April 22-28, 2000
Will Felicien Kabuga or Tharcisse Renzaho ever be brought to justice? They are still at large, among several hundred other senior Rwandans who in 1994 planned and promoted the genocide of up to 1m people. Mr Kabuga was a businessman who financed the murderous Hutu militias, supplied them with machetes and was part owner of Radio Mille Collines, the radio station that broadcast the orders for genocide. Colonel Renzaho was the governor of the capital, Kigali. He directed the killing squads there, ordering them to make sure that "none can escape", and he was a member of the committee that co-ordinated the slaughter throughout the country.
So far, 44 people have been detained by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha in Tanzania. Seven have been convicted, of whom six are on appeal. The prosecutor is still looking for about 35 people. Although names are not published for fear of alerting men on the run, Mr Kabuga and Colonel Renzaho are almost certainly on the list. Arrested or hunted, they are still only a small proportion of the people who planned and executed the fastest and most orderly genocide in history.
UN tribunal grinds on in Arusha, the Rwandan government is busy bringing genocide criminals before its own courts. If the main perpetrators are to be caught, and the evidence found to convict them, the two should co-operate. But their relationship, though it now shows signs of improvement, has long been unhappy. The government objects, among other things, to the money spent on the tribunal, which it feels could have been better used to rebuild a justice system in Rwanda.
The government has so far detained more than 120,000 people accused of genocide, of whom over 2,000 have been convicted and 300 sentenced to death. At the end of last year, it produced a list of 2,133 people suspected of planning or directing the genocide. Most of them are still at large.
Many of the missing villains are in Congo. Senior military officers fled there after their genocidal government was defeated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which now rules the country. In Congo, they regrouped soldiers and militiamen responsible for the killing. Since Rwanda became involved in Congo's civil war, many of the Rwandan militiamen are fighting on the side of President Laurent Kabila, against the Congolese rebels who, in their turn, are backed by the Rwandan government. So long as Congo's fighting continues, the missing Rwandans will be difficult to arrest - and they are making sure that the war continues.
Others are in Tanzania. Hutus from both Rwanda and Burundi are well established in the administration of western Tanzania from where, probably without the knowledge of the central government, they protect some of the killers. Others, again, are scattered around the world, some with false identities. Mr Kabuga was said to have been spotted in Switzerland but is now thought to be in Kenya. Colonel Renzaho is probably in Congo. Governments do not seem to be making much effort to find them. Those who have been discovered - in Britain, America, France, Belgium and Denmark - have often been unmasked by journalists.
By contrast, western security services expend considerable energy on tracking down war criminals from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague has so far issued over 90 indictments, and arrested more than 40 suspects, of whom 15 have been sentenced. It has named 29 people it is still looking for. So far as is known, they are all still in the region, either in power in Serbia or hiding in Bosnia.
It is much harder to find the dispersed Rwandans. Moreover, even if they were caught and sent to the tribunal, gathering evidence to prosecute them would be difficult. Persuading witnesses to leave their homes and come to Arusha to give evidence, and then providing them with protection when they return, is fraught with trouble. The horrible fact is that the only living witnesses to some of the worst Rwandan massacres are the perpetrators themselves.
