Rwanda on Tuesday rejected calls by a French judge to indict President Paul Kagame over his alleged involvement in the death of the country’s former leader, which sparked the 1994 genocide.
”The allegations are totally unfounded. The judge is acting on the basis of gossip and rumours,” Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama said.
Karugarama accused the Judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, of playing political games over the allegations that will further worsen the already frosty relations between Kigali and Paris.
”These are political games rather than a judicial process,” he said.
On Monday, Bruguiere said Kagame should face prosecution for war crimes before the Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) because of his ”suspected involvement” in the death of then-Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana.
But Rwanda has accused France of abetting the genocide, in which about 800 000 people, mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were slaughtered by Hutu extremists during a 100-day killing spree between April and July 1994.
Paris has adamantly denied the allegation but Kigali has charged a commission with determining whether there is evidence to file a suit against France for damages at the world court.
The Rwandan minister said his government would not respond to Bruguiere’s allegations by seeking to indict French President Jacques Chirac over the genocide.
Kigali would not be dragged into ”a sad situation where we would also engage in similar games by indicting Chirac or other senior French officials”, Karugarama said.
The ICTR, in which Bruguiere said Kagame should be arraigned, is currently hearing the case of several former high-ranking Rwandan army officers accused of genocide.
Formed in late 1994, the court has so far tried 31 suspects, convicting 26 and acquitting five. Twenty-five trials are now in progress, with 12 awaiting their start.
The tribunal last month turned down a request to consider an earlier account from Bruguiere into the killing of Habyarimana, which reportedly named Kagame as the main decision-maker behind the April 6 1994 attack in which Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed.
The downing of Habyarimana’s aircraft, in which Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira and a four-man French crew were also killed, sparked off the mass slaughter.
Kagame, who headed the Tutsi rebel force that took power in Kigali in July 1994, ending the genocide, has always denied any involvement in the attack on the aircraft carrying Habyarimana.
French courts also called on Monday for international arrest warrants to be served against nine of Kagame’s aides in relation to the plane attack, including James Kabarebe, or Kabare, a senior officer in the Rwandan army.
Before the allegations of Kagame’s involvement, which surfaced in unofficial United Nations documents, it was widely assumed that Habyarimana was killed by Hutu extremists in his own entourage, who were opposed to power-sharing arrangements with Kagame’s mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
A confidential memorandum written by a UN investigator in 1997 and implicating Kagame is under seal at the ICTR, which has refused to give a copy to Bruguiere.
The ICTR chief prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow of The Gambia, has said that the attack against Habyarimana is not part of his mandate.
The UN Security Council created the ICTR, based in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, to investigate, indict and put on trial the main suspects in the Rwandan genocide. — Sapa-AFP