Victoria Brittain
The former prime minister of Rwanda has become the first person to plead guilty to charges relating to the 1994 genocide in which a million people were killed within three months.
At the United Nations’s tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, last week Jean Kambanda admitted genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, complicity in genocide and two charges of crimes against humanity.
Kambanda is one of the few leaders of the genocide caught on film. As well as mobilising killers in his own area of Butare, he was active in propaganda, in raising international support for the genocidal government he headed and, later, in the camps in Zaire, in planning a return to Rwanda to complete the genocide.
His admission of guilt breaks with the collective denial of the other key genocide suspects held in Arusha, who recently published a document claiming no genocide took place.
Kambanda, one of two dozen leaders held by the tribunal, is kept apart from the other prisoners for his own safety because he was known to be preparing to co-operate with the prosecution and to give evidence against former colleagues. Other witnesses have been killed for their testimony.
Kambanda faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor for the Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals, said Kambanda’s guilty plea represented the most significant element of hope for reconciliation in Rwanda. “The guilty plea is not the result of any plea bargaining … There has been no agreement with respect to the appropriate sentence.”
n A detailed warning of impending genocide in Rwanda, three months before hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, was effectively dismissed by a UN office then headed by Kofi Annan, the present secretary general, an article in the New Yorker magazine alleges.
UN peacekeepers were told not to intervene in 1994.
The warnings came from Major-General Romeo Dallaire, Annan’s commanding officer in the field.
Annan rejected the accusations, blaming the paralysis of the UN’s peacekeeping in 1994 on a lack of political will, not a lack of information.