Rwandan leader warns Paris over aide's extradition

By William Wallis in Geneva

Published: November 17 2008 02:00 | Last updated: November 17 2008 02:00

The planned extradition to France this week of a top aide to Paul Kagame, Rwandan president, sets the stage for a courtroom showdown between Paris and Kigali over the origins of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Mr Kagame said the arrest last week of Rose Kabuye, his chief protocol officer, showed "total contempt" for his nation. In an interview with the Financial Times after visiting Mrs Kabuye in prison in Germany, he accused European countries of abusing the principle of "universal jurisdiction", whereby the courts of one country can pursue the citizens of another, to perpetuate unequal relations with Africa.

Mrs Kabuye was detained at Frankfurt airport as one of nine Rwandan officials indicted by Jean-Louis Bruguière, a French judge. He had investigated the 1994 assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana, then Rwandan president, on behalf of relatives of the French crew killed in the same air crash: the incident triggered the slaughter of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Mrs Kabuye was an officer in the guerrilla army led by Mr Kagame that took power after driving many of the perpetrators of the genocide out of Rwanda.

Rwandan officials said she would be extradited to France on Wednesday and indicated she would seek both to clear her name and to highlight the alleged role France played in backing extremists who orchestrated the genocide.

Mr Kagame - who severed relations with France in 2006 because of the Bruguière case and expelled Germany's ambassador to Kigali, the capital, last week - said he had the support of the African Union to challenge the place of "universal jurisdiction" within international law.

"I am not urging this to cover up anybody who is at fault. That is not my point. I am saying the process of doing that has to be clear, otherwise you have chaos," he said.

"You don't give one country jurisdiction over another country, in particular if that country has actually been involved in the case. It is madness. It's offensive in a sense that it is Africans who are perpetually the offenders, the criminals and the others who are their judges."

The French case alleges that Mrs Kabuye and other rebels led by Mr Kagame assassinated the former president as part of a conspiracy to seize power. The other main theory on the air crash is that it was caused by Hutu extremists to trigger mass killings that they had already planned.

Mr Kagame claimed the allegations against Mrs Kabuye were "baseless" and designed to undermine his government.

"Apart from not interviewing our people when the indictments were made, they were not even communicated to the very people accused or to the country. It just came out in the media," he said. "This is a very strange thing that . . . on this basis you start arresting people."

The case was potentially weakened last week when one of the main witnesses renounced his testimony in a radio interview, saying he had been manipulated.

French authorities have made no direct comment. But a government spokesperson said Paris still hoped to repair ties with Rwanda.

Mr Kagame said he too favoured a diplomatic solution. But he indicated that if this failed to materialise he would seek to test how universal "universal jurisdiction" really was, by indicting French officials named in a Rwandan inquiry into France's role in the genocide.