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Rwanda: Habyarimana-Ntaryamira suit faces legal hurdles

By Rwanda News Agency
Saturday, 08 May 2010

Kigali: A lawsuit filed in US state of Oklahoma against the President Paul Kagame faces numerous hurdles, but one of the U.S. attorneys pressing the case said Friday that his team is confident that it eventually will be heard.

The lawsuit accuses President Kagame and several other officials of planning and implementing the shooting down of the executive plane which was carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira.

Their widows filed the suit in Oklahoma because President Kagame is affiliated with a college in that state that runs a scholarship program for Rwandan students, according to The Associated Press agency.

“We don’t have any illusions that it is going to be easy, but really, any fight for justice never is,” said Kurt Kerns, an attorney based in Kansas, who is working with lawyers in Oklahoma and Minnesota on the $350 million lawsuit, which also names nine other defendants.

“It will take a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of hard work. But is it worth it? I think so. I think he ought to be held accountable,” Kerns said. He is actually the lawyer of 83-year-old Lazare Kobagaya accused on Genocide.

Communications Director in the Office of the President, Ms. Yolande Makolo, called the lawsuit “a desperate attempt” by attorneys to divert attention from ex-First lady Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana who was briefly detained in France in March on a Rwandan warrant on charges related to Tutsi Genocide.

President Kagame, who has long fiercely contested the allegations, spoke during the graduation ceremony at Oklahoma Christian University a day after the suit was filed April 29, but lawyers were unable to serve him with the legal papers.

Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi were aboard a plane that was shot down in April 1994 by unknown assailants as it approached the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Both were returning from a regional peace meeting in Tanzania.

The widows of Habyarimana and Ntaryamira don’t live in the U.S, and Ms. Makolo said their lawsuit was baseless. Agathe Habyarimana lives in France and Sylvana Ntaryamira is in Canada.

“Mrs. Habyarimana is a wanted genocide planner who has been on the run since 1994. The answers to who killed her husband lie within her inner circle, as it’s been amply documented,” Makolo wrote in an e-mail Friday to The Associated Press.

“The suit is nothing more than a character attack at a time when efforts would be better spent focusing on development for the people of Rwanda.”
Former U.S. Attorney Robert McCampbell of Oklahoma City, who is not connected with the case, said the widows’ attorneys likely have four primary hurdles: jurisdiction, statute of limitations, producing proof of the allegations — both of finding witnesses and obtaining testimony — and overcoming what he said is the Supreme Court’s traditional narrow interpretation of the Alien Tort Claims Act.

The law was enacted in 1789, and the lawsuit cites it as a key reason a U.S. court would have jurisdiction in the case. It reads, “district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

Mr. McCampbell said the plaintiffs “will have to show a specific jurisdictional basis for the Oklahoma court to keep this lawsuit.” He also noted that the statute of limitations on civil cases is generally five years or less.

Mr. Kerns acknowledged the challenges, but said President Kagame has considerable ties to Oklahoma, most notably with Oklahoma Christian. The small private university has given Kagame and his wife honorary degrees. He also said an argument could be made that “there is no statue of limitations on murder, even in a civil case.”

“If you get a bad guy who steps foot in Oklahoma and has business ties in Oklahoma, there’s a commerce interest going on between Kagame and Oklahoma (and) there is jurisdiction,” Kerns said.

Oklahoma Christian spokesman Ron Frost said the school was more connected to Rwanda than its president.

“We have a lot of connections with people of Rwanda, all geared with helping educate the people of Rwanda to help them recover from genocide,” he said.

Mr. Kerns said investigations of the 1994 crash by French and Spanish judges have concluded that President Kagame was responsible for ordering the plane be shot down. However, Rwanda has fiercely dismissed the allegations, and another government commissioned investigation blamed the deaths on Hutu extremists in the ex-government.

Ms. Makolo said a panel of experts commissioned by the Rwandan government ruled in January that the crash was the work of Hutu extremists.

The other two lawyers on the case include Prof. Erlinder Peter – who is the lead defense attorney in the Military I case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 1:11 AM