The French judiciary again, with ‘perfect’ timing, has made a controversial ruling to set free a suspected notorious génocidaire. The appeals court has just set free Claude Muhayimana who a lower court had ordered that he be extradited to Rwanda to face justice for his role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Their timing was not a surprise because they have made it an art to provoke genocide survivors as they embark to remember their loved ones, but the reasons for freeing a mass killer beats all reason; that at the time he committed the crimes, Rwanda had no law against Genocide in its statutes! Does that make him less of a killer? If his co-perpetrators were convicted and sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) what makes the French judiciary so special that they let loose a mass killer on its streets? Well, if their intention was to humiliate survivors, then they have failed miserably because today’s survivors have grown stronger and can resist any amount of goading. Many leaders have of recent heaped praise on genocide survivors for their resilience despite the many hardships that they went through. The most who have shown extraordinary feat in transforming their lives for the better are young survivors, the majority of them orphans who are now young adults and have joined their hands in rebuilding their country. They have vowed that nothing will stand in their way in shaping their future and no amount of distabilisation will shake them.
