When the French police in May 2020 made a pre-dawn operation out of Paris that led to the arrest of the most wanted genocide fugitive in the world, survivors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi were optimistic that justice was on the horizon.

The suspect, Felicien Kabuga had been on the run for over 25 years, and had a US$5 million bounty placed on his head by the US State Department, for any information that could lead to his arrest.

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Known infamously as the Financier of the Genocide, Kabuga had used his wealth – acquired over years through patronage, owing to his close links with the genocidal regime – to escape capture by trotting through different countries and bribing officials.

He was in the first cluster of the most wanted fugitives by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, later replaced by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

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Though it had come longer than expected, the arrest raised hope that the over one million people whose death was mainly bankrolled by Kabuga and his Akazu group will finally get justice. Specifically survivors looked at the development as a crucial step towards their journey of healing.

Alas! Following his arrest, the survivors who had waited for long encountered disappointments from the onset. Initially, they had hoped that he would be transferred for trial at the UN court in Arusha, Tanzania, which is relatively nearer to Rwanda.

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However, the court decided to keep him at their premises in The Hague in The Netherlands, which meant that even those that would have wished to make the trip to see justice being dispensed were greatly discouraged.

However, to add salt to injury, Kabuga is now set to be released, after the Appeals Chamber of the same court ruled to uphold the Trial Chamber decision that Kabuga was unfit for trial, owing to his advanced age.

Actually, the appellate court set him form immediate release when it ruled that even the option of ‘trial on facts’ set by the lower court was untenable because it was not supported by the Mechanism’s statutory framework.

The lesson from this regarding international justice is that someone will commit atrocities, loot the state coffers, and use that loot to hide from justice until when they are of advanced age. After their arrest, they will get a pat in the back and sent to be taken care of by their children and grandchildren, without ever having to worry about being arrested.

In conclusion, we can only wonder; how about the hundreds of thousands killed by the machinery that was funded by Kabuga and his ilk?