INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION :

ALOYS NTIWIRAGABO EX-RWANDAN COLONEL WANTED OVER 1994 GENOCIDE CONTINUES TO RESIDE IN FRANCE DESPITE ASYLUM REFUSAL

Left to right: an undated photo of Aloys Ntiwiragabo, and
Ntiwiragabo photographed in France in February 2020. © DR 

By Theo Englebert

Aloys Ntiwiragabo, the former head of Rwanda’s military intelligence under the country’s extremist Hutu regime, accused of being a ringleader in the 1994 genocide that is estimated to have exterminated up to one million mostly Tutsi people in the African state, continues to reside in France despite a request by Rwanda for his extradition and the rejection of his asylum application. The case of Ntiwiragabo, suspected of « crimes against humanity », is a further demonstration of the unofficial haven that perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide have found in France.

Aloys Ntiwiragabo, the former colonel who headed Rwanda’s military intelligence under the country’s extremist Hutu regime, who is suspected of playing a key role in the planning and perpetration of the genocide of the minority Tutsi people in the African state in 1994, continues to reside freely in France, where his presence appears to be officially tolerated, despite a formal request by Rwanda for his extradition and the rejection on appeal last September of his request for asylum.

In July 2020,  Mediapart revealed how Ntiwiragabo, now aged 73, had then been living in France for at least 14 years, and tracked him down to his apartment home in the north-central town of Orléans, about a120 kilometres south of Paris, where he resides with his wife Catherine.

Immediately after that report was published, Rwanda issued a warrant for his arrest, and France’s anti-terrorist public prosecution services opened an investigation into his suspected perpetration of « crimes against humanity » and « war crimes ». Meanwhile, the international police cooperation agency Interpol has issued a ‘Red Notice’ for his arrest.

Between April 7th and July 15th 1994, an estimated 800,000 people, and which some researchers believe may have totaled one million, mostly from the Tutsi population but also moderates among Rwanda’s majority Hutu ethnic group, were slaughtered by Hutu extremists at the climax of a four-year civil war in the small, east-central African state.

The massacres ended after the military victory of the Tutsi-led rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front – whose leader Paul Kagame is now president of the country – when many of the perpetrators of the genocide fled the country.

Aloys Ntiwiragabo was among those who left for neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or RDC), and who remain wanted by the Rwandan authorities.

A similar case to that of Ntiwiragabo is the story of Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, the widow of former Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, whose assassination in 1994 in a missile attack on his plane sparked the genocide in Rwanda.

She is wanted by the Rwandan authorities who accuse her of playing a key role in the Tutsi genocide, in her position at the centre of the  « Akazu » – meaning  « little house » – informal circle of Hutu extremists surrounding her and her late husband. But she has successfully fought off numerous legal attempts to secure her extradition to Rwanda from France, despite having no legal residence status since her request for asylum was first rejected 15 years ago.

At the behest of then French president François Mitterrand, Kanziga Habyarimana was evacuated to France following her husband’s assassination, and after later returning to Africa, where she notably found sanctuary in Gabon and Zaire, she re-settled permanently in France in 1998. This month, a Paris appeals court ruled the definitive closure, ending any further legal proceedings, of a judicial investigation opened in 2008 into her suspected complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity.

But in the case of Aloys Ntiwiragabo, the military intelligence chief of the Hutu extremist regime and the most senior of its officers still on the run, and who founded and led the so-called Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, one of the most notorious armed criminal groups operating in central Africa, his current situation in France owes nothing to the late François Mitterrand.

It tarnishes what President Emmanuel Macron, in a speech he gave in the Rwandan capital Kigali in May 2021, called a « historic » and « irreversible » rapprochement between France and Rwanda, and notably a « renewed confidence » which he said « implies pursuing the judicial cooperation between our countries ».

