Monster' saved by Cherie: How human rights champion Mrs Blair helped a general accused of appalling crimes avoid trial
- General Karenzi Karake's extradition case dismissed on legal loophole
- Karake and mentor Paul Kagame accused of orchestrating massacres
- Tony Blair's wife Cherie was hired to represent Karake after his arrest
Accused: Karenzi Karake has been linked to massacres in the wake of the civil war in Rwanda which cost so many lives
So idealistic was Graham Turnbull that he decided to give up his comfortable life as a solicitor in Lincolnshire and go to teach in Africa.
After farewells to his parents and family, the then 33-year-old headed for Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, where he dreamed of helping people escape poverty through education.
But Graham’s dream immediately ran into problems: he was held up on the border with Uganda, prevented from travelling any further, while inside Rwanda the worst genocide since the Holocaust was underway.
More than a million died in a three-month orgy of violence as the majority Hutu tribe wiped out members of the Tutsi tribe — who, despite being the minority in the country, had been the traditional rulers.
It was into this world that Graham Turnbull finally found his way in the summer of 1994, once the border was re-opened. Yet tragically he, too, would become a victim of the conflict.
Nearly two decades after he died, the man accused of organising his brutal murder in a state-sanctioned execution plot was arrested when he landed at Heathrow Airport in June.
General Karenzi Karake has been a powerful figure in Rwanda ever since the genocide ended. He is the country’s head of security and, significantly, the right-hand man of Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader and favourite of the West credited with bringing an end to the civil war.
This week, the Chief Magistrate for England and Wales dismissed the case for his extradition to face charges in Spain on a legal loophole.
Story of two lawyers: Tony Blair’s wife Cherie (left) and Graham Turnbull (right), who was murdered in Rwanda
Karake’s arrest reminded us that even though Rwanda is supposedly at peace, the Kagame regime stands accused of having its hands drenched in blood.
Karake and his mentor Kagame are accused of orchestrating not just one murder, but massacres that took place after the genocide was thought to be over.
Not that this has caused Tony Blair to withdraw his previously assiduous support for Kagame, who has thanked the former British prime minister by allowing him the use of the president’s two private jets to travel around Africa on charitable causes.
Tony Blair’s wife Cherie was hired to represent Karake after his arrest at Heathrow on June 20. One would assume her legal firm, Omnia Strategy, is being paid a lucrative fee.
In an interview with the BBC, Mrs Blair railed at the treatment of her client, who was freed on bail of £1 million, but was forced to surrender his passport to prevent him leaving the country.
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‘To the Rwandan people and government, the general is a hero,’ she said, and called for him to be tried in Rwanda, even though he’s the country’s spy chief.
‘They see this very much as a personal attack on Rwanda itself and they very much want him home as soon as possible.
'He’s had to surrender his passport, can’t go beyond the M25 boundaries, has to stay at a particular address between 8pm and 8am every day, has to report to a particular police station every day and has to wear an electronic tag.’
Now, it has emerged that Mrs Blair has been successful in preventing Karake from being extradited to Spain under the European Arrest Warrant, where he was wanted in relation to alleged crimes against a number of Spanish nationals. Instead, he will return to Rwanda.
He is alleged by Spanish prosecutors to have had a hand in the deaths not only of Mr Turnbull, but also three Spanish aid workers and four other UN officials the same year. Will Turnbull, Graham’s brother, told me he was ‘pretty disappointed’ by the decision to use a ‘legal loophole’ to set him free.
Harrowing reminder: Skulls and bones and piles of clothes put together in one corner of a church in Rwanda where dozens of people were killed after they came inside to take refuge back in 1994
For Karake to be extradited to face trial in Spain, the alleged offences — war crimes — needed to be against the law in both the UK and Spain, so-called ‘dual criminality’. They were not, because the alleged crimes took place in Rwanda.
Will Turnbull added: ‘Cherie Booth is obviously a very competent lawyer and has been able to use the legal system to her client’s advantage. We would like to see justice done.
‘Why can’t this man be sent to the Hague and tried for his alleged crimes? If he’s found not guilty, he should go free. If he’s guilty, he should be punished. It should be as simple as that.’
Why can’t this man be sent to the Hague and tried for his alleged crimes? If he’s found not guilty, he should go free. If he’s guilty, he should be punished. It should be as simple as that
Will Turnbull, Graham Turnbull’s brother
A Spanish court had accused Karake of ordering massacres of Rwandan civilians, while human rights experts have accused the regime of a grotesque cover-up of Kagame and Karake’s roles in the murders of tens of thousands after they took power, allegations dismissed as politically motivated by supporters.
Three of the murdered Spaniards — Flors Sirera, Manuel Madrazo and Luis Valtuena — worked for Medicos del Mundo, or Doctors of the World, and were allegedly killed by four Tutsi soldiers after they had been taken to see the mass graves of murdered Hutus.
Four Spanish priests were tortured and murdered by members of Kagame’s army. The dismembered bodies of two of them were thrown into a well.
A former intelligence agent who worked with Karake’s unit claimed it had been deployed to carry out the massacres and ensure there were no witnesses.
He testified to the Spanish judge that the killings had been ordered because these ‘whites had sensitive information about the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s recent massacres’.
Was this also what cost Graham Turnbull his life? Before he left for Rwanda in 1994, he had little experience of the murky, murderous politics of some areas of Africa, where those in power control the means to plunder the continent’s natural resources.
Connection: Karake and his mentor Paul Kagame (right) are accused of orchestrating not just one murder, but massacres that took place after the genocide was thought to be over. Not that this has caused Tony Blair (left) to withdraw his previously assiduous support for Kagame, the Rwandan president
The son of a vet who was friendly with James ‘Alf’ Wight, creator of All Creatures Great And Small under his pen name James Herriot, Graham was brought up in Yorkshire with his two older sisters and younger brother. After a degree in economics, he converted to law.
