UN prosecutor accuses South Africa of delay in finding Rwandan killers

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South Africa is holding back the hunt for the last fugitive leaders of the Rwandan genocide as time is running out to bring Africa’s most wanted men to justice decades after the killings, said the United Nations prosecutor at the head of the research.

The government of President Cyril Ramaphosa is delaying “very frustrating and disappointing” the search for genocide suspects who may have taken refuge in South Africa in recent years, Serge Brammertz, head of the international body investigating the genocide of 1994 and the wars of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Financial Times reported.

The hunt for fugitives from the Rwandan genocide was stepped up last year with the capture by the French of Félicien Kabuga, a suspected financier of the murders, after decades on the run.

But South Africa still has not put in place a police team to coordinate with international prosecutors to track down the suspects, despite high-level pledges as late as last month, Brammertz said.

Brammertz, who heads a legacy “mechanism” to prosecute international genocide criminal cases, told the UN Security Council this week that South Africa’s lack of assistance was “one of the cases. the most serious non-cooperation my office has ever faced ”.

In particular, it took years for South Africa to track down Fulgence Kayishema, a suspected genocidaire who allegedly took refuge in the country in the past, said Brammertz.

UN Prosecutor Serge Brammertz said South Africa’s lack of assistance was “one of the most serious cases of non-cooperation my office has faced” © Piroschka van de Wouw / Reuters

The country’s failures have been “even more serious in light of the growing number of South Africa-related leads involving several fugitives” beyond Kayishema, his office added in a report this week. The South African Foreign Office did not respond to a request for comment. Relations between South Africa and Rwanda were strained following the murder of a former Rwandan intelligence chief in Johannesburg in 2014.

The sharp criticism points out that decades after the murders, the conclusion of the last international criminal cases for the Rwandan genocide will depend on the application of local laws in African countries where many fugitives are still at large.

In total, more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 1994 in 100 bloody days. But when a Tutsi rebel army regained control of the capital in July, many of the top Hutu ethnic officials involved in the massacres escaped, first to neighboring Congo or via Uganda to Kenya, before dispersing further.

Kayishema, a former judicial police inspector, participated in the massacre of refugees in a church in 1994, according to international prosecutors. Hand grenades were thrown into the church before militiamen bulldozed it and killed more than 1,500 people. “There is no interest in South Africa in helping an individual of this nature escape the country,” said Brammertz.

In contrast, he said there were “positive signs” that South Africa’s neighbor Zimbabwe was stepping up its efforts to arrest the mechanism’s most wanted fugitive, Protais Mpiranya, the former commander of the Rwandan presidential guard.

Mpiranya, who was second on the wanted list until Kabuga’s arrest, is said to have used military links with Zimbabwe to hide there. “I think there is no doubt that he was there in the early 2000s. . and there is still a high probability that it will still be there, ”said Brammertz.

While “we would certainly like to see more activity on the ground”, the state of Zimbabwe has engaged more in joint investigations with international prosecutors than before, he added.

Local cooperation is needed to find informants and penetrate support networks for fugitives, said Brammertz. “It can only work if we have direct access to operational services,” such as police and immigration, he said.

With Kabuga on his way to The Hague, Mpiranya would be the last international trial on the Rwandan genocide. The Brammertz court is also prosecuting five other Rwandan fugitives, including Kayishema, but they will stand trial in Rwanda if arrested.

As the Brammertz-led mechanism comes to an end, national prosecutors in Rwanda and the countries of the former Yugoslavia are tapping into its resources to pursue their own cases, a significant but complex shift in the hunt for genocide fugitives.

As the international mechanism pursues its last six fugitives, Rwanda’s national prosecutor has around 1,300 cases. More than half of these suspects are believed to be still on the African continent.

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