Hassan Ngeze
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Hassan Ngeze (born 1962) is a Rwandan journalist, best known for publishing the "Hutu Ten Commandments", which fomented anti-Tutsi feeling among Rwandan Hutus prior to the Rwandan Genocide.
Ngeze was born in Rubavu Commune, Gisenyi Prefecture, in Rwanda. He is a Muslim of Hutu ethnicity. In 1990, he founded the newspaper Kangura, initially intended as a counterweight to the popular anti-government newspaper Kanguka. Kangura was financed by high-level members in the ruling MRND party, and later the extremist Coalition for the Defence of the Republic, and thus had extensive links to the Akazu, the network of President Juvénal Habyarimana.
In December 1990, Ngeze published the Hutu Ten Commandments (sometimes called the Ten Commandments of the Bahutu), which made disparaging remarks about Tutsis in general and Tutsi women in particular.[1]
In 1993, Ngeze became a shareholder and correspondent for the newly-founded Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), which was largely a radio equivalent of Kangura.
[edit] Genocide
During the Rwandan Genocide, Ngeze provided RTLM with names of people to be killed in his prefecture [2], which were broadcast on air. He was interviewed by RTLM and Radio Rwanda several times between April and June 1994, and in these broadcasts called for the extermination of the Tutsis and Hutus in opposition to the government.
At the same time, Kangura published lists of people to be eliminated by the military and the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias during the genocide.
Ngeze is alleged to have personally supervised and taken part in torture, mass rape, and killings in his native Gisenyi Prefecture. He was also an organizer of the Impuzamugambi militia.
Ngeze fled Rwanda in June 1994 as the country fell to the RPF. He was arrested in Mombasa, Kenya on July 18, 1997, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003, by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In 2007, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTR reversed some of his convictions, but confirmed others. It also changed his life sentence to one of 35 years' imprisonment.
