The widow of the former Rwandan president whose assassination sparked the genocide of 1994 was arrested in France on Tuesday, just days after French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised a new era of co-operation between the two countries.
Agathe Habyarimana was taken from her home in Courcouronnes, south of Paris, shortly before 8am by French officials acting on a Rwandan arrest warrant issued late last year. The present authorities in Kigali accuse her of playing a key role in the planning of the genocide after the death of her husband, Juvenal Habyarimana.
Resident in France since 1998, Habyarimana has always denied any involvement in the killing, in which about 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, died.
Her arrest came five days after Sarkozy became the first French president to visit Rwanda in 25 years. In a press conference with his counterpart, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, last Thursday, he vowed to “turn an extremely painful page” on recent history, saying that those responsible for the genocide must be found and punished.
Diplomatic ties between the two countries were cut in 2006 after a French judge issued arrest warrants for nine people close to Kagame in connection with the genocide.
Kigali, in turn, accused Paris of providing political and military support to the Habyarimana regime. Diplomatic ties between the countries were restored only in November.
Evacuated from Rwanda by French officials during the first days of the genocide, Agathe Habyarimana went to Zaire — now the Democratic Republic of the Congo — before moving to France in 1998.
But the authorities in her adopted country, which genocide survivors have described as a haven for instigators of the 100 days of killing, had in recent years shown signs of cooling toward her.
Her request for asylum, initially rejected in 2004, was definitively quashed in October when the French council of state refused her the right to appeal, saying she had been “at the heart” of a genocidal regime. The presidential widow was also the subject of a French investigation into the bloodshed.
It was not immediately clear what would happen to Habyarimana. Until now, France has refused to extradite genocide suspects directly to Kigali, saying the Rwandan legal system cannot guarantee a fair trial. It has, however, sent suspects to the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, in Tanzania.
Her lawyer, Philippe Meilhac, said his 68-year-old client would refuse to consent to extradition.
“If she must be questioned, she would like to speak before either a French or an international court. But she does not consider the Rwandan criminal justice system to be sufficiently independent or impartial,” he said.
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