Prosecutors in The Hague thought that would never happen.
The court’s most wanted man, once among Rwanda’s wealthiest and most influential people, had managed to escape for 23 years, living under ever-changing false names, changing countries and homes in Africa and Europe until he was finally arrested two years ago in a suburb. apartment not far from Paris.
Now 86 years old and in fragile health, Félicien Kabuga was tried Thursday on multiple charges of genocide. He refused to appear in court, saying in a note that it was a protest against the refusal to let him change lawyers, but the judges ordered that the procedure continue and asked the prosecution to read his opening statement.
He is accused of being a financier and logistical supporter of the groups that carried out the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus.
During this three-month bloodbath in the spring of 1994, at least 800,000 people, possibly as many as a million, were killed in the tiny central African nation of six million people. Tutsi women were raped on a massive scale.
Mr. Kabuga played a crucial role in the genocide, according to his prosecutors, as the founder and director of the popular radio station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. They say he had started spreading racial slurs and inciting fear and hatred months before the Hutu majority launched the attack.
At the start of the murderous campaign, the radio station boosted its listeners across the country. It broadcast information about where citizens should set up roadblocks and where to look for “enemies”, according to Mr. Kabuga’s indictment at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
The charges against him include paying for training and distributing machetes and other weapons to the militias who carried out much of the slaughter.
The trial is expected to draw widespread attention by focusing on the consequences of hate speech and incitement to violence, issues that have taken on greater prominence in many countries as they debate the role journalists and social media in political conflicts.
One example, rights groups say, is the crucial role social media played in what they call the genocide against the Rohingya population in Myanmar.
“This is also a rare case where a powerful economic actor, a wealthy businessman, is held accountable for the crimes he made possible,” said Stephen Rapp, former head of prosecutions at the Rwanda tribunal. , which is holding the trial in The Hague.
In an earlier trial, judges convicted two radio station executives and a newspaper owner of incitement to genocide and handed down heavy sentences for inciting the 1994 murder.
“With the power of the media to create and destroy human values comes great responsibility,” said the 2003 judgment summary. “Those who control the media are responsible for their consequences.”
Mr. Kabuga was not a scion of Rwanda’s privileged upper class. He was the son of farmers and started selling used clothes and cigarettes in his village in northern Rwanda. Gradually buying land and starting a tea plantation, he turned out to be an intelligent businessman who amassed great fortune and political influence.
Two of his daughters married sons of Juvenal Habyarimana, the Rwandan president whose assassination sparked the 1994 genocide.
Mr Kabuga’s French defense lawyer, Emmanuel Altit, tried to stop the proceedings, arguing that his client’s physical and mental frailty made him unfit to stand trial, but judges decided that the sessions would be held three times a week, but limited to two hours. each. The prosecution reduced some charges in the indictment to speed up the trial.
Curiously, the court pays for the defense of Mr. Kabuga. He pleaded that he is indigent, arguing that the court seized all his property.
Mr Altit, his lawyer, declined to address the issue, but court documents show the court froze several bank accounts in Belgium and France linked to the defendant and seized other assets.
The issue has led to family feuds, and over the past year several of Mr. Kabuga’s 13 children have filed petitions demanding the court release most accounts and assets because they belong to them. No decision has yet been made, according to court documents.
For more than two decades, Mr. Kabuga was able to hide with the help of his large family, moving with different passports to secret houses in places like France, Germany and Kenya, according to investigators from the French police and court.
It is unclear how or when Mr Kabuga moved to France, but investigators said they eventually found him in Asnières-sur-Seine after British, French and Belgian police traced the scene of the phone calls members of his family who had visited him.
The upcoming trial, experts say, may reveal details about Mr. Kabuga and his entourage, but it is unlikely to shed further light on the history of the Rwandan genocide and the crucial episodes that preceded and followed it.
Some historians say legal analysts grossly underestimated the atrocities of the civil war that lasted more than three years and helped set the stage for genocide.
But the tribunal has been blamed most by activists, including Human Rights Watch, for focusing only on the perpetrators of the genocide and not on both sides of the 1994 massacre. These critics say the tribunal has failed in its mandate also to pursue excesses. the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which still rules the country and whose members carried out large-scale revenge killings during and after the genocide. At least 30,000 people, and possibly as many as 50,000, are believed to have been killed as a result.
The Kabuga trial will likely be the last major trial for the UN-backed court, which has officially closed and is continuing its work through a smaller successor court. He tried nearly 80 cases, including those in which senior government and military officials were the defendants.
Over the past three decades, thousands more have been tried for genocide, the majority of them in Rwandan courts. Some have been convicted in national courts in North America and Europe. The court still has four senior fugitives on its international most wanted list.