Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (review)

In 1994, "Hutu Power" extremists in Rwanda massacred approximately 800,000 Tutsis and 50,000 moderate Hutus. This genocide has been subject to widespread media, legal, and academic attention. Academic scholarship has mainly focused on sociopolitical, cultural, and economic factors that led to these horrific events (e.g., Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). There have been works on victim narratives (Jean Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life, the Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak, London: Serpent's Tail Books, 2005) and analyses of collective memory (Susanne Buckley-Zistel, "Remembering to Forget, Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Co-existence in Post-genocide Rwanda," Africa, 72, no. 2 [2006]). While there has been research on post-genocide justice processes (Philip Johnson Clark and Zachary Daniel Kaufman, After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond, London: Hurst & Company, 2008), the nonlegal scholarship about the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has been scarce. This book is therefore a welcome account of the inner workings of the ICTR.

However, this is not an oral history book and OHR readers will be disappointed that Cruvellier provides few quotations from testimonies, nor tells us anything about his methodology. But as an oral historian who has interviewed Rwandan refugees in South Africa and as a teacher of trauma, memory, and genocide studies, I found value in this book. Researchers working on perpetrator studies or transitional justice and African historians working on the Great Lakes Region would find it useful. In his introduction, Cruvellier asserts that:

To recount the trial of these men accused of the genocide . . . is to retell three histories that intermingle and collide with one another: history with a capital H, the history of Rwanda, which provides the backdrop and the foundations; individual history of each person accused of the 'crime of all crimes,' which knits the story together; and the history of justice, of a new kind of international tribunal in search of its own existence and legitimacy.

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This suggests that a historical narrative will follow but that is not the case. Rather, as a journalist at the ICTR, he provides fascinating insights into the creation of the court in the shadow of the genocide. Remember, Brigadier Romeo Daillaire, the head of the United Nations (UN) observer mission in Rwanda, repeatedly warned the UN prior to the genocide that Hutu Power extremists were stockpiling arms, organizing death squads, and planning a major operation. That the UN ignored warnings from its own representative and that it reduced its troops early in the genocide is probably the most shameful episode in the history of the UN. Note also the U.S. State Department's use of the term "acts of genocide" to avoid direct involvement to prevent the unfolding genocide. In this context, read Samantha Power's searing critique of U.S. foreign policy responses to twentieth-century genocides (A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, 2002).

International diplomacy is a crucial context for why the UN, in its attempt "to repent," set-up the ICTR and placed it in Arusha, Tanzania (and not in Rwanda), in November 1994. But Cruvellier's account of the genocide and the diplomatic bungles during it is far too cursory. He more usefully describes the initial trials of key figures like Jean-Paul Akayesu, Jean Kambada, Georges Rutaganda, and Colonel Bagasora (now acknowledged to have led the genocide) and reveals how political interference tainted the tribunal and the legal and moral framework on which it was established. Cruvellier describes the ICTR in the 1990s as a ". . . spineless and oversensitive administration (the UN is a kingdom for petty tyrants and the obsequious) [that] wanted to keep at bay anyone it considered to be an unruly killjoy" (41).

He also outlines the Rwandan's government's gacaca court process set-up in 2003, which blends formal and traditional justice practices at...