“We will have our eyes riveted on the Court: that it render this Justice that we have been waiting for for three decades“. This is what September 28 writes in its editorial, the daily NewTimes, from Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The whole country awaits this trial: Kabuga escaped justice for 25 years. However, he knows everything about what happened in 1994, during this genocide which killed 800,000 people, the vast majority of them members of the Tutsi minority. Kabuga was then one of the richest men in Rwanda. He is considered one of the financiers of the genocide, in Rwanda some even call him “the architect“. Close to Hutu power, he armed the extremist Interhamwe militias, which perpetrated most of the genocide. He is also suspected of having imported hundreds of thousands of machetes. Kabuga was also one of the leaders of the Thousand Hills Radiothis radio which has become sadly famous with its calls for hatred to exterminate “them cockroaches“, understand the Tutsi. Kabuga is still the man who knows the names of all the financiers, of all the banks that were directly or indirectly involved in the tragedy. Several names of large Western, Belgian, Swiss, French, were regularly cited.
Kabuga is therefore the man who knows all the hidden faces of the genocide and he escaped justice for more than 25 years: this is the other, mysterious aspect of this file. Kabuga ended up being arrested 2 and a half years ago, in May 2020, in an apartment in Asnières (Hauts-de-Seine), in the Paris suburbs. He spent discreet days there under the name of Antoine Tounga with a passport from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Previously, he had always eluded searches, although traces of his flight were found in Switzerland, Kenya, the Comoros, Germany and Luxembourg. And so, finally, in the suburbs of Paris. His relations with France are also disturbing. Just one example: his son-in-law served as a translator for the highly controversial Judge Bruguière when he was instructing the investigation into the assassination of President Habyarimana, the trigger for the genocide. Kabuga is therefore also the man who knows everything about the networks that have allowed many Rwandan genocidaires to escape justice for many years.
The risk is that this trial in The Hague will not live up to expectations for several reasons. The first is the age of the accused, who is between 87 and 89 years old. Kabuga is said to be tired, even senile. He also sought to have the trial canceled or postponed on this ground. So he might not say much during the hearings. Second reason, he is in conflict with his own lawyer. Me Emmanuel Altit does not want to obey the instructions that the children of Kabuga seek to impose on him. So the exercise of the defense will be complicated. Finally, the third reason, there are doubts about the solidity of the elements collected in the prosecution file. This is a recurring weakness of international justice. From there, to see the trial get bogged down in procedures and give birth to a mouse, there is only one step.