On Friday, April 15, a landmark ruling was made in the chambers of the High Court. Genocide ideologue Leon Mugesera was found guilty of Genocide and subsequently handed a life sentence. A day later, a pre-planned event took place; residents of Kigali Sector of Nyarugenge District gathered on the banks of River Nyabarongo to unveil a monument that has been set up in memory of Genocide victims who were thrown into the river, either dead or to their death. Thousands of Rwandans were thrown into different water bodies in the country, mostly tributaries of the River Nile, in an attempt to “send them back to Abyssinia (current Ethiopia)” where Genocide ideologues, in sowing the seeds of discord, said one section of Rwandans hailed. As a result, bodies of tens of thousands of Genocide victims were washed ashore at landing sites on various banks of Lake Victoria both in Uganda and Tanzania. Mugesera was made rather popular by an incendiary speech he gave in November 1992 in Kabaya, in north-western Rwanda where, at a rally, he called for the killing of Tutsi and sending them downstream to Abyssinia via the shortcut of River Nile. Mugesera fled the country and for nearly two decades fought extradition from Canada, jumping from one courtroom to another in an attempt to escape the long arm of the law. He exhausted all those avenues and, in 2012, he was deported and immediately charged with the Genocide crimes he had long evaded.
