Saturday, September 23, 2006
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
I love Tanzania and am happy to be back, especially given that I now know a little more Swahili than I did when I came three years ago. So I hate to skip over talking about the country in favor of another but that is exactly what I am going to have to do. For when I was in Arusha in northern Tanzania I sat in on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR.)
The ICTR was mandated by the United Nations to prosecute those who mastermided the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which over 800,000 people were killed. The crime of genocide is any action that has the intent of destroying a particular group of people (in this case it was Tutsi's and moderate Hutu's, the two main tribes in Rwanda.) Some time has passed since the first trial started in 1997, so it is not surprising that individual don
or nations (the US in particular) have grown tired of pumping millions into this never-ending process and have insisted that the entire process be completed within the next two years. However, on my arrival they were exactly half-way done: 28 trials down (25 convictions and 3 acquitals), 28 to go. The guilty plea and conviction of former Prime Minister Kambanda were both firsts; quite literally this court was history in the making.
It was quite a process getting through security and all, especially given my unintended but interesting detour into a locked down wing of the building. After escaping I was given a headset that translated the proceedings into three languages (English, French, and Kinyarwanda) and shown into the glassed-in viewing room. The courtrooms were very nice, and crowded with a wide array of technology and lawyers. Obviously attire was formal with lots of black robes, red vestments, white scarves, and even a few old fashioned whigs. Even the supposedly "indigent" accused sported fancy suits and nice watches; indeed, this trial in Tanzania would be the best they could hope for for the rest of their lives...
The first case I observed was wrought with theatrical legal wrangling and discrepencies over page numbers, but was quite fascinating when they got down to the business at hand. The witness had written a book about his experience during the genocide, and interestingly, he was there as a defense witness for one of the accused despite losing several of his own family members in the killing. The other trial that I followed was hearing its 67th witness, a woman who's husband had been a prominent politican and was killed immediately after the fighting began. She spoke poignantly about the events of that day, from the UN's abandonment of 2,000 refugees to his soon-after abduction by members of the Presidential Guard. The woman clearly placed blame both at the feet of the accused and the very institution that was trying them (more on this in a minute.) On the cross-examination the defence desperately threw up several alternative theory's to her story, none of them convincing anyone.
When one of my fellow observers asked for my thoughts on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda over lunch, she got an earful. Namely the troubling starting point of the same international body that failed to stop the genocide being placed in the position of determining who was responsible for the murder of the 800,000 Rwandans. This fact created a dangerous dynamic in which the court had an inherent motive of wanting to convict and blame the accused. And this in a conflict that I believed was more a chaotic orgy of killing than a well-ordered master plot for genocide; one of the witnesses insisted on using the term "hoodlum" rather than genocidaire for this very reason. That said, there is a need to hold the bosses accountable and strike a blow to the "culture of impunity" and blind obediance to authority that the court said allowed the genocide to occur. In many ways this would be the biggest impact that the court could hope to have, seeking to deter future human rights abuses with the message that leaders would be brought to (western) justice. Or as my lunch-date and I concluded, the world needed the ICTR, Rwandan's needed the gacacas, or the traditional courts operating back home. But I will be a little more confident in this opinion once I visit the country for myself next month...
The ICTR was mandated by the United Nations to prosecute those who mastermided the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which over 800,000 people were killed. The crime of genocide is any action that has the intent of destroying a particular group of people (in this case it was Tutsi's and moderate Hutu's, the two main tribes in Rwanda.) Some time has passed since the first trial started in 1997, so it is not surprising that individual don
or nations (the US in particular) have grown tired of pumping millions into this never-ending process and have insisted that the entire process be completed within the next two years. However, on my arrival they were exactly half-way done: 28 trials down (25 convictions and 3 acquitals), 28 to go. The guilty plea and conviction of former Prime Minister Kambanda were both firsts; quite literally this court was history in the making.It was quite a process getting through security and all, especially given my unintended but interesting detour into a locked down wing of the building. After escaping I was given a headset that translated the proceedings into three languages (English, French, and Kinyarwanda) and shown into the glassed-in viewing room. The courtrooms were very nice, and crowded with a wide array of technology and lawyers. Obviously attire was formal with lots of black robes, red vestments, white scarves, and even a few old fashioned whigs. Even the supposedly "indigent" accused sported fancy suits and nice watches; indeed, this trial in Tanzania would be the best they could hope for for the rest of their lives...
The first case I observed was wrought with theatrical legal wrangling and discrepencies over page numbers, but was quite fascinating when they got down to the business at hand. The witness had written a book about his experience during the genocide, and interestingly, he was there as a defense witness for one of the accused despite losing several of his own family members in the killing. The other trial that I followed was hearing its 67th witness, a woman who's husband had been a prominent politican and was killed immediately after the fighting began. She spoke poignantly about the events of that day, from the UN's abandonment of 2,000 refugees to his soon-after abduction by members of the Presidential Guard. The woman clearly placed blame both at the feet of the accused and the very institution that was trying them (more on this in a minute.) On the cross-examination the defence desperately threw up several alternative theory's to her story, none of them convincing anyone.
When one of my fellow observers asked for my thoughts on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda over lunch, she got an earful. Namely the troubling starting point of the same international body that failed to stop the genocide being placed in the position of determining who was responsible for the murder of the 800,000 Rwandans. This fact created a dangerous dynamic in which the court had an inherent motive of wanting to convict and blame the accused. And this in a conflict that I believed was more a chaotic orgy of killing than a well-ordered master plot for genocide; one of the witnesses insisted on using the term "hoodlum" rather than genocidaire for this very reason. That said, there is a need to hold the bosses accountable and strike a blow to the "culture of impunity" and blind obediance to authority that the court said allowed the genocide to occur. In many ways this would be the biggest impact that the court could hope to have, seeking to deter future human rights abuses with the message that leaders would be brought to (western) justice. Or as my lunch-date and I concluded, the world needed the ICTR, Rwandan's needed the gacacas, or the traditional courts operating back home. But I will be a little more confident in this opinion once I visit the country for myself next month...
# posted by Josh @ 10:13 AM 
