With the imminent collapse of Rwanda’s Juvenal Habyarimana regime, Felicien Kabuga, a key genocide suspect arrested in France on May 16, escaped and received sanctuary in several countries.
After pressure from the international community to hand him over to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, his stay in Kenya became untenable and he fled to other countries, eventually ending up in France.
Instead of showing regret over its friendly relations with the genocidal regime by doing whatever it could to bring genocide suspects to book, France undertook a diversionary tactic.
Africa, more than anyone else, should take crimes of genocide very seriously because almost every country—from Kenya to Nigeria to the Central African Republic—has experienced ethnic slaughter or has potential for it.
Kabuga’s arrest and trial should remind us of that apocalyptic event in Rwanda in 1994 and make us more supportive of the Rome Statute and other international legal instruments meant to end these truly hellish crimes.
