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154 15 Like a Flight of Termites We all have in mind a question that no one who goes to Rwanda can avoid: Who sparked the fire? What criminal mind schemed up the attack on President Habyarimana’s plane? François Roux, lawyer, Ignace Bagilishema trial, April 26, 2000 As the prosecutor has indicated, she fully intends to indict members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, against whom evidence of atrocities has been established. Adama Dieng, ICTR registrar, June 11, 2001 The Rwandan authorities’ reaction to the acquittal of Ignace Bagilishema consisted in a few frowns and some symbolic boasting, evidence of the fact that in their eyes, the trial of Mabanza’s former bourgmestre held little importance. As seen in the Barayagwiza case, Rwanda’s government knows how to flex its muscles when it feels its interests are being threatened. There was no better illustration of this than Kigali’s ability to neutralize the only real threat that the UN tribunal could pose to it: prosecution of the RPF’s armed forces for the crimes they committed in 1994. The UN tribunal in Arusha was conceived first and foremost for the perpetrators of the Tutsi genocide. That was its primary mandate, its top priority. But one of the reasons for establishing the court outside Rwanda was that it was also supposed to punish the crimes committed by soldiers of the victorious RPF rebel force, which has been in power since July 1994. The nature of these crimes was not the same. It was not another genocide but rather repeated , large-scale massacres of the Hutu civilian population, acts that lawyers  would categorize as crimes against humanity or war crimes, depending on the circumstances. Some have called this the tribunal’s “second mandate”—a supplement to its genocide trials. From the outset, this second aspect has been considered essential in order for the international tribunal to appear impartial. “For justice to be seen by all to be fair, the International Tribunal for Rwanda must equally take a keen interest in reports of the human rights violations and other crimes by the RPF,” as Amnesty International’s legal advisor Christopher Keith Hall wrote in a letter to the tribunal’s first chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, on December 16, 1994, one month after the ICTR was established. There is no doubt about the RPF’s crimes during the war in 1994 and the ensuing months. “The RPF committed human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity,” acknowledged Rwanda’s chief prosecutor , Gerald Gahima, who had been considered an RPF “hard-liner” before falling out of favor with the party in 2003.1 However, these crimes were not nearly as well documented as those committed by the genocidaires. No independent observers had free access to the RPF’s side of the frontline. The crimes committed by its soldiers have been only partially reconstructed, and the process has been slow in coming and a sensitive issue. Moreover, there was a major concern after the genocide that caused some to retreat from insisting too much on the crimes committed by RPF soldiers: negation of the genocide. At the time, those responsible for the extermination of the Tutsis, such as Jean Kambanda, quickly got busy “cranking out the numbers.” The double genocide theory, publicly supported by French president François Mitterrand, was an attempt to reduce the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis and the Tutsi massacre of the Hutus into an equation. However, as historian Yves Ternon writes, “Comparativism carries the risk of trivialization, and that is one of the tools of negationism.”2 Given this risk, therefore, one of the first precautions the tribunal took was to do nothing. In order to thwart the negationists, it was thought that the RPF crimes should not be prosecuted until the genocide had been clearly tried. Although understandable at first, the postponement of these investigations proved to be fatal, and in reality, it was merely the beginning of the inevitable decision to renounce them. When Louise Arbour took over the OTP in September 1996, no efforts had been made to investigate RPF crimes, and little if any action was taken during her three years at the helm. This Canadian magistrate brought two essential elements to the prosecutor’s office: a clearer, more narrow focus on prosecuting the top genocide suspects, and a sense of integrity. Passionate, yet thoughtful, Arbour personified a rare pursuit of justice that was L i k e a F l i g...

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