DID KAGAME TRIGGER RWANDAN GENOCIDE?

In a 2006 BBC Hard Talk interview, Rwandan President Paul Kagame admitted that his predecessor had always been likely to die during the country’s civil war - started by the 1990 invasion from Uganda of the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), which Kagame went on to lead. However, Kagame sidestepped the issue of whether he’d had a direct hand in the fatal 1994 shooting down of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane over Kigali - saying only that he’d had the right to ‘fight for my rights.’

The interview followed a lengthy 12-year investigation led by French anti-terror judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who determined that Kagame had ordered his troops to shoot down the plane with the help of nine of his closest aides. In late November 2006, the French justice system issued international arrest warrants for those aides, while Kagame, as a sitting president, was protected by diplomatic immunity. However, another investigative report commissioned by two French judges in 2012 cleared Kagame and his aides. The report stated that it was unlikely that the missile that hit the plane was by the Kagame-led rebels. The investigation was done with the assistance of Kagame’s Rwandan government.

It’s hard to tell what happened, but this interview certainly didn’t do Kagame and his supporters any favours in convincing the world that he had nothing to do with it.

The aftermath of the Habyarimana assassination led to a chaotic 90-day period of violence and ethnic slaughter, known as the Rwandan Genocide. While in Uganda, the RPA (the military wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, now Rwanda’s ruling party) received support and training from the U.S.-backed Ugandan government.

Video credit: BBC Hard Talk, 2006