A
woman whose husband and three young children were slaughtered during the 1994
Rwandan genocide cried Thursday as she identified from the witness stand the
Kansas man she contends led a mob attack up a mountain where she and many
others had sought refuge from the ethnic carnage that was sweeping Rwanda.
Her
account was the most emotional yet as the trial of Lazare Kobagaya entered its
fifth day of testimony in a federal courtroom in Wichita in the U.S. The government is
seeking to revoke his U.S. citizenship for allegedly lying to immigration
authorities about his involvement in the genocide.
The
84-year-old Topeka man is charged with unlawfully obtaining U.S. citizenship in
2006 with fraud and misuse of an alien registration card in a case prosecutors
have said is the first in the United States requiring proof of genocide.
Kobagaya contends he is innocent.
Valerie
Niyitegeka, a Tutsi woman whose family farmed near Kobagaya’s village,
recounted for jurors the events of April 15, 1994, when she, her husband,
Appolloni, and their six children fled as mobs of Hutu men burned Tutsi houses.
“I
was OK for my house to be burned — as long as I am not dead,” she
testified through a translator.
Niyitegeka
detailed how she climbed — and at times crawled — up the steep, rocky mountainside
of Mount Nyakizu with her youngest son strapped to her back. She described how
the women and children gathered piles of stones for their men to throw as mobs
of Hutus attacked.
She
told jurors she was able to identify the elderly Kobagaya as the leader of the
attacking mob because she recognized the way he walked and the cane he carried
that day. She pointed at him in the courtroom : “He is there. He is the
one.”
The
defense tried to cast doubt on that identification by noting trees and other
obstructions on the mountain that day.
During
the melee as the family fled the mountain in the ensuing days, Niyitegeka was
separated from her husband and three of her children. She testified she would
never see them alive again. Their slain children’s ages were 12, 10 and 8.
Joseph
Yandagiye, a 76-year-old Hutu farmer, testified about what happened to the
children and their father, who sought refuge at Yandagiye’s house. After taking
them in, Yandagiye went to run some errands. When he returned, he said he found
a crowd of Hutus had already surrounded his house.
Yandagiye
testified that when the crowd threatened him in an attempt to get into the
house, Appolloni came out and told the mob : “Take me instead.”
Yandagiye
also told jurors he initially followed the mob that had taken Appolloni and his
children, but turned back after they told him they would make him kill them
himself if he continued to follow.
Later
that day, a group of Hutu men came to get him too, Yandagiye testified. It was
then that he learned that Appolloni and his children had been killed.
Yandagiye
testified that Kobagaya told the mob that they should kill him too because he
had sheltered Tutsis in his house during a 1959 conflict. Yandagiye said
another community leader, Francois Bazaramba, urged the crowd not to kill him
but to punish Yandagiye by making him buy beer, which he did.
Bazaramba
is a former Rwandan pastor who was sentenced last year to life imprisonment by
a Finnish court for committing genocide.
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