Rwanda genocide trials leave a mixed legacy

[High_Gravity]

Rwanda genocide trials leave a mixed legacy

Reporting from Kigali, Rwanda— Issa Munyangaju is willing to tell his story, but he requires a beer. He sips a Primus in a dim concrete bar and talks about the houseboy he shot during the genocide.

They were friends, he says, until they came to a roadblock manned by Hutu militiamen. They gave Munyangaju, also Hutu, a gun. They told him he would be killed if he didn't execute his friend, whose ethnic group, the Tutsis, had been targeted for extermination.

"I followed their orders," Munyangaju, 44, says. He put a bullet in the young man's stomach, and was within earshot when another shot finished him off.

While he was in prison, government officials visited to tout the benefits of confessing at a type of trial known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha), a radical experiment in community justice. Gacaca translates from the Kinyarwanda tongue as "justice on the grass," and many such trials played out on fields, atop hills and under trees. There were no lawyers, and instead of professional judges, panels of elders determined guilt or innocence.

Munyangaju says his confession at his gacaca reduced his prison time from 30 years to 10 and helped ease the burden of his guilt. "Now I can go to heaven," he says.

The ethnic massacres claimed more than 800,000 Tutsis and their perceived allies in 1994. When the trials began eight years later, Rwanda's government argued that the gacaca process would not only relieve prisons bursting with genocide suspects, but would accelerate cases that might take decades to unfold in conventional courts hobbled by the slaughter of much of the trained judiciary.

Survivors would learn who killed their loved ones and where to find the bodies. Killers who confessed would receive reduced sentences and the chance to reenter society. Ultimately, it was hoped, there would be reconciliation.

But as the courts hear the last of more than 1 million cases, the trials' legacy is sharply contested. In a recent report titled "Justice Compromised," advocacy group Human Rights Watch contends that the process has been used to settle personal beefs, as well as to silence journalists, activists and outspoken officials.

The report says the courts have ignored widespread killings attributed to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the party that halted the genocide and now runs the country.

The report also cites the lack of "fair trial rights" for the accused, such as access to lawyers, and decries poorly trained volunteer judges, unencumbered by evidentiary rules, who sometimes rely heavily on hearsay.

Munyangaju says that upon his release from prison, he found that his wife had been impregnated by another man, and in revenge he implicated the man in genocide-related attacks. Later, he says, he admitted that he had lied.

Now he sits on a plastic chair by the road and repairs shoes, earning barely enough to support his wife and two children. His house is crumbling. He tried to breed goats, but someone killed them, and now he is suspicious of his neighbors. Maybe someone from a survivor's family did it; he can't be sure.

"I don't know who killed my goats," he says. "That person can come kill me. I think everyone might be the one who killed my goats."

The genocide began in April 1994, when Hutu extremists seized on the killing of Rwanda's president to unleash soldiers, militias and the Hutu people against the minority Tutsis.

Radios blared orders to exterminate Tutsis like cockroaches; an estimated three-fourths of the Tutsi population was massacred. Yet it has been Hutus, the country's majority ethnic group, who often sit in judgment of other Hutus in gacaca court.

Rwanda genocide trials offer a mixed legacy - latimes.com

 

[waltky]

Rwanda - then & now...

Two Decades After Rwandan Genocide, Has the World Learned its Lesson?
April 06, 2014 — Rwanda on Monday is marking 20 years since the1994 genocide, with the hope that lessons learned can help prevent future atrocities. But as many times as the international community has said "never again," a failure to act has continued to cost lives.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame will light a national flame of mourning Monday in a ceremony at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. The April 7 commemoration marks the anniversary of the day violence broke out across the country, as ethnic Hutu militias killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a 100-day rampage. Across Rwanda, memorials to the victims display skulls and bones broken by machete blades and bloodied articles of clothing worn by the victims - constant reminders of the brutality that destroyed the nation.

Freddy Mutanguha, a survivor, is the country director of the Aegis Trust, which runs the Kigali Genocide Memorial. He said that with 20 years past, now is the time for the new generation to reflect on the past. “We remember and we honor our victims each and every year, but it's a very important year because children who are born during or after genocide, they are now growing. It's an important opportunity for them to learn and to understand what happened in this country,” said Mutanguha. Heads of state and other foreign dignitaries, including officials from the United States, Britain and the East African region, are expected in Kigali for the commemorations. Mutanguha said it also is a good opportunity for international guests to learn from Rwanda. “It's very important in terms of genocide prevention because those people will come and they will learn about what happens here so that they can prevent it in their own communities,” said Mutanguha.

In an opinion article timed for the anniversary, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the international community to learn from its failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda, and to take stronger action to confront modern day crises, like the conflicts in Syria and the Central African Republic. “The international community,” he said, “cannot claim to care about atrocity crimes and then shrink from the commitment of resources and will required to actually prevent them.” U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda in the early 1990s have been criticized for their inability or unwillingness to stop the genocide, despite warnings.

Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, said the U.N.'s failure in Rwanda prompted a serious moment of reflection. “I think after Rwanda there was this intense sense in which the international community had to rethink what it means to stand true to those principles embodied in the U.N. charter. So I would like to think that the lesson of Rwanda, the overarching lesson, is to be opposed to the politics of indifference and the politics of inaction,” said Adams.

