Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

June 23, 2009

Photo:

A file photo shows prisoners suspected of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Photo AFP

The Netherlands is ashamed for its absence during the genocide by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. That is why it is afraid to demand that the Tutsis - and France - be tried too.

Fifteen years after the mass slaughter during which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in Rwanda, only one party involved in the conflict has stood trial: the Hutu. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, has so far sentenced 44 Hutu leaders. People's tribunals in Rwanda - the so-called gacacas - have judged 1.5 million genocide suspects.

But according to the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees the Tutsi rebel army has also killed between 25,000 and 45,000 civilians in 1994. Despite the fact that these deaths were investigated and documented by the UN, the Rwanda tribunal and Human Rights Watch, there have been almost no prosecutions.

Time is of the essence in Rwanda. On 31 December 2010, the Rwanda tribunal will be dissolved. Before that happens the parties who have not had to explain themselves before a court of justice should be made to do so. They are France, which actively assisted the Hutus in carrying out the genocide against the Tutsis, and top Tutsi military men in the party of Rwandan president Paul Kagame. His Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), which stopped the genocide in 1994, also committed war crimes as it took control of the country.

The Rwanda tribunal is very different from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where all the parties involved are being tried: Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. It is a fundamental principle for all the tribunals, and for the International Criminal Court in The Hague that it should at all costs avoid carrying out victor’s justice.

The Croat and Serb governments resisted the Yugoslavia tribunal for years, until the European Union made compliance with the tribunal a condition for future EU membership. Slobodan Milosevic' arrest in 2001 proved that Serbia had made the switch. A year earlier, wanted war criminals were still dining freely in the best restaurants of Belgrade; after Milosevic' arrests they all went into hiding. One, Radovan Karadzic, grew a beard and started a new life as a druid.
But in the case of Rwanda there has been no equal treatment of all parties. The former French prime minister Edouard Balladur has never had to grow a beard, despite there being sufficient evidence for French complicity in the genocide. The top commanders of Kagame's rebel army have never had to go into hiding because of the atrocities they committed in 1994.

Political and economical power

At least the crimes committed by the latter were investigated by the Rwanda tribunal. But the so-called special investigations ordered by the main prosecutor in both the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunal, Carla del Ponte, so angered the Rwandan government that it stopped collaborating with the tribunal. In 2002, it banned genocide survivors from travelling to Arusha to testify - even if this jeopardised cases against Hutu genocide suspects.

The so-called "witness crisis" lasted for months. Only after the US put pressure on Rwanda behind closed doors did the government allow the survivors to testify again. But full cooperation in cases against Tutsi officers was never demanded. According to Victor Peskin, an expert in international courts and author of International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans (2008), the international community "never really exercised pressure on Rwanda to demand full cooperation with the tribunal."

Sabotaging the work of the tribunal didn't even get the Rwandan government in trouble, Peskin noted. Quite to the contrary: the Rwanda tribunal, which already had an image problem due to a series of administrative scandals, its excruciatingly slow progress and its unfair treatment of witnesses, was harassed by the Rwandan government to the point that Carla del Ponte was forced to offer her resignation in 2003.

International courts do not themselves have the power to make governments comply. It is only when the big players in the international community use their political and economical power that a country can be forced to collaborate with an international tribunal. The Netherlands, which plays the proud host to many international tribunals and courts, has understood this. Together with Belgium it is the only EU member state to demand that Serbia extradite former Bosnian-Serb leader Ratko Mladic before the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, the first step towards EU membership, can be signed.

The international community's approach to the former Yugoslavia tribunal is in stark contrast with the passivity it displays towards the Rwanda tribunal, says Peskin. Why is the Netherlands not bringing pressure on Rwanda to make sure that all the parties involved in the 1994 genocide are equally tried?

Conditional on cooperation

It is not as if there is a lack of ways to pressure Kigali. The Rwandan government depends on foreign aid for half its annual budget or 300 million dollars per year. The Netherlands are well placed to take the lead, because of its historic neutral position in Africa, and because of the considerable support that Dutch development aid minister Jan Pronk lent the Rwanda government immediately following the genocide, and because of the 36.5 million euros the Netherlands gives to Rwanda through its embassy in Kigali this year.

So why has the Dutch government not pulled its weight either within the United Nations, through bilateral contacts or other ways in order to force the Rwanda tribunal to try more cases against Tutsi officers?

In an email the Dutch foreign ministry responded: "The Netherlands respects the independence of the international courts and does not exercise pressure on their prosecution policy. The Rwanda tribunal is free to establish its own prosecution policy and to set its priorities..."

But why then has the Netherlands acted so differently in the case of the former Yugoslavia tribunal? Aid to Rwanda could have been made conditional on Kigali's full cooperation with the tribunal. The foreign ministry: "The Netherlands has never wanted to link aid to collaboration with the Rwanda tribunal or any other tribunal."

Perhaps not, but it has certainly made EU membership - and the financial and economic benefits that go with it - conditional on full cooperation with the former Yugoslavia tribunal.

