Rwandan convicted of lying while seeking U.S. asylum after genocide

BOSTON (Reuters) - A Rwandan man who U.S. prosecutors said participated in the African nation’s 1994 genocide was convicted on Friday of lying about belonging to the political party that led the killings in hopes of gaining asylum in the United States.

A federal jury in Boston following less three hours of deliberations found Jean Leonard Teganya, 48, guilty of five counts of immigration fraud and perjury in connection with his application for U.S. asylum. The four-week trial featured testimony by Rwandans who lived through the genocide, in which members of a hard-line Hutu regime massacred an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus during three months of slaughter.

Teganya denied the allegations. His lawyer, Scott Lauer, argued at trial that Teganya did nothing wrong and fled Rwanda because after the genocide any Hutu could be implicated in it. “Mr. Teganya is a good man whose only crime was being a Hutu at the time of the genocide,” he told jurors in his opening statement. After the verdict, Lauer said he was “deeply disappointed.” Teganya is scheduled to be sentenced on July 1.

Prosecutors said at the time of the violence, Teganya was a medical student at a hospital in the southern Rwandan city of Butare and was active in the political party that helped perpetrate the genocide. The genocide, carried out by Hutus from the ruling MRND party, followed the shooting down by unknown gunmen of a plane carrying the then-presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. Prosecutors, citing witnesses, alleged that during the course of the genocide, Teganya led Hutu soldiers through the hospital to identify Tutsi patients who were then killed. He also personally participated in the killing and raping of Tutsis, prosecutors said. He left Rwanda in mid-July 1994 and traveled through Congo, Kenya and India before arriving in Canada in 1999, prosecutors said.

He sought asylum in Canada, but officials concluded he took part in atrocities against Tutsis and, following years of litigation, ultimately ordered his removal from the country, prosecutors said. They said he then fled in 2014 and crossed into the United States, entering through Houlton, Maine, where he encountered U.S. Customs and Border Control officers and requested asylum. He subsequently disclosed that his father had been a senior local leader of the MRND, but did not reveal that he too was a member or his activities during the genocide, prosecutors said.

https://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKCN1RI06F-OZATP

Macron appoints researchers to evaluate role of France in Rwandan genocide

PARIS (Reuters) - President Emmanuel Macron has appointed researchers to carry out a two-year investigation into the role of the French army in the Rwandan genocide that is still a source of tension between Paris and Kigali 25 years later. The nine-member commission will have access to presidential, diplomatic, military and intelligence archives, the French presidency said on Friday, after Macron met members of an association supporting survivors of the genocide. “The goal is to deliver a report which will be published in two years time … and will be accessible to all. It will scientifically evaluate, on the basis of archives, the role that France played in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994,” the presidency said.

Macron’s predecessor François Hollande declassified presidential archives on the subject in 2015, but researchers have complained that only a fraction of the classified documents have surfaced and say a conclusive account on the role played by France is yet to be produced.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused Paris of being complicit in the bloodshed in which Hutu militias killed around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. While Paris has acknowledged mistakes in its dealings with Rwanda, it has repeatedly dismissed accusations that it trained militias to take part in the massacre.

However, during a visit to Rwanda in 2010, then president Nicolas Sarkozy, did acknowledge France made “a serious error of judgment, a sort of blindness when we didn’t foresee the genocidal dimensions of the government”. The two countries broke off diplomatic ties in 2006 after a Paris judge accused Kagame and nine aides of shooting down former president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane in April 1994 — the catalyst for the massacre. Rwanda rejected the charges. During that 2010 trip, Sarkozy also said a French rescue mission in under a U.N. mandate to provide safe zones, had been too little and too late. The killing started in April 1994, and the French arrived in June.

The two countries eventually restored diplomatic ties in November 2009, but Rwanda has long called on Paris to pursue genocide fugitives living on French soil. The presidential statement said the French court dealing with Rwandan genocide cases would receive additional resources to speed up the judicial process.

