It took almost three decades for Sosthène Munyemana, who is due to appear from Monday November 13 before the Paris Assize Court, to be tried for the acts he is suspected of having committed in Rwanda in 1994. former gynecologist at Butare hospital, in the south of the country, is notably referred to justice to answer charges of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”. Imprescriptible facts. The death toll from the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi between April and July 1994 amounts to one million deaths, according to the authorities in Kigali.
Placed under judicial supervision, the accused, aged 68, must report once a week to the gendarmerie at his home. But he will appear in court freely. The Rwandan is being tried in France under universal jurisdiction, a principle which stipulates that a state can prosecute the perpetrators of certain crimes regardless of where they were committed. Before opposing in the debates, there is one point on which his defense and the civil parties agree: the investigation was too long, the complaint against him having been filed in Bordeaux in October 1995.
“This wait is revolting, scandalous and justice does not come out of it,” deplores Alain Gauthier, president of the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda (CPCR), one of the associations to have filed a complaint against Sosthène Munyemana.
Judicial marathon
Me Jean-Yves Dupeux, who has defended the accused since 1995, shares this opinion. “These twenty-eight years of waiting are very probably a record,” he says. It is a bad signal sent by the justice system which can be explained by the limited means at its disposal, the distance which separates France and Rwanda, but also by the breakdown in diplomatic relations [between 2006 and 2009] between the two countries which delayed investigations on the ground. »
Sosthène Munyemana has already been questioned fourteen times by investigators. The accumulated documents made his file bloated. According to the indictment order, a hundred-page document dated December 15, 2021, which Le Monde was able to consult, “the judgment cannot proceed exhaustively with a presentation of all the depositions collected as part of this procedure, these numbering in the hundreds”.
The legal marathon of the man who had settled in Talence in Gironde with his wife two months after the end of the killings began on October 18, 1995. Five members of the Rwandan community then filed a complaint with the Bordeaux court, accusing him of torture and ill-treatment during the genocide. A year later, a judicial investigation was opened.
But in September 1997, the man who then worked as a doctor at the Saint-André hospital in Bordeaux counter-attacked: he filed a complaint against which gave rise to the opening of the judicial investigation into his person is a forgery.
Around sixty witnesses
In April 2007, the Paris prosecutor’s office requested his indictment and, the same year, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) rejected his request for asylum, considering that there were “serious reasons to believe that he was guilty of the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity.” In 2008, Rwanda issued an international arrest warrant against him, but the Bordeaux Court of Appeal refused to extradite him.
Finally, as indicated in the indictment order, “after several missions from the research section of the Paris gendarmerie and investigating magistrates in Rwanda, Sosthène Munyemana was indicted on December 15, 2011 for acts of of torture and barbarism within the meaning of the New York Convention, for genocide, crimes against humanity… and he is placed under judicial supervision.”
International letters rogatory are executed in Belgium, the United States, Norway, Great Britain and Switzerland to obtain new elements. Around sixty witnesses are expected to take the stand.
Before the court, Sosthène Munyemana will have to justify in particular the fact that he had the key to the office of the sector of the Tumba district between April 24 and mid-May 1994. Most of the Tutsi refugees or taken to this office were then exterminated.
A judgment expected on December 19
“These elements appeared from the complaint filed in 1995 and were subsequently supported both by the civil parties and by the multiple hearings carried out in Rwanda,” indicates the indictment order. Confronted with the testimony of the only survivor of a group of Tutsi locked up in the sector office, Sosthène Munyemana admitted from his first hearing that he had held the key to the building. »
“The trial will once again depend on the credibility of the testimonies,” explains Simon Foreman, the CPCR’s lawyer. The accused will present himself as a victim of the regime of Paul Kagame [president of Rwanda]. » “The hearings will show that he put pressure on several witnesses to plead in his favor,” adds Alain Gauthier.
Sosthène Munyemana was 29 years old at the time of the events. After working in Bordeaux, he settled in Villeneuve-sur-Lot where he now has a support committee. “Despite the years, he remains extremely combative and knows his case by heart,” assures Jean-Yves Dupeux, who will defend him with Me Florence Bourg. We will prove that it is impossible to remember certain events three decades later. »
In Lot-et-Garonne, the Rwandan worked for around fifteen years as an emergency physician before specializing in geriatrics. He has been retired for a year. Judgment is expected Tuesday, December 19.
