Rwandan Genocide
Afp, Arusha
A UN-backed tribunal yesterday sentenced the man accused of having masterminded the country’s 1994 genocide to life in prison for his part in the massacres that killed some 800,000 people.
Theoneste Bagosora, who prosecutors had portrayed as the mastermind of the genocide was convicted “of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” said the judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
Immediately after the verdict, Bagosora’s lawyer said his client would challenge his conviction. “Bagosora has decided to appeal. It is a disappointment,” said Raphael Constant of the verdict.
Bagosora, a church choir boy in his youth who rose to become a key officer in the Rwandan military, was tried along with three co-defendants.
Two of the co-defendants, also ex-military officers, were also sentenced to life, while the third was acquitted.
Prosecutors had sought a life sentence for Bagosora, who had pleaded not guilty and argued that he “never killed anybody.”
The genocide saw extremists from Rwanda’s Hutu majority slaughter minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killing 800,000 people over 100 days. The massacres shocked the world and led to accusations that Western nations watched them unfold without moving to stop them.
The slaughter is thought to have been triggered by the downing of a plane carrying Rwanda’s then president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and his Burundian counterpart on April 6, 1994.
The tribunal ruled that Bagosora was responsible for the assassination of former prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, as well as the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers and several politicians.
It also ruled that Bagosora, the cabinet director of Rwanda’s defence ministry when the genocide began, was behind the massacre of Tutsis at road blocks in the capital Kigali and in his home region of Gisenyi in the north.
Bagosora was arrested in Cameroon in 1996 and his trial began in 2002.
The indictment accused him and his co-defendants of having conspired to “work out a plan with the intent to exterminate the civilian Tutsi population and eliminate members of the opposition, so that they could remain in power.”
ICTR chief prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow charged that the four were involved in a conspiracy that began in late 1990 when hundreds of Tutsis were arrested after an attack by a Tutsi-dominated rebel group.
The conspiracy became more explicit the following year when the accused, part of a 10-member panel formed by Habyarimana, worked towards the “definition of the enemy”, Jarrow argued.
The panel met to explore ways of “defeating the enemy militarily, politically and through the media,” with the enemy being the Tutsi ethnic group.
Bagosora’s French lawyer Rapahel Constant had questioned the very basis for the case, arguing that prosecutors failed to prove the killings meet the legal definition of “genocide.”
The former military officer, 67, had also denied killing 10 Belgian peacekeepers to force the withdrawal of UN peace force in Rwanda and allow the massacres to go ahead.
“I never killed anybody, neither did I give orders to kill. You are the ones who can rehabilitate me back to the society,” Bagosora said. He argued he was a victim of propaganda from the present Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government.
Lieutenant-Colonel Anatole Nsegiyumva, the former commander of Gisenyi military region; and Major Alloys Ntabakuze, the former commander of the Para-Commando battalion of Kanombe (Kigali) were convicted on the same charges.
But the tribunal acquitted a fourth officer, Brigadier Gratien Kabiligi, the former chief of military operations, and ordered his immediate release.
Courtesy: thedailystar.net
