Where are they now?

The fugitives behind the genocide

They are the world’s most wanted men. The blood of hundreds of thousands is on their hands, rewards of millions of dollars on their heads.

The question is: can the remaining eight fugitives who planned, armed and incited the 1994 Rwandan genocide finally be brought to justice? From time to time over the years, and again in 2016, a UN criminal tribunal has been said to be closing in on them. But on the run for more than two decades, they have consistently outsmarted pursuers, helped by corrupt and greedy African authorities. Knowing where they might be is one thing, getting them before a court another.

So who are these men who inspired the perversely named Innocent Kayibanda, the fictional Hutu militia leader hunted in the novel Broken heart of Africa?

Perhaps the most wanted is Félicien Kabuga, now an old man of over 80 who, as likely as not, is tucked away in a corner of Kenya. If he is still alive.

Kabuga was an immensely wealthy businessman who is alleged to have been a major financier and driver of the genocide. He is said not only to have armed the extremists, and imported enormous supplies of machetes and farming tools like hoes to be used for mass murder, but to have orchestrated bloodshed. He was among other things a founder and director of Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, described by Human Rights Watch as the voice of genocide. To encourage the killing of Tutsis, it told its listeners, “It is time to gather in the harvest”. Later, as Broken heart of Africa describes, it urged the butchers on. “The baskets are only half full,” it told them. “They should be filled to the brim.”

Kabuga was behind the extremist Kangura newsletter as well, another medium of indoctrination which in the early 1990s published the Hutu Ten Commandments that laid down the basis of an ethnically pure Rwanda and a creed of Hutu power. One commandment instructed the Hutus to stop having mercy on Tutsis, something Kayibanda champions in the novel. 

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) based in Arusha, Tanzania, indicted Kabuga for genocide, complicity in genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and crimes against humanity, namely persecution and extermination. But by that time he was long gone. First he fled to Switzerland from where, in 1994, he was deported after less than a month. The Swiss were so efficient there was no time for Rwanda to seek his arrest before, at the cost of the Swiss tax payer, he was flying with his wife and seven children to Zaire, today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. There President Mobutu Sese Seko was providing the extremists with a virtual safe haven.

By 1997 he was in Kenya where, the ICTR would come to believe, another old African lion provided protection, President Daniel arap Moi, himself not averse to human rights abuses. Kenya has always denied any state collusion but evidence of his hiding there over the years is convincing. His trail has been followed to a number of well-appointed villas, three of them that the International Crisis Group identified as being owned by one Hosea Kiplagat, a nephew of the President. Moi’s son, Gideon, owned a property next to one of them. No state collusion? And were Kenyan authorities truly unaware he ran transport and import-export businesses from Nairobi?

By 2001, the Rwandan government was fuming. Beyond any doubt, Kabuga was living in Nairobi, it said, and the Kenyans should arrest them. The Reuters news agency reported an unnamed Rwandan official as saying, “If there were real cooperation by the Kenyan government, Kabuga could be arrested any time, because his whereabouts are known to the Kenyan authorities.”

Justice Minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo did not mince his words either. Having praised Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands for arresting genocide suspects and extraditing them to the ICTR in Arusha, he said other countries where fugitives were known to be hiding should follow the European example.

He told Reuters, “It is deplorable that some countries – Rwanda’s neighbours, and even those pretending to be our friends – continue to show very little or no cooperation in netting and extraditing well-known genocide suspects who have found safe havens in those countries.”

Ostensibly, Kenya did make efforts. In 1997, police raided a house in a well-to-do Nairobi suburb where Kabuga and two other fugutives wanted by the ICTR were reportedly living. The raid came too late. The birds had flown – Kabuga most likely to the Seychelles – and investigators found a hand-written note that allegedly revealed the police themselves had warned them they were coming.

Much like Innocent Kayibanda in Broken heart of Africa, Kabuga was now moving swiftly. A UN commission of enquiry into arms purchases by Hutu extremists placed him in south-east Asia in 1998, and he is thought to have been in Belgium – where his wife has been living – in 2000.

But more Kenyan intrigue has followed and more accusations of collusion. In 2002, it was in Kenya that the United States launched a public information campaign to support the hunt for Kabuga, and offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest. But by the end of the year, frustrated, the Americans were accusing a former permanent secretary for Kenyan national security of providing a safe haven and using government infrastructure to hinder an arrest.

Nor did things improve. A planned arrest involving Kenyan police and the American FBI in January 2003 failed and the FBI’s informer was found dead. According to the Daily Nation, the informer was a freelance journalist and he was tortured to death as he prepared to lead FBI agents to Kabuga’s Nairobi hideout.

