Foreign Minister Fled With Cash, Says Rwanda
WASHINGTON - The Rwandan government denounced Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Ndagijimana yesterday, accusing him of fleeing to Paris with $187,000 in U.S. currency needed to pay bills of its Washington embassy and its U.N. mission in New York.
Although New York police initially had treated the disappearance of Ndagijimana as a missing-person case, Claude Dusaidi, director-general of the Rwandan Foreign Ministry, told a news conference at the U.N. 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 Reuters news agency in Paris, denied he had stolen anything. He said he was in Paris on a private mission 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 the Rwandan government 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 bristled 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 500,000 Tutsis earlier this year in an act of genocide that stopped only when the Tutsi-led rebel army overran the small country in central Africa.
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, multi-ethnic 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."