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.”
The Paris court found that these words violated a 2017 amendment to France’s press law, which protects freedom of speech but also carves out exceptions, like denying genocide. The court underlined “the danger of the line of reasoning of Charles Onana and his publisher” given the current volatility of the region.
One of the prosecution’s court filings notes that “the crime of the genocide of the Tutsis has been recognized as a fact of public notoriety in a definitive decision by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda.”
The decision follows a long line of French court judgments against Holocaust deniers — politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen and negationist writers like Robert Faurisson. But the human rights groups that sued Mr. Onana said the Paris court’s judgment was the first time a writer had been condemned for challenging the reality of the massacre in Rwanda.
Over four months in 1994, some 800,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic group were slaughtered by ethnic Hutus, who controlled the Rwandan government. A U.N.-authorized French military intervention, named “Turquoise,” failed to stop the killing. In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron of France, for the first time in a speech in Rwanda, recognized his country’s “crushing responsibility” in the slaughter.
Patrick Baudoin, a lawyer and honorary president of the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, one of the plaintiffs, said the court’s ruling was a landmark.
“Given the obviously negationist words of Mr. Onana, the judgment condemning him has a precise meaning: you can’t falsify history with impunity, and you can’t have contempt for the victims,” Mr. Baudoin said in an interview. “His words were monstrous.”
“Mr. Onana is an apologist for genocide,” he added. “The court has done something indispensable, and it has created a precedent.”
Mr. Onana, for his part, maintained in his book that there was killing on both sides, by Tutsis and Hutus, but that there was no genocide. “Certainly, Tutsis were massacred, targeted, but they were not the only ones,” he wrote. In his introduction, he wrote that he was “above all trying to make a break with ‘official history.’’’
The author, who lives in Paris, told the newspaper Le Figaro that his work was “scientific” because it had originated as a thesis at the University of Lyon III, where it received “congratulations” from a panel of academics in 2017. Lyon III became notorious in the early 2000s when it was the subject of a government inquiry as a suspected hotbed of Holocaust denial.
Academics outside of Lyon have been less enthusiastic, however.
Serge Dupuis, a Rwanda specialist, wrote in a critique for the Paris-based research institute the Jean-Jaures Foundation that Mr. Onana had relied for his research on “officers in the Turquoise operation or on Rwandan officials of the time,” and that his inquiry was “typical of one that is exclusively exculpatory.”
He added that the “failure to be neutral is flagrant. Turquoise is depicted as a priori immaculate and unworthy of suspicion, to the point of denying the evidence.”
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