In 1994, alongside the mechanisms through which the genocide against the Tutsi was implemented, the genocidal regime launched a campaign to create alternative ‘truths’ aimed at denying, minimizing and justifying the genocide of more than one million innocent Tutsi.

Denial is the final stage of genocide. 

The perpetrators sought to minimize and revise their role in the massacres and particularly invested in efforts to deny the planning of the genocide.

The judicial manipulations surrounding former president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane crash on April 6, 1994, is one of the major revisionist narratives that perpetrators of the genocide have marketed for years. They do so by claiming to give a ‘truthful’ account of the causes and facts which painted them as victims, while depicting the plane's shooting incident as the real cause of the 1994 genocide and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel movement – which fought to stop the genocide and liberate the country – as the real architect of the genocide.

In the genocide  perpetrators’ narrative, which was later sustained through a court case in France, there had been no genocide in Rwanda but only “unplanned” and "spontaneous" killings by terrified peasants angered by the assassination of their president in a plane crash – which was all the work of the RPF.

Genocide perpetrators envisioned a judicial outcome that would declare the RPF responsible for causing the massacres and absolve the killers of any prior plan to commit genocide.

They had hoped for a verdict which would rehabilitate them and condemn the RPF or, at least, acknowledge that there were two sides killing each other (the double genocide narrative), so that any liability or blame would be shared.

But on February 15, 2022, heaven fell on the entire revisionist bandwagon. The French Court of Cassation dismissed the appeal by the families of people killed in the plane crash after a two-decade-long case. The court confirmed the decision of the Court of Appeal. There was no sufficient and reliable evidence to charge and prosecute anyone for committing the alleged crime of shooting down the plane.

The decision of the Court of Cassation came after years of a sequence of manipulations and lawsuits in different French jurisdictions which initially relied on a probe by the politicized French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière in which he controversially implicated former RPF officers in the downing of the plane.

Bruguière begun his discredited probe in March 1998 following a complaint submitted by the family of the co-pilot of Habyarimana’s plane. Despite different visible signs that his witnesses and their testimonies would turn out to be problematic, in addition to extensive intelligence reports that concluded the contrary, Bruguière had chosen to advance the revisionist narrative and unsurprisingly laid the blame of the plane crash on the RPF.

In reality, the findings of Bruguière and the arrest warrants against ex officers of RPF’s former military wing were more of a result of genocide perpetrators’ strategy to launch a diplomatic charm offensive in the West, especially France and Belgium, to create an alternative revisionist narrative of the genocide.

The latter narrative stretched from Captain Paul Barril and his famous black box, to the genocidaires’ media offensive spreading the narrative that no evidence incriminating the genocidal government existed, and to the lies that it was the RPF that triggered the genocide against the Tutsi and committed a genocide against the Hutu.

The propaganda climaxed in Bruguière's charges and arrest warrants. The genocide perpetrators had it all planned out. With a simplistic reasoning, Bruguière built his thesis exclusively on questionable witnesses and testimonies which corroborated the genocidaires and their supporters. And the French justice system was turned into a relay of the revisionist agenda.

No reliable material element had come in support of his allegations. In coming up with the indictment, Bruguière did not visit Rwanda or interview any of those he indicted.

Several witnesses including the principal witness, Abdoul Ruzibiza, later recanted their testimonies saying that the case was built on nothing but political machinations.

By successive manipulations and fallacious shortcuts, Bruguière fueled a revisionist narrative of the genocide against the Tutsi. For translation of documents written in Kinyarwanda, he hired a former spy of the Habyarimana regime and son-in-law of Felicien Kabuga, a businessman and génocidaire who played a major role in the run-up to the Genocide against the Tutsi. Kabuga is now in detention after nearly three decades on the run and is set to be tried for crimes against humanity considering his role in the genocide.

However, as the saying goes, «les faits sont têtus». The risk of manipulating the law and the justice system to advance or support a genocidal or denialist propaganda is well known. The law is incompatible with these practices, and the ultimate result could only be the dismissal pronounced by the French Court.

This final judicial defeat is the latest indictment of the alternative truth peddled by the perpetrators and their supporters. This is not the first time that French judicial and intelligence organs stood by facts and the truth. In 1998, the Director of France's foreign intelligence agency (DGSE) briefed the French Parliament and noted that the former Rwandan first lady, Agathe Habyarimana, and her relatives were central to the planning of the genocide and the attack on the president's plane in order to capture power as they did not want to share power with the RPF.

Indeed, a note from the DGSE declassified by the French Ministry of Defense on September 17, 2015, at the request of the investigating judges, identified Col. Théoneste Bagosora and Col. Laurent Serubuga, former Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), as the main architects of the attack against Habyarimana's plane.

Moreover, Judge Trevidic who later replaced Bruguiere confirmed the reports of several intelligence services which established, beyond doubt, that the missiles were fired from the Kanombe military camp, a stronghold of the former genocidal Rwandan government army.

About 13 years ago, Rwanda’s own investigation conducted by a team of experts dubbed the Mutsinzi Commission, which was led by former Chief Justice Jean Mutsinzi had arrived at similar conclusions. The Rwandan inquiry was backed by, among others, ballistics experts from the United Kingdom.

The Mutsinzi commission concluded that the attack was an inside job and the analysis established that the missile that downed the plane clearly came from the defence positions of the former government forces.

The French Court of Cassation, having sought to examine the basis of the dismissal of the allegations by lower jurisdictions, and relying solely on the law and the evidence, confirmed the ruling of the Court of Appeal, and ruled once and for all that the decision to dismiss the case was right and in compliance with the law.

In a statement released by Bernard Maingain and Leon Lef Forster, the two lawyers representing the Government of Rwanda, they said: “It took more than 20 years of proceedings for the outrageous accusations […] to be invalidated by the French courts thanks to the conscientious work of magistrates, investigators, and experts.”

As a result of the Court of Cassation’s decision, the genocidal galaxy’s last plot to frame the plane crash as the origin and the cause of the genocide has crumbled.

The thesis of an operation carried out by the genocidal government army and Hutu extremist officers is widely retained by investigators, researchers and secret services.

“France’s Court of Cassation puts an end to one of the biggest cover-up stories in recent history. Judge Bruguière’s massive 24-year scam on the 6 April 1994 plane crash is over and done,” tweeted Yolande Makolo, the Spokesperson of the Government of Rwanda.

The revisionist narrative around the plane crash has always been absurd. From the beginning, it was the perpetrators’ main or only defense. Those who relied on Bruguière's deception to avoid facing their guilt are now in a legal minefield.