Rose Kabuye and fellow indictees could be liberators to some Rwandans yet by the same token, they are villains to others. Without a doubt they stopped genocide but they also committed mass murder in the process, not collaterally but deliberately –there is no shortage of witnesses and survivors of RPA massacres before, during and after genocide.

Responsibility of the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane remains, a mystery at least officially to today. However as you opine in this post card, circumstances that suggest it might as well have been an inside job of MRND elements, there are even more reason why it might indeed have been RPF/A who needed a diversion from implementing the final peace agreement.

The peace agreement emphasized the creation of a unity government wherein, MRND, RPF, MDR and other smaller parties would participate. After the transitional period, multi-party elections based on one person one vote, would be held. Nobody expected RPF to win these elections, not even RPF itself thought they had a chance, given the sectarian and ethnic atmosphere reigning at the time. Therefore RPA struggle and sacrifice for the past four years would have come to naught. That in mind, it would not have been a terrible idea to eliminate their No.1 enemy and refocus their energies on a front where they had more advantage –armed struggle not democratic politicking.

It is also worth noting that, ever since those tragic events of 1994, no insider or outsider has made a serious accusation with any evidence credible or otherwise, against elements within Habyarimana’s movement. We cannot say the same about RPF/RPA.

Shooting down Habyarimana’s plane aside, there are many war crimes and crimes against humanity RPF/A should be tried for. They rivaled and often out performed the fallen government in killing innocent civilians in areas they captured and held or controlled temporarily. Many escapees of these RPA massacres having been sheltered and organized by President Habyarimana’s wife, later became the hard core genocidaire.

The 1995 massacres in thousands, of Kibeho in the south west of the country, where after the then president Pasteur Bizimungu is infamously remembered to have asked the world to accept the number of 300victim, is just one of those RPF/A signature massacres, only that time they were unsuccessful, with all bulldozers and caterpillars, to bury their victims in mass graves before day-break. Photographs of Kibeho mass graves filled with bodies of victims including women and children, makes one reconsider the ‘liberator’ stature that RPF built itself.

How about the massacres of 1996-97 in Congo during the Kabila campaign!! Again, thousands, babies included lost their lives to RPA guns. How about political assassinations that have been going on ever since RPF captured power.

The presence of Interahamwe genocidaire does not turn RPF/A mass murderers into angels. Justice can be exercised in both instances. The genocidaire can answer for their crimes and so can APF/A elements. In addition to the French list of alleged criminal within RPF, there is even a longer list of wanted RPF elements –that of the Spanish. We cannot accuse the Spanish of similar imperial designs or bruised egos as we do for the French. Stampeding Africa, yes, but if Africa had done its part we would not cross fingers wishing, somebody else intervened to redress our sense of injustice.

If African leadership had the courage and will, to make RPF\A answer for its own responsibility, there would be no pretext for France or any other western power to meddle whatever the motivation. All the protests by African leaders right now, is not necessarily out of principle but fear of the precedence being set by Kabuye’s arrest. They think they might be next.

Deo Lukyamuzi
deo_lukyamuzi@hotmail.com

Watch and see. The truth will come out.

With regard to this matter, it was not because the French people did not like Kagame that they started the investigation on the case of the attack against the Rwandan presidential plane that was shot down on April 6, 1994. Instead, this judicial instruction was the result of complaints from the french crew’s family members who died in the attack. Unexpectedly, the investigation has uncovered the responsibility of Paul Kagame in this terrorist act.

The allegation that the extremist Hutus shot down the aircraft does not make any sense. In Habyarimana’s plane there were people that the RPF has always accused of being the mind masters of the Hutu extremism. These include Colonel Elie Sagatwa and General Deogratias Nsabimana. How can we accuse them of having ordered the attack that would finally take away their own lives? The former Rwandan army has never fired a single missile during the civil war that spanned from 1990 to 1994. Never has there been any evidence that the former Rwandan Army Forces had missiles on deposit. How can we assume that, suddenly, former Rwandan army used missiles to shot down the plane?

In contrast, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had missiles at that time on deposit and had already used such a device to attack an aircraft belonging to the company SCIBE Zaire. The company was owned by a businessman by the name of Bemba Saolona, the father of the former Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba. Paradoxically, the RPF is currently exploring the possibility of serving as M. Bemba’s lawyer before the International Criminal Court with regard to this case!

In addition, during the Rwandan civil war, the RPF controlled and defended its headquarters in Mulindi and its radio Muhabura with missiles.
Paul Kagame has always opposed any inquiry into the attack on Habyarimana’s plane. It is only when the French judiciary has indicted him for this terrorist act that he has put into place the so-called “Committee of Experts”, composed of Rwandans only, to which he commissioned a report due in November this year, and whose findings are already well known.

The remains of the aircraft are still on the crime site in Kigali City. They are well kept and continuously monitored by the RPF soldiers. The former Chief of Staff of the current Rwandan army, Sam Kaka, has prompted cynicism beyond any level of human kind imagination, by arranging his marriage at that site, in October 1994.