The news that a UN appeals court has ruled that the notorious genocide financier, Felicien Kabuga, is suffering from severe dementia and, therefore, cannot be tried for the crimes he is believed to have committed in Rwanda preceding and during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, is not surprising to me. What was surprising to me was that he was even arrested by a European police force. I'd like us to recall that before he was arrested in Paris, three years ago, he had lived in Switzerland just after the Genocide. And when survivors identified him and begged Swiss authorities to arrest him, the Swiss simply put him on a plane and sent him to Zaire, present-day DR Congo. Furthermore, he had felt comfortable enough in the ability of his networks to keep him safe from arrest that he got surgery in Germany in 2007. So, it wasn't like Kabuga had disappeared, D.B. Cooper-like, into the ether. He could have been arrested more than once between 1994 and 2020. Fortunately for him (and unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of victims of his hate radio), the focus and investment on the part of the international community that was needed to apprehend him was largely absent. That is why I said that I was surprised that he was ever arrested. The mechanisms of international justice as well as the larger international community have been extremely unkind to the victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The specialized court in Arusha gave ridiculously lenient sentences to genocide masterminds, while other courts gave them early parole. Genocide perpetrators like Protais Mpiranya were able to use their wealth and networks to receive succor in African countries and escape scot-free from even the little justice that was available to survivors. And then to make matters even worse, nations that should have known better, like the United States, refused to acknowledge the nature of the genocide and who its victims were. Even today, the US refuses to call what happened in April 1994 the Genocide against the Tutsi. It continues to use the terminology 'Rwandan Genocide'. With all this in mind, the recent ruling is par for the course. It's a callous ruling that treats the perpetrator better than the victim of his violence. Let us even acknowledge that Kabuga is indeed senile today. Was he senile three years ago? How about in the late 90s? Justice could have been rendered years ago. And let's not pretend that the harm he caused ended at the defeat of the genocidal government. It is my suspicion that he continued to fund the activities of anti-Rwanda forces such as the FDLR. Furthermore, the fact that the people who hid him away all these years will not suffer any punishment is disgusting to me. They literally aided and abetted a genocide fugitive from justice. All that this case has done is give me more evidence that, as anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko wrote, black man, you are on your own. As Rwandans, that fundamental lesson was drummed into us as a result of our relationship with the so-called international community. We learned that, at the end of the day, no one would come to save us. That is why the Rwandan state has been building its capacity to stand on its own over the last 29 years. Fundamentally, we are the only ones who really care whether we live or die, remain poor or prosper. For everyone else, the 13 million Rwandans are part of a larger game, whether it is a geopolitical one that pits East against West, or as a backdrop to a funding campaign for NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, which use Rwandans as a tool to get money from unsuspecting donors. That is the cold hard truth, and the faster we internalize that and then act on it, the better the overall outcomes shall be for us moving forward. The writer is a socio-political commentator
