By Andrew England
Associated PressMay 4, 2002
Sometimes, defendants at the U.N. tribunal hearing cases connected to the 1994 Rwandan genocide smirk when charges of the brutal crimes they allegedly committed are read aloud in court. At other times, some defendants -- and witnesses -- simply don't show up.
The trials tend to be tedious, drawn-out affairs dominated by debates over the minutiae of international law. There are no juries -- just judges, prosecutors, lawyers, clerks and witnesses separated from the public gallery by bulletproof glass in three fish tank-style courtrooms.
The United Nations set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in this remote, sleepy northern Tanzanian town in 1995. Another tribunal, the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, which is trying former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, was created two years earlier in The Hague.
The lessons learned at these two international ad hoc courts could help guide those designing the International Criminal Court that is slated to come into existence on July 1. But there are significant differences between the two institutions.
While the Yugoslav court is in a developed European country and grabs international attention through regularly televised hearings, the Rwanda tribunal is based in the poorest of the continents where so-called justice often consists of defendants being beaten by police and locked up without charge.
The Rwanda tribunal is the first international court to hand down a judgment on the crime of genocide. Since November 1995, it has convicted eight people and acquitted one; it is now conducting seven trials for 17 defendants. Fifty-two of the 75 people so far indicted are in custody, and six people already convicted are serving sentences in the West African country of Mali.
Allegations of incompetence have dogged the Rwanda court as it examines charges of genocide in a tiny African country that few people had heard of before 1994. Critics argue the court is too slow and too remote from Rwanda.
It also has been tainted by charges of racism, corruption and the revelation that four genocide suspects were working on defense teams.
On April 8, two witnesses refused to testify after a genocide survivors' group known as IBUKA criticized the tribunal and suspended cooperation with it. A week earlier, the day after the trial opened for Col. Theoneste Bagosora, the alleged mastermind of the government-orchestrated genocide, hearings were suspened until September because key prosecution documents had not been translated into French -- one of the court's three working languages. The others are English and Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language.
"There are continuing logistical problems. There are repeated efforts to address them, but (court officials) have to be better at it," said Rwanda scholar and human rights activist Alison Des Forges. Des Forges, an American who was supposed to be the first witness at Bagosora's trial, played down the delay. "It's certainly regrettable there is this delay, but 10 years down the road will it make any difference that the trial started in September?" she said.
She says the tribunal has rectified some of its early failings but is still out of touch with the average person in Rwanda. "Most Rwandans know very little about the tribunal," she said, adding that the tribunal's information center in the capital Kigali -- complete with computers -- can provide little help to most victims and surviving families. Some 90 percent of Rwanda's 8.5 million people are peasants, most of whom live without electricity.
Tribunal officials acknowledge that mistakes were made but say problems were inevitable in creating such a court. They also complain about the difficulties of recruiting people and working in a small African town which has few amenities and intermittent water and electricity. "It's not easy to stay and live here," Hague-based chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said. "I could not stay one year working in Arusha. ... If it is like that for me, can you imagine what it is like for others? That is also a reason you cannot have the best people to work here."
Last May, Del Ponte refused to renew the contracts of six African prosecutors and one Indian, calling them incompetent which sparked the racism allegations. She said she wanted to hire prosecutors who could reach the "same goals in a much shorter time."
Some defendants, like Bagosora, have spent five years in the U.N. jail in Arusha waiting for their trials to begin. Bagosora then refused to appear in court at the single trial session that was held.
Defense teams have often been accused of filing frivolous motions that cause delays. All the defendants have declared themselves indigent. With no staff or resources to verify the claims, the tribunal pays all defense costs -- amounting to $8 million last year -- and there have been allegations that some defense attorneys split their fees with their clients.
"A lot of defense teams don't want their cases to go to trial," Judge Lloyd Williams said. "If the tribunal is paying, then the accused does not have any incentive to have the trial end quickly."
Tribunal registrar Adama Dieng said the tribunal plans to employ three special investigators and an auditor to root out financial abuses. It has also asked for more judges. "We are underfunded and under-resourced for the volume of work ... (and) complexity of crimes," Dieng said.
But he insisted that criticism of the tribunal was exaggerated and lamented Africa's lack of interest in its work. Of the continent's 53 countries, only Egypt has contributed to a trust fund set up to support the tribunal.
Pierre-Richard Prosper, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said experience so far has shown that both The Hague and Arusha tribunals are too far from where the crimes were committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Prosper was the lead prosecutor in the Rwanda tribunal's first case and remembers "constantly hitting our heads against the wall because we were forging new ground."
But he said that without the tribunal, it is unlikely that many of those who played a leading role in the genocide and then fled Rwanda would ever have been brought to justice.
The Rwandan government has been one of the tribunal's harshest critics. But Martin Ngogo, its representative at the tribunal, said the situation has improved. "We had good reasons to criticize the tribunal. At the beginning its performance was very, very poor. When the performance improved, we acknowledged it," Ngogo said.
Perhaps the biggest lesson learned is that trying genocide cases is anything but simple. "We all had unrealistic expectations in terms of how quickly international justice could be delivered," Des Forges said.
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