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20 3 At the First Judgment A: Is the natural tendency to obey or to oppose? A: To obey. questioning of Jean-Paul Akayesu by Judge Lennart Aspegren, March 13, 1998 Suddenly, in a matter of days, the judicial machine finally creaked into motion. Jean-Paul Akayesu’s trial had started fourteen months earlier, and, as Judge Laïty Kama, president of the tribunal , had persuaded himself, “a trial is conducted in order to be concluded.” Twenty-eight witnesses came to testify against the former bourgmestre of Taba, and twelve testified on behalf of the defense. There was no material evidence. Events in this small commune in central Rwanda from April to June 1994 were reconstructed solely on the basis of witness testimony. There is nothing more abundant than human testimony. There is also nothing more fragile and more easily influenced. Thus, as this first case was coming to a close before the international tribunal, a legitimate doubt still remained about what really happened to Akayesu during those weeks of terror. It had been established that he was part of the moderate opposition to the Habyarimana regime. It had been established that in the two weeks following the beginning of the massacres on April 6, 1994, the bourgmestre had valiantly protected his district from the militia attacks with the help of only eight commune police officers. Everything changed after April 18. On that day, the government organized a major meeting of all the local authorities (bourgmestres and préfets). Up till then, some regions had been spared from the massacres. But the day after this  meeting, the genocide began to spread to the remaining pockets of the country where the local officials had been resisting. According to the prosecutor, Jean-Paul Akayesu did a complete about-face after attending the meeting, joined the killers’ cause, and oversaw the genocide of his fellow Tutsi countrymen and women. The defense argued that following this fateful day, Interahamwe militias took power in Taba under the command of their local leader, Silas Kubwimana. From that point on, Akayesu was allegedly no more than a mere bystander, trying to save his own life and the lives of others whenever he could. How could he have done more with only eight police officers, argued his lawyer, when Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded approximately 2,500 UN forces, had testified on the stand that even he had been incapable of fighting the “force of evil”? Akayesu’s moment of truth came on March 12–13, 1998. The former bourgmestre had asked to testify last in his trial, as did nearly all his fellow detainees after him. With virtually no direction from his lawyer, he had ample time to tell his story. His account was lively, dense, and rambling, as though he could no longer contain himself after two years of confinement in his cell. First, he spoke of the period from 1991 to 1993, when the multiparty system spread rapidly , exacerbating the crisis. He described the deteriorating and violent relations between the opposition parties and the presidential party. From a legal point of view, the testimony had no value. In terms of the political context at the time, it was enlightening. Originally a school principal, Jean-Paul Akayesu became bourgmestre in April 1993—a post to which, he said, he had never aspired. One year later, on the morning of April 7, 1994, he learned that the president of the Rwandan Republic was dead. The evening before, Juvénal Habyarimana’s airplane had been shot down by missiles upon its descent into Kigali. There were no survivors. The assassination of the head of state, a Hutu who had been in power for twenty-one years, was to be the event that triggered the genocide of the Tutsis. Starting at dawn the next day, the killings began in the capital, where numerous roadblocks were set up and manned by soldiers, militiamen, simple civilians, or a combination of the three. At these barriers, Tutsis were singled out based on identification cards or for the random crime of merely looking like a Tutsi and were summarily executed. “A roadblock is a small pile of stones in the middle of the road and a big pile of bodies on the side of the road,” wrote André Sibomana , a well-known Rwandan human rights activist, in a glacial tone.1 “In such a situation, you have to see what needs to...

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