OWN CORRESPONDENT, Arusha | Wednesday 7.00PM.
THE United Nations war crimes tribunal for Rwanda has become the first international court to hand down a conviction for genocide, using legislation originating 50 years ago. The court has also defined rape as an act of genocide when women are assaulted because they are members of a targeted ethnic group.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, found former mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of inciting the massacre of more than 2,000 Tutsis in 1994.
Court President Judge Laity Kama of Senegal said the judgement is based on clear evidence of Akayesu’s direct involvement in the killings when he was mayor of Taba Commune in central Rwanda.
Kama said Akayesu, a member of the Hutu majority, personally took part in killing people who had fled to his office for refuge during the massacre. Akayesu was also found guilty of ordering the members of the Hutu militia, the Interhamwe, to rape Tutsi women before killing them.
Akayesu’s case was the tribunal’s first substantive trial. The verdict was the first conviction for genocide by a UN court since new codes on war and war crimes were drawn up as Geneva Conventions after World War II and the Nuremberg trials of Nazis.
In its lengthy judgement, the ICT stated that the genocide was led by Hutu extremists against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority between April and July 1994, during which up to 800,000 people including moderate Hutus were killed. “There was an intention to wipe out the Tutsi group in its entirety, since even newborn babies were not spared.”
The tribunal dismissed other charges filed under the Geneva Convention on the conduct of war as the former mayor was not directly involved in the wider conflict of the time. Akayesu faces life in prison when he is sentenced at the end of this month.
He is only the second man found guilty under the international laws against genocide written 50 years ago in response to the Nazi holocaust. The first man convicted under the 1948 statutes – the former prime minister in the extremist Hutu regime, Jean Kambanda – pleaded guilty in May. Because the court upheld a verdict on the basis of his guilty plea, there was no trial as such.
Kambanda is expected to appear in court on Thursday for legal arguments ahead of his sentencing on Friday.