Court upholds Rwandan woman's conviction for lying about her family's role in genocide there

A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a 21-month prison sentence for a Rwandan woman who moved to Boston after telling immigration officials she had no connections at all to mass murders in 1994 even though her husband was the country's chief of internal security and she was a member of the ruling party at the time.

A federal jury convicted Prudence Kantengwa, 50, in 2012 of perjury and fraud related to both her application for a humanitarian visa and statements she made before an immigration judge considering whether she should be kicked out of the country.

After twice being rejected for a US visa to attend conferences here, she won admission to the US in 2004 on humanitarian grounds.

The jury found she lied on a form aimed at keeping Rwandans involved in the murders of 800,000 of their countrymen out of the US, by answering "no" to questions on whether she or any immediate family members of, among other things, the internal-security department or the country's ruling party.

The jury also found she lied when she denied that there was a prominent roadblock outside the hotel where she was living that was used to detain members of the country's Tutsi minority for murder and that her relatives, who owned the hotel, helped set it up.

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said federal prosecutors did nothing wrong and that the jury was free to disbelieve Kantangwa's assertion that there was no roadblock outside the hotel where she was living.

The ruling is also a victory for Timothy Longman, director of the African Studies Center at Boston University, who did extensive research on the Rwandan genocide and who testified at Kantangwa's trial about the roadblock.

Kantangwa argued that because Longman had no direct knowledge of the roadblock and was relying on interviews he'd conducted in Rwanda, his assertions should have been thrown out as hearsay.

The appeals court said she might have had a good argument there if he'd been testifying about what his interview subjects thought, but said he wasn't.

[W]e recognize that sifting through the many myths and politically charged characterizations in the wake of the Rwandan genocide to determine what the actual events were presents a challenge where historical expertise may be particularly invaluable. Viewing the testimony in this light, Dr. Longman did not merely act as a "conduit" for the testimony of a select few individuals, but gave testimony that could explain the consistency of accounts as to this historical fact about the roadblock at Hotel Ihuriro, despite conflicting versions of other details about what happened in Butare during the genocide. His conclusions about the existence of the roadblock at Hotel Ihuriro seem based in part on the consistency of the accounts, not merely the interviews themselves. And his conclusions about the timing of the roadblock also accord with the consistency of these accounts, the roadblock's notoriety, and the timing of other political events, such as the government's meeting and President's speech on April 19, that brought the full force of genocide to Butare and sparked the quick establishment of major roadblocks run by the MRND militia. This is consistent with generally accepted historical methodology.

Also, Kantengwa's lawyers had ample opportunity to cross-examine him and raise questions in the jurors' minds, the court ruled.

Dr. Longman thus fulfilled the historian's role of "surveying a daunting amount of historical sources," evaluating their reliability, and providing a basis for a "'reliable narrative[] about the past.'"

Also yesterday, the court upheld the similar conviction against Kantengwa's sister, Beatrice Munyenyenzi, who did play an active role in the genocide - manning the roadblock Kantengwa denied was there, identifying Tutsis for murder. Munyenyenzi moved to New Hampshire.

That ruling starts:

Man's inhumanity to man is limitless. Any doubt, just recall the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Over the course of 100 days, roving bands of Hutus (Rwanda's majority ethnic group) slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, most of them Tutsis (a minority group long-dominant in Rwanda). Some of the crazed killers belonged to the Interahamwe, the dreaded militia of a Hutu political party known by the initials, MRND.2 About 7,000 Rwandans died each day, often butchered by machete-wielding Interahamwes at roadblocks set up to catch fleeing Tutsis. And these killers didn't just kill - they raped, tortured, and disfigured too.

Now meet Beatrice Munyenyezi, a Hutu from Rwanda.