'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Rwanda and prosecutorialism

So I did largely succeed in getting done, over this past week, what I needed to do on my violence-in-Africa book. Namely, I "uploaded" back into the relevant portions of my brain the three chapters about post-genocide Rwanda that I first-drafted back in July.

(Next, the same for the three chapters on South Africa, and the two chapters on Mozambique. Then, use all that uploaded material as the basis for my concluding reflections on the post-atrocity policies in these three countries. Rather than, which I tried to do six weeks ago, writing the conclusion of the book almost out of thin intellectual-Helena air... I just feel much, much more comfortable as a thinker and writer when I keep close to my empirically-based material. Besides, one of the intentions of the book is to give voice to extraordinarily experienced and wise people in these three countries whose voices almost never get heart in the rich countries that dominate the self-styled "international community".)

Anyway, Rwanda. What a multiply tragic place. I've been following Rwanda's post-genocide "story" fairly closely since October 2000, and undertook a really productive research visit to the country in 2002, followed by another to the UN's massive gravy train, oops sorry, the "International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda", in Tanzania, the following year.

Most of my colleagues in the human-rights movement in the west went almost gaga with delight over the creation of the ICTR and its slightly older sister-court for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, back in the early-mid-1990s. But actually the political-social effects of both courts, within the territories they were supposed to "serve", have been either quite disastrous (ICTR) or somewhere between quite irrelevant and moderately negative (ICTY), and nobody much in either the UN or the west-dominated "human-rights movement" seems to have given a damn.

But meanwhile many international lawyers and their staffs have been able to make out like bandits, so that must be good news, mustn't it?

I have never for a moment doubted the good intentions of the human rights activists and others who urged the creation of these courts... I mean, "ending impunity", "establishing accountability", and all those other fine things are good in their own rights, aren't they?

Oh, plus, certainly in Rwanda's case, there were all these enormous great mushroom clouds of sheer human guilt wafting around-- as in, why the heck didn't the UN do more to actually stop the 1994 genocide?, or, more to the point, why did the Clinton administration actually work hard at the UN in 1994 to dismantle the existing UN force in Rwanda, despite its hard-won and indisputable record in saving the lives of threatened Tutsis?.... Yes, plenty of raw unprocessed guilt to go around.

And so we, instead of deploying peacekeepers we had the unseemly sight of the deployment of UN prosecutors to Rwanda. Here's what the "righteous Hutu" genocide survivor Andre Sibomana, who saved hundreds of threatened Tutsi and Hutu lives in 1994, had to say about ICTR:

I have met some of the ICTR officials; I am amazed by their incompetence. They are very intelligent people, but completely incapable of carrying out research. They don’t speak Kinyarwanda—which is understandable—but nor do they know how to employ competent interpreters. I agreed to talk to the ICTR investigators. I spent a lot of time with them. When they presented me with an account of our meetings translated from Kinyarwanda into English and transcribed in French, there was only a remote link between the text and the subject matter of our discussions in French. I was angry with them for this flippant attitude and I refused to sign what was intended to be my deposition. Do you think the investigators tried to rectify the mistakes? They simply put me in the category of those who refused to cooperate with the ICTR. That was the last straw. They are incapable of approaching those who lived through the genocide. They don’t ask the right questions. People are offended by their attitudes and their discourse. Rwandans had invested great hope in the ICTR. They are very disappointed.

Poor old Sibomana died in 1998. He would doubtless have something to say if he were still alive today. ICTR has now consumed well over $1 billion of the "international community's" funds, and has completed the trials of fewer than 20 individuals.

Oh, nice work if you can get it, eh?

Meanwhile, by focusing exclusively on Hutu perpetrators of violence against Tutsis, and ignoring the considerable and substantial bodies of evidence of Tutsi violence against Hutus (even if not genocide, at least war crimes and crimes against humanity-- how bad do they have to get, after all?) , the ICTR has established itself pretty firmly as a court of "victor's justice". (At least at ICTY the prosecutors have done what they could to give the court a semblance of ethnic balance in the charge sheet.... )

And meanwhile, we have had an increasingly authoritarian government in power in Rwanda. Recently, in a move almost unmentioned by the mainstream western media, Kagame's government shut down the last decent local human-rights organization, Liprodhor.... Kagame has really learned some interesting lessons about how governments that claim to represent the survivors of a genocide (though in truth, many actual survivors of the rwandan genocide would hotly contest how much they feel the carpet-bagger from Uganda, Kagame, actually represents them) can wrap themselves in the cloak of injured "victimhood" forever and get the guilty but rich nations of the west to continue to support them, almost whatever they do.

