The Move Toward Justice in Rwanda

This is the first of three excerpts from the new book “Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption” (Free Press) by The New York Sun’s associate editor and City Hall bureau chief, Dina Temple-Raston. It will be in book stores March 9.John Shattuck noticed the vultures first. They barely moved their wings but somehow they climbed above Kigali, riding the rising columns of air until they became dashes against the blue sky. The genocide had ended only a month earlier and Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, had been sent by the Clinton administration to convince General Paul Kagame, now vice president and defense minister of Rwanda, to embrace an international criminal tribunal that would hold the masterminds of the genocide responsible for what they had done.The security situation in Rwanda was still fragile. The piles of bodies that had once littered the streets had been shoved into mass graves. A musky smell remained. The vultures were looking for the bodies the RPF soldiers had missed. So many of them were circling, they made Shattuck slightly dizzy. They were, he said later, the classic symbol of where things were in August 1994 for Rwanda.A fleet of beaten-up Land Rovers met Shattuck at Kigali International Airport. There were RPF troops every hundred feet. They were the only moving things in the streets. The Land Rovers moved quickly up into the hills above the city center. The red clay roads were rutted and the trip was hard going. Shattuck met the hero of the Rwandan genocide, the man who managed to end the killing, in a small villa. It was part of a complex of buildings that used to belong to a tea plantation, a graceful house with a huge veranda overlooking what once might have been a formal garden.Paul Kagame stood when Shattuck entered, and shook his hand. Given that the United States had done little during the genocide, Shattuck saw the gesture as a good sign.Shattuck was immediately struck by how ascetic Kagame was. He was painfully thin – six-two but only 128 pounds. He spoke precisely, and slowly. “He struck me as a cross between a monk and a king,” Shattuck said. Kagame’s message for the envoy was clear and simple. He was not convinced any U.N. court would be helpful to Rwanda. When Rwanda needed assistance stopping the genocide, the United Nations did nothing. “We have done this entirely by ourselves,” he said.It was difficult to argue. But Shattuck pressed on and presented Kagame with a proposal to create a tribunal. The court would arrest individuals accused of involvement in genocide, lay down principles of international law that would serve as precedents for other international criminal tribunals and courts all over the world, and pioneer advocacy for victim-oriented, restitutive justice. He urged Kagame to send a letter to the Security Council calling for the creation of a tribunal. Kagame was not enthusiastic. The United Nations would be too slow, he said. It would take a long time to launch an international tribunal, and “we need early and viable justice,” he told Shattuck. “We need the people of Rwanda to see this justice for themselves.”What Shattuck didn’t say that day, as the vultures and buzzards circled, was that the United Nations was adamant about not having the tribunal take place in Rwanda. Any trial in Rwanda of a high-level genocidaire, or genocide mastermind, would be, by definition, unfair. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was in The Hague, and, the international officials reasoned, the tribunal for Rwanda could be there too. Twagiramungu, from the safety of Belgium, had asked for a tribunal in May 1994, three months earlier, with a question that sent eyes to shoe tops. “Is what is happening different from what happened in Nazi Germany?” he asked reporters at a press conference. “Is it because we’re African that a court has not been set up?”Part of the problem was that just six months earlier, a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter had been shot out of the sky by rebels in Mogadishu, Somalia. Americans watched their television sets in horror as news channels showed footage of a dead U.S. soldier dragged through the streets of Somalia: “The Pentagon could not have been more hunkered down than that,” said Shattuck. “They were unwilling to do anything. And I was one of the people trying to change that. I just couldn’t do it fast enough.”It wasn’t until June, when the massacres began to slow, that the United States finally called the killing a genocide. “The first and most important step to reconciliation in Rwanda is justice,” Shattuck told reporters after his meeting with Kagame. “The principal movers in the genocide must be identified and then prosecuted so that the cloud of collective guilt and confusion hanging over Rwanda can be lifted.” The fact that the same cloud hung over an international community went without saying.The Clinton administration offered $3 million in cash assistance to help set up the war crimes tribunal – the same amount it had pledged to help establish the Yugoslavian criminal court months earlier. There was a $4 million offer to help rebuild the Rwandan justice system. Washington had offered the intelligence it had gathered concerning genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda so the leaders would be better prosecuted. (The offer meant, of course, that the United States knew precisely what was unfolding during those hundred days of chaos – and chose to do nothing to stop it.)“These are important elements in the ongoing and very difficult effort to end impunity and restore justice in Rwanda so the process of national reconciliation can begin,” Shattuck told reporters. Days later Kagame announced plans to prosecute, and possibly execute, the masterminds of the genocide in Rwanda itself. The U.N. vowed to come up with a solution everyone could live with.Making the tribunal effective and credible not only meant establishing a historical record of what happened but also required judges to determine where justice lay. It meant testing the question of whether acts of genocide and crimes against humanity had consequences for the people responsible.“The international tribunal is meant for taking over when the national system fails,” Judge Erik M0se, the future president of the ICTR, said soon after he arrived at the tribunal. “In many situations the national system is breaking down and you need something else instead. We understand that even if it is only one hour’s flight from Kigali to Arusha, it is mentally quite a long distance between Arusha and the countryside in Rwanda. And we’re trying to bridge that gap, so Rwandans know what we are doing.”

The Move Toward Justice in Rwanda

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