No justice for the victims of the genocide.

last updated 8 January 2015

Rwanda

Oscar Kimanuka

The international tribunal for Rwanda is a failure, said Oscar Kimanuka in the Nairobi East African. It’s been more than 10 years since the court was set up to try the perpetrators of the horrific 1994 genocide, in which thousands of Hutus armed with machetes hacked 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, to death over three blood-drenched months. Back then we hoped that the victims’ families “would be granted an opportunity to confront those responsible for what happened to them,” and to see the killers brought to justice. Instead, the Rwandan people were made into mere “spectators” as the international community took over. The tribunal is located far away, in Tanzania, and its pace is excruciatingly slow. Nearly $1 billion has been spent so far, yet only a handful of the killers have been convicted. And now we hear that, instead of the 700-odd ringleaders who were originally to be tried, fewer than 100 people will be prosecuted by the time the tribunal winds up in 2008. Faced with such a colossal waste of time and money, and a lack of principled international commitment to justice, the Rwandan people can only “look on in disbelief.”