Jean Flamme
The court of Assises in Brussels today continued the hearing of a case involving two Rwandans who are facing Genocide trial; Pierre Basabose and Seraphin Twahirwa.
While Twahirwa appears to court in person with his lawyer Vincent Lurquin, Basabose who is allegedly sick is only represented by his lawyer Jean Flamme.
In the last eight days, Flamme played tactics of deviating from the core matter of the questions put to him in regard to the role of his client in the Genocide committed against Tutsi.
His would be for example to rather defend that there was four Genocides in Rwanda, that there was no facts that may prove that indeed those who were killed in the genocide were Tutsi, among others.
Flamme came out to argue that a new probe around the genocide against Tutsi should be conducted “to bring new facts different from Rwanda’s facts” which he claimed, “are biased.”
The lawyer made several other twists of facts around the liberation struggle, something other parties in the trial qualified as delaying tactics.
Particularly, on October 18, Flamme was apparently determined to go as far as possible. At the start of the hearing, when he was given the floor to defend his client, he said that “there is nothing like speaking the truth in Rwandan culture,” that “the concept of intelligence -ubwenge- in Kinyarwanda simply means manipulation.”
The point he wanted to bring home, was that the submissions of civil parties and the prosecution should not be considered because he assumed that everything is built on lie.
According to a local journalist following the trial in Brussels, Flamme continued ‘firing’ heavy words always going out of the trial boundaries until the presiding judge decided to send the audience into break around 10AM.
Shortly had the hearing reopened, lawyer Martin Karongozi from civil parties submitted a case to the court claiming that Flamme was abusing him, saying that “he is a lawyer of lie.”
When asked to explain himself, Flamme lost his temper and the presiding judge decided to suspend the hearing for a couple of minutes.
The hearing resumed but no decision was taken against this attitude.
In the hearing, Flamme maintains that his hearing had no influence to commit the Genocide crimes he is alleged to in Karambo, Gikondo sector, Kicukiro district.
He said that this former soldier in the Force Armees Rwandaise(FAR) was just a simple retailer who was selling salt to the neighbors.
However, the man who is alleged to be member of the then ruling party-MRND in his testimony said that he run a foreign exchange boutique where, once the thieves broke and stole $600,000.
