Rwanda genocide suspect appeals life sentence

By David Ochami, in Arusha

The alleged mastermind of the 1994 Rwanda genocide Theoneste Bagosora last week began an appeal on the life sentence imposed on him in 2008.

He was convicted alongside three other Rwandans in Military One trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda based in Arusha.

The trial, conviction and appeal is significant for Kenyans watching the matter of the Ocampo Six because Bagosora, who was a retired colonel before the Rwanda genocide, was the equivalent of a civilian permanent secretary in Defence and in effect in charge of armed forces, according to the indictment issued in 1997. He was on trial for 11 years.

The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. [PHOTO: ANDREW KILONZI/STANDARD]

His lawyer Raphael Constant from France argued that evidence used to convict his client was based on hearsay and wants him acquitted on several points. But the prosecution stuck to the argument raised at his trial that during the genocide Bagosora exercised de facto control of the Ministry of Defence and all the military institutions under it following the April 6 killing of former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana.

Bagosora, who was born in 1941, called Rwanda’s minister for Rehabilitation and Refugee Affairs Marcel Gatsinzi, a former chief of staff at the start of the killings, to testify in his appeal. He sought to establish that evidence adduced at trial that he controlled the military and ordered soldiers and other special forces to kill were neither factual nor tenable under Rwanda’s law under Habyarimana.

Crisis meeting

According to the prosecution, Bagosora convened a crisis meeting of military officers following Habyarimana’s assassination on April 6 to try to establish a new government in the absence of then Defence Minister Augustine Bizimana in which deathly decrees were issued.

But Gatsinzi, who has since risen to the post of general under President Paul Kagame, declared that Bagosora not only controlled the armed forces but also resisted his rise to the post of chief of staff between April 6 and April 15 and sabotaged him during his brief tenure at the top of the military.

His lawyer, however, argued that Gatzinzi’s testimony was contradictory and compromised by his defection to the Rwanda Patriotic Army and rise in the Kagame regime and said it is Bagosora, in fact who proposed his appointment to he post of chief of staff.

Renegade soldiers

Gatsinzi claimed Bagosora engineered his fall from the post of Chief of Staff after he established communication with Rwanda Patriotic Army through the United Nations Mission in Rwanda.

According to Gatsinzi, Bagosora sabotaged his authority by establishing a separate radio-communication channel with renegade soldiers and special forces and engineered the transfer of money from the Central Bank to a rural town at Gitarama without his authority.

But the defence lawyer questioned Gatsinzi’s truthfulness as a witness and produced documents that Bagosora had no substantive powers in the Defence ministry during the minister’s presence. Bagosora, who has been described as one of the architects of the Rwanda mass murder, was director of cabinet in the wartime Ministry of Defence after retiring from the military as a colonel.

Captured in Cameroon Bagosora has been in custody of the International Criminal Court for Rwanda since 1996.