Author guilty of downplaying genocide

A court in France has found French-Cameroonian author Charles Onana guilty of downplaying the Rwandan genocide. The 60-year-old writer was fined €8 400 and Damien Serieyx, his publishing director from Éditions du Toucan, was ordered to pay €5 000. They are also required to pay €11 000 in compensation to human rights organisations that filed the suit, BBC News reports. The Paris court ruled that Onana's writings violated France's laws prohibiting genocide denial and incitement to hatred, noting that France would ‘no longer be a haven for denialists’. In his book Rwanda, the Truth About Operation Turquoise, published in 2019, Onana described the idea that the Hutu Government had planned a genocide in Rwanda as ‘one of the biggest scams’ of the last century. Rwanda's Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe welcomed their conviction, posting on X that it was a ‘landmark decision’. The court said that Onana's book had ‘trivialised’ and ‘contested’ in ‘an outrageous manner’ the genocide that occurred between April and July 1994. The case against Onana and Serieyx was brought by NGO Survie and the International Federation for Human Rights for ‘publicly contesting a crime against humanity’. However Onana's lawyer, Emmanuel Pire, told the AFP news agency in October that the book was ‘the work of a political scientist based on 10 years of research to understand the mechanisms of the genocide before, during and after’. Both Onana and his publisher have appealed against the verdict.

Full BBC News report