Rwandan tycoon Felicien Kabuga played a “substantial” role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi that shocked the world, prosecutors said at the opening of his trial in The Hague on Thursday.
Once one of Rwanda’s richest men, the 87-year-old Kabuga used his vast wealth to set up hate media that urged ethnic Hutus to kill rival Tutsi “snakes” and supplied the murderous Interahamwe militia with machetes, the prosecution said.
The wheelchair-bound Kabuga himself refused to appear for his trial at the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals due to a dispute over his lawyer.
“Kabuga didn’t need to wield a rifle or a machete at a roadblock, rather he supplied weapons in bulk and facilitated the training that prepared the Interahamwe to use them,” prosecutor Rashid S. Rashid told the court.
“He didn’t need to pick up a microphone to call for the extermination of the Tutsi on the radio, rather he founded, funded and served as president of… the radio station that broadcast genocidal propaganda across Rwanda.”
After decades on the run, Kabuga was arrested in France in 2020 and sent to a UN court to face charges for the 1994 massacre.
Kabuga’s lawyers entered a not guilty plea at a first appearance in 2020 and have repeatedly tried but failed to halt the trial on health grounds.