The announcement of commission comes against the backdrop of commemorations marking 25 years since the genocide. The French president will not attend official commemorations of the massacre on Sunday. He will be represented by Hervé Berville, a Tutsi survivor of the genocide who is a member of French parliament from Macron’s ruling party. French high schools will start teaching the Rwandan genocide from September 2020.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rwanda-genocide-macron/macron-appoints-researchers-to-evaluate-role-of-france-in-rwandan-genocide-idUSKCN1RH1F9

The Catholic church must apologise for its role in Rwanda's genocide

The Vatican's reluctance to confront those accused of murder in its midst is rooted in its refusal to face up to the church's complicity in the events of 1994

There is a Roman Catholic priest at a medieval church an hour's drive from Paris who has been indicted by a United Nations court for genocide, extermination, murder and rape in Rwanda. Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka was notorious during the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis for wearing a gun on his hip and colluding with the Hutu militia that murdered hundreds of people sheltering in his church. A Rwandan court convicted the priest of genocide and sentenced him in absentia to life in prison. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda spent years trying to bring him to trial. But the Catholic church in France does not see any of this as a bar to serving as a priest and has gone out of its way to defend Munyeshyaka.

It's not an isolated case. After the genocide, a network of clergy and church organisations brought priests and nuns with blood on their hands in Rwanda to Europe and sheltered them. They included Father Athanase Seromba who ordered the bulldozing of his church with 2,000 Tutsis inside and had the survivors shot. Catholic monks helped him get to Italy, change his name and become a parish priest in Florence. After Seromba was exposed, the international tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused the Vatican of obstructing his extradition to face trial. The Holy See told her the priest was "doing good works" in Italy. Another Rwanda priest taken on in Italy is facing charges of overseeing the massacre of disabled Tutsi children.

The Vatican's reluctance to confront the murderers in its midst is rooted in its refusal to face up to the church's complicity in mass murder. But as Rwanda marks the 20th anniversary of the genocide, the time has come for Pope Francis to follow his own lead on paedophile priests and apologise for the part played by the clergy in turning churches into extermination centres. The Vatican should accompany a plea for forgiveness with a calling to account of priests complicit in the killing. For two decades, the Vatican has maintained that, while individual clergy were guilty of terrible crimes, the church as an institution bears no responsibility. The Holy See would prefer the world to focus on the more than 200 priests and nuns killed in the genocide. But, while there is no doubt there were courageous members of the clergy, many Tutsi survivors regard the church as allied with the killers and culpability as beginning at the very top of the Catholic hierarchy in Rwanda.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/catholic-church-apologise-failure-rwanda-genocide-vatican

This article was written for the 20th anniversary year, it details the role of the Catholic Church in the Genocide of Rowandans

Rwanda invites Macron to attend 25th anniversary of genocide

Rwanda, which has accused France of complicity in the 1994 genocide that killed some 800,000 of its citizens, said Tuesday it had invited President Emmanuel Macron to attend the 25th anniversary of the massacre on April 7. Kigali has long insisted that France supported the Hutu regime and helped train the soldiers and militiamen who carried out the killing of minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. "President Macron has… been invited to the 25th commemoration of the 1994 genocide," Rwanda's state minister for foreign affairs, Olivier Nduhungirehe, told AFP. Macron has not indicated whether he will attend the event in the Rwandan capital. If he accepts, Macron will become only the second French president to visit the country since the genocide, which still poisons relations between the two nations. Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to visit Kigali in February 2010, when he admitted France had made "serious errors" but gave no apology.

Paris has consistently denied any involvement in the massacre, which the UN says claimed about 800,000 lives in 100 days between April and July 1994. In December, French judges dropped a long-running investigation into the killing of former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994, the event that sparked the blood-letting. The probe represented a major source of tension between the two countries after seven people close to President Paul Kagame were charged in the French investigation.

Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was killed in a missile strike on his plane near Kigali's airport. The first judge to lead the French probe, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, backed the theory that it was Tutsi militants from the former rebellion led by Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), who shot down the plane. However, a Rwandan commission in 2009 found Hutu extremists were responsible for the assassination of Habyarimana. Kagame had already invited Macron to visit Rwanda, when he was in Paris in May last year for the first visit of a Rwandan head of state to France since 2011.

https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/live-feed/40535-rwanda-invites-macron-to-attend-25th-anniversary-of-genocide.html

>>6082900

fyi…

There are I believe 20, something pages in total to that letter.