Agence France Presse — English
April 30, 2005 Saturday 6:27 PM GMT
Defence lawyer at trial of Rwandan official defends denial of
genocide
ARUSHA, Tanzania
A French lawyer who has disputed whether the killing of 800,000
minority ethnic group Tutsis and moderate majority Hutus in Rwanda in
1994 was genocide said Saturday that he stood by his claim.
Raphael Constant, defending Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, former head
of the private office of the Rwandan defence minister, drew protests
earlier this month when he questioned whether there had been
genocide, attracting cries of “Holocaust-denier.”
He was appearing at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in
Arusha for Bagosora, regarded as the brains behind the massacres.
“I dispute that the prosecution has proved the reality of the
genocide to which he refers in his charges against my client,” he
told AFP.
“If that amounts to being a Holocaust-denier, I am ready to accept
it.
“In the case of the Armenians, Jews and gypsies, historians and
courts have shown there was a preexisting plan, and the putting into
effect of that plan,” he said.
“In the case of Rwanda that has not been demonstrated.
“The intellectual approach of the prosecution consists of starting
from an assumption: if so many people were killed in so short a
period of time, it is because it was prepared,” he said.
“People forget or pretend to forget that in April 1994 Rwanda had
been a seething cauldron for four years with a seventh of the
population forced to flee the areas controlled by the FPR”, the
Rwandan Patriotic Front, Tutsi former rebels now in office, he said.
“Add to that a collective memory, inherited from a tumultuous past,
which will lead to thousands of people becoming murderers to avoid
being murdered.”