All judicial restrictions against Rose Kabuye, Rwanda’s Director of State Protocol, have now been lifted by the French courts. The charges relate to the act which sparked the Rwandan genocide in 1994. On 6 April 1994, someone shot down the plane carrying Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyarimana, and started a three-month period during which the Hutus massacred the Tutsis. The massacre ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) seized control of government.
There are two alternative explanations of who shot down the president’s plane. One version is that the plane was shot down by RPF rebels. The other is that the plane was shot down by Hutu extremists. France, which had been providing military assistance to the Hutu government before the genocide, has been inclined to believe that the RPF were guilty. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that the current Rwandan government is largely composed of former RPF members.
A French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, who has never been afraid of attracting controversy, conducted investigations and, relying on the evidence of such persons as Paul Barril, a soldier of fortune who has previously been convicted of offences involving dishonesty, issued arrest warrants for a number of members of Rwanda’s government including the current president. When Rose Kabuye, one of the people named in the arrest warrants, travelled to Germany last year, the Germans arrested her without examining the validity of the French arrest warrants. Since then Kabuye has been travelling backwards and forwards to France to answer the charges.