The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda(1) was established in Arusha, Tanzania in 1994 to try those allegedly responsible for genocide in Rwanda. Only twenty-one members of the Hutu(2) tribal majority have been indicted for the killing of more than a half-million minority Tutsis.(3) Escalating violence in Rwanda and mismanagement in the Tribunal have hindered efforts to bring perpetrators of the genocide to justice. Hutu refugees returning from Zaire have allegedly been killed in an attempt to eliminate witnesses to the slaughter.
Rwanda has condemned the Tribunal as a crippled body that requires major changes.(4) Rwanda alleges poor organization, failure to investigate crimes, failure to bring suspects to trial and failure to work with the Rwandan government.(5) United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan(6) met three senior tribunal officials on February 28, 1997 after an internal United Nations report earlier in February accused the Tribunal's officers and personnel of inefficiency and waste, mismanagement and corruption.(7)
A United Nations investigation recently found the Tribunal was suffering from widespread mismanagement and inadequate staffing, but did not turn up evidence of corruption.(8) The prosecutor, Judge Louise Arbour of Canada, met with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to discuss ways of improving the Tribunal's workings and advance prosecutorial work following the embarrassing investigation.(9)
The Undersecretary General, the United Nations' equivalent of an inspector general, Karl Paschke, charged that the Tribunal's administration functioned chaotically during most of the two years since it was established.(10) Unless the situation is corrected quickly, "the Rwandese will be right to suspect that justice delayed is justice denied," Paschke said.(11)
Critics in the United States Congress believe the world body has an inept bureaucracy badly in need of purging. African governments, however, resent suggestions that the largely African staff of the Tribunal is the place to begin the purging, and is pressuring Annan, a native of Ghana, not to dismiss personnel. Many Africans claim the Tribunal has received less help from New York than the Yugoslav court based in the Netherlands.
Arbour indicated that it would be up to Annan to remove Registrar Andrionico Adede or the Deputy Prosecutor Honre Rakotomanana, who were appointed by former United Nations Secretary-General Butros Butros-Ghali and have since been charged with mismanagement. The two court officials met with Annan in New York on February 28, 1997.
Although the Tribunal was established only months after the genocidal acts, the first trial did not begin until January 9, 1997. Jean-Paul Akayesu is the first suspect to be tried before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.(12) So far, Akayesu is the first person to stand trial, and only a handful are indicted, awaiting trial. Prosecution witnesses have testified that Akayesu ordered and participated directly in killings of Tutsis and political enemies in Taba commune, south of Rwanda, where he was mayor.(13) On March 6, 1997, the trial of a former mayor accused of participating in the 1994 genocide began.
The United Nations Security Council was initially extremely reluctant to consider setting up a war crimes tribunal for Rwanda similar to that established for the former Yugoslavia. Although the number of lives lost in Rwanda during the 100 days of widespread and systematic murder of more than seventy-five percent of the country's Tutsi population was almost three times the number of Jewish lives lost during the Holocaust, the United Nations was reluctant to describe the massacres as genocide which would trigger United Nations aid under the Genocide Convention of 1948.(14) After a detailed report on the atrocities in Rwanda was issued by the Special Rappateur for Rwanda, the U.N. Security Council finally acknowledged that genocide had occurred.(15) Rwanda has in the past condemned the Tribunal for its slow pace and its inability to bring those most seriously implicated in the genocide to justice.
The Tribunal can deliver only a maximum sentence of life imprisonment,(16) but Rwanda wants death for the most serious offenders. In Rwanda itself, at least eleven death sentences have been handed out by state courts which began in December, while another 90,000 people accused of participation in the genocide are awaiting trial in overcrowded prisons.(17) The first to be convicted, Deo Bizimana and Egide Gatanaza, were sentenced to death by either hanging or firing squad.(18) Bizimana and Gatanaza, Hutus, pleaded not guilty to all eleven charges, including organizing massacres and raping and pillaging their Tutsi neighbors. The two men were found guilty of planning genocide, genocide, crimes against humanity and rape following a trial that lasted a mere four hours.(19) They were dressed in pink prison uniforms during the trial where the gallery booed the defendants and cheered prosecutors.(20) The alleged leaders in the genocide, however, are living in exile, and have thus far escaped both the United Nations and Rwandan government.(21)
The need for justice to be served when the crime of genocide is committed is just as important when Africans are slaughtered as when Europeans are. Whether intentional or not, the inequity between the Yugoslavia and Rwandan tribunals must end, and strong, efficient and swift justice must come to relieve the world's conscience.
1. U.N. Doc. S/RES/955 (1994) [hereinafter Tribunal].
2. John M.Goshko, U.N. Probe Finds Mismanagement, Waste in Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal, Wash. Post Feb. 13, 1997, at A20.
3. Rwandan Tribunal Frees Hutu Suspect, Wash. Post, Feb. 21, 1997, at A24.
4. Matthew Tostevin, Rwanda Says U.N. Genocide Tribunal Useless, Reuters North American Wire, Feb. 23, 1997, available in LEXIS, News Library.
5. Id.
6. U.N. Rwanda Trial Suspended Until March, Reuters North American Wire, Feb. 24,1997, available in LEXIS, News Library.
7. Id.
8. Goshko, supra note 2.
9. Annan, who took office January 1, 1997, is promising broad reform.
10. Goshko, supra note 2.
11. Id.
12. Id.
13. U.N. Rwanda Trial Suspended Until March, supra note 6.
14. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Dec. 9, 1948, U.N. art. I.
15. Tostevin, supra note 4.
16. Id.
17. Id.
18. Armando Franca, Rwanda Sentences 2 To Death, Boston Globe, Jan. 4, 1997, at 1.
19. Id.
20. Id.
21. Rwanda Says U.N. Genocide Tribunal Useless, supra, note 4.
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