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102 11 Closing Up Shop The odds are good that this tribunal, whose judges were just appointed by the United Nations General Assembly, will be able to pull off its mission , given the expertise of the people who make it up, along with the caliber of the prosecutor who is assisting them. Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Rwanda: Le sang Hutu est-il rouge? L ouise Arbour had never been so well received in Rwanda. In 1997 the chief prosecutor had been booed at in the streets of Kigali. Survivors accused her of not wanting to prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide, and the Rwandan government called for her resignation. But in this first week of August 1999, that was all just a bad, distant memory. This time, Arbour was hailed, thanked, and honored. The president of the supreme court, the ministers of justice and foreign affairs, and the prime minister all met with her, as did the man who had really held all the power in Rwanda since 1994, General Paul Kagame, the uncontested leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The chief prosecutor had endured so much humiliation from Rwandans over the past three years that she gladly allowed herself to fall under the spell of this unusual outpouring of warmth and cordiality. Touched, she praised the improvement in relations between the Rwandan authorities and the ICTR and suggested taking a hard look at the possibility of holding some of the tribunal’s hearings in Kigali. “I think that there is recognition of the progress that has been made in the past three years and an understanding of the direction to take in the future. I am convinced that the year to come will be one in which the ICTR’s successes will likely be remarkable,” she promised .1 This visit to Rwanda was a crowning point for her. It would also be her last. One month later, the Canadian prosecutor stepped down from her position and was replaced by Swiss prosecutor Carla del Ponte.  Beyond her initial emotion, Louise Arbour was not wrong. Relations between the UN tribunal and Rwanda had never been so good. Kigali had even decided to appoint an ambassador to the tribunal. “At the beginning, the Rwandan government criticized the tribunal’s results, a criticism that was justi fied. We now believe that the tribunal has made remarkable progress, even though there are still some areas that need to be fixed. This can be done more appropriately and more rapidly if we work alongside the tribunal,” declared the Rwandan diplomat upon being installed in Tanzania.2 At the same time, there was renewed optimism following the change in presidency that had just occurred at the tribunal. Navanethem Pillay had succeeded Laïty Kama, giving rise to the hope for revival and the promise of accelerating the pace of trials. This was something that had been the subject of discussion for two years but was threatening to become simply rhetoric, similar to when a big corporation declares that it needs to be a good corporate citizen. The Arusha-based tribunal had a growing number of accused behind bars, but the trials were not making any headway. Alfred Musema’s was the only trial to be opened in two years. While Louise Arbour was saying her good-byes to the Rwandans, President Pillay had convened everyone else— judges, prosecutors, and lawyers—for an unprecedented judicial marathon, smack in the middle of August. The goal was to eliminate the procedural obstacles, deal with them more swiftly and resolutely, and set dates for what was hoped to be a large number of trials sure to be held in the fall. The tribunal administration moved into high gear. Hearings were held at a brisk pace. Ten cases were examined in one week. Obsessed with the sudden desire to move quickly, the judges trampled on certain basic principles of what legal experts like to call an adversarial proceeding, that is, giving the prosecution and the defense the possibility of presenting their arguments on the basis of the same information. Having dawdled for over a year, the judges now decided to move full speed ahead. The judicial machine creaked, groaned, warmed up, began to chug, and then conked out. Efforts to organize major trials as announced failed again. All the top cases on the court’s docket that had been in the offing for at least two years were now blocked. Defense lawyers filed a flurry of motions before the appeals chamber...

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