General
French Court Finds Writer Guilty of Denying Rwandan Genocide
Charles Onana and his publisher were fined for passages in a book that were found to have violated a French law making it illegal to deny an officially recognized genocide.
A court in Paris has found a writer and his publisher guilty of denying the 1994 Rwandan genocide, apparently a first under French law.
The French-Cameroonian writer, Charles Onana, author of “Rwanda, the Truth about Operation Turquoise — When the Archives Speak,”and the publisher, Damien Serieyx, were fined nearly $15,000 and ordered to pay more than $11,000 to three human rights group that had sued them.
Mr. Onana, who could not be immediately reached for comment, and his publisher have appealed.
The court on Monday found Mr. Onana and the publisher guilty for their “public challenge to the existence of a crime against humanity.” In his book, Mr. Onana denied there had been a genocide and denied France’s responsibility.
The court cited some 19 passages it said violated French law making it illegal to deny a genocide that has been officially recognized by France or international jurisdictions. Notably, Mr. Onana wrote that the “conspiracy theory of a Hutu regime that planned a ‘genocide’ in Rwanda constitutes one of the biggest scams of the 20th century.”
The word genocide is always rendered in quotes in his book.
He wrote that to “continue to hold forth about a hypothetical ‘genocide plan’ by the Hutus, or a pseudo rescue operation of the Tutsis by the FPR” — the French initials for the political group known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which is led by the current president, Paul Kagame — “is a scam, a hoax and a falsification of history.”
