Simbikangwa’s conviction should open the floodgates to more trials

At last, after 20 years, the French public finally came to grasp the real extent of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The trial and conviction in Paris, this week, of Captain Pascal Simbikangwa, the notorious senior intelligence officer in former President Juvenal Habyarimana’s regime, has done just that. For many years, French authorities have looked the other way when calls to mete out justice to Rwandan Genocide suspects living within its borders rang out.  Many of the suspects felt safe in a country that had exfiltrated some of them out of Rwanda when the tide was turning against them.