PARIS (CN) — The trial of a former driver charged with assisting genocide in Rwanda began in Paris on Monday, a decade after the case was first opened.
Claude Muhayimana, who worked as a driver for a hotel in western Rwanda, is charged with complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity for allegedly transporting Hutu militiamen to the sites of massacres of ethnic minority Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The trial is being held before the Assize Court in Paris. Muhayimana became a French national after leaving Rwanda in the late 1990s and France's legal system allows for universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity.
Lawyers for Muhayimana, who faces a life sentence if convicted, say their client was forced to obey the militia's demands for transportation. His own wife was a Tutsi and an investigation into his actions revealed he also hid members of the ethnic group and aided them in escaping at his own peril.
During the months-long genocide, Muhayimana was employed by the state-owned Kibuye Guest House, a tourist hotel on the shore of Lake Kivu in western Rwanda. During the conflict, thousands of Tutsis took refuge in the mountainous region surrounding the lake. According to prosecutors, Muhayimana drove armed men to various sites in the region where mass killings occurred.
Some 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority group, as well as moderate Hutus, were slaughtered between April and July 1994. Violence broke out after the president was assassinated when her plane was shot down and genocidal killings began almost immediately. The French government was found to have enabled the genocide by failing to stop the killings in the landlocked East African country and putting its own economic interests above the safety of locals. A French-led force ultimately quelled the unrest.
After the war, Muhayimana fled to France and was ultimately granted French citizenship in 2011. He settled in the northern city of Rouen, where he has been working as a construction worker for the city, repairing roads.
French authorities first issued an arrest warrant for Muhayimana in 2011. The Rwandan government in Kigali asked that he be extradited to face charges in Rwanda but the French Supreme Court denied that request in 2014.
Three years later, prosecutors dropped some of the charges against him, after he was able to prove he was in another part of the country at the time the massacre in question occurred. His trial on the remaining charges was initially scheduled for 2020 but was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“He is going to fully explain himself,” Muhayimana's lawyer Philippe Meilhac told Agence France-Presse. “This is a man who has been waiting 10 years for this.”
France has not extradited any suspects to face charges in Rwanda. Instead, it’s currently pursuing some 30 cases under universal jurisdiction, a legal principle that allows certain atrocity crimes to be prosecuted in France regardless of where they occurred. The French government has turned some suspects over to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a United Nations tribunal established to bring justice for victims of the genocide.
Three men have previously been convicted for crimes in Rwanda. Pascal Simbikangwa, the country’s former spy chief, was sentenced in 2016 to 25 years in prison for supplying arms to Hutu militia groups and directing groups to the homes of Tutsis. Earlier that year, two former mayors, Octavien Ngenzi and Tito Barahira, were given life sentences for organizing and leading militias that committed civilian massacres.
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