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83 10 Be like the Arab (Reason to Doubt) At the end of the defense presentation, the words of a poem by Longfellow came to mind. I thought to myself that the prosecutor should “Be like the Arab / Who in the night / Quietly folds his tent / And as silently steals away.” But that is not the case. Steven Kay, lawyer for Alfred Musema, June 28, 1999 Atrial, especially one that lasts as long as those before the UN tribunals, can be a numbing process. To guarantee their impartiality, the proceedings must take place under the anesthesia of rules of procedure and legal decorum. Form and codes are all-important. The vocabulary is abstruse and disembodied. The dynamics of the legal battle between the parties emphasize this cold distancing of what is really at stake, shifting it to a place shielded from emotion and feeling. The product of the trial—the judgment of an individual—can also, therefore, appear to be technical , as though it were necessary to downplay the toll it takes on a person’s life. Paradoxically, in Arusha this effect was multiplied by the social promiscuity of the various parties involved in the trial and by their shared life in the ICTR’s little world (whether they rejected it, embraced it, feared it, or longed to be part of it). Over the months and over the years, people became familiar characters in a deceptive play in which they were all simply going willy-nilly about their lives, which in most cases were actually pretty good. A verdict is the complete opposite. It’s short; it’s rapid; it’s an instant, a word. And everything that preceded it—the warrants, interrogations, motions , replies, investigations, hearings, witnesses, cross-examinations, delays,  adjournments, briefs, arguments, closing remarks—is swallowed up. Evaporated . Paperwork. Poof ! Civilized to an extreme, silent and disciplined, never protesting , never provocative, with utmost deference to the court, Alfred Musema allowed the professional confrontation around his “case” to unfold in accordance with the rules. Of course, in the final days of his trial, when prosecutor Jane Adong speculated that he was playing with the court, he reminded her, ever so courteously, “This is about my life; I am not playing around.” But like a quick needle prick, this reminder of what was truly at stake was not enough to “un-numb” the proceedings. On January 27, 2000, everything happened very quickly. Alfred Musema was found guilty of genocide in Bisesero and sentenced to life in prison. On paper, the case differed from preceding ones on two points only: the trial took only one year from start to finish (a record for the tribunal), and in addition to genocide and extermination (the law draws a subtle distinction between the two), the defendant was the first to be convicted of direct rape.1 For those who followed this trial, however, the matter was entirely different . It was a case of bad conscience, a murky zone between the illusory certainty of facts and the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Consequently, the verdict in this case—an instant, a word—was that moment where one had to either abandon one’s doubts in favor of the judges’ sovereign decision or acknowledge that the judges had emancipated themselves from the law. Every day for a week during the month of May 1999, the defendant would leave his seat and slowly walk over to take the witness stand with his hands clasped in front of him. Before reaching his spot, Musema would systematically pause for a second to bow obsequiously to the judges, who, for that brief moment, felt they had a duty not to notice anything. Before he sat down, he would always turn and give a discrete little bow to the prosecutors, who made a habit of looking busy in that fleeting instant. For a person accused by twentytwo witnesses of committing the worst crimes imaginable—murder, mass attacks , rape, collective “fumigation,” all without interruption for nine weeks (from April 14 to June 22, 1994, more precisely)—Alfred Musema was infuriatingly polite. On the witness stand, where he always maintained civility, it was clear that underneath the patina of his suave personality was a determined, highly intelligent person. The man was tough. He was sharp and perceptive. His French was precise, even rich. He rarely misused the idiomatic expressions that are so often poetically distorted in Rwandan French. Always focused, his answers were well thought out. He often removed his glasses when...

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