At the end of a six-week trial before the Paris Assize Court, former Rwandan doctor Sosthène Munyemana was sentenced Wednesday to 24 years of criminal imprisonment, with a security period of eight years, for his involvement in the genocide of Tutsi in 1994.
At the end of a six-week trial before the Paris Assize Court, former Rwandan doctor Sosthène Munyemana was sentenced Wednesday to 24 years of criminal imprisonment, with a security period of eight years, for his involvement in the genocide of Tutsi in 1994.
After nearly 15 hours of deliberation, he was found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, participation in an agreement to prepare these crimes, as well as complicity in crimes against humanity.
Unmoved by the verdict, the accused, aged 68, was to be imprisoned immediately. His lawyers immediately announced their intention to appeal the verdict.
“For us, this is an unacceptable decision,” declared Me Florence Bourg and Me Jean-Yves Dupeux. “No element of the defense was accepted even though there was massively contradictory testimony which left plenty of room for doubt.”
They regretted that Sosthène Munyemana had been presented “as a planner”. “Everything he did to save Tutsi backfired.”
He had been appearing since November 14, under the universal jurisdiction of French justice.
The public prosecutor had requested a sentence of thirty years of criminal imprisonment against him, considering that the “sum” of his choices outlined “the features of a genocidaire”.
Sosthène Munyemana is accused of having signed a motion of support for the interim government established after the attack on the plane of Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana, which encouraged the killings committed between April and July 1994.
The Rwandan genocide left more than 800,000 dead, most of them Tutsi, according to the UN.
He is also accused of having set up barriers and patrols in Tumba, in the prefecture of Butare (southern Rwanda), during which people were arrested before being killed, and of having detained the key to a sector office where Tutsi were locked up before their execution. A “death row”, according to general counsel Sophie Havard.
The accused was close to Jean Kambanda, Prime Minister of the interim government, definitively sentenced in 2000 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to life imprisonment for his participation in the genocide.
Steering of the genocide
Sosthène Munyemana was part of a group “which prepared, organized, piloted the genocide of the Tutsi in Tumba on a daily basis”, declared the president of the court when announcing the verdict, who underlined that by participating in the genocide on the scale of Tumba, he had “participated in the genocide throughout Rwanda”.
During the debates, several dozen witnesses, survivors or relatives of victims, were heard.
Sosthène Munyemana, for his part, never stopped contesting these accusations, claiming to have been a moderate Hutu who had on the contrary tried to “save” Tutsi by offering them “refuge” in the sector office.
“The important thing is done, it is the conviction,” commented Alain Gauthier, co-founder of the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda (CPCR). “It’s a little below what was requested but he is still found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide. All the boxes are ticked,” he added.
Arriving in September 1994 in France where his wife and father of three children already lived, Sosthène Munyemana started a new life in the South-West, working as an emergency doctor then as a geriatrician. He had recently retired.
His case was the oldest investigated in France on facts linked to this genocide: opened in 1995 after a complaint filed in Bordeaux, the judicial information was transferred in 2001 to Paris. The charging order was not issued until 2018.
Before him, six men had already been sentenced in France for their participation in the genocide of the Tutsi, with sentences ranging from 14 years of criminal imprisonment to life imprisonment.
Two of them must still be tried on appeal, and another, the former Rwandan prefect Laurent Bucyibaruta, sentenced at first instance to twenty years of criminal imprisonment for complicity in genocide, died on December 6.