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Relatives seek inquiry on Rwanda
Who started genocide?: Daughter of former president to
launch lawsuit in Canada
April 3, 2004 UNITED NATIONS - A Canadian court will be asked to resolve the one enduring mystery of the Rwandan genocide as the central African nation marks the 10th anniversary next week of the mass slaughter in which more than 800,000 people died. The United Nations has been at the centre of international resistance to finding out who triggered the killings by assassinating Juvenal Habyarimana, the Rwandan president, on April 6, 1994, firing missiles at his plane as it approached the airport near the Rwandan capital, Kigali. His daughter Marie-Rose Habyarimana, now a Canadian citizen, plans legal action in her adopted country based on evidence emerging from the first completed probe of the missile attack. In an exclusive interview, Ms. Habyarimana said she will join relatives of others killed in the missile strike in launching lawsuits in their countries of exile against Rwanda's current president, Paul Kagame. The lawsuits will be based on allegations implicating Mr. Kagame contained in a newly completed French judicial probe. This was launched six years ago under pressure from families of the French crew members who also died. Ms. Habyarimana's declaration comes as a newly declassified U.S. State Department memo reveals that Mobutu Sese Seko, then president of Rwanda's neighbour Zaire, called for an international investigation into the plane attack soon after the massacres. The memo is significant because one of the reasons the UN's Montreal-based aviation arm gave last week in answer to Ms. Habyarimana's renewed plea for a probe was that no state had asked for one. Also killed in the attack were Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Burundian president, and senior Rwandan and Burundian officials. The increasing pressure to resolve who shot down the plane threatens to overshadow the extensive memorial services Mr. Kagame has planned in Rwanda next week. His regime has hit back by announcing Mr. Habyarimana's wife, Agathe, tops a list of 300 suspects the Rwandan government wants to prosecute for alleged involvement in the genocide. Significantly, Agathe Habyaramina, who fled Rwanda with her children within days of the start of the killings and is now living in France, is not among the 81 suspects indicted by the UN's war crimes tribunal for Rwanda. "First, Kagame's government said she had killed my father, now she is supposed to have masterminded the whole genocide," said Marie-Rose Habyarimana, 35, who was studying at Universite Laval in Quebec when the killings erupted. "Apart from accompanying him on some trips, she was never involved in the politics of the country. She was just a mother to her children. On the other hand, you have to look at who benefited from this assassination." At the time of the missile attack, Mr. Kagame headed a rebel army of Rwanda's minority Tutsis that was descending on Kigali. The death of the president, a member of the Hutu majority, gave Hutu extremists an excuse to call for mass slaughter of Tutsis. The killings ended 100 days later when Mr. Kagame's movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, took control of the country. The results of the French probe challenge the never-proved but widely accepted account Mr. Habyarimana was killed by Hutu extremists because he had signed a peace agreement that would have seen them share power with the Tutsis. After the assassination, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for a full investigation. Internal UN documents obtained by the National Post in 2000 show UN investigators launched a probe. But the same papers, dated 1997, alleged that Louise Arbour, the Canadian Supreme Court Justice who was then chief UN war crimes prosecutor, shut it down after investigators uncovered evidence appearing to implicate Mr. Kagame. Michael Hourigan, chief of the aborted UN investigation, told the French judicial inquiry he believed the United Nations had caved into pressure from the United States, which saw Mr. Kagame as a "valuable ally" in the region. Now working outside the United Nations as an international lawyer, Mr. Hourigan said he remained astounded the murder of two presidents and their respective delegations does not warrant an open international inquiry. "It was an act of terrorism as much as Lockerbie, or 9/11 or the attack on USS Cole," he said. "It plunged a country into a genocide that killed an estimated one million people. Yet no one wants to know about it." One of the most active of the victims' relatives pushing for an inquiry has been Maurice Nsabimana, son of Deogratias Nsabimana, the Rwandan chief of staff, who lost his life as he jumped from the stricken craft. "We wanted a lawsuit against 'unknown perpetrators' which led to the French inquiry, and now we have a basis for more legal action," he said. After the crash, Mr. Habyarimana's army fled with the bodies of the dead to the Zairean border. Although the younger Nsabimana was able to rescue many family members, he has never found his father's remains. International law experts say Canada has jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Conventions committed abroad. But it can only arrest suspects if they step on to Canadian soil. In addition, Mr. Kagame would be immune from arrest as long as he remains a state leader. "It is conceivable that if the Canadian minister of justice were presented with a detailed file containing evidence that could point to President Kagame's responsibility in this act, then Canada would in turn have a responsibility to address its relationship with a leader who may be responsible for one of the most significant acts of terrorism in the 20th century," said Tiphaine Dickson, a member of the Quebec bar, and former defence attorney at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Two other relatives of those killed in the missile attack live in Canada and could join Ms. Habyarimana in filing lawsuits in a Canadian court. � National Post
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