Félicien Kabuga dies in The Hague, accused of instigating and financing the genocide in Rwanda

Félicien Kabuga, 93 years old, the Rwandan businessman accused of instigating and financing the genocide in his country in 1994 — which cost the lives of about 800,000 members of the Tutsi and moderate Hutu ethnic groups — died on Saturday in 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.

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The genocide, however, is a crime that does not prescribe, and the tribunal has a mechanism to continue its work from the Netherlands. In any case, Kabuga was not finally tried due to dementia, and he had not been transferred to Rwanda because of his health condition and doubts about his security.

Between April and June 1994, nearly 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus considered moderate were killed, and about one million people had to seek refuge in neighboring countries to escape the massacre. The genocide was unleashed after the death of 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 execution arm of the genocide.

Félicien Kabuga, of the Hutu ethnic group, was one of the richest men in Rwanda thanks to his businesses with coffee and tea plantations. 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 of the ICTR Prosecutor’s Office, based in Arusha (Tanzania).

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 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 killed 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 for 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 been forgotten, on May 16, 2020, he opened the door of his house in a suburb of Paris. The ICTR had been tracking him all that time through Africa and Europe, and the elderly man met 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 coronavirus lockdown allowed agents to focus on following his trail.

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More than a thousand genocidaires wanted

The surprise of his Parisian neighbors was immense, as Kabuga was a discreet man who often went out for walks. First confined 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 main suspects of the Rwandan genocide wanted by the authorities. The death of two of the last fugitives was confirmed by the ICTR in May 2024. The tribunal’s prosecutor, Belgian Serge Brammertz, recalled at that time that “there are still more than a thousand genocidaires wanted 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), which focused on the Balkan war (1991-2001).

The Rwanda tribunal prosecuted a total of 93 people, including businessmen, politicians, military personnel, and officials. Media executives and religious leaders were also tried. There were 61 convictions and 14 acquittals, and more than 3,000 testimonies, according to ICTR documentation. The tribunal operated outside 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 of its foreign policy. In 2021, 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 machinery that led to the worst.”

In 1998, then U.S. President Bill Clinton also apologized on behalf of his country, and Belgium did the same later. In 2014, the United Nations acknowledged its failure during the genocide, and Pope Francis apologized in 2017. He said he did so “for the sins of the Church and for its members who gave in to hatred,” betraying its evangelical mission.

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