Philippe Hategekimana Manier(sited)
Genocide survivors who escaped the massacre of ISAR Songa in the Southern Province told the Paris Court of Assizes that the Gendarmes of the nearby Nyanza were part of the death squad.
The witnesses testified on Friday in the appeal trial against Hategekimana Philippe Manier famously know as Biguma. The defendant was in June 2023 sentenced to life in jail after he was found guilty of crimes of Genocide against Tutsi.
He appealed the sentence with an alibi that he was not in Nyanza during the Genocide, but in Kigali.
One witness who testified said that she was 22 years old and she had come to find refuge at the farms of ISAR, the Rwanda’s agricultural research institute alongside 160 family members who would be massacred, with only 10 members surviving.
“I may recall a very difficult day that was April 28, 1994 when heavy weapons fired on us after one week of starving. I could feel the pains of corpses falling on me after an injury that I had sustained,” said the witness.
“Firing on us were gendarmes of the government forces. We could recognize them through their khaki uniform and red berets.”
The same gendarmes picked the witness from the corpses, and, the court wondered how they stopped targeting her and helped her through.
“It was not out of charity, they wanted to rape me. They raped me and impregnated me before vanishing to Zaire-Congo today,” she said.
“In the end I have birth to a baby girl who survived.”
This witness said that she went through a lot, including one incident where the Interahamwe militia asked her to dig her own grave, only to be saved by the same gendarmes who had interests in her.
“They raped me however they wanted,” she said. “The gendarmes would come every evening praising Biguma while saying he was the one behind the attacks. Some would say that he was more brave than his boss Birikunzira.
Another witness recalls that at ISAR, before trying to escape, a helicopter went around and the refugees divided themselves into two groups which tried to run for their life, trying to connect with the border to Burundi.
“They arrested us and tied the men among us and killed them, then kept women for rape while children were also put in the houses of Hutus to serve them,” said the witnesses.
