Monday, April 26, 2010
Jean-Damascène Bizimana (AP Photo-United Nations, Milton Grant)
Sixteen years after one of the world’s most horrific genocides, the government of Rwanda has accused its former United Nations ambassador, Jean-Damascène Bizimana, of being a party to the killings. Bizimana, now a U.S. citizen living in Alabama, was the UN representative for the Hutu-dominated government in 1994 when the bloodshed was unleashed following a plane crash that killed the country’s president.
Rwandan prosecutors claim Bizimana lied to the world during the genocide in an attempt to shift blame away from Hutu forces and onto Tutsi rebels. “At no point did he denounce or distance himself from the murderous regime,” Augustin Nkusi, a spokesman for the National Prosecution Office of Rwanda, told the Associated Press. “The physical absence from the murder scenes is not an alibi enough in the context of genocide.”
When the government he was defending was overthrown in July 1994, Bizimana, then 36, disappeared, leaving behind an empty Rwandan U.N. mission office and a bank account that had been cleaned out. Without calling attention to himself, Bizimana moved to Opelika, Alabama, became an American citizen, and currently works as a quality-control manager for Capitol Plastics Products. It was in Opelika that Bizimana was finally tracked down—in 2009—by David L. Bosco, author of Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World.
Bizimana could become the first person accused in the mass slayings who wasn’t in Rwanda at the time, if officials decide to charge him.
-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky
Ex-Rwandan Diplomat Denies Role in '94 Genocide (by Jay Reeves, Associated Press)
Rwanda's Ex-U.N. Ambassador, Who Vanished After Genocide, Resurfaces in Alabama (by David L. Bosco, Washington Post)
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