This past week has not been good for Genocide fugitives. It started with the deportation of Beatrice Munyenyezi, who, working with her husband and mother-in-law – now convicts of a UN-backed court – presided over killings of the Tutsi mainly in what was then known as Butare Prefecture.
Munyenyezi who had earlier in 2013 been sentenced to ten years in prison by a US court over immigration fraud, was last week Friday deported to Rwanda to stand trial for the Genocide crimes she stands accused of.
Shortly after Munyenyezi was deported, news broke that another Genocide fugitive, Marcel Hitayezu, a Catholic priest who continued to practice despite the genocide charges he faces, had been arrested in southern France.
Such developments, especially the deportation of Munyenyezi, happening during the month when Rwandans are commemorating the over one million souls killed during the Genocide against the Tutsi, bring survivors of the Genocide close to healing, with the prospect that those who killed their loved ones are being brought to book, other than continuing to roam freely.
For the arrest of Hitayezu in France, it only remains to be seen if indeed the priest will be made to answer for the lives of the Tutsi who died at his hands because we have been here before. In 2016, a French court turned down a request for his extradition to Rwanda, and yet he was not even tried in France.
Instead, he was let off and returned to the pulpit for his pastoral work as if nothing had happened.
The same thing is happening in the case of notorious mass murderers like Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, who is well known in Kigali where he was the vicar at Saint Famille Church and in which thousands were killed on his orders.
Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and tried and convicted in absentia by Rwandan courts, Munyeshyaka was allowed to continue with his services in Church in France, to the chagrin of survivors.
Many other fugitives continue to roam freely in France, and we have failed to see a ground-breaking ruling in France that reverses the one made in 2014, in the case of Laurent Serubuga, Claude Muhayimana and Innocent Muhayimana, all masterminds of the Genocide against the Tutsi.
In this case, the Cour de Cassation in France ruled that the trio could not be extradited to Rwanda because, in 1994, Genocide had not been defined as a crime in the Rwandan penal code. They were set free.
France also remains home to other masterminds of the Genocide like Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, the patrone of a Akazu, a small elite group that was at the heart of planning the Genocide against the Tutsi.