2023-09-23 13:34:31
A former Rwandan prefect suspected of having participated in the 1994 genocide in part of the country was indicted on Tuesday in Paris and imprisoned, AFP learned on Saturday from a source close to the case. Pierre Kayondo, who had lived in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) for many years, was the subject of an investigation in France since the end of 2021 after a complaint from a group of victims.
He was indicted by a Parisian judge from the crimes against humanity division, for genocide, complicity in genocide, complicity in crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit these crimes.
According to another source close to the case, he was arrested Tuesday by gendarmes from the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Against Humanity and Hate Crimes (OCLCH), on the basis of a warrant. bring issued by the investigating judge. He was presented the same day to this investigating magistrate, who indicted him. Pierre Kayondo was then placed in pre-trial detention.
An “active role” in the organization of exterminations
This Rwandan politician was the target of a complaint with the constitution of a civil party from the Collective of Civil Parties of Rwanda (CPCR) filed in September 2021, and which gave rise to the rapid opening of a judicial investigation. The association, which has been tracking suspected genocidaires in France for more than twenty years on behalf of victims and survivors, relied on several testimonies which, according to it, “establish the active role of Pierre Kayondo”, “former prefect of Kibuye”, region of western Rwanda, and “former deputy” of Gitarama prefecture, in the center of the country.
In its complaint, the CPCR thus affirmed that Pierre Kayondo had “actively participated in the organization of the exterminations in Ruhango and Tambwe in the prefecture of Gitarama by allowing the formation of a group of Interahamwe militia”, Hutu militias, the main armed arms of the genocide, “by providing weapons and participating in meetings.”
For Alain Gauthier, the emblematic president of the CPCR, this high Rwandan dignitary was “a shareholder of Radio Télévision des Mille Collines”, the radio which had broadcast calls for the murder of the Tutsi, and “considered a diehard of the National Republican Movement for democracy and development, very linked to the Interahamwe movement.” This man, whose age Alain Gauthier estimates at around 70 years, “was close to personalities convicted of genocide”, including Colonel Aloys Simba and Ephrem Nkezabera, nicknamed the “genocide banker”.
Questioned on Saturday by AFP, Alain Gauthier and his wife Dafroza, who co-founded the CPCR, welcomed the fact that their “complaint was followed by the opening of an investigation and that justice was interested in Pierre Kayondo. It’s good “.
Six civil parties were formed in January in the investigation, also specified Me Domitille Philippart, lawyer for the CPCR. “They had important information and were heard in the spring. The indictment was the logical next step.” Pierre Kayondo “is an important personality. This is a file in which we have quite important elements,” she added.
More trials to come
The genocide left more than 800,000 dead according to the UN, mainly Tutsi exterminated between April and July 1994. Under the “universal jurisdiction” exercised under certain conditions by France to judge the most serious crimes committed outside its ground, French justice has already definitively sentenced several Rwandans.
Other cases are close to their outcome: former Rwandan gendarme Philippe Hategekimana, 66, naturalized French under the name of Philippe Manier, announced that he had appealed his sentence in June to life imprisonment.
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Other trials are to come, such as that in November and December of the Rwandan doctor Sosthène Munyemana, or that of another Rwandan doctor, Eugène Rwamucyo, possibly in 2024. Around thirty cases are under investigation at the crimes against humanity in Paris, according to a specialized magistrate.
For a long time, the judicial fate of suspects who had taken refuge in France was one of the points of tension in the complicated relationship between Paris and Kigali, poisoned by the question of France’s role in the genocide, but the tone is now one of appeasement. Emmanuel Macron pledged “that no person suspected of crimes of genocide can escape justice”. “The noose is slowly closing” but French justice has fallen behind “a delay which will never be made up for,” Alain Gauthier told AFP in July.
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