Félicien Kabuga, 93, the Rwandan businessman accused of instigating and financing the genocide in his country in 1994—which claimed the lives of some 800,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic group and moderate Hutus—passed away on Saturday at a hospital in The Hague (Netherlands). Although the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) formally charged him in 1997, Kabuga managed to evade justice for two decades, until he was discovered in Paris in May 2020 and transferred to The Hague. By then, the ICTR had already closed its doors.
Genocide, however, is a crime that does not expire, and the court has a mechanism to continue its work from the Netherlands. In any case, Kabuga was not ultimately tried, due to suffering from dementia, and he had not been transferred to Rwanda either due to his state of health and doubts regarding his safety.
Between April and June 1994, nearly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered, and nearly a million people had to take refuge in neighboring countries to escape the massacre. The genocide was unleashed after the death of the then-Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was Hutu, when his plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. His companion, Cyprien Ntaryamira, president of Burundi, also died. The killings began within hours by the Rwandan Armed Forces and the extremist Hutu militia interahamwe, which was the main executing arm of the genocide.
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Félicien Kabuga, of the Hutu ethnic group, was one of the richest men in Rwanda thanks to his coffee and tea plantation businesses. He founded the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, which operated between 1993 and 1994, and from there incited hatred against the Tutsis, according to the indictment by the ICTR Prosecutor’s Office, based in Arusha (Tanzania).
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He was also accused of having created the National Defense Fund to supply machetes to the interahamwe militia. The radio station served to provide the location of the victims and to call for the elimination of the Tutsis, who were called “cockroaches.” The hate speech reached everyone: men, women, children, the elderly, or the sick were hacked to death with machetes or burned alive.
Kabuga disappeared for two decades, with signs that he may have been in Kenya, Madagascar, and Burundi, according to the ICTR Prosecutor’s Office. He was even seen in Germany, where he went to undergo surgery in 2007, and the United States offered a five-million-dollar reward for any lead that could lead to his arrest.
When he was already 84 years old and his name seemed to have fallen into oblivion, on May 16, 2020, he opened the door of his house in a suburb of Paris. The ICTR had followed his trail all that time through Africa and Europe, and the old man encountered the police on the landing. Several countries and Interpol collaborated in the arrest, and investigators monitored Kabuga’s children until they located him under a false identity and in possession of a passport from an unidentified African country. The pandemic and the coronavirus lockdown allowed agents to focus on following his trail.
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More than a thousand wanted genocidaires
The surprise of his Parisian neighbors was immense, as Kabuga was a discreet man who often went out for walks. Initially held in La Santé prison in Paris, he was later transferred to The Hague. At the time of his arrest, there were six other fugitives considered prime suspects in the Rwandan genocide who were wanted by authorities. The deaths of two of the last fugitives were confirmed by the IRMCT in May 2024. The tribunal’s prosecutor, Belgian Serge Brammertz, recalled at that time that there were “still more than a thousand genocidaires sought by national authorities.”
The ICTR closed its doors in 2015. It had been established in 1994 by the United Nations Security Council, as it also did with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the latter focused on the Balkan war (1991-2001).
The Rwanda tribunal prosecuted a total of 93 people, including business people, politicians, military personnel, and government officials. Media executives and religious leaders also sat in the dock. There were 61 convictions and 14 acquittals, and more than 3,000 testimonies were heard, according to ICTR documentation. The tribunal operated outside of Rwanda to avoid pressure and conflicts and worked in three languages: English, French, and Kinyarwanda, the main Rwandan language.
France’s role in the genocide is a dark chapter in its foreign policy. In 2021, the president, Emmanuel Macron, admitted “responsibility, though not complicity” in the tragedy. France wanted to keep Rwanda in its sphere of influence and supported the Government. Hence, Macron added that “there is an overwhelming responsibility in the chain of events that led to the worst.”
In 1998, then-US President Bill Clinton also apologized on behalf of his country, and Belgium later did the same. In 2014, the United Nations acknowledged its failure during the genocide, and Pope Francis asked for forgiveness in 2017. He did so, he said, “for the sins of the Church and its members who gave in to hatred,” betraying its evangelical mission.