After a spell working as a solicitor in Spalding, Lincs, the 33-year-old committed Christian revealed the bombshell decision he had made to give ‘meaning to his life’ — and travel to Africa.
But after entering Rwanda, his world collided full tilt with the horror of the bloodshed sparked when the genocide erupted.
At the height of this slaughter, 10,000 people were killed each day during an orgy of blood- letting that saw bodies stacked like firewood by the road. Time magazine called Rwanda ‘Africa’s Heart of Darkness’.
There were few machine guns and no gas chambers to account for this horrific, industrial level of slaughter: most victims were hacked to death with machetes or bludgeoned with garden hoes.
So physically exhausting was the killing — and so many were captured and held pending slaughter — that the perpetrators would slash the Achilles tendons of their victims with machetes to incapacitate them while they had a rest.
This meant the killers could break for lunch, often accompanied by refreshing bottles of the local Primus beer, with no risk of their captives fleeing before they could be killed.
Instead, they were killed at leisure, some held in churches, then murdered like chickens pulled from the coop.
More than one million people are believed to have died. These murderous Hutu militias were eventually driven out by Paul Kagame, an exiled Tutsi Rwandan soldier trained by the U.S. at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, who invaded from neighbouring Uganda and drove the Hutus from power.
The stick thin, teetotal Kagame has been portrayed in books and Hollywood films as a hero. Western aid, dubbed ‘genocide guilt’ money, poured into Rwanda amid claims the West and the UN had done little to stop the killing.
Graveyard: General Karake has been a powerful figure in Rwanda ever since the genocide ended
Tony Blair and Kagame became friends. A regular visitor to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, Blair always stayed in the presidential suite at the five-star Serena Hotel, and has spoken of Kagame as a ‘visionary’.
But this ‘visionary’, in cahoots with his arrested spy chief Karake, has since been accused of involvement in the massacre of tens of thousands of their ethnic rivals in a series of brutal reprisal killings.
Indeed, Spanish court records say that special units created by Kagame and Cherie Blair’s ‘hero’ intelligence chief systematically rounded up and killed Hutus throughout the country — and went to desperate lengths to suppress news of the slaughter. Karake has also been linked to a series of other gruesome massacres, when fleeing Hutus were encouraged to come to football stadia or fields to hear the words of their new leaders.
I will never forget the night I got the call to say he died. Everything that happened can be traced back to Kagame
Homayoun Alizadeh, Mr Turnbull’s friend
Some were offered gifts of food as an inducement to attend. But these meetings were called not to talk, but to kill, with witnesses saying soldiers opened fire. Indeed, one soldier wrote a book detailing his life under Karake’s command, claiming the spy chief was so involved in the slaughter of 700 people that he personally organised shipments of petrol to incinerate the bodies.
He then arranged for vehicles to collect the ashes and bits of bone and dump them in a remote national park. Meanwhile, Graham Turnbull — who loved Rwanda and was engaged to a woman he had met there — decided to put his legal training to good use.
He accepted a position in 1995 with the UN to probe human rights abuses. He, too, had heard rumours of revenge massacres by Kagame.
‘Graham was investigating reprisal killings by the regime,’ his brother Will told me.
‘He was collecting the evidence about the murder of Hutus by Tutsis. Many UN aid workers at the time had their suspicions about what was going on in Rwanda.’
His quest for the truth cost him his life. Travelling with four other UN representatives in two vehicles clearly marked with UN badges and flags, Mr Turnbull drove into an ambush during one of his investigative trips into reprisal killings.
Skulls: A survivor of the 1994 Genocide prays over the bones of genocide victims at a mass grave in Nyamata
They were attacked by soldiers loyal to Kagame, and under the command of Karake, who were desperate to cover up their revenge killings and stop UN monitors visiting massacre sites.
Mr Turnbull was cut down in a hail of machine gun fire as he struggled to get out of the vehicle after elite troops threw grenades at them. He died instantly. His Cambodian colleague was shot dead, before his head was hacked from his body and left by the road. Three Rwandan UN workers in the other vehicle were also killed.
These terror tactics to cover up war crimes spread panic in the UN. As Mr Turnbull’s body was flown back to Yorkshire for burial, a decision was taken to withdraw human rights monitors from Rwanda.
Homayoun Alizadeh, a close friend of Mr Turnbull’s, who joined the UN mission in Rwanda at the same time, has no doubt Karake’s regime was to blame for the killings.
‘They were ambushed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army [led by Kagame and Karake] because these people wanted to get rid of the UN,’ he told me. ‘I will never forget the night I got the call to say he died. Everything that happened can be traced back to Kagame.’
Though the Blairs have done their best to burnish Kagame’s reputation, some of the lustre faded from this carefully honed image after a damning BBC documentary aired last year, which saw the president branded ‘one of the biggest war criminals in office today’.
The documentary has led to the BBC being banned from Rwanda.
After seizing power, Kagame amassed vast personal wealth and entertained foreign visitors to Rwanda, providing them with official limousines and, in the case of Tony Blair, use of luxurious jets.
Will Turnbull says: ‘There have always been suspicions that Karake and Kagame were involved in Graham’s death.
‘We don’t want vengeance — we just want the truth. We won’t believe we will get the truth if Karake is allowed to return to Rwanda.’
Isn’t it bitterly ironic that Cherie Blair, a ‘human rights’ lawyer, has succeeded in putting him on a plane back to Africa.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3195870/Monster-Karenzi-Karake-saved-Cherie-Blair-human-rights-champion-helped-general-accused-appalling-crimes-avoid-trial.html#ixzz3ihj3mvgg
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