The former deputy leader of the DR Congo-based FDLR militia, Straton Musoni, has been deported to Rwanda from Germany after completing his eight-year jail term for crimes against humanity, it has emerged.
Musoni arrived in Kigali on Friday, October 21, according to reliable sources.
In September 2015, the former FDLR leader, Ignace Murwanashyaka, and his deputy Musoni were sentenced to 21 years in jail collectively by a court in Germany after a four-year trial in connection with their roles in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the genocidal FDLR militia.
Musoni was sentenced in 2015 and, almost immediately, released early, having already been in pre-trial detention for almost six years. He was restricted to his home in Germany, while fighting deportation.
The German Federal Court of appeal rejected his appeal in December 2018.
However, Murwanashyaka, who had been sentenced to 13 years in prison for aiding and abetting war crimes, died in April 2019 while still serving his sentence.
The two FDLR leaders were arrested in 2009 on a warrant issued by German Federal Prosecutors who confirmed that the then fugitives were leaders of a "terrorist group (FDLR) which was responsible for crimes against humanity and different ‘systematic’ war crimes” against the civilian population in DR Congo.
Their trial began on May 4, 2011, before the Oberlandesgericht, or the Higher Regional Court, in the south-western German city of Stuttgart.
The case was hailed as a breakthrough by the United Nations.
During trial, the court heard how the militia group, which was formed in the 1990s, raped and massacred hundreds of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo as their fighters resisted an assault by Congolese rebels in early 2009. Despite living in Germany for more than 20 years, prosecutors said Murwanashyaka and Musoni remained at the helm of the FDLR's activities from a distance.
The FDLR militia terrorised civilians in eastern DR Congo and exploited the country’s minerals, court heard. Prosecutors detailed how the negative group, formed by remnants of the forces and militia that played a key part in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi that claimed over a million lives in Rwanda, had also attacked villages and killed many civilians.
The two former FDLR leaders were initially accused of 26 counts of crimes against humanity and 39 counts of war crimes committed by militias under their command between January 2008 and their arrest in Germany in November 2009.
Over time, however, that was whittled down to charges related specifically to the killings, as the court decided not to further aggravate the vulnerability of traumatised rape victims or child soldiers by making them appear before court.
German prosecutors said in 2009 the duo led a para-military organisation that had killed hundreds of Congolese, raped women and recruited child soldiers.
In June 2002, Germany introduced a new International Penal Code to deal with the crime of genocide and other crimes against humanity and terrorism. It is the same legislation that enabled German prosecutors to try a civilian for command responsibility over atrocities committed outside Germany.
FDLR's origins and how it changed faces
The FDLR was formed in May 2000 in Kinshasa by the masterminds and perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, who had fled to neighbouring DR Congo (formerly Zaire) after the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) stopped the killings and defeated the genocidal machinery.
After the defeat of the genocidal interim government in July 1994, then government officials, soldiers and Interahamwe militia fled to the then Zaire where they set up a parallel government and plotted future attacks on Rwanda.
Carrying with them many weapons and other movable government assets, the genocidal machinery had led roughly two million Rwandans into exile, where they continued to spread genocide ideology.
They first set up a platform known as Rally for Democracy and Return of Refugees in Rwanda (RDR) in 1995, recruiting refugees in DR Congo and Tanzania.
When the Rwandan army later dismantled the refugee camps in 1996, RDR collapsed and was soon replaced by the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR).
Operating mostly in the eastern regions of the DR Congo, in May 1998, ALIR launched an insurgency war in Rwanda before its defeat in 2001.
In 2000, ALIR agreed to merge with another resistance movement based in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, to form what is known today as FDLR. This was after the Kinshasa-based command (ALIR 2) and the Kivu-based group (ALIR 1) agreed to merge.
By 2001, the FDLR had totally displaced the ALIR.
Since then, the FDLR has had a history of attacking civilians, killing, raping, pillaging, forcefully recruiting children and taking civilians hostage in the DR Congo.
The militia has also mounted several terror attacks on Rwandan territory in the recent past, in most cases alongside the Congolese army, FARDC.
The collaboration between the Congolese army and genocidal FDLR militia has been at the heart of renewed tensions between Kigali and Kinshasa in recent months.