In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Prologue Standing over six feet five inches tall, Laïty Kama had a bird’s-eye view of the world, yet seemed to falter a little as he looked down over it. In court, he would sometimes rest his head on his right hand, so long and slender that it covered his entire forehead. In this weary posture , the Senegalese judge would mumble or stiffen his face in a gloomy, sullen pout. When he did crack a smile, as wide as an ocean sky, his small round eyes would light up. At fifty-six years old, Laïty Kama had risen through the ranks of the public prosecutor’s office in Senegal to become the prosecutor at the Dakar court of appeal. Now, he was one of six judges elected by the United Nations General Assembly to sit at the ICTR, which was tasked with punishing the main perpetrators of the crimes committed in the hills of Rwanda in 1994, and he had been chosen by his peers to preside over this tribunal. On May 30, 1996, two other judges were seated beside him in court. To his right was Lennart Aspegren, a sixty-five-year-old Swedish judge with expertise in public administration and governance. To his left was fifty-five-year-old Navanethem Pillay, who had made a name for herself as a lawyer under apartheid . She had just been appointed to sit on the South African Supreme Court when her name was proposed to the UN as a judge for the tribunal set up in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha. Kama’s authoritative manner during the hearing was somewhat brusque. “Mr. Akayesu, how do you plead—guilty or not guilty?” he asked in a deep, gruff voice. “Not guilty, Mr. President.”1 Jean-Paul Akayesu had been arrested seven months earlier while seeking refuge in Zambia. He had just been transferred to Arusha along with two fellow countrymen, Clément Kayishema and Georges Rutaganda. These men were the first accused to be brought before the international tribunal. They  were middle aged—in their forties or nearly so—though their weary faces bore witness to their two years in exile. All three were from Rwanda’s largest ethnic community, the Hutus. All three were suspected of helping to organize the genocide of Rwanda’s main minority group, the Tutsis. Rather tall and slender, Jean-Paul Akayesu was light skinned with delicate features and almond-shaped, almost slanted eyes. He was the exact opposite of the stereotypical image of the stocky, pudgy Hutu. He was fast becoming the judicial symbol of an ideology that had led Rwandans to exterminate fellow Rwandans on the basis of such irrational stereotypes. And yet his appearance betrayed these simplistic ideas. He seemed to have acquired this newfound notoriety as the emblem of Hutu ideology despite his non-Hutu appearance. Akayesu was also the least likely of the three suspects. Up until July 1994, he was only a bourgmestre (the equivalent of a “mayor” in the vocabulary inherited from Belgian colonization) of a small commune in central Rwanda. Three months earlier, when the massacres started in Rwanda’s capital in April 1994, this well-liked teacher and novice politician, with no history of extremism , allegedly did an about-face, turning against the Tutsi population in his commune and orchestrating their extermination—approximately two thousand killed, according to the Office of the Prosecutor, which indicted him. The impression one gets of a man suspected of murder makes you realize the power of prejudice. Suddenly it seems difficult to see him as anything but guilty. But Jean-Paul Akayesu, indirectly accused of two thousand murders, defied expectation. At first glance, he could instill a shadow of a doubt. Not Clément Kayishema. This former prefect of the Kibuye region in western Rwanda had hunched shoulders and a slightly stooped back that made him look guilty in spite of himself. There was a rare intensity in his round, deep-set eyes, and he had an incandescent, mechanical gaze that caused people to look away instinctively. Accused of having directly or indirectly caused the death of tens of thousands of people, Clément Kayishema did not challenge the public opinion’s preconceptions. He magnified them. He also pleaded not guilty. The third man, shabbily dressed in a faded green jacket, looked intimidated . Yet on paper, Georges Rutaganda had the highest profile of the three. In April 1994 he was one...

Share