When France saw a threat to Aloys Ntiwiragabo’s safety

In the summer of 2020, the prefecture – the local representation of the state administration – of the Loiret, the French département (equivalent to a county) in which the town of Orléans is situated, announced that Ntiwiragabo had, several months earlier, filed a request for asylum in France. Ntiwiragabo’s asylum request was surprisingly brazen, given that he was one of 11 accused architects of the genocide identified by the now-disbanded United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and that he had on several occasions been refused a visa to reside in France on the grounds that his presence in the country represented a « breach of public order ».

On August 17th 2020, the French interior ministry’s office « for the protection of refugees and the stateless », the OFPRA, rejected Ntiwiragabo’s asylum request. The refusal came six months after he had filed his application, and was justified on the grounds that there was serious evidence that he was guilty of both « crimes against humanity » and « war crimes » perpetrated during and after the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi people.

The rejection was appealed before France’s national court for the right to asylum, the CNDA, which eventually confirmed the refusal to grant asylum to Ntiwiragabo after a closed-door hearing in September 2021. But evidence that was consulted by the court before its ruling raises questions; in a document dated April 2021, the director of the OFPRA, Julien Boucher, explained the reasons for its rejection of Ntiwiragabo’s asylum request, but it also stated that his « ethnic affiliation » justified his fear of returning to Rwanda.

It was a revealing example of the biased and archaic reasoning of the French administration towards Rwanda, according to which the country is divided between two « ethnic » groups, and that the Hutu regime’s perpetrators of the genocide in 1994 are now in turn threatened with persecution because of their alleged « ethnic affiliation ».

The CNDA did not uphold that interpretation, but the argument set out by Boucher, a Councillor of State (from the supreme administrative court, the Council of State), who was appointed as head of the OFPRA by President Macron in 2019, is in line with his predecessors.

While refusing asylum status for Ntiwiragabo, the CNDA, as also the OFPRA, also argued that because of his role in creating and leading the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda armed group, and because of testimony he gave to a French investigation, he feared « with reason, according to the sense of […] the Geneva Convention, being persecuted in the event of returning to his country of origin because of his profile as an opponent ». 

A decidely unusual case among asylum seekers

It would appear that there is no intention, at least in the short term, to send Aloys Ntiwiragabo back to Rwanda. According to the Rwandan embassy in Paris, the French authorities have not yet acknowledged reception of the request for his extradition sent by Kigali.

Mediapart questioned the Loiret prefecture about his situation from an administrative point of view, but it now refuses to discuss Ntiwiragabo’s case on the grounds that it is an « individual situation ». Meanwhile, his French lawyer, Benjamin Chouai, has declined to answer any questions from Mediapart.

In principle, the Rwandan no longer has a legal right to remain in France after the rejection of his appeal brought before the CNDA, and even if an ultimate appeal is filed, this time before the Council of State, it would change nothing in the immediate future. Usually, when an asylum seeker’s request has been refused after an appeal hearing before the CNDA, the French authorities immediately issue an order for them to leave French territory – what is called an OQTF (for “obligation de quitter le territoire français”). But the case of Ntiwiragabo appears decidedly unusual.

For the Rwandan authorities, the confusion has deepened over the past year. On January 26th 2021, the then Rwandan justice minister Johnstone Busingye wrote to his French counterpart to request access to a number of documents concerning Ntiwiragabo’s period of residence in France. According to the Rwandan authorities, no reply to that letter has ever been received.

In 2017, Rwanda commissioned an investigation by US law firm Levy Firestone Muse, based in Washington DC, into the role of the French government in relation to the 1994 genocide. The report of that investigation, the so-called « Muse report », was delivered to the Rwandan government on April 19th 2021. Among the many issues covered in the 592-page report, it cited at length Mediapart’s several investigations into Ntiwiragabo’s presence in France, and gave a damning assessment of the OFPRA’s handling of a number of cases involving Rwandan fugitives.

« In addition to giving voice to the false narratives of génocidaires, the French government, even now, provides safe haven to suspected génocidaires, » the report found. « There may be more than 100 suspected génocidaires living freely in France. The French office responsible for asylum, l’Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA), has too often granted them asylum without taking seriously into account information about their connection to the Genocide, effectively leaving the suspected génocidaires free to live and work in France. »

The report said France « has chosen to protect and not prosecute génocidaires ».

