MONTREAL - Leon Mugesera is accused of inspiring mass murder, but on many Sundays the man who is No. 44 on Interpol’s list of fugitives from the Rwanda Genocide sings divine inspiration in Quebec’s cathedrals.

Mugesera is a leader of a choral group called "Magnificat,” a touring choir of about a dozen Rwandan immigrants that performs soul-elevating hymns at Sunday masses in Quebec.

The regular appearances among the Catholic devout grate on members of Quebec’s Tutsi community who have watched Mugesera’s 14-year refuge from justice in Canada.

Mugesera is accused of whipping up a genocidal frenzy against Tutsis in Rwanda with a speech in 1992, just before he fled to Canada.

Protected by Canadian friends

Longtime observers of the case say friends in high Canadian places, including clergy, academics and government officials, have helped shield Mugesera from Rwandan justice ever since.

Joachim Mutezintare, a Genocide survivor who lives in Quebec City, sat in stunned silence in church on a recent Sunday as he listened to Mugesera’s devotionals.

Mutezintare says it’s another attempt by Mugesera to entrench himself into Quebec establishment.

"This is what really shocks me,”’ Mutezintare said in a recent interview. "For years now, he has used these institutions to protect himself, and here he goes, using the church once again.”

Mugesera is awaiting deportation while the Canadian federal government evaluates the danger he would face in his native Rwanda.

His removal was upheld nearly two years ago by the Supreme Court of Canada after it found he helped incite Rwanda’s massacres.
Born in 1952, Mugesera studied under Canadian missionaries in Rwanda in the 1970s and with leading Quebec academics at Laval University in Quebec City in the 1980s.

He completed internships with the Canadian and Quebec governments around that time.

He used those connections repeatedly to gain refuge in Canada in 1993 and again in his fight to avoid deportation.

A decade of court files are filled with glowing references from academics and government officials, including his initial application to come to Canada.

Those connections still protect him in subtle ways, says William Schabas, a Canadian human rights expert now with the Irish Centre for Human Rights.

Schabas documented the threat of Genocide, and Mugesera’s key role in it, in early 1993 - some 15 months before Hutu extremists backed by the government massacred hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis and Hutu moderates.

"When Mugesera came to Canada, he was sheltered by a network of people who shared a sympathetic view of the old (Hutu) Rwandan government,” Schabas said in an interview.

"I think there’s still a constituency in Canada and Quebec, a rather small one now, who are nostalgic for the previous Hutu regime, who still think of Rwanda in terms of the good Hutu and the bad Tutsi.”

Mugesera, the best-known among five people believed to be residents of Canada on Interpol’s wanted list from the Rwanda Genocide, has spent a dozen years fighting deportation.

His case has underlined the misery Canada has dealing with alleged war criminals.

His five children have grown up in Canada, one becoming an accountant, another a lawyer and a third an expert on international relations. Two others remain in school.

Mugesera’s Quebec City lawyer, Guy Bertrand, says Mugesera lives in poverty and suffers constant harassment from his detractors. Mugesera often gets calls in the night accusing him of murder, Bertrand says.

Mugesera no longer gets much work from Laval University, where professors once slipped him academic jobs. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

Bertrand admits he has let his fight to keep Mugesera in Canada become personal over the years. Bertrand was slapped by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2005 for suggesting that a Jewish conspiracy was behind the attempt to deport Mugesera.

Bertrand apologised.

"I’m a lawyer who defends his clients forcefully, and with the passing years I try not to get too close to my cases,” Bertrand said in an interview.

"But I tell you, it’s hell, what he’s been through. They’ve put things on his shoulders based on his associations, based on disgust for what happened in 1994.”

In 1992, Mugesera was an adviser to the Rwandan Hutu ruling regime.

Two years before the Genocide, the Hutu government was fighting a civil war launched from Uganda by mainly Tutsi rebels.

Some 2,000 Tutsi civilians had already died in massacres that started in 1990.

In this heated atmosphere, Mugesera gave a speech on November 22, 1992, exhorting Hutus to fight back against their Tutsi ‘aggressors’.

Cockroaches

He suggested the Tutsis were cockroaches, saying "We must do something ourselves to exterminate this rabble.” He then suggested Hutus could send their enemies ‘back to Ethiopia’ via the Nyabarongo River, an unnavigable waterway that was often used to dispose of bodies in previous massacres.

Mugesera said Hutus made a mistake in 1959, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsis fled the country during a Hutu-led violence.
"The mistake we made in 1959 ... is to let you leave,” said Mugesera.
The speech was even too much for some within Rwanda’s coalition government.

The Hutu justice minister allegedly sought his arrest, but Mugesera found refuge with the Rwandan military and quickly fled to Canada via Spain, using his Canadian connections as references.

The Canadian Supreme Court in 2005 said Mugesera knew his speech would be understood as an incitement to murder.

Schabas’s fact-finding mission to Rwanda in January 1993 showed the court’s judgment against Mugesera was not just hindsight.

Schabas and a team of researchers documented smaller massacres already taking place and found Mugesera’s speech was an important trigger.

"The country was in an agitated state precisely because of Mugesera’s famous speech,” Schabas said.

"It was widely interpreted within the country as a speech of incitement to Genocide.”

Schabas and former New Democrat leader Ed Broadbent, then in charge of a human rights group, met with a half-dozen federal officials on the eve of the slaughter in early 1993 to warn them that Genocide was in the air in Rwanda.

Schabas says the Canadian officials brushed them off as victims of a propaganda campaign by Tutsi former rebel leader Paul Kagame - now Rwanda’s president.

For more than 20 years, Canadian politicians, civil servants, writers, students, lawyers, academics and clergy, mainly based in Quebec, had developed "a bit of a love affair” with the Rwandan Hutu regime under Juvenal Habyarimana, Schabas said.

Canadian elites couldn’t accept that a regime they considered a model of development in Africa - or a high-profile official like Mugesera, with his Canadian friends - could sink into Genocide, he said.

"There are a whole lot of people in Canada who developed a nice relationship with Rwanda in the 1970s and 80s, and found this twist in Rwandan history hard to understand,” Schabas said.

"They saw the Hutus as victims. The idea that Hutu extremists were engaged in horrible atrocities was too much to accept. Some still subscribe to this view.”

In 1994, Hutu extremists went on a rampage, killing at least one million people, according to the Rwandan government, in 100 days.

The Canadian Press