Kenya complicit in denying Rwanda genocide victims justice

It is 32 years since the Rwandan Genocide, which in a mere three months killed close to a million people, mostly ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, following the shooting down of an aircraft carrying then leader Juvenal Habyarimana on April 7, 1994. Habyarimana died alongside others, including his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and the ensuing pogroms soon claimed the lives of many more, including then-Rwandan prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana.

The focus of this particular article, though, is Kenya’s role in denying justice to the victims of the aforesaid near-extermination campaign.

The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established not long after the genocide ended on July 4, 1994, convicted 61 suspects for their alleged roles in the campaign. One suspect, though, managed to elude capture, leading to a US-declared global manhunt that only bore fruit in May of 2020. Félicien Kabuga, who died on May 16, 2026, aged 93 at The Hague in the Netherlands, was a wealthy Rwandan businessman long accused of having played a key role in organising, but mostly financing, the genocidal attacks on ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda. Kabuga, who enjoyed closer ties to then-president Habyarimana for obvious reasons, two of his daughters married to the latter’s sons, was the main financier and a silent partner of the ruling party, and served himself as president of the National Defence Fund of Rwanda. He was said to have begun purchasing weapons, mainly from Kenya, in preparation for the campaign as far back as 1993.

Upon the fall of the Habyarimana regime, Kabuga fled to Switzerland (where he was ordered to leave), before settling, first in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then later in Kenya. First indicted in 1997 on seven counts of genocide, Kenya was thereafter requested to assist in his arrest for trial. But when, on July 19, 1997, the police arrested several other Rwandan suspects of genocide in Nairobi in a raid code-named Operation NAKI (Operation Nairobi-Kigali), Kabuga evaded capture. Later, in the 2000s, he would escape yet another Interpol-led dragnet in Nairobi’s Runda estate, leading to suspicion and claims he was being shielded from accountability for his actions by officials in the Kenyan government.

When, in 2020, more than a quarter century since the genocide, the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals announced his arrest near Paris, France, his victims’ hope for justice was renewed, only to be dashed when, less than 24 months later, the case against him was dropped on medical grounds. The operation leading up to his arrest had involved, not Kenya, notably, but the authorities in France working alongside law enforcement agencies and prosecution services from elsewhere around the world, including in Rwanda, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the United States.

The Kenyan authorities, despite documents filed in local courts showing that Kabuga, indeed, was liable for arrest and subsequent prosecution for genocidal activity, over a number of years chose to join as State enabler of the fugitive’s escape artistry. And history will, rightly, record that if the goal of justice for genocide victims in Rwanda was never fully attained, it was partly because such powerful, resource-endowed suspects as Kabuga sought and found protection from State enablers of injustice in the region, including Kenya.

Nairobi’s reputation for flirtation with, and protection of, suspects of genocidal activity in the region and beyond is, however, not unique to the Kabuga saga. In 2010, Kenya wilfully failed to help with the arrest and prosecution of then-Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, for whom the Hague-based International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant in 2009 following the Janjaweed-perpetrated pogroms in the country’s western region of Darfur of 2003. Al-Bashir, who first rose to power in a 1989 military coup, was toppled in a 2019 army-backed, cost-of-living-crisis-fuelled uprising, only to be supplanted in Khartoum by power-hungry generals who now themselves stand accused of genocide, with some of the accusatory flak directed towards, among other State enablers, Kenya.

When, not long ago, Israel was condemned for its military campaign in Palestine that killed well over 70,000 people and reduced the Gaza Strip, with a pre-October 7, 2023, population of nearly three million, to a sprawl of bomb-racked, smoke-wafting ruins, it was South Africa that led the cries for justice with a genocide case against Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice. Kenya, for her part, chose to make common cause with the ever-thinning band of Israel’s backers and enablers led by the West.

For continually sticking up for, as well as offering a safe haven to, genocide suspects and known fugitives from justice, Kenya not only courts the uninviting, sanctions-carrying pariah status, but also risks jeopardising future cooperation on such shared goals as action on coloniser-perpetrated depredations. Recently, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Ghana made a strong, states-and-nations-backed statement on the historical wrong of slavery-era indignities. With the strongest objections to the Accra-sponsored resolution coming mainly from known State practitioners and beneficiaries of the old slave-holding culture, led by the United States and France, voting patterns were, at once, a (sad) reflection on national self-reputation.

The lesson for Kenya, and other State enablers of genocide around the world, is that both cooperation and friction (read dissension) are very much an outgrowth of reputation at an individual level. From the United States, France, and other one-time slave-holding states, the lesson is that complicity potentially negates one’s credentials as a future champion of justice. Kenya, even with all its might as an East and Central Africa jurisdictional heavyweight, wouldn’t pull off an Accra in New York for its record of either insulating from accountability or playing footloose with those from within the region and beyond suspected of genocidal acts.

Woven into the Kabuga tale is, and will always be, the not-so-exciting sub-story of a two-faced Kenya as a refugee-hosting enemy of justice. With fresh claims of ties to insurrectionist groups accused of acts of genocide both in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan lately, however, Nairobi seems even more determined to continue down the path of justice-defeating, reputationally suicidal suspect-hugging. And thus shall continue the hum of Africa’s familiar, self-blame-laden song about man-on-man predation.