And what Kagame's government and military have done in Rwanda--but even more, in the neighboring DRC-- almost defies the imagination.

An estimated 2.5-million-plus of God's children have been killed by the conflicts in the eastern DRC since 1996; and a very large proportion of those deaths have to be laid at the door of Kagame's government. He sent his forces into DRC in 1996 in the first instance to try to wipe out the networks of former genocidaires who were active there in 1994-96. But he stayed there--occupying an area sixteen times the area of tiny Rwanda itself-- for so many years because his people were able to do some majorly profitable resource extraction while they were there. Soon, it was not "just" Rwandan exiles who were dying in DRC, it was indigenous DRC-ers.

It is probably true to say that tens of entire, indigenous Congolese language groups have been entirely wiped out in DRC by the Rwandan army, or as a direct result of its presence on foreign soil.

Okay, maybe not "intentionally". Maybe the Rwandan government types didn't sit down and declare "We're going to wipe out this language-group, and this one, and this one.... " So it would be hard to prove "genocide", which requires a degree of intentionality about wiping out, in whole or in part, an "ethnical, national, or religious group, as such."

But what if a number of such groups got entirely wiped out, not intentionally, but because of the generalization within the eastern DRC of internecine warfare?

I should recall, before I keel over into bed with exhaustion here, that it was actually within eastern Congo-- the present DRC-- that the term "crimes against humanity" probably first ever came to be used. That was in 1890, when the area was being used as a huge, and hugely lethal, personal "rubber plantation" by Belgium's King Leopold II. Adam Hochschild, in his searing book King Leopold's ghost estimates that some ten million native Congolese people died during the 23-year period that Leopold ran the "Belgian Congo" as a personal possession. (Not that it got very much better once it came under the control of the Belgian state, in 1918 or so.... )

So anyway, there was a Black American preacher called George Washington Williams who visited upriver Congo in 1889-90 and saw quite a bit of what was going on... That was, I guess, shortly before Joseph Conrad got there as a pilot and gathered the material he later used for "Heart of Darkness"?

So in Spetmber 1890, Williams wrote a report to US Secretary of State Blaine which he concluded thus:

The State of Congo [i.e. King Leopold's personal fiefdom there] is in no sense deserving of your confidence or support. It is actively involved in the slave trade and is guilty of many crimes against humanity.

So why, you ask, this interesting coinage of a new term?

At the time, Williams was not the only person writing reports about the atrocities the Belgians were perpetrating in upper Congo. They were truly, truly heinous things: mutilations, enslavements, rapes, widespread killings, etc. But usually, such actions were presented in the west as "crimes against Christianity". In the Congo, it was hard to do this-- non of the victims were Christians, after all... So Williams hoped that the term "crimes against humanity" might speak to his audience back in the US equally powerfully...

He was wrong.

So anyway, back to Rwanda today. It seems quite clear to me that-- regardless of the degree of post-genocide trauma the Rwandan Tutsis are suffering from-- the content and effect of their actions inside today's DRC must be judged quite objectively. And, obviously, their military presence and operations there must be halted.

And what does the ICTR have to do with all this? One of my main arguments is that by substituting for, and actively (though unintentionally) impeding, a process of internal, inter-group reconciliation, the ICTR kept alive and exacerbated existing inter-group hatreds and along with them the generalized paranoia of the Kagame ruling group.

My main counter-example, in my book, is Mozambqiue... I'm ways too tired to go into all of that now, except to note that the Mozambicans decided to end their atrociuty-laden civil war of 1977-92 with a blanket amnesty and lots of inter-group and personal healing-- and since 1992, they have done a lot better on all measures of community and political wellbeing than the Rwandans....