Kenya President Offers Shelter to Rwanda Suspects Sought by War Tribunal

In defiance of an international quest for justice, Kenya’s president has declared that he will provide sanctuary for Rwandan ringleaders who face indictment in the 1994 slayings of 500,000 of their countrymen.

President Daniel Arap Moi, in a statement published Thursday, also said he would jail anyone from the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda who sets foot in Kenya in pursuit of suspects.

“Any such characters come here, they will be arrested,” the president announced. “I shall not allow any of them to enter Kenya to serve summons and look for people here. No way.”

The president gave as his reason his belief that, before the United Nations pursues war criminals, it should investigate not just the killings but the events precipitating them.

Moi’s decree compounded frustrations over providing Rwandans a measure of justice for some of the worst crimes in African history. And it could further destabilize a fragile and needy part of the continent.

The decision puts Moi’s already wobbly and aid-dependent government at odds with the binding obligations of the charter of the United Nations. And it tarnishes Kenya’s international image, already battered by rising crime, corruption and political heavy-handedness.

Foreign diplomats at first expressed disbelief at Moi’s pronouncement. Could he possibly have been quoted accurately, or meant what he said? To understand the bombshell-like impact of such a pronouncement in Africa, imagine a European head of state offering sanctuary to Nazi ringleaders after World War II.

But Moi spoke directly to reporters twice Thursday, and both times made clear that he stood by his statement.

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In The Hague, headquarters of the Rwanda war crimes tribunal, prosecutor Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist, said that Kenya’s refusal to cooperate “would constitute an extremely serious setback . . . and such an action would be regarded as a breach of Kenya’s obligations under international law.”

Moi dismissed the complaints. “Kenya is not a signatory to a farcical situation,” he said, his voice rising.

Kenya, separated from Rwanda by Lake Victoria, has become one of several exile headquarters for some of Rwanda’s former government leaders and their associates--some of whom are believed to have masterminded last year’s genocide of Tutsis and their Hutu supporters. This is according to international investigators, published accounts and diplomatic sources.

These ringleaders, almost all of them extremist Hutus, are the targets of the international tribunal, which has been moving slowly toward its first indictments after a painstaking investigation.

Last month, Deputy Prosecutor Honore Rakotomanana said the first charges would be disclosed and arrest warrants signed in November.

Ultimately, the tribunal is expected to indict about 400 people.

It is unknown how many potential suspects are in Kenya, particularly since the exiles are affluent and mobile. But published accounts and diplomatic sources have identified half a dozen or more high-profile suspects who maintain homes, businesses and bank accounts in Nairobi, the capital.

Diplomats guessed that others who fear indictment will regard Moi’s statement as an official invitation to seek refuge here.

Investigators have long said one of their gravest fears is that other nations would not wholeheartedly join in hunting down suspects, despite case files that now exceed 10,000 pages for some individuals.

One Western diplomat said no one, however, expected any nation to publicly offer sanctuary and threaten investigators with arrest.

“I’m shocked. It’s hard to understand,” the diplomat said.

Moi, whose own judicial system is under heavy criticism for its lack of independence from presidential authority, insisted that the international tribunal was “chomping at the end of the stick” and not reaching for the “roots” of Rwanda’s problems.

Before anyone is charged with genocide, Moi insisted, the United Nations should investigate who was responsible for the mysterious downing of an airplane that killed Rwanda’s president 18 months ago near Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

That deed was the spark that touched off Rwanda’s frenzy of killing that left a death toll estimated at between 500,000 and 1 million.

Diplomatic sources said Moi’s demand for a probe into the airplane downing is a smoke screen to hide his loyal friendship with the former leaders of Rwanda, no matter what their deeds.

Already he has signaled his support for the former leaders by expelling diplomats who complained too loudly about the free movement permitted suspected killers here.

Experts also say it is probably impossible at this date to determine who brought down the plane that killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, as well as the president of neighboring Burundi, Cyprian Ntayamira.

The wreckage was immediately looted, and one independent probe last year could not even determine whether the aircraft was shot down or brought down by a bomb carried aboard.

There are two primary theories. One blames radical Hutus inside the government who found the president, also a Hutu, too accommodating toward Tutsis in Rwanda’s generations-old ethnic rivalry. Others point a finger at soldiers of the Tutsi rebel army, which was waging civil war on the government.

Whichever, it is now apparent that the crash was only a catalyst--and that influential Hutu extremists at the highest levels of Rwandan society had assembled a systematic plan to eradicate the largely unarmed Tutsi population of Rwanda.