THE HAGUE: Rwandan tycoon Felicien Kabuga played a crucial role in the 1994 genocide that shocked the world, prosecutors said as he boycotted the opening of his own trial in The Hague on Thursday.
The last major suspect from the slaughter, the now-87-year-old set up a hate broadcaster that urged ethnic Hutus to kill rival Tutsi “cockroaches” and armed the murderous Interahamwe militia with machetes, a UN tribunal heard.
The wheelchair-bound Kabuga refused to appear in court and stayed in his jail cell as the trial got underway, more than a quarter of a century after the 100-day rampage that left over 800,000 people dead.
“Twenty-eight years after the events, this trial is about holding Felicien Kabuga to account for his substantial and intentional role in that genocide,“ lead prosecutor Rashid S. Rashid told the court.
“Kabuga didn’t need to wield a rifle or a machete at a roadblock, rather he supplied weapons in bulk and facilitated the training that prepared the Interahamwe to use them,“ he added.
“He didn’t need to pick up a microphone to call for the extermination of the Tutsi on the radio, rather he founded, funded and served as president of... the radio station that broadcast genocidal propaganda across Rwanda.”
After decades on the run, Kabuga was arrested in France in 2020 and sent to a UN court.
Kabuga's lawyers entered a not guilty plea at a first appearance in 2020 at the UN's International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, and have repeatedly tried to halt the trial on health grounds.
'Cockroaches'
Head judge Iain Bonomy said on Thursday that Kabuga had decided not to attend the opening of the trial in person or watch by video link but “appropriate course is to proceed”.
Kabuga issued a statement saying that he court had refused to let him appoint his own lawyer and that he had lost confidence in his own defence attorney, Emmanuel Altit.
Prosecutors said that as a wealthy ally of Rwanda's then-ruling party, Kabuga helped create the pro-Hutu Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), which broadcast anti-Tutsi propaganda.
As Rwanda descended into carnage after the shooting down of a plane carrying the country’s Hutu president in April 1994, RLTM’s spewed “constant frenzied overt calls for extermination,“ said Rupert Elderkin, another prosecution lawyer.
The radio station described Tutsis as “cockroaches” and “subhuman vermin” and identified the hiding places of Tutsis where they were later killed, he said.
The prosecutor said RTLM broadcasts “were comparable to Nazi propaganda about the Jews.”
Yet in a video played to the court Kabuga defended the broadcaster at the time, saying it “can’t please everyone” and was trying to “enlighten the population”.
Kabuga also directly supported the Interahamwe militias during the genocide, prosecutors said.
He allegedly bankrolled the death squads, imported machetes and other weapons, and organised training for them.
Kabuga himself is also alleged to have personally handed out weapons at Interahamwe rallies. “Kabuga then told them to go and finish the job,“ Elderkin said.
'Significant step'
More than 50 witnesses are expected to appear for the prosecution, starting next week, in a trial that is set to take months.
After fleeing Rwanda, Kabuga spent more than 20 years evading an arrest warrant issued by the UN war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, helped by a network of former allies.
He was finally caught in a small apartment in Paris and sent to The Hague for trial.
Kabuga is one of the last top Rwandan genocide suspects to face justice, with 62 convicted by the tribunal so far.
Four key but lesser suspects are still at large while others have recently died, including the man seen as the architect of the genocide, Augustin Bizimana, and former presidential guard commander Protais Mpiranya.
The trial is being closely watched in the small central African nation, including in Kabuga's native village of Nyange.
“We are looking forward to his trial. It has been a long time coming,“ Anastase Kamizinkunze, the district head of IBUKA, the umbrella association for genocide survivors, told AFP.
Human Rights Watch welcomed the start of the trial.
“This is a significant step in efforts to ensure accountability for planning, ordering, and carrying out the genocide in Rwanda,“ the rights group said. - AFP