More questions were raised when a Kenyan soldier said to have been part of a unit set up to protect Kabuga, disappeared in 2009. The soldier’s relatives believe he was killed because he secretly took pictures of the Hutu.

Kenyan broadcaster NTV established in a documentary that photographs the soldier left behind were of Kabuga. The soldier had to begun to earn big money, one relative said, and had told him he was working for a very rich Rwandan the government wanted to keep in hiding.

The documentary aired in 2012, and NTV said at the time that their investigations over a five-month period pointed to Kabuga still being in the country. And, in 2015, a source within the ICTR said Kenya was the last country they could prove he had entered and they had no indication that he had left it. However, no one can rule out that he moves back and forth across its borders.

Zimbabwe has also provided fugitives with sanctuary, chief among them Protais Mpiranya, the former Commander of the Rwandan Presidential Guard indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity that include murder, extermination, rape and persecution. Since 2012, when the country was reported to the UN Security Council for failing to cooperate with the ICTR, Zimbabwe has allegedly sought to detain him rather than risk UN sanctions. How rigorous the hunt has been is far from clear, however.

Money has kept most of the fugitives free. As a senior ICTR officer told The East African, most of them were people of means and had often entered into massive business deals with the elite of countries which hid them. Mpiranya is known to have run businesses from Harare with, it is said, people close to President Robert Mugabe.

But Mpiranya has had other uses as well. Hutu fugitives,The Zimbabwe Mail has alleged, were recruited into the country’s Central Intelligence Organisation and “were used to do dirty work like abducting and murdering” political opponents of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party (the Zimbabwe African Union-Patriotic Front). Mpiranya was said to have led a group of foreign mercenaries who carried out vicious attacks on opposition supporters in rural areas. In Manaca province they were accused of torture and mutilation. Foreigners “were cutting out the tongue, removing eyes and genital parts,” The Mail quoted the provincial chairman of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change as saying.

Then there is Rwanda’s former Minister of Defence, Augustin Bizimana, indicted on similar genocide charges to Kabuga and Mpiranya. He is said to have helped train militiamen, distributed weapons and compiled lists of people he wanted killed.

Reports of him have emerged from Angola, Guinea, Kenya and the Republic of Congo but he is thought to be in the former Zaire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Innocent Kayibanda went to ground. It remains a volatile and violent place where armed groups continue to terrorise the population. Yet even from there prosecutors have hope of bringing the killers to justice.

In December 2015, Interpol agents arrested Ladislas Ntaganzwa in Goma, a dismal Congolese town close to the Rwanda border. Ntaganzwa is a former mayor of Nyakizu, a commune in Butare prefecture, southern Rwanda, who, among other things, is accused of playing a major role in the massacre of 20,000 Tutsis in a nearby parish. After evading justice for so long, his arrest was a shot in the arm for the ICTR’s mission. It even led some media to suggest that Kabuga and the others had been put on notice.

The ICTR’s mandate ended in 2015 but there has been no let up. The tracking, arrest and prosecution of the remaining fugitives has been taken over by the United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, based in both Arusha and The Hague.

The Mechanism freely admits it is severely challenged. It has, it points out, no police force and no powers of arrest. It depends on the cooperation of national governments to detain the wanted Rwandans although UN member states are obliged to comply with its requests.

The hunt is in the hands of a tracking team attached to the Mechanism’s Office of the Prosecutor. It gathers intelligence on the fugitives and provides support to national law enforcement authorities, a task fraught with logistical complexity. The men’s identities change with their location. They move back and forth across a massive belt of East, Central and Southern Africa, and within the Democratic Republic of the Congo they continue to find refuge in inaccessible areas. Often there is no authority, let alone any capable of cooperation.

Still, no one is giving up. Addressing the UN Security Council in December 2016, Prosecutor Serge Brammertz said his office had developed strategies to locate and arrest each of the men indicted by the ICTR. “All victims share the same hope: to see those responsible for the crimes against them brought to justice,” he said. “And so it remains of critical importance that these eight fugitives are arrested and stand trial.”

Kabuga, Mpiranya and Bizimana have been earmarked for trial by the Mechanism. The other five will be tried by the Rwandan judiciary. They are Fulgence Kayishema, former Judicial Police Inspector of Kivumu Commune in Kibuye Prefecture; Charles Sikubwabo, former Mayor of Gishyita in Kibuye; Aloys Ndimbati, former mayor of Gisovu commune, Kibuye; Ryandikayo, a businessman and extremist politician in Gishyita; and Phénéas Munyarugarama, Lieutenant Colonel in the Forces Armées Rwandaises, the highest ranking military officer at Gako camp, in the Bugesera region of Kigali-rural Prefecture. Whether these real-life Innocent Kayibandas ever come to trial, though, only time will tell.