'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

GALA DAY FOR THE RESEARCH PROJECT

GALA DAY FOR THE RESEARCH PROJECT: I've been working on this research project, that looks at the effectiveness, as viewed 8 - 10 years later, of the widely varying policies that each of Rwanda, S. Africa, and Mozambique dopted in the early-to-mid 1990s, for nearly 30 months now. Today was truly a gala day for my enquiry. I had substantial amounts of time with three people key to understanding the Rwanda portion of the puzzle.

The first of these was Alison Des Forges, an American researcher who is truly a world-class expert on Rwanda-- as well as a person who's been called as 'expert witness' in a number of trials before the ICTR. I approached her in the public gallery of Courtroom 1 at the end of the morning's proceedings, and she immediately agreed to go have lunch with me.

I've been playing an international game of telephone tag w/ Alison for two years or more now! Last year, we had an interaction in print, after she and Ken Roth, the Exec. Director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a fairly sharp criticism of the piece I had in Boston Review about post-genocide policies in Rwanda. (You can access that article through one of the links on the right of this weblog.)

Anyway, we had a really good discussion. I went back into the courtroom, and soon enough one of my very, very helpful contacts at the court came in to say that my application to interview Carla del Ponte had just turned up trumps. Carla, as you may know, is the Swiss legal eagle who's the Chief prosecutor for both UICTR and its companion court for former-Yugoslavia, ICTY. I told her when I met her, at four this afternoon, that I last saw her in June 2001-- from distance-- when I was at ICTY the very day that she got custody of Slobodan Milosevic, and she'd given a fairly victorious press conference to celebrate the fact.

Then finally, a request that I'd made to speak to one of the defense lawyers came through; so this evening I had a great, one-hour-plus discussion with Diana Ellis, QC, a British barrister who's on the defense team whose performance I'd been watching in Courtroom 1 these past two days. Diana voiced her trenchant criticisms of the ICTR process, which she sees as a clear example of "victor's justice" (and she gave me many examples of bias against the defense teams that seemed to back up this conclusion. She also said that her three-year experience of working on Ferdinand Habimana's defense team at the court had really soured her on the idea she had earlier had, that the ICC might be a great development in international affairs, given that she saw the distinct possibility that many of the problems she had identified at the ICTR would be exported wholesale to the ICC.

So, three widely varying points of view there. But all expressed in an extremely articulate and convinced way. Later it'll be time for me to go in detail through the extensive notes that I took, and to make finely-tuned judgments. For now, I'm just acting like a sponge and gathering as much material as I can.

Have you noticed something, meanwhile, about the three people I described here? They are all of one gender... Are we talking, then, about a progressive feminization of international affairs? I would wish! But there are some portions of it where women are now coming to form some kind of a critical mass, and I find this really interesting to see (and, I suppose, to be a part of.)