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A Rwandan doctor known as the “butcher of Tumba”, accused of facilitating the 1994 Rwandan genocide, goes on trial in Paris starting Tuesday. He will become the seventh Rwandan to be tried in France for crimes related to the genocide.
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Sosthene Munyemana, 68, is accused of perpetrating and planning massacres against Tutsis in Tumba, in the current town of Hyue, in southern Rwanda.
In the 100 days of the genocide, around 800,000 Rwandans, most of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed by Hutu extremists.
Munyemana, a Hutu, is accused of being involved in setting up roadblocks to help sort people to be killed, and allegedly locking people up in inhuman conditions in local government offices before they were sent to be executed.
Munyemana, who is currently living under police supervision in France, where he moved after the genocide in 1994 to join his wife and three children, has rejected all of the charges.
He claims that the local office in Tumba, to which he had the key, was a refuge for Tutsis looking for protection.
His lawyer has argued that an open letter Munyemana signed in April 1994 supporting the interim government, which orchestrated the genocide, was signed before the massacres had occurred, and that his client had in fact worked to prevent the genocide.
Twenty-eight years later
Nearly 70 witnesses are reportedly expected to testify at the trial in Paris, which is to run through mid December.
But the difficulty in the case is how long it took between the charges being filed and the case being brought to trial.
Munyemana’s is the oldest case currently open in France based on the idea of universal jurisdiction, in which any country can prosecute crimes against humanity, regardless of where the crimes took place.
The first charges were filed against him in 1995 by the Collectif Girondin pour le Rwanda and the International Federation for Human Rights.
But it took 28 years for prosecutors to bring the case to trial.
In the meantime, Munyemana, who was trained as a gynaecologist, continued his medical career in Bordeaux and then in Villeneuve-sur-Lot.
Prosecutions in Rwanda
The Paris prosecutor opened an investigation in 2007, the same year Munyemana asked for asylum from France, which rejected his claim, saying there was real suspicion that he was responsible for genocide crimes.
That same year, Rwandan village Gacaca courts sentenced him to life in prison, in absentia, for genocide crimes.
Rwanda issued an international arrest warrant for him in 2008, and requested his extradition in 2010, but the Bordeaux court refused.
More than 40 indicted genocide fugitives are still in France, and Munyemana is the seventh to go on trial.
The first was Pascal Simbikangwa, a former spy chief, who in 2014 was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
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