Focus Media (Kigali)
12 November 2008
editorial
A question sprang to mind the moment people learnt of the arrest of Rose Kabuye, Presidential chief of protocol, in the German city of Frankfurt.
People on Monday demonstrated before the German Embassy against the arrest of Rose Kabuye (inset) (photo Timothy Kisambira)
Why are the Germans arresting this woman yet they have recently released a genocide suspect, one Callixte Mbarushimana, Secretary General of the FDLR-that group of people who fled to the Congo after massacring a million people and up to now are still bent on coming back and finishing what they started, which is to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda?
Another question then follows: is it because it is a European, a French judge who issued the warrant for Kabuye but it was an African government, Rwanda which wanted Mbarushimana arrested?
What really explains this behavior of Germany's? German officials have a rather lame excuse for it. A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Berlin said his government was obliged to arrest Rose Kabuye.
The spokesman, Jens Ploettner was quoted in the international media saying: "the arrest warrant was binding and obligatory for the German government and the police. Against this backdrop we had no other choice than to make the arrest."
In other words the Germans were bound and obliged to do what a single French judge, one Jean Louis Bruguiere requested but when it came to what it was required to do by the government of Rwanda it simply arrests the man (suspected of mass murder) and releases him. Is this an unjust world or what?
It's such a great pity really that some Europeans have this tendency to yield to their worst instincts when it comes to dealing with Africans.
Mrs. Kabuye is a mother of three; a woman who all her life lived a life of exile like millions of other Rwandans-until she came to Rwanda as part of the vanguard of a movement to reverse decades of the injustice of statelessness and being spat on everywhere as a refugee.
This heroic individual sacrificed so much to have her rights as a human being recognized; so she and millions of others forced into exile by the worst forms of ethnic cleansing would get a simple recognition- that they are Rwandan and not Ugandans or Congolese or Burundians or wherever else they lived those years of exile.
She lost people during the war and Genocide and now some French judge will question whether she helped bring down a plane carrying a dictator whose regime planned the Genocide and whether by bringing down the plane she knowingly helped cause the Genocide. This is mind-bending to say the least.
If the Germans had done their homework, they would- if this were a fair and just world- treat Bruguiere's warrants (against nine officials of the Rwandan administration and military because Bruguiere has taken it upon himself to question Rwandans about the death of Habyarimana) with a lot of reservation, if not suspicion.
A starting point would be to ask themselves: did Bruguiere's methods-as he went about preparing his indictments and issuing his warrants-measure up to international standards? If they did they would quickly discover the warrants only amount to a joke.
Think for a moment of the roster of so called witnesses of the French judge.
Each and every one of these people has an axe to grind with the government of Rwanda, or with high-ranking officials of the administration. In fact some of these "witnesses" are genocide suspects.
Consider for a moment: among the people Jean Louis Bruguiere interviewed as he prepared his indictments were Theoneste Bagosora and Hassan Ngeze.
Here we may be excused for talking in terms any German would understand: that is like some judge interviewing Heinrich Himmler and Josef Goebbels so as to indict a member of the allied forces that defeated the Nazis.
Think of the other witnesses of Bruguiere's. You have a fellow like Michael Hourigan, an Australian who was an employee of the International Criminal for Rwanda and whose ICTR bosses sacked him for advancing theories- not backed up by any evidence- that Paul Kagame ordered the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane.
Another Bruguiere witness is one Emmanuel Ruzigana, formerly a rank and file soldier within the RPF who went AWOL one day, surfaced in Kampala and somehow got linked to the French embassy which later sponsored him to go live in France.
There are individuals like Andre Guichaoua a French academic well-known for being a denier of the Rwandan Genocide, as well as Philippe Reyntjens, another notorious denier.
Those are the people whose testimony led to the issuance of warrants one of which has led to the jailing of Rose Kabuye.
Surely even a blind person would see Bruguiere's activities are motivated by something other than a desire for justice?
The French, past colonial masters of much of Africa, are hurting that a poor people like Rwandans would drive a client regime like Habyarimana's out of power; surely they are hurting that we have not behaved like good little colonial servants, taken orders from them and begged them not to be angry with us for causing the demise of their client regime.
They are hurting that Rwandans have dared show the ingratitude to not slavishly continue to do everything in the French language.
Oh yes-they are hurting so much; so much in fact that they've forgotten a simple fact of life: you can't defeat the truth no matter what bunch of lies you will resort to.
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