Ntiwiragabo told the OFPRA that he had been living in Sudan until 2011, and then in Niger up until January 2017. He claimed to have entered France via Brussels after obtaining a visa from the Belgian consulate in the Burkina Faso capital Ouagadougou. Questioned by Mediapart, the Belgian authorities declined to communicate any information about that claim.

But Ntiwiragabo’s account does not correspond with the spontaneous recollections of several of his neighbours in Orléans when they were questioned by Mediapart in 2020, and who affirmed that they had seen him in the local area over a period of around ten years. His version of events was also contradicted by a source from the lessor of his family apartment in the town, who said Ntiwiragabo had declared his residence there as of 2006. 

Could Ntiwiragabo have been able to cross international borders at will during all those years? The precise details of his life over the period of his residence in France, and the extent of support that he may have been given, remain largely mysterious.

Missed opportunity

The apparent tranquillity he has enjoyed while living in France is all the more of concern given that, in 2013, France created a dedicated inter-ministerial agency for hunting down suspected perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes (now renamed as the OCLCH). More than a year before Mediapart’s revelations in 2020 of Ntiwiragabo’s presence in France, the agency’s gendarmerie investigators had the opportunity of identifying him.

On February 12th 2018, the gendarmes were monitoring the phone of a Rwandan woman fugitive in connection with a complaint filed against her in France. The phone taps intercepted a discussion between the fugitive and a man using a landline that had been opened in the name of Catherine Ntiwiragabo, and which corresponded with the address of Aloys Ntiwiragabo’s apartment in Orléans.

During the conversation, which was translated and recorded in transcripts seen by Mediapart, the woman told the man: « Truly, when I learnt that you are still breathing, I told myself ‘We rejoice that you are still alive, that you are still standing’. » The translator noted that the woman spoke with a deferential tone.   

In all likelihood, and without realising it, the OCLCH investigators were listening in on a conversation with Aloys Ntiwiragabo, who by his own account had been living in the apartment for several years, and who was a far more important fugitive than their initial target. However, they did not seek to identify the man. The gendarmerie colonel then in charge of the investigations did not respond to Mediapart’s request for comment.

In several articles published since 2019, Mediapart has revealed a total of 24 other Rwandans suspected of taking part in the genocide who have lived in France without being investigated. Two have since died, while three others have moved on to Belgium.

When Ntiwiragabo filed a complaint against a journalist

As surprising as it may seem, Aloys Ntiwiragabo does not appear to have been intimidated by the media coverage of his presence in France, for his first reaction was to sue a journalist for a post that appeared on Twitter.

While there is no trace of Ntiwiragabo on social media, he filed a complaint for « public insult »

 – which borders the notion of defamation – against Maria Malagardis, a journalist with French daily Libération who, following Mediapart’s revelations of Ntiwiragabo’s life in France, tweeted: « An African Nazi in France? Will someone react? »

 It was Libération which published, in April 1994, an article by French historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien, which was titled « A tropical Nazism », in which he denounced the genocide that had that month begun in Rwanda, and summarized the ideology of the killers, which had obvious similitudes with that of the German Nazis. Eleven days later, in the daily L’Humanité, he accused the Hutu extremist regime as having moved from « a rampant Salazarism to a Nazi slaughter ».

Ntiwiragabo has for long been accused of acting as one of the ringleaders of the genocide between April and July 1994, and is today suspected by a French judicial investigation of being a perpetrator of those crimes.

In a summary of its ruling last September rejecting Ntiwiragabo’s appeal over the refusal to grant him asylum, the CNDA noted that in interviews with him by both it and the OFPRA, he « never pronounced the term ‘genocide’, preferring the term ‘regrettable catastrophe’, and showed no regrets about his path in life, having affirmed before the Office [OFPRA] that he did not reproach himself for anything ». The court underlined his “total adherence to the political ideas” of the principal Hutu political party that organised and oversaw the genocide in Rwanda.

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