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Rwandan fugitive Leon Mugesera (R) is handcuffed on the tarmac as he arrives at Kigali International Airport on Jan. 24. Mugesera, a linguist who had lived in Canada since 1993, is wanted by the Rwandan authorities for alleged incitement to genocide in a speech he delivered two years before the 1994 genocide. (Steve Terrill/AFP/Getty Images)
Two seemingly unrelated Rwandan stories made both history and the headlines last week. One was the dramatic finding by a French inquiry that members of the pre-genocide Hutu government and military must have shot down the plane carrying their President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, launching their planned genocide only hours later.
After 18 years it has essentially settled the central question of who was morally responsible for triggering the genocide.
The second was the decision of the Canadian government to deport to Rwanda at long last a man named Leon Mugesera, accused of inciting his fellow Hutu to massacre Tutsi about one and half years before the plane crash. In fact, the two stories are closely related.
Responsibility for the plane crash has been the source of bitter dispute from the very moment it happened. Given the extraordinary number of direct and explicit threats from Hutu extremists that they intended to annihilate all Rwandan Tutsi and would come after anyone who failed to support their conspiracy, even the president, and given Habyarimana’s intention after much stalling to implement a power-sharing plan with the largely Tutsi RPF rebels, the perpetrators of the crash always seemed obvious.
Logic suggested that the extremists decided to murder the appeasing Habyarimana as the signal for the genocide to be launched. And just as events prior to the genocide pointed directly at Hutu extremists as the only logical culprits, so the events immediately following the crash strongly pointed to a carefully organized plan that was now ready to be executed: the roadblocks that immediately went up; the murder of the prime minister and other moderate cabinet ministers, judges, and senior officials; the beginning of the systematic hunt to slaughter all Tutsi; the murder by government soldiers of 10 Belgian soldiers from the U.N. military mission; and through it all, the provocations of hate radio RTLM. How could there be any reasonable doubt as to the perpetrators of the crash?
This is where the case of Leon Mugesera comes in. He was among the first of the Hutu extremists to publicly call for the extermination of the Tutsi, helping to create the atmosphere of hysteria and hatred for the Tutsi that eventually allowed the conspirators to mobilize so many ordinary Hutu to carry out the genocide.
Mugesera shrewdly understood how to dehumanize the Tutsi by labeling them “inyenzi”—cockroaches—and to challenge their very existence by proclaiming them aliens who had come from Ethiopia and had no right to remain in Rwanda. “I am telling you,” he said to whip up his Hutu audience, “that your home is in Ethiopia, that we will send you by the Nyabrongo River so you can get there quickly.”
As it happens, this speech was taped and was later replayed around the country. A short portion can be found on YouTube.
Mugesera himself fled to Canada, and though he was convicted of inciting hatred, for years he found legal ways to resist being shipped back to Rwanda for trial. Now, however, he seems to have squeezed the last possible ounce out of the Canadian appeal processes and will soon be back home. During his trial the relation between his inflammatory exhortations to genocide and the plane crash 17 months later should become quite clear.
Plane Crash Investigations
Yet from the start, in their typically cynical, shrewd way, the genocidaires, with the help of France, began blaming everyone else for the crash: the Belgian soldiers in the U.N. mission, Uganda, and above all the RPF and their commander, Paul Kagame. But from the start, the motives for Kagame and the RPF were entirely obscure.
Did it make the remotest sense to think Kagame shot the plane down precisely in the hope there would be a genocide against his own people that would somehow, in some incomprehensible way, lead to RPF rule of the country? These questions have never had anything close to a sensible answer, which didn’t stop two groups of people from accusing Kagame of shooting down the plane.
The first group consisted of all those who for various reasons have denied that any genocide ever took place. Their interest here was simple: If Kagame shot the plane down, then there was no carefully organized genocide conspiracy by Hutu extremists that the crash was meant to trigger.
A second group agreed there was genocide but had grown so hostile to every act of the Kagame government that they concluded he had to be responsible for the crash as well.
Both groups found vindication for their unprovable position in a 2006 report by a French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere that found President Kagame and several top aides guilty of deliberately assassinating Habyarimana. In the annals of shoddy, dishonest, biased, worthless reports, Bruguiere’s will forever take a dishonorable place.
