Forgotten Wars and Treaties, Volume 13 #6

RWANDA
So Far, Justice Means Only Prisons

Major Chola, who is a lawyer as well as a major, is shouting at his batman to fetch him one boot and one sock, for today it is his duty to judge nine soldiers charged with misconduct. Yesterday he hurt his foot, and he will therefore have to preside at the military trial in a flip-flop. In a dusty yard full of oil cans and surrounded by barbed wire, a bugle sounds the alarum, and the nine soldiers line up nervously. An adjutant has prepared each case. Major Chola will hear it and make his judgement. If the crime is serious enough, he will go over to the offending soldier, in his shiny boot and his flip-flop, and rip that soldier's badge right off his shoulder. That will be the end of the soldier's career, right there.

This is the way the Zambian UN troops, stationed temporarily in Rwanda, deal with crime. It may seem like summary justice, but it's possibly the most sophisticated justice system to be found in Rwanda today.

Coming up with a justice system to deal with the 70,000 people who the UN estimates were implicated in last year's genocide is a daunting and discouraging project. Currently the Rwandan justice system consists of putting people in jail (about 1,500 per week) and leaving them there. There are now 50,000 people in jail.

Ninety-nine per cent of them are accused of crimes of genocide, but not one has been tried. It is estimated that 300 people a month die in jail, of suffocation, dystentery or gangrene. In Kigali, for example, there are 10,000 detainees in a prison built to hold 2,000. In some prisons there as many as four people per square metre. The risk of an epidemic breaking out is, as the International Red Cross reported, "obviously extremely high and the death rate from such an eventuality does not bear thinking about."

"It's a macabre calculation on the part of the government," said exiled human rights worker Monique Mujawamariya. "Work it out! Soon the prisons will be empty." This way, what she calls the "culture of impunity" can continue unchallenged: "The culture of impunity in Rwanda is part of the culture of governance. There have always been people who were outside the law, beginning with the king and his close associates. All the governments since have identified with the king and kept the privileges of impunity."

Historian Ian Linden, author of Church and Revolution in Rwanda (1977), calls it a culture of entitlement, or "institutionalized discrimination by a small ruling class through command of the state apparatus, legislation and public policies." The elite customarily reserved privileges for those with an ethnic, regional or patronage relationship with the rulers.

The first step for a government to prove that it is seriously trying to break this habit would be to subject its own troops to justice, as Major Chola did with his bugle and his flip-flop. There have been military trials for theft and murder, but no Rwandan soldier has yet been convicted in connection with the Kibeho massacre in April 1995, when government troops killed between 338 and 4,000 people (the first figure being the Rwandan government's estimate, the second the UN's). The government's first gesture in this direction was made in September: a hundred of those who had killed returning villagers near Gisenyi were imprisoned.

"Yes, but a month ago 200 military prisoners were also let go," said Mujawamariya. "It's just throwing dust in the eyes of the international community." A proposal that Rwanda recruit foreign judges and prosecutors into the judicial system was made by the former justice minister, but "parliament kicked him out and cancelled the program," she said. "They said it would be a kind of recolonization."

Many of those accused of genocide are in refugee camps outside the country, especially in Tanzania and Zaïre. They fear reprisal killings by neighbours if they show their faces in their villages again.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda's vice president and defence minister, was a refugee himself for most of his life. In an address on the occasion of a mass burial at Mayunzwe, Kagame connected refugee returns firmly to punishment for the guilty: "Those Rwandans who have a responsibility for the massacres, who planned them, who killed people, every last one of these people must be punished....Let people not think that we don't want the refugees to come back to their country, and we do want them to, seriously, because we cannot have refugees outside Rwanda, and if we did we wouldn't be any better than the former governments who abandoned Rwandans to exile for dozens of years. But that doesn't mean that the right to come back to one's own country should be used to wipe out the guilt of those who have killed."

But stories travel fast between Rwanda and the camps, such as the one about the fourteen people just returned from the camps who were stoned and beaten to death in their home community in April this year (true), and stories of deaths in prison (also true). Kagame also knows that until a justice system is rumored to be working justly, the refugees won't come flocking home, and "welcome committees" will continue to take justice into their own hands.

The UN and other international bodies have decided that an international tribunal is the best way to deal with the genocide in Rwanda. The Rwandan judiciary doesn't have the personnel (80 per cent of the country's judges are dead or in exile), vehicles, communications equipment or even stationery to undertake such a project. In addition, genocide is a crime under international jurisdiction.

However, the international tribunal, which has not yet published a list of accused and has only got as far as naming its judges, will be held in Tanzania, not Rwanda. The reason for that, says Mujawamariya, is that the Rwandan penal code has a death penalty, and the UN cannot sponsor a tribunal that will result in death for the guilty.

"I would have liked it to be in Rwanda," she said. "Seeing the process going on would have been like therapy for them, and served to get out their anger and bitterness. It would have been direct evidence of a rupture with the impunity of the past."

An international tribunal requires international cooperation. But Kenya's President Daniel arap Moi announced in October that his government will arrest any representative of the international tribunal who comes to Kenya to carry out investigations or arrests. Can President Mobutu of Zaïre, another close ally of the former regime, be far behind?

At best, an international tribunal will deal with only a small number of individuals, and will be remote from the majority of rural Rwandans who were inundated with lies on their radios. Suspects need to be brought to court before their own people. Justice must be linked to truth-telling, which must be an intrinsically Rwandan process. It was a deliberate ploy on the part of the Hutu extremists to implicate as many people as possible in the bloodshed, so that there would be a kind of national collective complicity. At this point telling the truth thus risks making enemies all around.

Hutu refugees say that the truth cannot be told in Rwanda when crucial witnesses are elsewhere. Any court should also consider the four years of civil war preceding the events of 1994, they say, during which rebel Tutsis went on their own killing sprees. Can Rwandans even talk about justice yet, even among friends? It's asking people to declare themselves in a struggle that is far from over.

Rwanda has passed out of the media limelight, and international organizations have few creative ideas to contribute. The International Red Cross and the UN, for example, are helping Rwanda build more prisons.

Louisa Blair is an associate editor of Compass. She visited Rwanda in the summer of 1995.