France Rejects Kagame’s Political Justice in Agathe Kanziga Case

When French judges dismissed the case against Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, widow of former Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, Kigali’s propaganda machine jumped into overdrive. Headlines screamed: “If she were a Nazi, would France dismiss her case?” The Kagame regime and its supporters want the world to believe France shields “genocidaires.”

📌 Quick Facts: Agathe Habyarimana Case

But the truth is far more complex. This case reveals not France’s “empathy” for killers, but Paris’s reluctance to hand over justice to a regime that has turned genocide memory into a political weapon.

The Flawed Nazi Analogy

Kigali compares Agathe Kanziga to Nazi mastermind Heinrich Himmler. The problem? Nuremberg trials were independent international tribunals, not staged courts run by the victors. In Rwanda, justice is monopolized by Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the same group implicated in atrocities that remain unpunished.

Labeling Kanziga “Himmler” serves one purpose: to distract from Kagame’s own role in April 1994. Multiple investigations, including French and Spanish judges, have pointed to the RPF as responsible for shooting down Habyarimana’s plane, the very act that ignited the massacres.

France has, in fact, tried and convicted several Rwandans accused of genocide crimes. But extraditing Agathe Kanziga to Kigali would mean handing her over to a system where trials are political theatre. Kagame’s government routinely fabricates charges and brands critics as “genocide deniers” or “ideologues.”

This isn’t about shielding suspects. It’s about refusing to be complicit in Kagame’s abuse of “genocide justice” for political ends.

The Forgotten Victims

While Kigali demands action on Kanziga, it silences any probe into RPF war crimes. The UN Mapping Report (2010) documented mass killings of Hutu refugees in Congo—crimes that may qualify as genocide. Yet no RPF commander has ever faced trial.