Opinion | On the Trail Of Genocide (original) (raw)
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- Sept. 7, 1994
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September 7, 1994
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The prisoners in the Government jail in Kibungo, Rwanda, will tell you they killed their Tutsi neighbors and burned their houses, but they deny they did it willingly. Their testimony has a chilling similarity: not just their repeated invocations of "orders from above" or their matter-of-fact delivery, but their depiction of the massacres as a military operation, a matter of guns and grenades. The duty of the civilian conscripts, they say, was nettoyage, "cleaning up" -- killing the survivors.
But it is unlikely that the several hundred prisoners held in Kibungo will come to trial in the near, or even foreseeable, future. In early August, the United States and the United Nations secured a promise from the new Government of Rwanda that it would not prosecute anyone for genocide. Instead, Rwanda's Prime Minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, agreed to an international war crimes tribunal under U.N. auspices, probably at The Hague.
Yet while the U.N. has relieved the Government of its jurisdiction over war crimes prosecutions, there are few signs that it is ready to commit the resources needed to bring speedy trials. And there are many reasons to believe that trials outside Rwanda would be a mistake.
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, it is not enough for prosecutors to offer evidence of mass killings to secure a conviction -- they must also prove genocidal intent. A full investigation of the 500,000 to one million murders that have taken place in Rwanda since April will require teams of forensic experts, trained prosecutors, translators and lawyers. Yet until mid-August the U.N. Human Rights Commission had been depending on a single field officer in Rwanda, Karen Kenny, who was given no car, no translator and no telephone.
In late August Ms. Kenny was joined by a handful of U.N. investigators and human rights monitors, and the commission has promised that 14 more monitors will arrive next week. But actual trials are unlikely to be approved until later this fall, when the Security Council, under pressure from the U.S., will probably vote to expand the Bosnia war crimes tribunal at The Hague to include Rwanda.
While the U.N. drags its heels, the Rwandan Government is getting nervous about its ability to keep people from taking the law into their own hands. So far there have only been isolated reports of revenge killings, but Wilson Rutayisire, a Government spokesman, says swift justice is the only way to stop a long-term cycle of violence. "It is important to remember that there were also killings in 1990, in 1991, '92 and '93," he told me. "The impunity that the killers enjoyed fueled the genocide more than any ethnic hatred."
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