A former director-general of Rwanda Agriculture Research Institute (ISAR), Charles Ndereyehe, played a key role in planning the Genocide against the Tutsi, including and funding the Interahamwe militia to commit the Genocide, and should account for this. This was said by Philbert Rutagengwa, the advisor to the Executive Secretary of the National Commission for the Fight against the Genocide (CNLG). Rutagengwa was speaking on Saturday in Huye District as Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB) management and staff as well as survivors, remembered the institution’s former workers killed during the Genocide against the Tutsi. ISAR is one of three agencies that were merged to form the current Rwanda Agriculture Board. Ndereyehe, who is currently in the Netherlands, hailed from former Cyabingo commune, Ruhengeri prefecture (Northern Rwanda). In the Netherlands, Ndereyehe coordinates the activities of extremist groups of radical Rwandan exiles, linked to the same ideology that led to the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. Awarding Interahamwe In May 1994, Rutagengwa said, Ndereyehe wrote a letter to all ISAR staff ordering that everyone should cede 20 per cent of their salary for the month of May to support the act to wipe out Tutsi. “It is in the same letter he said that ISAR itself [as an institution] should give a particular contribution of Rwf1 million that would be used to recognise killers, whereby each was allotted up to Rwf10,000 depending on their viciousness in killing,” he said. “The genocide crime is indelible. We hope that justice will be rendered,” he said. In 1992, Ndereyehe, together with other elite Hutu extremists including Ferdinand Nahimana, Dr Eugene Rwamuco, Dr Jean Berchmas Nshimumuremye among others, created and led a group of gang called ‘Cercle des Republicains Progressistes’ which was at the forefront of sensitising students from Butare (former National University of Rwanda), and the University of Nyakinama to join such the group whose objective was to subsequently commit the Genocide. When he was deployed at ISAR in 1993, as the head, he made a plot to exterminate the families of Tutsi who were employed at the institution, witnesses say. Rutagengwa said Ndereyehe linked militiamen to the notorious Captain Ildephonse Nizeyimana who facilitated their gun use training with support from Junior Military Academy (ESO) in Butare. Also, he said, Ndereyehe gave cars that were used by the perpetrators, and set prizes for those who would kill many people in the genocide. “The major killing (in Butare) took place on April 26, 1994, when over 300 Tutsi including men, women, children and babies, were killed upon his instructions,” Rutagengwa observed. Ndereyehe was sentenced to life in absentia by Gacaca court on November 5, 2008 for genocide crimes. “His ruthless and genocide acts were so infamous,” said Bernadette Mukeshimana, 48, a Genocide survivor, and representative of the families whose 13 victims of the genocide were decently buried at RAB Rubona Genocide memorial during a commemoration event on Saturday. Speaking during the event, the Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Dr Gerardine Mukeshimana, said that many Tutsi who came from areas surrounding ISAR-Rubona, and those from communes that made up the former Butare prefecture were killed there after seeking refuge at the site there thinking that they would get refuge because they knew that it a was a hub of knowledge. editorial@newtimes.co.rw
