Genocide claims doubted

Rwandan refugees: Situation is complex

By Karen Langley
Concord Monitor staff
July 4, 2010

When Blaise Gakwaya learned a fellow Rwandan in Manchester had been accused of participating in the country's 1994 genocide, he saw in the charges evidence of the long reach of a government he distrusts.

"You're going to tell me someone's been here for 10 years, then tell me she did something?" Gakwaya said. "Maybe tomorrow they will accuse me, too."

Beatrice Munyenyezi, a U.S. citizen who came to the country as a refugee in 1998, was arrested June 24 on charges she had lied on her immigration papers. In an affidavit, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Munyenyezi had denied crimes she had committed during the Rwandan genocide of spring and summer 1994.

The agent reported that in Rwanda he had found witnesses who saw Munyenyezi direct the murder and rape of numerous people, mostly members of the minority Tutsi ethnicity, in front of a hotel where she was living. One witness said Munyenyezi had ordered the witness gang-raped while Munyenyezi and her husband watched. Another described watching Munyenyezi kill a boy by hitting him in the head with a wooden club. She would have been 24 at the time.

Members of central New Hampshire's small Rwandan community have watched the case, and for some it has reinforced their suspicion of the government that has led Rwanda since the genocide. Acquaintances of Munyenyezi, like Gakwaya and his father, who was a government minister in Rwanda, are quick to say that anyone who committed a crime should be punished.

But they believe the charges against Munyenyezi were more likely motivated by her opposition to the Rwandan government, as seen at protests in Boston and Washington, D.C., as well as the fact of her Hutu ethnicity. They claim the government of Rwanda steered the investigation of the American agent so that he unknowingly interviewed people bribed to frame Munyenyezi.

"From the moment you land in Rwanda, there are so many people who look like they don't know you but who follow you every hour," said Theobald Gakwaya, a former Minister of Internal Affairs. "When you went there, your investigation is flawed and oriented for the issue the government wants."

Gakwaya, a Hutu, said he was hunted during the genocide because he opposed the Hutu Power call to kill Tutsis and was later imprisoned for criticizing the government.

Sixteen years after the genocide, the events and their aftermath remain a difficult topic for Rwandans, even in New Hampshire. When the 100 or so Rwandan people living in the Concord and Manchester area get together, both Hutus and Tutsis attend, said Augustin Ntabaganyimana, a Rwandan of both Hutu and Tutsi heritage who works with refugees at a social services agency in Concord. But people avoid speaking about the genocide, he said, because they have different views of what happened and why.

People who are Hutu sometimes say the government disregards killings of their own people before and after the genocide, while people who are Tutsi sometimes feel the prosecution for genocide lags.

"It doesn't really matter whether you are in Rwanda or abroad, you are connected to the events of 1994," Ntabaganyimana said. "People in the community still live that, because we are connected to people who have died in the genocide or the deaths that happened in the refugee camps in Congo, in Tanzania."

After losing nearly all her family to the genocide, Chantal Kayitesi moved to New Hampshire in 1999. Kayitesi, who now lives in Massachusetts, does not know Munyenyezi personally, and she said she does not know whether the accusations against the Manchester woman are true. But for Kayitesi, who lost her husband, a teacher named Joseph, when their son was only a few months old, along with her parents and two siblings, the prosecution of genocide is essential.

"By bringing people to justice, you tell a survivor, 'We are not ignoring your suffering,' " Kayitesi said. "And you are telling the world, you are telling Rwanda, that you can't just kill your neighbor. It's not acceptable to kill people in Rwanda or anywhere in the world, and we care."

Investigations by the United States are all the more important because political distance gives the results credibility, she said.

Kayitesi, the Gakwayas and others said the ethnic conflict between Tutsis and Hutus has been spurred by governments seeking to maintain their own power.


"It wasn't Hutu and Tutsi killing each other," Kayitesi said. "It was a government-sponsored genocide, when regular peasants who used to be our neighbors and our friends, our teammates and our colleagues, were manipulated by the government."

Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, a brother of Munyenyezi, said today's Rwandan government continues to exploit that division. Like other Hutu residents interviewed, Higiro, a professor at Western New England College in Massachusetts, said the government ignores historic killings of Hutus and labels its opponents as deniers of genocide to stifle dissent. Human Rights Watch said a week ago that political repression was increasing in Rwanda in advance of the country's August presidential elections.

"When the Rwandan government wants to go after a person, they use the word genocide because it has resonance in Western cultures because of the Jewish Holocaust," Higiro said.

Higiro said his sister has been accused because of her family ties. He is the chairman of an opposition party based abroad, and he said the government of Rwanda has asked the United States to extradite him. Munyenyezi's husband and mother-in-law are imprisoned in Tanzania, where they are defendants at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Higiro said he is sure the accusations against his sister were fabricated, and he dismissed the immigration agent's conclusion, in the affidavit, that Hutu extremists have spread throughout the world with the intention of returning home to kill every remaining Tutsi.

"That's exactly the propaganda of the Rwandan regime," Higiro said. "Once you criticize the current regime, once you say, 'Look, the way you tell the story of the genocide in Rwanda is distorted,' you are labeled a Hutu extremist who would like to go back and finish the genocide."

Higiro said that his political party is allied with a Tutsi party that also opposes the government, and he said both are fighting for an open political space.