The genocidaire of Alabama?
At the height of the Rwandan genocide, Jean Damascène Bizimana, a 36-year old Rwandan diplomat, presided over U.N. Security Council deliberations as members of his government carried out the mass slaughter of nearly 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. David L. Bosco, a scholar at American University and a former senior editor at Foreign ...
At the height of the Rwandan genocide, Jean Damascène Bizimana, a 36-year old Rwandan diplomat, presided over U.N. Security Council deliberations as members of his government carried out the mass slaughter of nearly 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu.
At the height of the Rwandan genocide, Jean Damascène Bizimana, a 36-year old Rwandan diplomat, presided over U.N. Security Council deliberations as members of his government carried out the mass slaughter of nearly 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu.
David L. Bosco, a scholar at American University and a former senior editor at Foreign Policy, has tracked down Bizimana, who now works as a quality-control manager at a plastics factory in Opelika, Alabama. In a fascinating piece in the Washington Post‘s Outlook section, Bosco tells the story of Bizimana’s abrupt disappearance (along with the office stereo and refrigerator) following the fall of his government, and his improbable new life as a U.S. citizen living in the American heartland.
"It seemed that the ambassador, along with his wife and two small children, had simply vanished — until he turned up living quietly in a small town of Opelika, Ala., a few miles up the road from Auburn University. He’s an American citizen now. He works for a plastics company. And he doesn’t want to talk about genocide," Bosco writes.
The article explores the question of whether Bizimana is complicit in the Rwandan genocide, saying that he aggressively defended his government’s actions and lobbied against proposals to intervene to stop the bloodshed. It notes that although the new Rwanda government is still probing Bizimana’s possible role in the genocide he has never been charged with a crime, and has little to fear from extradition to his country since Rwanda and the United States have never signed an extradition treaty.
"Bizimana, a rising star in Rwanda’s diplomatic corps, told his fellow ambassadors that the violence was due to spontaneous public outrage over the president’s death on April 6 and that the interim government he now represented would quickly reestablish order," Bosco writes.
"He blamed rebel forces from the country’s Tutsi ethnic minority for all the trouble, insisting to the council on April 21 that the rebellion ‘must be made responsible for its attitude in wishing to continue hostilities, to perpetuate the current violence and to continue to perpetrate massacres.’ In May, he voted against an arms embargo against Rwanda that every other member of the council supported."
Colum Lynch was a staff writer at Foreign Policy between 2010 and 2022. Twitter: @columlynch
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