The UN criminal court for Rwanda, which handed down two more life sentences for genocide this week, has become something of a political football in its nine-year history.
Between half a million and a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed over the course of 100 days from April to July in 1994 in a well-planned ethnic cleansing campaign overseen by the interim Hutu government.
In the immediate wake of the genocide, the United Nations set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, northern Tanzania, in November of the same year to try the key suspects in the massacres.
Relations between the ICTR and the Tutsi-led government that swept to power in Kigali in July 1994 got off to a bad start and have since swung between non-existent and chilly.
The inefficiency and sluggishness of the court, which took six years to close its first case, together with the release on technicalities of one key suspect in 1999 and the tribunal’s plans to indict some former Tutsi rebels who are now in government for war crimes, have added to Kigali’s hostility.
In nine years, the court has convicted only 16 prisoners and acquitted one among the 60 or so Rwandans held in the main detention center, despite a comfortable budget — $177-million for 2002-2003 — and about 900 employees including numerous permanent UN staff members.
The massacres began on April 7, 1994, the day after President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down in Kigali.
For the next 100 days, about one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists, according to the government.
The court, based in Arusha in the north of neighbouring Tanzania, is one of the first tribunals set up specificially to investigate the crime of genocide, as laid down by the international convention of December 9, 1948.
The maximum sentence the court can impose is life imprisonment and its mandate allows it to cover the alleged crimes against humanity and genocide committed in the year 1994 only in Rwanda and neighbouring countries by Rwandan citizens.
Its structure is broadly similar to that of its sister body, the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and will sit until 2008.
Until August this year, controversial Swiss judge Carla del Ponte was chief prosecutor for both courts, but the UN separated the jobs, appointing del Ponte to The Hague and replacing her in Arusha with Hassan Bubacar Jallow of Gambia.
The abrasive Del Ponte had upset the Rwandans by announcing her intention to investigate members of the Tutsi-led armed forces for atrocities they may have committed when they invaded Rwanda in the wake of the genocide.
The government of President Paul Kagame refused to cooperate with the investigation and sought her removal.
Unrepentant, Del Ponte fought tooth and nail to hold on to her double mandate and has made no attempt to play down poor relations between the Rwandan court and the government in Kigali.
The tribunal is headed by Norwegian judge Erick Mose, elected to the post in May this year.
The court’s main remit is to try accusations of genocide which is defined as an act ”committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group”.
But it also has the power to try crimes against humanity and, since 1997, acts of sexual violence.
Rwanda voted against UN resolution 955 which set up the court, claiming that the death penalty should have been within its power, that it should be able to investigate offences committed as far back as 1990 and that it should sit in Kigali.
The Rwandan authorities have instigated their own genocide trials and the most recent verdicts were handed down on Tuesday when 18 people were sentenced to terms ranging from seven to 25 years for their involvement in one of the single biggest massacres by Hutu militia and civilians of some 20 000 Tutsis who had taken refuge in a church complex in Nyarubuye.
On 18 June 2002, the Rwandan government launched the Gacaca justice system — based on traditional communal courts — in a bid to expedite trials for more than 100 000 genocide suspects who are held in the country’s congested prisons.
The Gacaca tribunals merge customary practice with a western, formal court structure. Rwandan national courts and the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, also conduct genocide trials. — Irin, Sapa-AFP