Paul Kagame with Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops in the 1990s. Photo courtesy Great Lakes Eye.

If power is measured by the capacity to influence outcomes, then Louise Arbour, Canada’s new choice for governor general, is one the most commanding figures in the annals of international justice.

The fate of millions of people living in central Africa was directly impacted by a series of decisions that Arbour made nearly three decades ago as chief prosecutor at a United Nations tribunal that was set up to seek justice in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.

Between 1996 and 1999, Arbour decided on how justice was carried out, who among the perpetrators of violence would be prosecuted at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and by extension, who would be granted judicial immunity.

Two men who were privy to Arbour’s discretionary power at the tribunal were Michael Hourigan, a former crown prosecutor from Australia, and Jim Lyons, a former FBI agent and specialist in counter terrorism. Lyons became a senior investigator at the ICTR, and worked in the same office with Hourigan for the tribunal. During Arbour’s tenure, Hourigan began collecting evidence on the event that triggered the Rwandan genocide: a missile attack on April 6, 1994 that shot down the plane carrying Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira, senior military and political officials close to the Rwandan leader, and three French crew members. All 12 people on board were killed.

By early 1997, after a year on the job, Hourigan had collected evidence about the missile attack from three former soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) who served under Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s current leader, who seized power in July 1994 amid the ashes of the genocide. Two of the soldiers said they had been part of a commando team that shot down the plane, and the third soldier said he had direct knowledge of the operation. Hourigan also obtained information from a UN peacekeeper who overheard a broadcast on the RPF’s shortwave radio, on the night of the plane attack, indicating that “the target” had been hit.

“What better way for Kagame to become a hero than to start the genocide himself by shooting down the plane and then marching into Kigali with his army and saving everybody,” Lyons told me in a lengthy interview, adding that Kagame had long been the “fair-haired boy of the US government and the Brits, trained by the CIA and MI6.”

Lyons was at the US embassy in Kigali with Hourigan when the Australian lawyer used an encrypted phone to call Judge Arbour, who was in The Hague at the time, to brief her on the investigation. Lyons heard Hourigan’s........

© Canadian Dimension