Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

2. The Eagle Eye

15 2 The Eagle Eye People were slipping brown-paper envelopes under my door alleging fraud and conspiracy. It was a mess. Louise Arbour, prosecutor, in The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle Richard Goldstone had to be replaced. After three years of dealing with all the start-up problems as the first prosecutor of the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, he was stepping down. Names of candidates began to circulate. Among them was Louise Arbour, a forty-eight-year-old judge in Ottawa. Arbour was a discreet person totally unknown in advocacy and political circles. Consequently, everyone started digging up her past. It was a disaster. In Canada, she had turned women’s groups against her by declaring unconstitutional a law precluding use of a rape victim’s sexual past as a means of defense. Worse still, after being appointed to the Ontario appeals court, she and a majority of her fellow judges upheld the acquittal of a Hungarian man accused of war crimes, solely on the grounds that this was not a prosecutable offense under Canadian law. To top it all off, Judge Arbour also granted prisoners the right to vote. This clearly worried representatives of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) community, which was rallying behind the UN tribunals. They felt it was urgent to sound the alarm. “A flurry of faxes to New York explained why Arbour was an enemy of human rights and unworthy of the position. American agencies reacted quickly with a campaign to stop the appointment. The Working Group on Human Rights of Women sent out a fax, asking anyone who cared to tell the powers that be to hold off on the Arbour appointment,” recounted Canadian journalist Carol Off.1
16 T h e E a g l e E y e Madeleine Albright was the new U.S. secretary of state but had been the U.S. ambassador to the UN back when the Rwandan tribunal was established. After she expressed concern about Arbour’s candidacy, the Canadian ambassador to the UN arranged a private meeting between the two. The closed-door session lasted only fifteen minutes, but when she left, Arbour, a jurist who was more rigorous than rebellious, had the support of the world’s leading power. “The complaints about Arbour kept coming in, but Albright was prepared to ignore them. In fact, it was precisely because Arbour had no history of activism that she was attractive to Albright. Arbour represented no cause. She might actually win unanimous approval by the Security Council.”2 Louise Arbour took up her post as prosecutor on October 1, 1996. “But from the moment Arbour arrived, she suspected that the UN was not interested in war crimes trials at all. It was interested in the appearance of war crimes trials,” wrote Off. “Louise Arbour went to Africa to take stock of what she had inherited in the fall of 1996. She was overwhelmed. She had thought her job was to investigate a travesty of war, but she found she had a travesty of bureaucracy.”3 The OTP in Kigali lacked strategy, discipline, and coherence. In fact, the entire tribunal administration, the so-called Registry, was in serious crisis. New York assured Arbour that this was not going to last. Change came a few months later in the form of an investigative report by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services. The report noted that “in the Tribunal’s Registry not a single administrative area [finance, procurement, personnel, security and general services] functioned effectively,” and concluded that “key administrators in the Registry and Office of the Prosecutor did not effectively fulfil their responsibilities .”4 In the euphemistic language of the UN, it read like satire. On the basis of this report, the UN took measures that were extremely rare for this international organization: the registrar and the deputy prosecutor were both forced to resign. Kofi Annan had just been appointed UN secretarygeneral with the backing of the United States on the promise of reforming an institution drowning under the weight of bureaucratic waste and incompetence . Annan saw this as an opportunity to reassure those who had put him in charge of the administration that had produced him. For Arbour, meanwhile, it was an opportunity to reorganize her office. The Rwandan government, for its part, did not wait for the report to be published before lambasting the tribunal. Gerald Gahima promptly stated, “It would be preferable to dissolve the ICTR completely...