French Court fines author €8,400 for downplaying Rwandan Genocide
The 60-year-old author received a fine of €8,400 ($8,900; £7,000), while his publisher, Damien Serieyx of Éditions du Toucan, was fined €5,000.
A French court has convicted Charles Onana, a French-Cameroonian author, of minimizing the Rwandan genocide in his writings.
The 60-year-old author received a fine of €8,400 ($8,900; £7,000), while his publisher, Damien Serieyx of Éditions du Toucan, was fined €5,000. Additionally, the two must jointly pay €11,000 in damages to human rights organizations that initiated the legal action.
The court determined that Onana's book violated French laws against genocide denial and incitement to hatred. The ruling emphasized that France would no longer serve as a "haven for denialists."
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, approximately 800,000 people were massacred in just 100 days by ethnic Hutu extremists. Victims primarily included members of the Tutsi minority and political opponents of the regime, regardless of their ethnicity.
Onana’s controversial 2019 publication, Rwanda, the Truth About Operation Turquoise, described the notion that the Hutu government had orchestrated a genocide as "one of the biggest scams" of the 20th century.
Rwanda's Foreign Minister, Olivier Nduhungirehe, praised the court's decision on social media, calling it a "landmark ruling."
The court found that the book "trivialized" and "contested" the genocide in an egregious manner, and the case was brought against Onana and Serieyx by Survie and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) for "publicly contesting a crime against humanity."
Critics argue the book misrepresents historical facts and undermines the gravity of the genocide. Onana's lawyer, Emmanuel Pire, defended the book as a scholarly analysis based on a decade of research, claiming that it aimed to explore the mechanisms of the genocide. He maintained that Onana did not deny the genocide or the targeting of Tutsis.
Prosecution lawyer Richard Gisagara hailed the verdict as a "victory for justice that protects genocide victims and survivors," noting that this was the first European conviction of individuals denying the Rwandan genocide.
French law criminalizes the denial or minimization of any genocide officially recognized by the state. Both Onana and his publisher have filed appeals against the ruling.
