Félicien Kabuga, one of the masterminds of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that left over almost a million Tutsi murdered, died on Saturday in custody in The Hague. He had been there since being arrested in 2020 near Paris after evading justice for over a quarter of a century, and by the time he was taken into custody in his late 80s he was so old that he was deemed unfit to stand trial for reasons of dementia. He deferred justice for long enough that it was never able to be served to him, even though he was one of the chief financiers and planners of one of the darkest crimes in human history.
When Kabuga was finally arrested, authorities reportedly found passports and identity documents from multiple countries in his name, a testimony to the international complicity that allowed one of the world’s most wanted fugitives to disappear in plain sight for so many years. He had apparently lived, over the years, in Kenya and France, operating with relative freedom and allegedly enabled by his family, his network of Hutu extremists, and his vast personal wealth.
At The Hague, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), the body set up to handle unfinished cases from the genocide of the Tutsi and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, charged Kabuga with seven counts related to the genocide. Prosecutors alleged Kabuga, a prominent and wealthy Rwandan businessman, was a principal financier of the extremist militias that carried out the genocide. They accused him of using his position as a founder of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) to incite violence and mass participation in the genocide by broadcasting anti-Tutsi propaganda, describing the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” He was also accused of financing importation and distribution of machetes used during the killings.
