Chris McGreal in Arusha, Tanzania
LUC DE TEMMERMAN’S defence strategy is as brazen as the crime itself. Standing before the first genocide trial since Nuremburg, the Belgian lawyer denied there ever was any slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsis. And if there was a genocide, then the world has got it all wrong. The real victims were the Hutus.
“It is going to come out clearly that it is not Hutus who are guilty of this so-called genocide,” De Temmerman said before the trial. “We are convinced there was no genocide. It was a situation of mass killings in a state of war where everyone was killing their enemies.” The international tribunal on Rwanda opened briefly in Arusha, Tanzania last week and was postponed for a month. But in those two days, the court and survivors were given a disturbing insight into defence tactics when the trials resume.
Leaders of the deposed Hutu extremist regime have disingenuously tried portray the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in 1994 as a spontaneous tribal uprising which they tried to prevent, not encourage. De Temmerman is rewriting history differently. He is the most vocal and belligerent of the defence lawyers, and he makes no bones about the contempt in which he holds the international tribunal.
“The goal here is political, not to find justice and truth,” he told the court. Twice during a single hearing, the judges rapped him over the knuckles after he swore in French. Afterwards, De Temmerman accused the judges of being part of a vast international conspiracy against Hutus and said he was going to use a Belgian law to charge them with crimes against humanity.
The stocky, puffy-faced Belgian lawyer represents Georges Rutaganda, the vice- president of the notorious interahamwe Hutu militia which spearheaded the genocide. Rutaganda is dying of an undisclosed disease, widely speculated to be Aids, and is unlikely to make it to a full trial. De Temmerman brushed aside prosecution evidence that the former interahamwe leader despatched Tutsis to barricades where the militia tortured, raped and cut their victims to pieces.
“Mr Rutaganda is accused of sending Tutsis to roadblocks that were guarded by the interahamwe. Fine. You can send people to roadblocks and they won’t necessarily be killed,” he claimed.
An incredulous prosecution lawyer scoffed loudly. Others wondered just how many Tutsis had survived the barricades.
But De Temmerman is in court to defend more than just his sick client. He has long been counsel to the family of the slain Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose assassination launched the genocide. Although Habyarimana is dead, he and his family are also very much on trial for their role in setting the stage for genocide.
Among other things, De Temmerman is keen to push the theory that Habyarimana was assassinated by a French mercenary in league with Tutsi rebels. More sober minds believe the president was murdered by extreme Hutus.
But above all, the Belgian lawyer is intent on challenging the very basis of the charge. “The tribunal must establish what genocide is. What are we doing here today?” he remarked to the judges. While at times claiming there was no genocide, he is equally comfortable with another form of revisionism – that the victims were Hutus not Tutsis. “There are a million people dead, but who are they? They are 800 000 Hutus and 200 000 Tutsis. Everyone was killing but the real victims are the Hutus. So they’ve got this so-called genocide all wrong,” he claimed outside the court.
Other defence lawyers are none too comfortable with their colleague’s tactics. Johan Scheers, who represents the first of the accused to go on trial, not only believes the genocide took place but says he is not yet convinced of his client’s innocence. Still, Scheers has adopted his bulldozing approach. Last week he accused the prosecution of withholding evidence and threatened to walk off the case unless he was given more time to prepare his defence of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. And he shares De Temmerman’s scepticism that there can be a fair trial. “They have to convict Akayesu. He is the first one to go on trial so they can’t possibly let him go,” Scheers said.