By Pierre Claver Niyonkuru
French-Cameroonian author Charles Onana was on trial at the Paris Criminal Court from October 7-October 11 alongside his publisher, Damien Serieyx, head of Éditions du Toucan, for “disputing the existence of a crime of genocide” – specifically the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda – in his 2019 book Rwanda: The Truth about Operation Turquoise (Rwanda: la vérité sur l’opération turquoise).
The case is historic, being only the second in France to bring to trial someone accused of denying the Genocide Against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Under French law, denying or “minimising” a genocide that is officially recognised by France is illegal.
The genocide resulted in the deaths of over 1 million people, according to the Rwandan government. The United Nations says approximately 800,000 people died.
According to the prosecution, Onana is guilty of “minimizing” and “trivializing” the genocide in at least four sections of the book, which constitute “an abrupt, frontal, and unapologetic denial” of the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
“You have here the whole arsenal of Holocaust denial,” the prosecution said, adding that Onana’s comments in his book reflected a “reductive and erroneous approach, deliberately omitting the purpose of the genocide, which was the total or partial destruction of the Tutsi group.”
The 60-year-old French-Cameroonian author, who was the last to speak before the end of the proceedings on Friday, October 11, rejected the accusation of genocide denial and denounced the trial as political: “I’m not here to deny the genocide. I am here because Mr. Paul Kagame decided that I should be here,” he declared, provoking in the room a few murmurs of disapproval but above all, applause, according to several sources.
Sowing confusion as strategy
Charles Onana had many supporters in the courtroom, notably Congolese, who see in this trial a connection with the ongoing war in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo between the Congolese army and its allies on the one hand, and the M23 and the Rwandan army on the other. For them, Charles Onana is a hero, speaking out against the unpunished crimes committed in this region over the past 30 years, which have resulted in approximately 6 million deaths.
Outside the courtroom’s door, where some of his supporters waved Congolese flags, Charles Onana accused the prosecution of being in the pay of the Rwandan president: “I know that Paul Kagame had asked for the head of prosecutor Carla Del Ponte at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and he got it. He also asked for the destruction of Judge Bruguière’s investigation, and he got it. Today, he’s asking for Charles Onana’s head, but he’s not going to get it!”
For the prosecution who brought the case on behalf of civil entities, these comments are further evidence of Charles Onana’s strategy throughout the hearings: “He changes the subject. He creates confusion and tries to reverse the roles of victim and executioner by claiming that he is the victim of a plot,” said Sabrina Goldman, a member of the prosecution and lawyer for the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, which was established in 1927 and prosecutes neo-Nazism and genocide denial in France.
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“Diversionary maneuver”
During her closing address to the judges, Goldman said, “What you have to judge are the comments published in Charles Onana’s book. This is not a trial about history. … You can say what you like about Paul Kagame’s regime: that’s not the point,” she said.
The DR Congo-Rwanda confrontation has inevitably been at the fore in Charles Onana’s trial, with Onana’s supporters mobilized by the Congolese diaspora in Europe to appear at the trial.
“Of course, we are fighting the massive human rights violations committed by this regime today. It’s monstrous to see the behavior of Rwandan armed forces in northeastern Congo in support of militias like the M23. And so Onana is a window to denounce all this,” Onana’s supporters claimed during the trial.
During his closing arguments, Maître Baudouin took care to address Charles Onana’s Congolese supporters: “I understand your revolt against Paul Kagame. But don’t let yourself be misled, because this is simply not the same subject,” he said.
Witnesses prosecuting Onana included Maître Hamuli Rety, who spoke about his experience at the ICTR as president of the ICTR lawyers’ association; Marcel Kabanda, president of Ibuka France (genocide survivors); Jean-François Dupaquier, a journalist and researcher specializing in the Great Lakes region in the 1970s; Maître Richard Gisagara, counsel to the Communauté rwandaise de France association.
Defense standing tall, invincible
Onana’s defense team asserts that the book in question is not about “genocide,” but rather a military operation known as “Operation Turquoise” that has previously not been explained to the public.
“Charles Onana was obliged to set out the framework of the military operation. Moreover, he warned in his book that it was not a question of disputing the genocide… this is the first time that a book has recounted everything that happened in Rwanda, and the publisher had no intention of publishing a negationist book, as there is no denial of the genocide,” Defense attorney Pape Ndiogou Mbaya said.
Another member of Onana’s defense team, Emmanuel Pire, commended the “positive and sincere approach” in his book:
“He has uncovered facts that deserve to be written and published. Rwanda is ruled by a dictatorship. There is no question in this book of asserting a double genocide. All he does is denounce the crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which he clearly distinguishes from the Tutsis: he does not say that the Tutsis massacred the Hutus,” Pire insisted.
Onana’s lawyers
Pire acknowledged that the quotation marks around the word genocide were “the pebble in the shoe” of the book. “These are not ironic quotation marks,” he exclaimed, pointing out that the word genocide is not the only one in quotation marks in the book, and that this is not the case in other of his works.
Charles Onana said that “his words had been hijacked, taken out of context.”
In her closing address, the prosecutor invited the court to remind the defendant and “society as a whole of the indisputable existence of the Tutsi genocide.”
She did not suggest a sentence, leaving the matter to the court’s discretion in the event of a conviction.
The verdict will be handed down on December 9.
Kigali’s view of Onana case
Genocide researcher Tom Ndahiro has commented on Onana’s case, describing him as infamous among those who seek to kill the memory of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. According to Ndahiro, Onana’s denial has evolved into a sophisticated narrative that goes beyond mere revisionism.
“Onana’s 2019 book, Rwanda: The Truth about Operation Turquoise, attempts to rewrite history by absolving the génocidaires and recasting them as victims within a distorted narrative,” Ndahiro said.
Ndahiro also cited a critique by historian Serge Dupuis, who likened Onana’s work to a form of intellectual “mental hemiplegia,” a condition where one refuses to acknowledge an entire side of the truth.
“Onana’s denialism fits into a broader pattern among genocide deniers who attempt to shift the blame from the perpetrators to the victims,” Ndahiro added.
This is not the first work of Onana about the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda that has courted controversy.
His 2002 book The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, so upset Kagame that his co-author, a Rwandan national, was jailed for life in Kigali.
