As Rwanda commemorate the African holocaust of our times, the long walk to freedom is till very far and many Rwandans have lost hope in the RPF regime as more people are running away from the country even those helped to liberate it from the talons of the murderous regime.

I heard Paul Rusesabagina this morning on the BBC World Service warning the international community that the signs and behavior of the regime that was behind and planning the genocide are not only manifesting in the governing style of RPF but the regime has crossed the borders to hunt those perceived to be ideologically different where they are assassinated or just disappear. Rusesabagina is not alone; the political anxiety has led many people to form political parties or have broken away from the RPF ruling party.

Kagame as usual uses the commemorations to play his cards of accusing France and Belgium so that he can hide from the crimes against humanity he has committed during and after genocide. In an interview with the French-language weekly news magazine Jeune Afrique, Mr Kagame denounced the “direct role of Belgium and France in the political preparation for the genocide”.

The Rwanda autocratic regime being one that feeds and lives on the genocide industry, has been planning a new scheme to launch a market for criminal Paul Kagame’s genocide narrative of 1994 against the Tutsi. We all know that Kagame has now lost all credibility across the international community, reports indicate that he failed to meet some Rwandans in Belgium and Europe who are paid wherever he goes to show the international community that he has support. This was after the summit of African Heads of Sate and Europe in Brussels on the pretext that he was very busy with summit. But it’s not true because Kagame knows that Europe is no longer a tender ground for him to land on and he will always look for excuse to avoid embarrassments as those we witnessed in Oxford last year.

It’s astonishing and amusing for Kagame to keep politicking by accusing France and Belgium whenever Rwandans are commemorating and remembering their dear ones who were butchered in just 100 days. This politics of Kagame are obsolete and in fact he has run out of ideas now he is playing witch hunting to other people as scapegoats for Kagame’s own mistakes and crimes so that he could keep killing people without accountability from the international community of which France a big player.

 

It’s unfortunate that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda closed its doors without indicting senior officers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) who are alleged to have committed war crimes in Rwanda in 1994 as we remember and commemorate the genocide on the 20th Anniversary. The tribunal tried only leading figures in the former regime responsible for Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and failed to bring cases against RPF officers despite having jurisdiction to pursue these crimes.

The tribunal’s mandate required it to prosecute persons responsible for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in Rwanda in 1994. However, unlike the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which has prosecuted crimes committed by all parties to the conflict, the ICTR prosecuted persons belonging to only one side. The Rwandan Patriotic Front is now the country’s ruling party. Indeed, with this failure to bring to book the RPF officials including Kagame, the regime has continued killing innocent people inside and outside Rwandan unabated.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by current President Paul Kagame, ended the genocide after a military campaign in which its forces killed tens of thousands of civilians in the same three-month period. Therefore, prosecuting one side of the war does not only risk failing the reconciliation but also seeing the justice as victor’s justice. “The tribunal’s failure to address the war crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front risks leaving the impression that it is delivering only victor’s justice,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “That’s a poor legacy for this historic effort at international justice.”

It is no longer a secret for Crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front because they were well documented, including by a United Nations Commission of Experts in 1994 which concluded that the group “perpetrated serious breaches of international humanitarian law” and “crimes against humanity.” According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, between April and August 1994, the RPF killed between 25,000 and 45,000 civilians. At least four United Nations agencies, Human Rights Watch, and other nongovernmental organizations have also documented RPF crimes. The tribunal investigated crimes committed by the RPF for more than 10 years and has gathered witness testimony and physical evidence.

It is not therefore surprising that Kagame will act like a scare crow to scare anybody putting pressure on him personally or his regime to account for his crimes, indeed, the recent rhetoric that France had direct role in Rwandan genocide is one of the political cards remaining in the hands of Kagame to cheat Justice.

Jacquline Umurungi

Brussels.