Agathe Habyarimana, thirty years of exile and suspicion with out justice | EUROtoday

It's an inextricable affair. That of a girl who, for thirty years, has been suspected of getting orchestrated and inspired probably the most critical crime, however with out ever having been tried. Agathe Habyarimana, 81, widow of the previous Rwandan president, was evacuated by the French military within the first days of the Tutsi genocide on April 9, 1994. She now lives in a home within the Paris suburbs. Prosecuted for “complicity in genocide” in France since 2007, she is topic to a world arrest warrant issued by Kigali. But Paris, which rejected her asylum request, additionally refuses to extradite her to Rwanda.

“ I am committed to ensuring that no person suspected of crimes of genocide can escape justice,” However, affirmed Emmanuel Macron, on May 27, 2021 in Kigali, the place he got here to seal Franco-Rwandan reconciliation.

Three years later, whereas Rwanda is getting ready to have fun the thirtieth commemoration of the Tutsi genocide and the trials of genocidaires comply with each other earlier than the Paris Assize Court on the fee of two per yr – six males have already been sentenced with sentences starting from fourteen years of prison imprisonment to life imprisonment – ​​the case of Agathe Habyarimana appears insoluble. The former first girl of Rwanda was positioned below assisted witness standing in 2016 and has not been questioned by the courts since. In September 2020, she requested an investigating decide to shut the investigation citing the “unreasonable delay” of the process, however his request was judged “inadmissible”.

“In this case, French justice has dragged on far too long, deplores Alain Gauthier, president of the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda (CPCR). His role played during the planning of the genocide seems indisputable. » In May 2021 in Paris, Rwandan President Paul Kagame reaffirmed that M^me Habyarimana featured “at the top of the list” suspects he wished to see tried. But the file is slowed down.

“The devil in the body”

Born in 1942 in Gisenyi, Agathe Habyarimana, née Kanziga, is a descendant of one of many highest lineage Hutu clans in northern Rwanda, the Abahinza.. She was 21 years previous when she married Juvénal Habyarimana, an bold profession soldier who took energy in July 1973 in a coup d'état. Around twenty Hutu radicals from the north created “Akazu” in 1991., the “little house” in Kinyarwanda, the language generally spoken in Rwanda.

This political-economic community locks entry to energy as a way to put together, militarily and financially, for the genocide. Even if Agathe Habyarimana has all the time denied the existence of the “Akazu”, a number of notes and reviews present the affect she had over this clan, and particularly the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE) which wrote in September 1994 : THE “the real brains of Akazu would be Agathe Habyarimana and her brother Protais Zigiranyirazo, alias “Mr. Z””.

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