Rwanda Says Its Foreign Minister Stole $187,000 : Africa: Government claims official fled to Paris with cash meant for its U.N. mission and Washington embassy. He denies charge.

The Rwandan government denounced Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Ndagijimana on Wednesday, accusing him of fleeing to Paris with $187,000 needed to pay the bills of its embassy in Washington and its U.N. mission in New York.

Although New York police initially had treated the disappearance of Ndagijimana earlier this month as a missing-person case, Claude Dusaidi, director general of the Rwandan Foreign Ministry, told a news conference at the United Nations that the foreign minister had surfaced in Paris.

“I think he should be trapped and arrested as a common thief,” Dusaidi said.

But Ndagijimana, according to a fax sent in his name to the office of the Reuters news agency in Paris, denied that he had stolen anything. He said he was in Paris on a private visit approved by Rwandan President Pasteur Bzimungo.

The accusations, he insisted, revealed “the atmosphere of prejudice, suspicion and mistrust which currently rules at the heart of the Rwandan government.”

“The truth is, however,” he went on, “that some Rwandan leaders are trying to push me toward the exit, given the positions I have adopted on a number of fundamental political issues.”

But Dusaidi said that the government in Kigali had asked French and other international authorities “to find him and assist (in getting) him back to Rwanda . . . so he can deliver back to the government the money with which he has been entrusted.”

The case bristles with ethnic overtones. Ndagijimana, a Hutu in a Tutsi-dominated government, was the previous regime’s ambassador to France. That Hutu-dominated regime has been accused of slaughtering more than half a million Tutsis earlier this year in an act of genocide that stopped only when the Tutsi-led rebel army overran the tiny Central African country.

Dusaidi, in fact, indirectly blamed the international community for pressuring the government to include suspect Hutus as a demonstration of its intent to encourage a tolerant, multiethnic society.

“You are aware of the pressures that the international community has been putting on our government to become broader,” he told reporters, “. . . and bring in elements who come from groups responsible for the genocide of our people. . . . We entrusted him (Ndagijimana) with responsibility, despite the fact that he was a high member of the former regime that was responsible for genocide.”

In the fax sent to Reuters, Ndagijimana said the government was upset because he had called for the release of thousands of people jailed for genocide without proof as well as for a lifting of a ban on political party activities.

Ndagijimana arrived in New York on Oct. 5 with Bzimungo. According to Dusaidi, the foreign minister was carrying the $187,000 in U.S. currency and was supposed to turn it over to the diplomats at the U.N. mission on Oct. 8. But, said Dusaidi, he never showed up.

Dusaidi told reporters that the money was needed to pay telephone, electricity and other bills for the Washington embassy and the U.N. mission. He said no money had come from Kigali since July.

The foreign minister carried cash, Dusaidi said, because “our banking system is not working.”

“There is no bank that is open in Rwanda that is operating,” he said. “If that was the case, we would have wired the money directly to our account in the U.S.”

Dusaidi also said that the previous ambassador to Washington had wired $2 million to bank accounts in Cairo and Nairobi, Kenya, in July before the Clinton Administration froze the bank account and expelled him from the United States.

Dusaidi also rejected a report by Amnesty International in London that accused the Rwandan Patriotic Front--the rebel army that ousted the previous government--of killing hundreds and possibly thousands of prisoners and unarmed civilians in its onslaught.