Karugarama accuses judge of snubbing international law

The government of Rwanda has strongly denounced Wednesday’s indictments by a Spanish judge against forty senior Rwandan military officers for alleged mass murder and crimes against humanity after the 1994 Genocide.

Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama yesterday urged Rwandans and the international community to disregard the document, describing it as "a racist and negationist document" designed to destablise Rwanda.

Karugarama, who is also the country’s Attorney General, said of the 182-page document: "That document, those indictments should be treated with the contempt they deserve."

He said that Spain’s National Court’s Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles’ indictments were "an attempt to deny Genocide in Rwanda or to make the authors of the Genocide the heroes or innocents of this country and instead attempt to make those who stopped the Genocide to be the actual Genocidaires."

He explained: "It’s not really a judicial document but a political document, which mixes up the war in (DR) Congo, the deaths of some Spanish citizens in Rwanda, or the deaths in Congo being laid on the hands of the forty Rwandan officers."

He said that the document is an attempt to disrupt the country’s stability "in as far as it targets, all senior Rwandan military officers, are concerned. It is a vague document, incomplete and generally unconnected except in as far as it wants to excuse, defend or justify the Genocide that took place in Rwanda."

President Paul Kagame led the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) – now the Rwanda Defence Forces – during a 1990-94 liberation war that ended when the former rebels seized power and stopped the Genocide.

The then president Juvenal Habyarimana government is blamed for planning and executing the Genocide, which in a record 100 days (from April to July, 1994) had claimed the lives of an estimated one million people.

The Spanish judge’s indictment document targets top former RPA officers with the exception of one officer at the rank of Lieutenant General.

Judge Merelles was quoted saying that he had gathered testimony from 22 people, most of them in exile and now in witness-protection programmes.

He said he also has evidence implicating President Kagame in human rights crimes, but could not indict the Head of State because he has immunity.

However, Karugarama said the document is a result of coordinated efforts between negative forces and Genocide suspects still at large, still bent on destablising the country.

"All deaths in Congo are attributed to Rwandan officers; Congo has not complained or asked the judge to step in for them; Rwanda has not complained; so who is complaining?

"From the information we have, the complainants are a group of fugitives networking together with negationists and Genocide deniers and opponents of the Rwandan Government to try to destablise the country," he said.

Judge Merelles issued the indictments within the context of Spain’s "universal jurisdiction law" under which the European nation has a mandate to punish human rights crimes committed anywhere in the world, but Karugarama says the judge totally disregarded his own country’s legal provisions and the international law.

"The fact that Spanish courts have universal jurisdiction to try certain offences committed outside their territory does not give the judge the right to publish a racist, negationist and fraudulent document to violate another country’s sovereignty," he said.

"International law has a framework in which it operates; it does not authorise judges to abuse the principle of due process, the right to defence and professional judicial conduct. It does not give a blanket authority to do anything, anyhow, anywhere and do it in an abusive manner," stressed Karugarama.

He added that the document "totally ignores" the judgments that have been rendered by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) based in Arusha, Tanzania. The UN court is set to wind up all trials by the end of this year.

"The judge should have taken judicial notice of decisions of an international court which is a higher court than the one he sits in," Karugarama said, adding that Kigali was more than ready to challenge the document all the way.

President Kagame and other government officials have previously said that former RPA soldiers who committed crimes were legally dealt with by the country’s legal system, at times attracting criticisms from international activists who said the punishments were severe.

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