A Rwandan rebel leader was arrested Monday in Paris on charges of leading rebels responsible for mass rape and killings in Congo, the International Criminal Court said.
Callixte Mbarushimana, a leader of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, known by its French acronym FDLR, was arrested Monday on a secret warrant by French authorities.
The court said he was charged with 11 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including killings, rape, persecution based on gender and extensive destruction of property committed by the FDLR during most of 2009.
No date has been set for Mbarushimana to be transferred from Paris to The Hague.
The FDLR was established by former guerrillas accused of genocide in Rwanda's 1994 ethnic slaughter. After moving to Congo, the FDLR launched attacks on Rwanda aimed at ousting the government.
Until his arrest, Mbarushimana, 47, had lived openly in a Paris suburb even though he was on a U.N. sanctions list. He is executive secretary of the FDLR, which is accused of killing at least 700 civilians last year. He is also on Interpol's wanted list for genocide in his native Rwanda.
The court's prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, called the arrest a "crucial step in efforts to prosecute the massive sexual crimes" committed in Congo.
More than 15,000 cases of sexual violence were reported in the conflict-torn country in 2009 alone, the court said.
Moreno Ocampo said the FDLR's attacks helped trigger two wars in Congo that left around 4 million people dead, and its fighters continue "to commit horrific crimes against the civilian population."
In an interview earlier this year with The Associated Press, Mbarushimana cast himself as a freedom fighter.
He said he was fighting for his people, who are being persecuted by a Rwandan government that discriminates against Hutus. He compared his life to that of anti-Apartheid icon Nelson Mandela.
"I thought of Mandela, who was jailed by the apartheid regime for 27 years," says Mbarushimana. "And then I said, I'm not the first one to suffer when you are struggling for your people against a repressive regime."
In the decade and a half since Rwanda's genocide, Mbarushimana has been able to avoid going to trial on a series of technicalities.
He became more influential in the FDLR after Germany arrested its chairman and vice president late last year.
After the Rwanda genocide, he went to work as a software programmer for the United Nations in Angola and then Kosovo.
He was arrested in Kosovo at the request of Rwanda but released in 2001 because Rwanda failed to properly prepare his indictment. The documents sent by the Rwandan judiciary arrived late, were mostly illegible and didn't include enough witness statements, according to the decision by the Kosovo court.
He was later indicted by the Rwanda war crimes tribunal, set up by the U.N. in Tanzania. But his case was dropped. Those close to the case say the court was under orders to only go after the "big fish," meaning the orchestrators of the genocide rather than those who helped carry out the massacres.
He was arrested as recently as 2008 at Frankfurt airport when passport control realized he was the subject of an Interpol "Red Notice." But he was released after four months in prison after German authorities -- much like the French -- deemed that they could not extradite him to Rwanda because of the country's dysfunctional judiciary and poor human rights record.
Upon his release, the U.S. State Department called the FDLR "the root cause of instability" in Congo and said the U.S. is "disappointed that leaders like Callixte Mbarushimana ... are able to operate with impunity although they continue to support FDLR efforts to evade justice, propagate violence (and) abuse civilians."
