Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide barely 70 individuals out of thousands involved in the 1994 massacres have been convicted by the UN-backed court that was designed to deliver justice.
The international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) pioneered the first genocide trials in Africa but after almost 20 years of legal argument and an estimated bill of $1.7bn (£1bn), only a tiny proportion of the Rwandan malefactors has been brought to justice.
Next year the ICTR's courtrooms at Arusha, in neighbouring Tanzania, are scheduled to be handed back to local authorities and returned to use as an international conference centre. The ICTR dealt with the government leadership and those who motivated the interahamwe militias. Excessive court delays, however, caused cases to drag on for up to 10 years.
A total of 92 people, overwhelmingly Hutus, were indicted for their role in the 100-day genocide that killed 800,000.
Nine suspects – including Félicien Kabuga, alleged to have purchased the machetes handed out to Hutu militias and who was part-owner of the Mille Collines radio station, which broadcast hate campaigns against Tutsis – have never been located. Several suspects are thought to be hiding in eastern Congo.
Of 83 defendants put through ICTR courts, 12 were acquitted either at the end of their trial or on appeal to the upper chamber, which is shared with the UN-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Another dozen are still challenging their convictions. Confronted by bulging prisons and the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of individuals participated in the bloodbath, the Rwandan government warned that it would take more than 200 years for the ICTR to deal with all outstanding accusations.
The country sidestepped legal formalities to speed up the process of punishment and reconciliation through traditional gacaca community courts. Gacaca means to sit down and discuss issues on a village's grassy clearing.
The informal courts ran for about 10 years, between 2002 and 2012, during which time the government estimated that 1.9 million people appeared before locally elected judges.
Defendants were given shorter sentences in exchange for confessing, and encouraged to seek forgiveness from victims' families. Some perpetrators were sentenced to hard labour.
Human rights groups criticised the gacaca process for not meeting international fair trial standards and for endangering witnesses who gave evidence.
In many cases neighbours had turned on each other in 1994; and a number of witnesses who spoke out were murdered. Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, estimated that gacaca courts had cost his country about $40m, compared to the $1.7bn spent by the ICTR.
Assessing the tribunal's record at an anniversary commemoration, the ICTR's senior legal adviser, Roland Amoussouga, summarised its achievements: "The genocide of 1994 in Rwanda is no longer a matter of conjecture or argument. It is a well-established fact of history that has been judicially taken notice of by mankind.
"This … is the first time high-ranking individuals have been called to account before an international court of law for massive violations of human rights in Africa. The tribunal's work sends a strong message to Africa's leaders and warlords."
Among those convicted and sentenced to life in prison was Jean Kambanda, prime minister at the start of the genocide. "This was the first time that a head of government was convicted for such crimes," Amoussouga said. "Through this process the tribunal laid down definitions of international law, which will serve as precedents for … courts all over the world."
In the so-called "media case", for example, involving those responsible for radio broadcasts and newspapers that fomented hatred of Tutsis, the tribunal established the principle that anyone who incites the public to commit genocide can be punished for crimes against humanity.
Amoussouga said another ICTR achievement was the doctrine of command responsibility, which ruled that "military commanders and civilian leaders are equally held personally responsible for human rights violations … committed by their subordinates if as superiors they knew, or should have known, about commission of those violations and did not prevent them or punish the perpetrators".
Iain Morley QC, who worked for four years as an ICTR prosecutor at Arusha between 2005 and 2009, recalled how hard it was to present evidence from victims suffering from post-traumatic stress who had never received counselling. "You asked them what happened," he recalled, "and they began to shake. [People] deliberately try to forget the worst of it."
The ICTR was a success, he said, "but there were lessons to be learnt – primarily that the trials were too long".
He added: "It was an ad hoc tribunal. Lots of money got spent feeling our way forward. It costs a lot to fly in witnesses from around the world."
The court's bureaucracy became "overcomplicated", he said, with almost a thousand staff running four courts at Arusha. Some legal staff, Morley explained, found they were earning far higher wages at Arusha than in their native jurisdictions. "That's one of the reasons why it took so long." One case lasted 10 years, another eight. "When a case takes that long it's difficult to remember what's been going on," Morley said. , "Consequently there's often repetition in the evidence."
Huge amounts of testimony and paperwork were generated. The writing of judgments was sometimes entrusted to legal officers, among whom there was a high staff turnover. One judgment took three years to deliver.
"It was a good project," he contended, "an intelligent attempt to consider the wrongs of Rwanda. A definitive record of what happened [has been created], which stops people perhaps later suggesting history was rewritten by the victors."
But locating the ICTR in Tanzania left many in Rwanda feeling detached from the court, Morley said. "There's been an unease that the Hutu have been prosecuted but not the Tutsi."
The advent of a permanent international criminal court at the Hague, replacing individual ad hoc tribunals, may streamline the cost of international justice in the future.
Most remaining cases are being transferred to Rwanda's national courts, including files on six of the missing indicted by the ICTR. The conflict has scattered victims and alleged fugitives around the world and led to court cases in foreign jurisdictions.conviction for genocide, sentencing a Rwandan former intelligence chief to 25 years in prison for his role in the 1994 killings.
Pascal Simbikangwa, 54, who is in a wheelchair, proclaimed his innocence, insisting he had never seen any bodies. His was the first of what may be dozens of French trials dealing with Rwandan atrocity suspects. Simbikangwa, who was arrested in 2008 on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, was convicted of complicity in genocide but not of personally killing anyone.
Improvements in diplomatic relations between France and Rwanda, as well as the establishment of a Paris-based genocide investigation unit, paved the way for the trial. French legislation provides for universal jurisdiction over crimes of genocide, meaning that offences committed abroad even by foreign nationals can be tried in France.
Universal jurisdiction under UK law has proved more limited and resulted in suspects accused of genocide by Rwanda remaining at liberty in Britain. The extradition of four men to Kigali was blocked by an English court in 2009 on the grounds that it would violate article 6 of the European convention on human rights, which safeguards the right to a fair trial.
The extradition case against the four, and one other, has recently been revived. The pastor of a Pentecostal church in Kent, Celestin Mutabaruka, is alleged to have led Hutu militias, armed with spears and machetes, that hacked Tutsis to death and gouged their eyes out, Westminster magistrates court heard earlier last month).
Mutabaruka, along with Dr Vincent Brown, from north London, Charles Munyaneza, from Bedford, Celestin Ugirashebuja from Essex and Emmanuel Nteziryayo, of Manchester, all deny involvement and say they would not receive a fair trial if they were forced to return to Rwanda.
The men were detained by officers from Scotland Yard's extradition unit following a fresh application by the Rwandan authorities. The court was told that laws in Rwanda have been amended so that suspects are no longer kept in solitary confinement while in prison; their case continues.
The shock of what occurred in 1994 may echo through the world's courtrooms for years to come. Iain Morley distilled his searing memories of thousands of legal statements: "It was the most bestial thing, to our knowledge, in 500 years. Sometimes children were made to kill their parents. Hundreds of thousands of women were horribly raped, often by many, before being brutally disfigured and murdered. There was this fundamental, destructive, violent, rapacious hatred … Pretty much everyone was involved. You were either hunting or being hunted."
Rwanda: the convicted
Convictions appealed
Augustin Bizimungu (ICTR-00-56)
