Europe's crisis over refugees and migrants is raising much talk about the failure of European nations to fulfill their obligations, moral and legal, to the United Nations' refugee convention, agreed in 1951. The problem is symptomatic of a more general issue: the way the west lectures the developing world on human rights and democracy while continuing to turn its back on its own responsibilities. Another area where Europe, and the wider west, is negligent is in relation to the UN genocide convention, agreed in 1948, whose signatories agree to prevent and punish the crime. The failure here is compounded by inaction over genocide-denial, a phenomenon which has spread quietly but steadily in recent years. The long aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda is an alarming case in point.
France in particular has continued to be a safe haven. Dozens of genocidaire live and work there today with impunity from prosecution, disseminating lies about the 1994 genocide and in some cases providing financial and organisational help to the Hutu extremist movement, the Rally for the Return of Democracy to Rwanda (RDR, and its hard core the FDLR), based in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). What makes this disregard for justice even more galling for survivors is that in the only trial France has managed to conduct over these twenty-one years - that of intelligence chief Pascal Simbikangwa in March 2014 - its judges noted the historical reality of the genocide, and dismissed the defendant’s well-rehearsed pro-RDR line.
In that case, the court judgment assessed Simbikangwa's argument as follows: "[A] chaotic, spontaneous, uncontrolled, non concerted and unorganized popular movement in no means tallies with the observations made by historians, visual witnesses, journalists, survivors as well as diplomats, who all on the contrary reported effective preparation and organization of the massacres that were perpetrated for political and racial motives. That argument of a generalized chaos is also incompatible with the scale of killings that were committed and their spread all over the country."
