An ex-Rwandan government minister charged with genocide and crimes against humanity held meetings ”to spread the gospel of genocide” ahead of the massacre of 800 000 people in 1994, a court heard on Wednesday.
The trial of Augustin Ngirabatware, the son-in-law of the man alleged to have bankrolled the genocide, opened before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in the north Tanzanian town of Arusha.
Prosecutor Wallace Kapaya told the court in his opening statement that Ngirabatware convened several meetings in 1994 in his native Gisenyi region in north-western Rwanda.
The purpose of these meetings was ”to spread the gospel of genocide” and he on several occasions insisted that no Tutsi should be spared, Kapaya said.
Of the 800 000 people slaughtered in 100 days in 1994, most were Tutsis.
”He used his connections, his political power and his education” in the framework of ”a joint criminal enterprise” aiming to destroy partially or completely the Tutsi ethnic group, Kapaya said.
The Tanzanian prosecutor also accused the former planning minister, son-in-law of fugitive businessperson Felicien Kabuga, of having distributed arms to Interahamwe militia and abused his position to divert funds from donors such as the World Bank, the United States and Belgium to the Interahamwe.
Kapaya said Ngirabatware, as a minister, a renowned academic and a son-in-law to Kabuga, himself related by marriage to then president Juvenal Habyarimana, was an ”indispensable link in the common criminal undertaking”.
The former minister followed the prosecutor’s statement attentively, sometimes exchanging comments with his team of lawyers headed by Peter Herbert of Britain.
The start of the trial was postponed several times, notably because of changes in the defence team.
Arrested in Germany in September 2007, Ngirabatware has been in ICTR custody since October 8 2008, and has consistently denied all charges.
Ngirabatware was a teacher at the National University of Rwanda before becoming planning minister from 1990 to 1994. After he went into exile in July 1994, he worked in research institutes in Gabon and in France.
The ICTR was established by the United Nations in November 1994 to try the masterminds of the genocide. The first trials started in 1997.
Rwanda, meanwhile, set up a series of grass roots tribunals known as ”gacaca” courts — revamped versions of traditional courts where elders would settle village disputes — to try hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects.
Laymen were chosen to be judges for the courts in 2001 as Rwanda responded to the fact that its legal system had been left in ruins after the genocide and that most of the country’s legal practitioners were either dead or in exile.
Several other countries, including Belgium and Canada, have tried Rwandans in their own national courts. A Finnish court is currently hearing a case involving a Rwandan accused of genocide. — AFP
