Africa President Paul Kagame of Rwanda says his country will consider charging French nationals who allegedly played a role in the country’s 1994 genocide if nothing is done to reverse a series of indictments of Rwandan officials in European courts.
Full interview
Mr Kagame says a Rwandan investigation has garnered information on French nationals he alleges are complicit with the former Rwandan regime responsible for the murder of more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
He was speaking to the Financial Times after winning backing at an African Union summit in Egypt on Tuesday for a resolution to prevent universal jurisdiction being extended across the AU’s 53 member states.
The AU called for the creation of an international regulatory body with competence to review appeals “arising out of abuse of the principle of universal jurisdiction by individual states”, saying this violated sovereignty and interfered with member states’ ability to conduct international relations.
Mr Kagame led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels in 1994, driving those responsible for the genocide into neighbouring states while the world looked on and did little. His soldiers were accused of atrocities in years that followed, but he has remained a dogged defender of the moral high ground he believes the RPF won in 1994.
The role of France in backing the former Hutu-dominated regime has been a source of friction with Kigali ever since.
France denies a role in the genocide and claims its intervention helped stave off worse catastrophe. Relations between the countries worsened in 2006 when a French prosecutor indicted nine Rwandan officials for allegedly conspiring to shoot down an aircraft carrying former president Juvenal Habyarimana, an event that triggered the genocide. The source of the missile remains a mystery. Mr Kagame and his many allies blame Hutu extremists. He has severed diplomatic relations with France.
In February, a Spanish judge indicted 40 Rwandan officials for their alleged role in the killing of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda and Congo in the years after the RPF took power. Mr Kagame was named but enjoys immunity as head of state.
“There is no basis [for the Spanish and French charges] . . . They are indicting the people who actually stopped the genocide,” he says, adding: “One would expect there to be an international regulatory mechanism. Otherwise you will have chaos – everyone will be indicting everyone.”
If European countries could extend their judicial powers to Africa, he warned, African countries should be able to do the same.
“Hopefully, our judges will also enjoy indicting some of them [French nationals], he says. I don’t rule that out unless these issues are sorted out.”
Under Mr Kagame, Rwanda projected its military muscle across much of central Africa through the 1990s as it pursued the remnants of the former regime. He remains a close ally of both the US and the UK.
His government is constantly investing in defences to safeguard “social and economic development”, he says. Rwanda, he adds, “is much better off now than it has ever been”.
Yet western onlookers remain preoccupied with his country’s “ugly history”, not the progress it is making towards recovery.
Mr Kagame has a wry sense of humour and a bitter sense of history.
He says that while there is much talk about new, more equal relations, European powers continue wanting to dominate events. “When things are going well they want to be seen to be responsible. If things are going badly they want to be seen to be the ones putting them right.”
