Theoneste Bagosora, the head of a commission which is believed to have laid the foundation of the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi
The French Court of Assizes has continued the trial in Appeal of Genocide convict Hategekimana Philippe Manier famously known as Biguma.
The defendant, an Adjutant Gendarme in the EX-FAR was sentenced to life in jail in June 2023 after he was found guilty of Genocide crimes committed in and around Nyanza.
Among others, he was found guilty of participating in attacks and massacre of Tutsi in Nyanza, Nyabubare, Nyamure, Ntyazo and Isar Songa where Biguma was in most cases reported to have led the gendarmes who were firing on the desparate Tutsi or was coordinating both the gendarmes and Interahamwe on roadblocks.
He was also allegedly heard and seen himself firing on the Tutsi or pledging to kill them in several areas according to dozens of witnesses who include eyewitnesses, or Genocide survivors who narrowly survived the tragedy after several torture.
Biguma was found guilty of killing Bourgmester Nyagasaza Narcisse of the then Ntyazo commune, then Pierre Nyakarashi who was a police officer and Musonera alias Sana Sana.
He was also found responsible of the killings at Rwesero, Mushirarungu and Nyanza roadblocks.
On November 7, from the side of prosecution Me Philppart referred to a report that were commissioned by President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1991, to define the enemy of Rwanda.
The report was written by the officials of the Ecole Superieure Militaire(ESM) with at the helm, Col. Theoneste Bagosora.
The report narrated events of Rwanda since 1959 where Bagosora’s commission said that, the Tutsi who didn’t want to “concede defeat” after abolition of the kingdom regime in Rwanda fled the country to the neighboring Burundi and Uganda.
They said that the tutsi who fled the country organised themselves under the name of Inyenzi and attacked several occasions the Northern, the Southern and Eastern provinces respectively.
Portraying MRND, the ruling party until 1994 As “Peacemaker”
The Bagosora commission did not stop to this history of the year 1960s, but they continued their report to include the period of the second Republic, and the creation of the Mouvement Revolutionaire Nationale de Development (MRND) by then President Juvenal Habyarimana.
“The second republic thought that they were doing good when they created a single political party which did not have any discrimination, be it on ethnic, religious and regional ground; the party fought for the the development and unity of all Rwandans,” the commission alleged before adding: “The Hutus, naive that they were became drunk of peace and prosperity that offered the party and just relaxed while the extremist Tutsi were busy preparing to reconquer the power.”
A statement like this could be similar to what artiste Simon Bikindi put in his hatred songs when he called the Hutu “naive who do not see what the Tutsi are cooking against them.” Bikindi was sentenced over Genocide crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha. He died in jail.
The report then alleged that the Tutsi “gave their women to the influential Hutu in politics to seduce them and spy them, to be able to overturn power at the opportune time.”
The report continued to call the Tutsi “betrayers and bloodthirsty race of people who always believe that they are superior and want to dominate the rest of people around them and always seek to make the Hutu their subjects and to reconquer the monopoly that they lost during the 1959 revolution.”
“The Hutu, naturally naive do not understand that their being majority is not an assurance that the minority Tutsi cannot dominate them as they did for the last four centuries,” writes Bagosora at Al.
Bagosora and his commission made several other allegations against RPF.
This army officer was sentenced to 35 years in jail over Genocide; Crimes against humanity; War crimes -He is said to have said that he was going to prepare the apocalypse against the Tutsi.
He died on September 25,2021 in Bamako, Mali Prison aged 80 years.
