Kabuga Felicien

Felicien Kabuga is one of the main sponsors and inspirers of the genocide To Rwanda in 1994.

Biography

During the hundred-day madness of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in the spring and summer of 1994, Felicien Kabuga led the government Free Teleradio Thousand Hills, the main coordinator and inspirer of Hutu extremists. Created in 1993, it became most famous as a "machete radio" - this media became the main tool for negative mobilization of Hutus against the Tutsi minority.

In addition to leading the initiative committee of the "radio machete," Kabuga was one of its main shareholders and seriously influenced editorial policy. He also financed paramilitary party structures engaged in the systematic extermination of Tutsis in close cooperation with the armed forces, special services and church leaders - it was thanks to Kabuga that more than 580 thousand machetes were brought to Rwanda, supplying up to a third of future killers.

The Pentagon and the legal service of the US State Department have repeatedly blocked international initiatives to jam, block and physically destroy the antennas of the Thousand Hills radio, citing a commitment to "freedom of speech" and international radio broadcasting agreements. Historian Ivan Krivushin in his famous book "One Hundred Days at the Mercy of Madness" writes that once it got to the point that at a regular interdepartmental meeting, a Pentagon spokesman objected irritably: "Radio does not kill people. People are being killed by people!. "

Without waiting for the agony of the extremist regime, Kabuga quickly left the country and went first to Switzerland, and then to Zaire (now DR Congo), until he settled in Kenya, where, thanks to good connections in the local establishment, including surrounded by President Daniel Arap Moi, he even opened a trading company.

Kabuga was always one step ahead of the pursuers - for example, he eluded justice in July 1997 after receiving a warning letter from a Kenyan policeman. Kabuga later appeared in Southeast Asia, in 2000 he transited to Belgium.

In 2002, the US State Department and the FBI, in cooperation with the Kenyan special services, developed a new plan to capture the criminal, but Kabuga again fled, and the informant who surrendered him was killed. It is assumed that Kabuga hid in Kenya until at least 2010, and subsequently moved to France, where he lived under an assumed name in the suburb of Paris Anyers-sur-Seine.

In May 2020, 84-year-old Felicien Kabuga was detained in France. With his capture, only two key military criminals remain at large - ex-Minister of Defense Augustin Bizimana and battalion commander of the presidential guard Prote Mpiranya.