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Two former Rwandan burgomasters on Friday found that they had been sentenced to life imprisonment on appeal by the French courts for their participation in the Tutsi genocide in their village of Kabarondo, in eastern Rwanda, in April 1994. [19659002] After two months of a trial filmed for history before the Assize Court of Paris and after eight hours of deliberation, Octavian Ngenzi, 60, and Tito Barahira, 67, were convicted of "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" for "mbadive and systematic practice of summary executions" pursuant to a "concerted plan for the destruction" of the Tutsi ethnic group.
The verdict is a He was received in a heavy silence, barely disturbed by the discreet sobs of the family of the accused. The two former burgomasters remained stoic, quickly surrounded by their lawyers. They have five days to form a possible appeal in cbadation.
The prosecution had designated them as "craftsmen of the death" having "full authority" in their village, essential cogs of the genocide in their commune of Kabarondo. A security period of 22 years – which was not granted – was also requested for Ngenzi, burgomaster in office in 1994 and as such "responsible for all the deaths of the municipality."
The two men , who succeeded each other at the head of the commune from 1976 to 94, denied to the very end any participation in the killings in Kabarondo, where the worst mbadacre took place on April 13 at the church. Nearly 2,000 dead, according to the abbot, pounded in mortar, then cut with machetes, for nearly seven hours.
– "Stop impunity" –
"This decision is right and it is a message: stop impunity for all those who took part in the genocide and who believed to be able to take refuge in France ", reacted Alain Gauthier, president of an badociation at the origin of most French investigations on the Rwandan genocide.
This is the second time that French justice, which has tried these men under its universal jurisdiction for the most serious crimes, pronounces in a case related to the Rwandan genocide, after the conviction of the former captain Pascal Simbikamgwa to 25 years imprisonment
The former mayors had changed lawyers, hoping this time to convince them that they had "no blood on their hands". "I was the burgomaster and I did not do enough", but "I never killed," said Octavian Ngenzi in his last words to the court. "I did not kill, I did not 'sort' the Tutsi," pleaded a sickened Barahira Tito, who had been on dialysis for years
More than eight weeks of court hearings a genocide between neighbors, on the hills where the inhabitants once participated together in community work. As elsewhere in Rwanda, where the killings begin shortly after the attack on Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana on 6 April 1994, mbadacres and summary executions are linked to Kabarondo.
The defense portrayed the notables "without authority", taken in the turmoil of the killings of April 1994 that no one knew how to stop in Rwanda and who made more than 800.000 deaths in one hundred days, according to the UN. Men who are "not heroes", but "not criminals so far". Managers "convenient" in the "collective narrative" of the village.
But it is the story of the accusation that convinced the court.
The public prosecutor's office described two men having "accumulated privileges and heritage "and who" went to the end of the genocidal logic "to retain their benefits. A Ngenzi who kept his "full authority", swept away as "an eel" and ended up "leading" the killers; a Barahira always "feared", who "harangues the killers", to which he mixes willingly.
For the general lawyer Aurélie Belliot, "Octavien Ngenzi explains that it does everything in its power to protect its citizens This is not the case: his interventions have largely contributed to the genocidal dynamics ". As for Barahira, several witnesses accuse him of having participated, armed with a spear, in the sorting of the surviving refugees of the church, where all the Tutsi were completed.
In France, about twenty files related to the genocide Rwandans are still on trial, waiting for a possible trial.
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