The arrest of Félicien Kabuga, one of the Rwandan genocide’s most wanted fugitives for over 25 years, marks a significant milestone in the journey towards truth and justice for victims and survivors. 

The 84-year old businessman is alleged to have supported and armed ethnic Hutu militias that murdered 800,000 people. These victims were mainly part of the Tutsi ethnic group but also included moderate Hutus.  

The French police arrested Kabuga in Paris on 16 May 2020 following a joint investigation with the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) Office of the Prosecutor. He currently awaits transfer to IRMCT custody. According to French officials, Kabuga had been living under an assumed name in an apartment in Asnières-Sur-Seine, northwest of Paris.

Kabuga was close to the former Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, whose death sparked the 100-day genocide when his plane was shot down over the Rwandan capital of Kigali on 6 April 1994. 

Kabuga allegedly founded and funded the notorious Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a Rwandan broadcaster that encouraged people to carry out atrocities against the Tutsis. Kabuga is further alleged to have created and funded the interahamwe militia as well as equipped it with the machetes used in many of its atrocities.

The UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) indicted Kabuga in 1997 on seven counts, including genocide. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) was set up in The Hague to handle cases left over from the ICTR and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia when those tribunals closed. Kabuga will likely appear before local magistrates before being transferred to the IRMCT to stand trial.

UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Kabuga’s arrest “sends a powerful message that those who are alleged to have committed such crimes cannot evade justice and will eventually be held accountable, even more than a quarter of a century later”. 

Mausi Según, Africa director at Human Rights Watch said that the arrest is a “major victory for victims and survivors of the genocide in Rwanda”.

While Kabuga’s arrest comes as a result of international cooperation, it has raised questions about how he was able to evade arrest for so long. In the wake of the genocide, Kabuga is thought to have evaded capture by staying in many countries in East Africa, including Kenya, where in 1996 he narrowly avoided being arrested. In a statement, the French justice ministry said that Kabuga “had with impunity stayed in Germany, Belgium, Congo-Kinshasa [Democratic Republic of Congo], Kenya, or Switzerland”.

The search continues for six other Rwandans accused of genocide. 

HISTORICAL BACKGOUND ON THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE 

On 6 April 1994, then-President of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana—a Hutu—was killed when his plane was shot down. The Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) denied accusations by extremist Hutus that they had carried out the attack.

This event sparked three months of violence between April and July 1994 during which Hutu extremists killed approximately three quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsi population. 800,000 people died, including many Hutus who opposed the genocide. In July 1994, the Ugandan-backed RPF took control of the country and killed thousands of predominantly Hutu civilians in the process.  

The ICTR, established in 1994, indicted 93 people, convicted and sentenced 61, and acquitted 14. Hundreds of thousands faced trial in Rwandan community courts.

Rónán is an LLB and LLM (Human Rights and Criminal Justice) graduate from Queen’s University Belfast. His work focused on areas such as mass surveillance, sexual and gender-based violence, and the relationship between minorities and the UK criminal justice system. Since then he has spent time as a legal intern at REDRESS, London and Phoenix Law, Belfast. 

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