the country. It was then found he was using two passports – a ‘parallel network’ of official and non-official documents as standard for a man in his profession. The ‘other’ second passport Trevidic ordered him to hand over has yet to be produced after several months of delay.
Barril also asserted, under questioning, that in his opinion whoever shot down the Falcon jet would have needed to have used such a weapon 30–40 times before the actual incident that brought down the plane. If so, it would strongly point to a foreign, perhaps Eastern European or even French mercenary being involved. What has become clear is Barril himself is a key witness to such events, and the wealth of electronic information he left for the investigators makes it far more likely that Trevidic can come to a strongly evidenced conclusion to this case. It was notable Barril’s former employer Agathe Habyarimana, under instruction from her lawyer Philippe Meilhac, began to distance herself publicly from Barril at the start of 2013, perhaps fearful of what evidence the mercenary’s large stash of documentation and notes might bring.
Agathe challenged the findings of the Trevidic report in ‘la chambre de l’instruction de la cour d’appel’ in Paris, but on 19 March 2013 the outcome of the previous year’s report was upheld. In a final bid to get this judgement overturned Agathe and her fellow plaintiffs then filed for the case to go before the Supreme Court where a decision is likely before the end of 2013.
For nearly a decade after the leaked Bruguière report by Le Monde in 2004, the politics of the present day have covered the truth about the plane crash. The two sides have been polarized in a bid to either tarnish and destabilize the current Rwandan government of Paul Kagame, or to prove that the extremists did shoot the plane down and that the whole episode is just a convenient smokescreen away from the real complicity in the genocide. Otherwise distinguished western journalists, editors and academics have joined forces with genocide deniers, revisionists and indeed several genocide organizers and perpetrators such as Bagosora in an unlikely alliance against a common enemy – Paul Kagame. The truth has played a secondary role to politics. It is hoped that when Trevidic finally finishes his work the real task of investigating the role of members of the French government and military in the genocide of 1994, and years prior to the tragedy, can begin.
While the focus of the legal action for most of the years post 1998 has been the crash, it has gone almost unnoticed that international justice has failed to bring to trial those accused of the most heinous crimes known to humanity. And such failure is again most notable in France. By the end of 2013 it had failed to bring a single genocide suspect to trial. With Rwanda overhauling its justice system comprehensively in recent years to comply with all international judicial requirements for fairness and impartiality, and in terms of upgraded detention facilities, European and North American countries have been sending back those accused for trial in Kigali. Most notable recent returnees have been Léon Mugesera in 2012 from Canada and Emmanuel Mbarushimana due to be extradited from Denmark in 2014. Belgium has tried a number of suspects itself. In 2012 in a landmark ruling, the ICTR as part of its completion strategy agreed to begin to send remaining first instance cases to Rwanda. Former priest Jean Uwinkindi and Interahamwe leader Bernard Munyagishari arrived back in Kigali from the ICTR to stand trial in the country where their alleged crimes had been committed.
By contrast, despite numerous genocide suspects living and working openly in France, in twenty years none have been summoned for trial. The French judicial system, while protesting its independence from the executive, has cited over the years a raft of problems and reasons for giving impunity, from its judicial system not being mandated or legally able to try those whose crimes were committed outside French territory, or the alleged inadequacies of the Rwandan judiciary which meant extradition was not possible. Other reasons for judicial inactivity have included the premise that as Rwanda had no law to punish genocide in 1994 then it was not possible for suspects in France to face this charge later on regardless of evidence against them. Given other European nations and indeed the UN itself now deem Rwanda to be fully compliant and capable of holding such trials, and countries such as Belgium and the USA have put suspects on trial without the need for extradition it is clear France is failing in its international and moral obligations.
The list of alleged high profile killers living with impunity in France is a long one. It includes Vénuste Nyombayire, the former director of SOS-Gisenyi, accused of directly participating in the killing of children who were evacuated to the centre. Hyacinthe Rafiki Nsengiyumva, the former Minister of Public Works, accused of spearheading the genocide and being a founder of the murderous FDLR that has destabilized the DRC for many years. Also Claver Kamana, a former businessman and RTLM funder, Lt. Col. Marcel Bivugabagabo, Colonel Laurent Serubuga, Tito Barahira, Joseph Habyarimana, Enoch Kayondo, Vénuste Nyombayire, Manassé Bigwenzare, local Interahamwe leader Pierre Tegera, football referee Felicien Barigira, Stanislas Mbonampeka, three doctors – Eugene Rwamucyo, Charles Twagira and Sosthene Munyemana, Isaac Kamali a science teacher and Manasse Bigwenzare a former magistrate. Only two suspects are in custody – Octavien Ngenzi and Pascal ‘the torturer’ Simbikangwa, – both were arrested and transferred to France from the dependent island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.21
In early 2013 the Rwandan prosecutor general Martin Ngoga announced that France was reneging on its moral and international obligations in its twenty years of inactivity regarding such high profile accused. Despite numerous visits to Rwanda by French investigators to gather evidence, and even a special unit set up in April 2011 to investigate and prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity the results have been the same. And while Rwanda had UN monitors sent to ensure trials in Kigali of transferred ICTR suspects like Uwinkindi were proceeding as agreed, the UN imposed no such monitors on France, which in six years had not even opened the case files on the two suspects transferred back to it – Munyeshyaka and Bucyibaruta.22
An irate and clearly frustrated Ngoga told the media in February 2012. ‘My office in its attribution to deal with fugitives is considering giving government some options on what to do with a country which does not take seriously individuals indicted of heinous crimes on its territory.’ He added that ‘Rwanda may need to rethink our strategy as France, the country that supported the Genocide, cannot be the one to dispense justice.”23
There is more than a suspicion that western justice has failed Rwanda. Can a scenario be imagined where tens of thousands of Europeans or north Americans were killed, with the culprits allowed to live a happy retirement with impunity in an African country? The case of Osama bin Laden shows the lengths the West will go to to track down those whom it alleges killed its citizens. Rwandans have to watch while human rights legislation, numerous appeals and Supreme Courts in domestic and international settings and the United Nations have become filled with highly expensive cases which have lasted years. Politics has interfered with justice, with courts acting out of political motivation rather than their judgement being independent and evidence-based. The accused, represented by top lawyers use every possible legal technicality and loop hole in human rights legislation that was never intended for such a use. Instead, France like so many western countries has opened its doors to such individuals, often granting citizenship and refugee status without question.
Chantal Kabasinga, President of Avega Agahozo, an association of genocide widows, voiced her frustration and sadness with the sorry tale of finding justice in France. ‘There is no big surprise at all in whatever France is doing today because the role they played in the genocide is well documented. But as survivors, we are so hurt when people who had a major role in preparing and executing the genocide are not arrested. This is simply genocide denial. It is also as good as killing us, all over again, and discouraging Rwandans who are trying hard enough to unite and reconcile.’24