8 October 2001
editorial
Johannesburg — IN A matter of weeks after the suicide attacks on the US which left about 6000 nearly 7000 people dead on September 11, Washington and its allies are frantically trying to convince the world that they have a water-tight case against Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect.
It looks highly unlikely, though, that Bin Laden, the Saudi Arabia-born leader of the Al-Qaeda organisation who is the "guest" of the Taliban in Afghanistan, will face trial, as the allies are already baying for his blood. They, if we are to believe reports, might just be eliminated in the "war against terror".
In the process of executing Operation Infinite Justice, the relatives of the victims of September 11 will feel that justice, or some sort of justice, will have been delivered. After all, justice delayed is justice denied.
The US and its allies understand this concept very well. All the so-called evidence against Bin Laden appears to support although more importantly, it does not yet prove the theory that he did it.
Still, the need for justice is the overriding concern behind the global coalition for what is increasingly becoming a search for Bin Laden.
The drama, broadcast in networks across the globe, is obscuring the search for justice for millions of survivors of Rwanda's genocide of 1994. Millions of mainly Tutsis relatives of the victims have waited nearly six years for some kind of justice.
Roughly, the story began on April 6 1994, when Juvenal Habyarimana Rwanda's president, a Hutu was killed after his plane was shot down. This sparked off one of the deadliest cases of massacre in modern Africa; about 800000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by Rwanda's army and Interhamwe militia in a space of 100 days.
The international community, under the leadership of the United Nations, did nothing to stop this genocide. Even after admitting its failure to help stop the genocide, the hand-wringing global village has done precious little to help speed up the process of prosecuting the big fish who planned the genocide.
A few years ago the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was set up after a UN Security Council resolution. This tribunal was to prosecute those guilty of serious crimes that is, those who planned and ordered genocide. A handful are being tried in a slow process in the Tanzanian city of Arusha.
Even though the tribunal is hobbled by myriad barriers, including the cumbersome translation (from English-French to Kinyarwandan language and back) and sloppy preparation of cases in the beginning, it has scored some successes: the tribunal is the first to have tried and sentenced a prime minister (Jean Kambanda).
Slowly but surely, it is overcoming its teething problems.
Back in Kigali, courts have tried and sentenced to death at least 500 of the bigger fish in the genocide case.
While the pace of prosecutions is set to gain speed, new concerns are surfacing about the fairness of the trials. Amnesty International's latest report says the past year saw an increase in group trials, which reportedly led to breaches of fair trial procedures. "Some witnesses were intimidated, and some trials were repeatedly postponed".
More than 100000 suspects have languished in prison for months, some without any evidence against them. Others would have been children during the genocide.
To help clear up the backlog of cases, though, government this week revived the gacaca system a form of traditional people's justice. At the weekend people voted for 250000 such lay judges to speed up justice and, hopefully, reconciliation.
These "judges", who will be trained, will "hear" less serious cases in the genocide the foot soldiers, as it were, or those who did not play a leading role in the killings.
While the gacaca system may help clear the backlog when it becomes operational next year, it has its own problems. The displacement of people after the genocide could easily see some of the perpetrators being elected into the system, resulting in the intimidation of witnesses.
The system, like in SA's townships in the mid-1980s, may easily be hijacked to become vehicles of personal vendettas.
Human rights activists point out, quite rightly, that the main concern is the fairness of the system particularly, protecting the accused's rights.
The other key weakness of the reintroduction of the gacaca system is that its architects believe, rather wrongly, that disclosure of what happened will help victims heal and, by implication, aid reconciliation. Closest models of the gacaca such as SA's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Nigeria's Oputa panel have not provided unassailable evidence that reconciliation is advanced by disclosure.
More worrying is that all the parallel judicial processes currently under way are not designed to deal with alleged human rights abuses for example, the killing and torture of returning refugees by present rulers of Rwanda.
Neither will the international community be called to account for its failure to stop the genocide from taking place; better still, how humanity can be spared such horrors in future.
It is a pity the world finds the search for justice to thousands, though vital, more riveting than that owed to millions of Rwandans.
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