It is true that international tribunals are free to set their own prosecution goals. But Carla del Ponte did want to prosecute crimes committed by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. She knew that it would undermine her legitimacy and that of the Rwanda tribunal if it was seen to deliver only victor's justice. But if the Rwanda tribunal was going to be free to set its own goals, it needed the international community to bring pressure on Rwanda to cooperate.

Ironically, one of the involved parties that have so far escaped justice is now actively trying to prosecute Tutsi officers: France. Based on a controversial report by the French investigative judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, prominent officers in Paul Kagame's army have been indicted for complicity in shooting down the plane of then Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, on April 6, 1994. The attack signalled the beginning of the genocide against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda.

France is the least suitable country to seek justice in Rwanda because France played an important part in the Rwanda genocide.

French president Francois Mitterand supported the extremist Hutu government of Rwanda from the first incursion by Kagame's rebel army on October 1, 1990 until it took power in Kigali in July 1994. Desperate to safeguard the "Françafrique" - the French influence in Africa - from the Uganda-based and therefore Anglophone RPF, Paris had sent money, military instructors, radio equipment, food and weapons to the Hutu government, despite a UN embargo.

Between 1990 and 1994, French military armed and trained the Interahamwe, the later Hutu death squads, despite France having been warned as early as 1990 of the possibility of a genocide. All the evidence suggests that if France hadn't shored up the beleaguered Hutu government in the early nineties, the Tutsi rebels would have taken power in no time.

The American journalist Andrew Wallis, in his book Silent Accomplice, gives an astonishing account of French involvement in Rwanda. Wallis lists testimonies about weapons deliveries, French soldiers "protecting" survivors in return for sexual favours, French soldiers advising Interahamwe militiamen to throw the dead bodies in the Kivu lake to avoid them being spotted by Western satellites. The French soldiers showed them how to first cut open the bellies of the corpses so they wouldn't float.

There have been several investigations into France's role in the Rwanda genocide. The French parliament in 1998 investigated French military cooperation with Rwanda between 1990 and 1994. The investigation was led by Mitterrand’s former defence minister Paul Quilès. The commission heard 88 witnesses; not one of them under oath. The testimony was given behind closed doors if the witness so requested. Conclusion: "France was not an accomplice in the Rwandese genocide."

Perpetrators feel like victims

The Organisation for African Unity also commissioned a report from an international panel of experts. In 2000, it concluded: “The French government had unrivalled influence at the very highest levels of the Rwandan government and the Rwandan military. They were in a position to insist that attacks on the Tutsis must cease, and they chose never to exert that influence.”

Instead, Paris evacuated prominent Hutu politicians to Paris as soon as the genocide began. In the international arena it lobbied actively in support of what it called "the legitimate government of Rwanda". That interim government had been installed on April 10, 1994 at the French embassy in Kigali, while street dogs were eating the corpses on the streets outside. An estimated 200,000 people had been murdered when France gave an official reception to members of the interim government in Paris, among them Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, who was given a life sentence by the Rwanda tribunal in 2003.

The reason why the Netherlands is letting Kagame off the hook is simple: it is because we are ashamed about our passive role during the genocide in 1994. But by going easy on the RPF we are in danger of leaving a new and festering wound behind in Rwanda.

Impunity breeds more violence. It has been this way in Rwanda for a hundred years. Yesterday's victims are tomorrow’s perpetrators. The Hutus in Rwanda are now cowed, just like they were before the Hutu revolt of 1959, when the Tutsis ruled Rwanda. Once again Hutus are often being passed over for good jobs and positions of power. There is no justice for the Hutu dead. And so the perpetrators of 1994 now feel like the victims.

The tribunal that could lift the impunity of both France and the current government in Rwanda will be around for just a little bit longer. It looks like its mandate will be extended until December 31, 2010 for trials, and until 2013 for appeals. On June 4, Carla del Ponte's successor, Hassan Jallow, made it clear before the UN security council that he has no intention to prosecute Tutsi cases. Some people say many of these cases are ready to go but they have been deliberately buried.

Rwanda deserves justice. In order for that to happen France has to be made to answer to an international court, and Tutsi officers have to explain themselves for retaliatory murders committed against Hutu civilians. It is exactly because of our gross negligence in 1994 that we should now do everything in our power to see to it that justice is done in Rwanda.

Notes:

Immunity for dictators: free pass to perdition

Rwanda: Academic Scholars Call for ICTR to Fulfill Mandate and Prosecute RPF/RPA Members

Letter to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Regarding the Prosecution of RPF Crimes

Rwanda: Tribunal Risks Supporting ‘Victor’s Justice’

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Kagame massacred both Hutu and Tutsi

The Rwandan Genocide: The Bodies That Were Floating In The Kagera River Were Victims Of The RPA

Rwanda: RPF's Paranoia Over HRW

Rwanda: Fighting Revisionism is a Question of Morality

Rwanda: Professors of Hate

Rwanda: Dancing to the Revisionist Tune in the Name of Promoting 'Rights'

Rwanda: 'Group of Academics' Or Have the HRW Genocide Negationists Come Out Clean?