Meanwhile, recent Rwandan claims of French involvement in the genocide have set back relations between those two countries. France withdrew a delegation due to attend memorial events this week following remarks by Rwandan President Kagame made to an African news weekly that France played a direct role in the preparation and execution of the genocide. Paris has long denied the accusation. French foreign affairs spokesman Romain Nadal told VOA the government was surprised by Kagame's remarks, and said they go “against the ongoing process of reconciliation between our two countries.”

Two Decades After Rwandan Genocide, Has the World Learned its Lesson?

See also:

RWANDA GENOCIDE: MAN AND VICTIM NOW FRIENDS
Apr 6,`14 -- She lost her baby daughter and her right hand to a manic killing spree. He wielded the machete that took both.

Yet today, despite coming from opposite sides of an unspeakable shared past, Alice Mukarurinda and Emmanuel Ndayisaba are friends. She is the treasurer and he the vice president of a group that builds simple brick houses for genocide survivors. They live near each other and shop at the same market. Their story of ethnic violence, extreme guilt and, to some degree, reconciliation is the story of Rwanda today, 20 years after its Hutu majority killed more than 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The Rwandan government is still accused by human rights groups of holding an iron grip on power, stifling dissent and killing political opponents. But even critics give President Paul Kagame credit for leading the country toward a peace that seemed all but impossible two decades ago. "Whenever I look at my arm I remember what happened," said Alice, a mother of five with a deep scar on her left temple where Emanuel sliced her with a machete. As she speaks, Emmanuel - the man who killed her baby - sits close enough that his left hand and her right stump sometimes touch.

On Monday, Rwanda marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of 100 days of bloody mayhem. But the genocide was really in the making for decades, fueled by hate speech, discrimination, propaganda and the training of death squads. Hutus had come to resent Tutsis for their greater wealth and what they saw as oppressive rule. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in mainland Africa, slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland but with a population of more than 12 million. The countryside is lush green, filled with uncountable numbers of banana trees. The Hutu-Tutsi divide may be the country's most notorious characteristic but also its most confounding. The two groups are so closely related that it's nearly impossible for an outsider to tell which the average Rwandan belongs to. Even Rwandans have trouble knowing who is who, especially after two decades of a government push to create a single Rwandan identity.

Emmanuel Ndayisaba, right, and Alice Mukarurinda, pose for a photograph outside Alice's house in Nyamata, Rwanda. She lost her baby daughter and her right hand to a manic killing spree. He wielded the machete that took both. Yet today, despite coming from opposite sides of an unspeakable shared past, Alice Mukarurinda and Emmanuel Ndayisaba are friends. She is the treasurer and he the vice president of a group that builds simple brick houses for genocide survivors. They live near each other and shop at the same market. Their story of ethnic violence, extreme guilt and, to some degree, reconciliation is the story of Rwanda today, 20 years after its Hutu majority killed more than 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The Rwandan government is still accused by human rights groups of holding an iron grip on power, stifling dissent and killing political opponents. But even critics give President Paul Kagame credit for leading the country toward a peace that seemed all but impossible two decades ago.

For Alice, a Tutsi, the genocide began in 1992, when her family took refuge in a church for a week. Hutu community leaders began importing machetes. Houses were burned, cars taken. Hutu leaders created lists of prominent or educated Tutsis targeted for killing. They also held meetings where they told those in attendance how evil the Tutsis were. Like many of his Hutu neighbors, Emmanuel soaked in the message. The situation caught fire on April 6, 1994, when the plane carrying Rwanda's president was shot down. Hutus started killing Tutsis, who ran for their lives and flooded Alice's village.

Three days later, local Hutu leaders told Emmanuel, then 23, that they had a job for him. They took him to a Tutsi home and ordered him to use his machete. A Christian who sang in his church choir, Emmanuel had never killed before. But inside this house he murdered 14 people. The next day, April 12, Emmanuel found a Tutsi doctor in hiding and killed him, too. The day after, he killed two women and a child. "The very first family I killed, I felt bad, but then I got used to it," he says. "Given how we were told that the Tutsis were evil, after the first family I just felt like I was killing our enemies."

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[Gracie]

I was reading the story about the woman with no hand being friends with her attacker. I'm not sure what it takes to forgive someone hacking your hand off...but I guess it can be done. However, hacking your 9 month old baby to death? I don't think I could do that. I'd want him dead. Period.

 

[georgephillip]

"Washington, DC, May 29, 2014 – Leading decision makers from the United Nations, Africa, the United States, and Europe will gather in The Hague from June 1 to 3 to consider the failure of the international community to prevent or effectively respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and to explore whether and how the tragedy might have been averted..."

Specifically, what happened behind closed doors at the UNSC during the genocide that dared not speak its name?

"The initiative has collected, applied to get declassified, and made accessible-in many instances for the first time-significant documents from a wide variety of sources relating to many aspects of the Rwandan genocide.

"Most recently, declassification requests that the National Security Archive and the Holocaust Museum made in four countries have resulted in the release of nearly 300 formerly secret diplomatic cables that provide fresh insights into closed UN Security Council sessions in the days and weeks leading up to the genocide."

KEY DECISION MAKERS AND EYEWITNESSES GATHER IN THE HAGUE TO CONSIDER THE FAILURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE