After 90 Million In Canadian Funding Court Leaves Rwandans Stateless

For 10 years after his acquittal of alleged crimes of genocide, Former Rwandan foreign minister Jerome Bicamumpaka has requested permission to reunite with his wife and children in Montreal. Canadian officials ignored every request – until three months ago, when he died of cancer at age 64, stateless and exiled in East Africa. Then, finally, they relented: they allowed his body to be flown to Canada, in a coffin. Mr. Bicamumpaka is being laid to rest today at a cemetery in Montreal’s east end, where his family is visiting his grave. Embittered by Ottawa’s treatment of him in his later years, they raise awkward questions about Canada’s role in an international justice system that has kept him in a surreal state of statelessness for decades. “They refused to answer us – they ghosted us,” said Mr Bicamumpaka’s son Cédric. “It’s unfair. When he was alive, they didn’t want him in their territory. But when he died, it was acceptable.” Since 1994, Canada has poured an extraordinary amount of money into the international tribunals for Rwandan genocide crimes. In total, Canada has transferred nearly $90 million to support the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and its successor organization, according to James Wanki, a spokesman for Global Affairs Canada, in response to questions from The Globe and Mail. Despite the heavy financial investment in the court, however, Ottawa appears reluctant to recognize the legitimacy of its verdicts by allowing family reunification following acquittals, Mr Bicamumpaka’s lawyer and family say. The United Nations tribunal has convicted 61 people of crimes related to the genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were killed. But when defendants are acquitted or released after completing their sentences, most governments – including Canada’s – have preferred to leave them in an indeterminate state, without passports or travel documents, often under house arrest or with severe restrictions on movement their. For the past eight months, four acquitted Rwandans and four freed Rwandans have been confined to a house in Niamey, the stormy capital of the West African country of Niger. With armed police watching the house around the clock, they cannot leave for fear of arrest. They are only allowed to go out for emergency hospital treatment, but even the ambulance is watched by the police. The uncertainty and restrictions have left them increasingly depressed and anxious, their lawyers say. Their house arrest is a violation of an international agreement signed by Niger and the UN last November. Niger pledged to give official residence to the eight Rwandans, who had nowhere else to go. However, just weeks after the agreement was signed, Niger revoked their residence permits, confiscated their identity documents, confined the eight men to their home and threatened to deport them. Niger said it canceled the stay of the eight Rwandans for “diplomatic reasons”. She did not explain that vague phrase, but her decision was the result of intense political pressure from the Rwandan government, lawyers and their families believe. They say the unofficial imprisonment is not only illegal, but also a violation of UN promises that the Rwandan crime tribunal will not become a form of “victor’s justice” handed out to the losers of Rwanda’s wars. “They’re supposed to be free, and they’re not,” Marie said–Grâce Uwase Zigiranyirazo, daughter of Protais Zigiranyirazo, an 84-year-old Rwandan who was acquitted by the international tribunal in 2009 and is now among those under house arrest. “They can’t move around freely, they can’t even go to church, and yet they’ve been told they didn’t commit a crime and they’re free,” said Ms. Zigiranyirazo, who now lives in Toronto. “We want to believe in justice, but what we see is unfair and we don’t see when it will end. It’s mental torture. We have a feeling of hopelessness.” UN officials and defense lawyers have approached more than 42 countries to ask them to accept any of the Rwandans, but all have refused, just as Canada has refused to accept Mr Bicamumpaka. Meanwhile, the eight men are running out of money to pay for their food and other living expenses. Most are elderly, with chronic health conditions. “The situation is becoming dire,” their lawyers said in a statement last month. “They also suffer from the stress and anxiety of possible deportation to Rwanda, where they fear they will be persecuted, or worse,” said the statement by eight lawyers, including Canadian lawyers John Philpott and Alison Turner. The court’s successor body, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Courts (IRMCT), has strongly criticized Niger’s refusal to honor the agreement it signed with the UN last November. “The situation before me is a crisis,” IRMCT Judge Joseph Masanche said in a ruling in February. Niger’s actions against Rwanda were a “flagrant violation” of the UN agreement and had turned the rule of law “on its head”, the judge said. He had earlier ordered Niger to return the confiscated identity documents to the eight Rwandans and give them freedom of movement. The Niger government ignored the order. In a letter to the UN Security Council, IRMCT president Carmel Agius said he was “deeply troubled” by Niger’s violation of the agreement and the “potentially serious impact” on Rwandan human rights. The idea that a UN member state “could seek to ignore a recently concluded agreement with the United Nations is troubling and cannot be allowed to set a precedent,” he said. Critics say the indefinite confinement of the Rwandans is a vivid example of how Western and African governments want to curry favor with President Paul Kagame, the man who has ruled Rwanda almost single-handedly since the end of the genocide. Rwandan troops are vital to UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and security operations to protect Western gas investments in Mozambique. Few governments are willing to jeopardize this key source of military stability. Family members of those acquitted and released from Rwanda formed a group, Save Our Parents, to push for permission to reunite the eight men with their families. The group has held demonstrations in The Hague, where one of the IRMCT offices is located. “We feel like our parents are caught in the middle of something that we really don’t understand,” said Diane Asimbe, the daughter of one of the acquitted Rwandan men, Francois-Xavier Njuonemeje. “For me, it’s unfair because we really don’t know the reasons. If the UN cannot resolve the situation, who can?’ Mr Bicamumpaka is among those who paid the price. After serving as Rwanda’s foreign minister for three months during the 1994 genocide, he was arrested and charged with genocide crimes, including murder, in 1999, and spent 12 years in pre-trial detention. The international tribunal, based in Tanzania, tried and acquitted him of all charges in 2011 after his lawyers proved he was traveling to Europe and the United States at the time of the alleged crimes in Rwanda. After his acquittal, unable to get a Canadian permit to join his family in Montreal, he spent a decade in a UN safe house in Tanzania, without seeking work or official residency. He applied for a Rwandan passport in Tanzania, but the Rwandan embassy told him he must apply in Rwanda – a move that would have put him at risk of further prosecution and imprisonment, as the Rwandan government and state-controlled media have made clearly do not accept the court’s acquittals. Rwanda has a long history of imprisoning and even killing its opponents, with many cases documented by human rights groups. Mr Bicamumpaka remained in Tanzania, declining a UN invitation to join Niger’s ill-fated team. When he contracted cancer, he was taken to a hospital in Kenya, where he died on May 18, still stateless. His son, Cédric, is convinced that Rwandan political influence is the reason his father and other Rwandans were unable to join their families. “Even when acquitted, they had to live as if they were criminals,” he said. Aidan Strickland, press secretary to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser, said the immigration department could not comment on specific cases. Global Affairs Canada did not respond to questions from The Globe about whether Canada accepts all of the international tribunal’s verdicts on Rwanda. Lawyers say Ottawa has a policy of denying entry to high-ranking officials of the government that was in power in Rwanda in mid-1994, since the government itself was complicit in the genocide, although Canada’s immigration minister has the power to issue exceptions this policy. Mr. Bicamumpaka, an economist by profession and a member of an opposition party, joined Rwanda’s interim government as foreign minister in April 1994, after the genocide began. He served in the post for three months, until the government was defeated by Mr. Kagame’s invading army in July. In Mr. Bicamumpaka’s travels as foreign minister, he defended the government and argued that the Tutsi death toll was exaggerated. In a UN speech he made outlandish claims of acts of cannibalism by Kagame’s forces. Philippe Larochelle’s Canadian lawyer, in an interview with The Globe last month, said The comments at the UN were “unfortunate”. However, he noted that Mr Bicamumpaka had also called for peace and had voted in favor of an armed UN intervention to stop the genocide. The specific charges against him in court were clearly fabricated, etc…