Eugene Rwamucyo
The trial of Eugene Rwamucyo who is battling Genocide trial at the Paris Court of Assizes is nearing conclusion.
Started October 1, 2024 in substance, the trial entered the phase of pleading since Friday withe the prosecution which concluded by requesting the court to hand the suspect 30 year in jail on October 28.
On Monday, the prosecution concluded its pleading with Maitre Peron indicating that “a lie is generally the vocabulary of perpetrators”, also adding that the circles of exiled extremists present strong similarities with mafias.
He said that the defense has based their arguments on three allegations, including that the witnesses were manipulated, that Rwamucyo’s trial is a political, not a judiciary case, and that the French judiciary is being used for political and diplomatic matters.
However, the prosecution constructed its arguments on facts before during the Genocide where they say that, the hate media, case of Kangura and RTLM and the stigmatization of the tutsi mark “a deliberate will to destroy where government is responsible of the massacre of its own people.”
Me Peron said that, with his membership at RTLM, and extremist political parties like CDR, his influence at ONAPO and University of Rwanda, “Rwamucyo was a precursor of the Genocide.”
“The support of Rwamucyo in the genocidal politics is as both theoretical and material,” said the prosecution.
“He filed three abrupt reports that followed the murder of a Tutsi who was working at Medicin Sans Frontieres and then the massacre of the Tutsi who had fled at Butare University Teaching Hospital.”
Practically, said the prosecutor, Rwamucyo supervised the burying of the Tutsi who were killed, and among the bodies, he also buried the living people.
The prosecution said that Rwamucyo moblised prisonners from Karubanda prison, then ordered for a machine_Caterpillar for this work, according to a testimony of the driver of the machine.
The same witness also said, that there were 11 mass graves in Butare which were meant to throw the Tutsi in Gishamvu, Nyakibanda, Kabutare, IRST, Nyumba, Kabuye, Hotel Faucon, and Ngoma among others.
Contrary to what alleged Rwamucyo that he never supervised the burial of the living, that he only assisted in the burial of the dead as a hygienic measure, the prosecution said that it was not an act of decency, “it was a deliberate act of concealing the facts, to an extent that they would dare to even throw living people in the pits.”
“The hygiene in their language meant to ‘clear the city with its tutsi population.”
The prosecution admits that Rwamucyo may have no blood on his hands, but “one can kill by words”. “Rwamucyo was in intellectual of action who did not hesitate to head to the mass graves. He put his knowledge to the service of the genocidal politics,” the prosecutor said and added:’He is today retired in pension, while his victims lay to rest without sepulchre in Rwanda.”
With all these, the prosecution suggested that the suspect deserves “a life sentence in jail, but looking at previous trials, we may request the court to hand him 30 years in jail.”
