People who were affected by the 2018 FLN terror attacks have expressed concern about how the international community has paid less attention to them, and instead put focus on their tormentor, branding him as the victim. Many of the victims of the attacks have lodged their appeal at the Court of Appeal, where they are protesting against the compensations that the High Court awarded them during the first instance trial. This week on Wednesday, the judges continued with the appeal trial, spending time to listen to the plight of the victims concerning the losses they suffered and the compensations they believe they should have got. The claimants include those whom the High Court did not give any compensation on grounds that they did not present enough evidence for the damages, and others who were awarded compensation but insist it was not enough considering the gravity of the damages they sustained. During the attacks, at least nine unarmed civilians lost their lives, while more others were injured. Property was also destroyed or looted. Among the people that testified on the day was Francoise Uwambaje, a woman who lost her husband in the Nyungwe attacks. Her spouse, Dominic Habywarimana, a businessman was on his way back home to Rusizi, from Kigali where he had been engaged in some contractual work, when he fell into an FLN ambush. “We expected him back home that day, but we waited for him in vain. Late in the night, I received a phone call informing me that there had been an attack in Nyungwe, and some people had been shot. I was told that my husband had sustained critical injuries,” she sorrowfully narrates. When she received the news, she was devastated. “It was impossible to perceive. It was hard for me to anticipate that such could happen to us,” she says. The next morning, she traveled to Butare to visit him at the CHUB where he had been admitted. Though she was rattled by the bad news, she hoped that Habyarimana would recover. Unfortunately, it was not the case. “When I arrived at the hospital, my elder sister who had reached the venue earlier came to me crying. She held me tight and asked me to be strong. She then broke the news of my husband’s death.” “This was a tough moment. They took me to the mortuary where his body was. I felt like if they had not shown me his body, I could not believe that he had died. He was there in the mortuary, having a bandage around his belly. After seeing, I believed that it had really happened.” From that day, she has lived a hard life, as she not only lost a lover and father of her 3 children, but a bread winner too who supported the family financially. Besides struggling with feeding her children, taking care of their school fees among other needs, she has to answer very disturbing questions. “One of my children once asked me, ‘Mum, you should show me Sankara. I want to ask him what my dad did to him that made him kill him,’” she narrates. Ignored by international community On that day, The New Times spoke to five other victims who had turned up for the court session. Except one of them, the rest said they had not seen a foreign journalist ask about their situation. Uwambaje told The New Times that she is sad about how the victims of the case have been completely ignored by the international community and instead moved to glorify the man behind the creation of the militia group. She was referring to Paul Rusesabagina, the founder of MRCD-FLN, who is still cast as a hero and victim by the international media. Rusesabagina is also part of the FLN trial, though he boycotted the proceedings and was on first instance sentenced to 25 years in prison. “Often, people feel pain if something is affecting them directly, so some people are treating our plight as a simple thing. But we are barely living and it is so painful because life would have been very different had my husband not been killed,” she says, amidst sobs. The lower court awarded her only Rwf10 million in reparations, as opposed to the over 100 million that she had asked for. Desiree Ngirababyeyi, another victim who lives with disability in his left leg due to fragments of an explosive that hit the bus he was driving told this newspaper: “Please speak for us and write about us, we are here in pain.”
