Clémentine Nakure, one of the key witnesses in Simbikangwa trial (Photo by FRANCE 24)
Twenty years after the Genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda, the first historic trial of a former top Rwandan intelligence officer started on Tuesday at Paris court. FRANCE 24 went to meet up with two of the victims and a repented killer in Kigali who came face to face with the man who decided the fate of tens of thousands.
In the dock: 54 year-old Pascal Simbikangwa, former chief of intelligence services at the Rwandan presidency, has been paraplegic since a traffic accident in 1986. This former army officer stands accused of complicity in the genocide and crimes against humanity. He is accused of having incited, organized and helped the massacres that claimed more than a million lives in a hundred days between April and July 1994, namely by supplying arms to militiamen operating at checkpoints put up in downtown Kigali. The accused, who denies all the charges, risks serving a life imprisonment.
In Rwanda, few people have accepted to testify in this trial. Clémentine Nakure is one of the rare women to have accepted to speak of Pascal Simbikangwa’s role during the Genocide. In August 1993, this businesswoman was travelling to the North of the country. She affirms having been kidnapped without a reason by men under orders from the former Captain (Pascal Simbikangwa). Still shock-stricken, she affirms having been beaten up for about an hour.
“When I arrived in the office of Simbikangwa, he had a pistol and a club. He accused me of working for RPF intelligence services,” narrates Nakure in reference to the Rwanda Patriotic Front, rebel group at the time.
“I answered him, ‘I don’t even know what you are talking about’. After each answer, he hit me with a butt of the pistol. Every time that I repeated to him, ‘Forgive me, I am not a spy’, he continued to hit me again and again”.
“Death Squad”
At the time, journalists were also suffering the worst from the Hutu regime. Some of the hard-hitting (critical) articles are now kept in Kigali at the Center for Training and Cooperative Research, Iwacu. Sam Gody, a former editor-in-chief, is one of the key witnesses to the acts of the former Captain. He claims to have been imprisoned and tortured for four days for publishing an editorial that designated Simbikangwa as the chief of the death squad.
“On the fourth day, Captain Simbikangwa summoned me into his office for the fourth time,” said Gody.
“He then told me, ‘I forgive you, but with a condition. You can write whatever about the President of the Republic, you can write whatever about Ministers, about the MRND [National Revolutionary Movement for Development, party of former President Juvénal Habyarimana], but you must no longer ever talk about the death squad”.
“He was someone influential – a Captain”
Pascal Simbikangwa may have supervised the checkpoints at Kiyovu, in downtown Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where Tutsis were either arrested or executed. Thousands of people were massacred at these spots.
“He was someone influential – a Captain. He used to move around in a car, giving orders, all instructions”, said Emmanuel, a former Interahamwe militiaman who affirms having obeyed orders from the former Captain. “He used to say that Tutsis had to die. He went through all the quarters of the town to give us his instructions”.
After nine years in prison, Emmanuel has come back to normal life. He is a driver of a Moto-taxi, but his memories of the massacres are now even fresher than ever (before), in the build-up to the 20th commemoration of the Genocide.
