France's 'contempt for Africa'
2008-11-14 20:07
Kigali - The Rwandan parliament on Thursday charged that the French warrant which led to a senior Rwandan official's arrest in Germany was evidence of France's "contempt for Africa," a senior official said.
A special session of parliament attended by several ministers was convened to discuss the arrest on Sunday in Frankfurt of President Paul Kagame's chief of protocol, Rose Kabuye.
"For Rwandan parliamentarians, this is a coup. It's a violation of a state's sovereignty and independence," deputy speaker Dennis Polisi said after the meeting.
"It's contempt for Africans, for the poor countries. How can a European judge be sitting in his office and have the highest-ranking officials of another country arrested," he said.
For the fourth consecutive day on Thursday, thousands of Rwandans in the capital Kigali and in the countryside protested against Kabuye's arrest.
In Kigali, thousands gathered before the French and Rwandan cultural centre and marched towards the German embassy, but were stopped by police around 100m away.
"Why is Germany and France persecuting our heroes? We will protest until Rose Kabuye is freed," shouted the demonstrators.
Protesters, including local authority officials and university students, also marched in provincial capitals, police spokesperson Willy Marcel Higiro said.
French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued a warrant against Kabuye and nine other Kagame aides two years ago over the 1994 assassination of then Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana.
The death of the Hutu president is widely seen as having triggered the genocide against the country's Tutsi minority by Hutu militias, in which an estimated 800 000 people were massacred within weeks.
The lawmakers "deplored the fact that even as genocide perpetrators are leading quiet lives in Europe, European judges are persecuting those very people who stopped the genocide," Polisi said.
Bruguiere is probing the role of then Tutsi rebel leader Kagame's movement in shooting down Habyarimana's plane, which also had a three-man French crew.
Rwanda hit back with a 500-page report on France's alleged role in the genocide and naming 33 top political and military officials, including the late president Francois Mitterrand and former premier Dominique de Villepin.
The investigation charges that France knew of the genocide's preparations and actively supported the perpetrators.
Earlier this week, a judicial source in Kigali said that Rwanda was poised to hand down indictments and arrest warrants against 23 of the officials named in the report.