French Court Sentences Rwandan Genocidaire Laurent Bucyibaruta to 20 Years in Prison

A French court on Tuesday sentenced Laurent Bucyibaruta, the former prefect of Rwanda’s Gikongoro Province, to 20 years in prison for his role in the 1994 genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and Twa.

Bucyibaruta, 78, was found guilty of complicity in the massacres of nearly 1 million people in 1994 by the Hutu Power movement.

In particular, he was found responsible for leading thousands of Tutsis to take refuge in the Murambi Technical School, promising that French troops there would protect them from the violence. Instead, the refugees were denied food and water for days. The weakened refugees defended themselves with rocks for several days, but were overrun on April 21, 1994, when the French troops disappeared. At least 20,000 Tutsis were executed at the school, while those who escaped were found and killed at a nearby church a few days later.

The school is now a memorial and museum about the genocide, which ended that summer, roughly 100 days after it began, when the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by now-President Paul Kagame overthrew the Hutu Power government.

The French court also looked at Bucyibaruta's responsibility for another smaller massacre at a school in Kibeho, and the execution of several Tutsi prisoners in Gikongoro prison. In the trial, the former prefect denied all responsibility or connection, saying he “was never on the side of the killers.”

Bucyibaruta is the highest-ranking Rwandan official who has been taken to trial in France in connection with the genocide. In May, Protais Mpiranya, who was commander of the Rwandan presidential guard at the time of the genocide and played a key role in drawing up and executing the “kill lists” of officials during its initial stages, was found to have died in Zimbabwe in 2006, where he hid under a false name.

The killing was the product of decades of divide-and-rule colonial policy by German and then Belgian rulers, and continued by France after Rwanda gained independence in 1960. The teachings pitted the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups against each other, with Hutus being taught that the Tutsis were invaders occupying their land. The Hutu Power ideology elevated this attitude to genocidal proportions, and after then-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s aircraft was shot down on April 6, 1994, his Hutu allies sprung into action, blaming Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus for the attack.

Roughly 10,000 Twa people, a separate ethnic group, were also killed in the genocide, amounting to one-third of the Twa population.

In February, a French court blocked an attempt by families of the victims of the crash to reopen an investigation that had ended inconclusively. The crash also killed Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira; both men were Hutus.

In May 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron met with Kagame in Kigali, but while he did not apologize for France’s support for the Rwandan government at the start of the genocide, he did acknowledge “the magnitude of our responsibilities.”

Two other French reports from earlier that year found the government of then-French President Francois Mitterrand bore “overwhelming responsibilities” for the genocide for continuing its divide-and-rule tactics while being fully aware of Hutu preparations for a genocide of Tutsis, as well as arming, advising and protecting the Hutu-led Rwandan government.

After the Hutu government was overthrown in July 1994, its remnants fled across the western border into Zaire, and soon began mounting new attacks. When the Rwandan military, now Tutsi-led, intervened in Zaire to hunt down the Hutu militias, it helped set in motion the destruction of Zaire, the foundation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the decadelong Congo Wars that drew in half of Africa and killed more than 5 million people.

The present-day tensions between DR Congo and Rwanda over militia groups in Congo’s North Kivu Province is part of the continued fallout of that conflict, with Kigali claiming that Kinshasa backs the Hutu Power group Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and Kinshasa saying Kigali backs the Tutsi M23 militia that is fighting them.