Félicien Kabuga, tycoon charged with helping launch Rwandan genocide, arrested outside Paris
Readers in Nairobi in 2002 look at a newspaper featuring a photograph of Félicien Kabuga, sought for his alleged role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. (George Mulala/Reuters)
NAIROBI — After a quarter century on the run, Félicien Kabuga, indicted on charges of using his wealth and influence to stir Rwanda's 1994 genocide, was arrested Saturday in Paris and will face trial before an international court.
The office of the prosecutor for an international tribunal in The Hague said in a statement that Kabuga, now 84, had been living under a false identity in Asnières-sur-Seine north of Paris and had been hiding with the complicity of his children. He was arrested in a “sophisticated, coordinated operation with simultaneous searches across a number of locations” by French police.
“The arrest of Félicien Kabuga today is a reminder that those responsible for genocide can be brought to account, even 26 years after their crimes,” the statement said.
In 1994, Kabuga was one of Rwanda’s richest men and co-owned Radio Television Milles Collines, a radio station whose broadcasts incited hatred toward Rwanda’s Tutsi minority by the Hutu majority.
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He also financed the Interahamwe militia, a Hutu-led paramilitary group, making “massive purchases” of hundreds of thousands of machetes, hoes and other farming implements that would be used to hack people to death, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
More than 800,000 were killed in the span of just three months during the Rwandan genocide. Most were Tutsis. The slaughter was ended by a Ugandan-supported army of Tutsis led by Paul Kagame, who has been president of Rwanda since the genocide ended.
The Rwanda criminal tribunal was closed in 2015 after dozens of convictions, but Kabuga remained one of the highest-profile fugitives wanted by Rwanda’s government and the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Kabuga was indicted in 1997 on “seven counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, persecution and extermination, all in relation to crimes committed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda,” according to the tribunal’s statement Saturday.
It also said he would stand trial in The Hague, though other genocide perpetrators have been extradited to Rwanda.
Between 2005 and 2012, hundreds of thousands of genocide perpetrators were tried in “gacaca,” or grass courts, where victims could come face-to-face with their family’s killers in an attempt to reconcile. That process resulted in a two-thirds conviction rate.
U.S. authorities had put a $5 million bounty on Kabuga’s head and worked with Kenyan authorities in 2003 to arrest him in that country, where he was thought to be sheltered by politicians associated with President Daniel arap Moi.
A trap was set with the help of an informant. The informant was later found dead, however, and Kabuga remained at large. According to the tribunal, Kabuga also spent time as a fugitive in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Congo. It is unclear how or when Kabuga traveled to France.
On a trip to Kenya in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama accused Kenya’s government of “allowing [Kabuga] to purchase safe haven.”
The perpetrators of the genocide fled mostly into neighboring Congo, where Kagame’s army chased them down, sparking a regional conflict that lasted more than a decade and led to millions more deaths. Splintered factions of Hutu militias still operate in eastern Congo and regularly carry out attacks against civilians.
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Max Bearak
Max Bearak is The Washington Post's Nairobi bureau chief. Previously, he reported from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Somalia and Washington, D.C., for The Post, following stints in Delhi and Mumbai reporting for the New York Times and others.Follow
By Max Bearak
May 16, 2020 at 7:53 a.m. EDT
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