Rwanda tribunal

Maureen Therese Anderson manders at midway.uchicago.edu
Mon Jul 19 14:16:54 PDT 1999


Joe,

I can see why you found Phil Taylor's speech on the ICTR rousing. He addresses compelling issues, and he participated in a very fraught process riddled with abuses and ineptitudes. And Taylor seems like a very sharp guy, with humane intuitions.

He also seems very ignorant on several matters. This and his glib dismissals make many of his characterizations misleading in ways that parallel the facile posturing he rightly criticizes in others.

I'm no specialist on tribunals either. And from what little I know of this one I'm no fan on how it's been working. By widespread consensus for the first 18 months or so the internal workings of the ICTR were a total mess. Very easy target, with lots of inequities, manipulations and general mismanagement that Taylor rightfully draws attention to. Since that time many operations of the Tribunal have apparently been restructured, with completely new legal strategies, manners of collecting testimony, and people at the top. Serious problems remain, but it would have been fairer if Taylor had conveyed something of the court's evolution in time.

Similarly Taylor gives no sense of the complexity, even just on the juridical level, of what the court was dealing with. Pioneering a juridical system responsive to Common Law systems, the Napoleonic Code, and African functioning legal systems and protocol (in all their variability even in a small country like Rwanda), while proceeding in three official languages (English, French, Kinyarwanda) in a poorly-equiped Kiswahili-phone country, is no simple undertaking. Again, this is not to explain away the abuses Taylor witnessed, but it should also be understood as the complex and evolving process that it is.

Besides ignoring the tough juridical issues, Taylor's analysis ignores both local social norms and the immediate political milieu that people were testifying in. So Taylor breaks out in a rash when dealing with the infamous formalities of Rwandan social norms. (Fine. Lots of Rwandans break out in rashes around aggressive, pushy, impatient North American styles of speech and interpretion as well.) The theatrics of Rwandan oral circumlocution is apparently joked about by Rwandans, too. Taylor's lampooning of the Rwandan linguist and the various witnesses is a pretty good parody of the society's discreteness in formal discourse, including that in public interaction Rwandans tend not to answer questions that directly implicate another. But his audience is unaware of these normative differences so the witnesses are uniformly characterized as unreliably, doltishly, wishy-washy.

More alarmingly, he shows no sensitivity to the political context in which witnesses were testifying. The situation is that if a witness were to say that they been at a certain (required) communal meeting, they might well risk implicating themselves in the eyes of current regime. ...So of course what you end up with are lots of required communal meetings, where no one was there, but everyone knows what was said and what went on. And so on. This all makes for an exceedingly laborious consensus-gathering process, to be sure. Taylor has no patience for it and apparently prefers no inquiry at all.

And by the way, every Rwandan in that courtroom, even that funny linguist of such refined contextual nuance, knew precisely what Inkotanyi and Inyenzi refer to. They were not exactly being sent out to kill "cockroaches" as if on some public hygiene squad! And to understand that elementary fact you don't have to be an expert in the "psychology of the Rwandan mind" (as Taylor gratuitously dismisses Des Forges in a characterization she'd never accept of what she does) any more than you'd need a North America expert to tell you that if a crowd of Chicagoans witnessed the Bears defeat the Lions in Soldiers Field that they had not been witnessing zoological combat. (Actually, don't get me started...)

And then there's Hillary. A deliciously easy target. Who wouldn't want to criticize all the publicity seekers waltzing into Arusha, doing their grandstanding and pronouncement-making with minimal knowledge of the complexities before them.

But it is abundantly possible to make fun of Hillary without disparaging the complex issues linked to her trip. It appeared at times that through Hillary's grandstanding Taylor was disparaging the very concept of rape as a war crime. If so I'd be open to hearing his arguments.

Moreover charges against Akayesu (Taylor's client) over the use of rape as an element of systematic torture were in no way whipped up on the spot as a result of Hillary's visit. The opposite. Hillary came precisely because this was the first time sexual violence was being presented in a judicial proceeding as a crime against humanity. Long before Hillary had ever heard of the ICTR, the prosecutorial team had worked in difficult conditions (including opposition from the Kigali gov't) to gather testimony and amass a huge dossier on this case, while wrestling with the difficulties of Rwandan discourse norms, norms surrounding sexual and gender issues (a woman raped is not likely to find a marriage partner, etc.), in an environment of extreme grief, shame and pain.

Furthermore, as I have understood it from others, no one has ever suggested that Akayesu participated in rape himself, only that he encouraged this to happen after people had gone to him directly for protection. Nor apparently does anyone think Akayesu was in the upper eschelons or on board in the early stage of the genocide. Quite the contrary apparently Taba had a reputation as a safe haven for a while.

But it also seems that when Akayesu did finally capitulate, tens of thousands were directly killed as a result, in part because they had gathered there in trusting him. And there is convincing evidence that they were killed not because he passively allowed it, but as a direct result of his decisions, planning and orders.

I wouldn't know where to weigh in on such a complex case. Genocide is a very complicated matter. But one would think this might be an argument for why the Arusha Tribunal, with all its imperfects, should be addressing the matter rather than the current Kigali regime which has killed thousands of Hutu with far less blood on their hands.

Finally it was his portrayal of Alison Des Forges (a stand-in for "experts" more generally) that revealed the most about Taylor himself.

First the minor point of his gratuitous digs on her language abilities. His audience might have wanted to know that Kinyarwanda is by far the most complex of the Bantu language (with over 20 million verb transformations), and a language that Rwandans themselves say no European has ever learned, in part because it is expressed less as phonemes than as proverbs. Des Forges seems to be paying respect to this complexity when she says she can't engage in philosophical debate in Kinyarwanda. Given her long years of experience and ample abilities in the language, one might respect the fact that she noted her limits. This in contrast to many Europeans in Africa who, once they've gotten the greetings down claim they speak the language.

Also, I'll leave aside the patronizing tone he uses when relating how Des Forges had been upset by the news of the death of a dear friend. This incident is more notable for how Taylor used it to cast a shadow on Des Forges' credibility: she is not a neutral enough observer because that dear friend of hers was a "minister in the Kagame government."

Significantly, what he doesn't tell the audience is that he is referring to Alphonse Nkubito, who was not a minister at the time of his death but an ex-Minister. Nor that Nkubito had been dismissed because he insisted that those Hutu imprisoned without formal charges filed against them had to be released. He had done the same as Procureur under the Habyarimana government in 1992 when he obtained after months of struggle the release of some 4000 Tutsi imprisoned in the wake of RPF attacks. It was Nkubito's eminence as a jurist, his international reputation for integrity, and his calm, forceful personality (a Mandela type) that led him to be appointed Minister of Justice under the new regime in 1994. Those same traits got him fired and since he would not leave the country they probably got him killed. Under Habyarimana he was issued threats to his life and he survived. Under the RPF he received threats to his life and succumbed.

The ironic thing is, based on Taylor's humane pleas at the end of the text, I would guess that he and Nkubito shared a lot of the same concerns about the power-games of the current regime. If he'd bothered to know more, rather than branding Des Forges as an unreliable witness for associating with such a shady figure, or branding Nkubito himself as some shady "Minister in the Kigali regime," he might well have been joining Des Forges in some homage to the man.

Likewise, if he had talked with Des Forges or looked at her public statements or her written work (she is generally recognized as having produced the most thorough, balanced and sociohistorically nuanced account of the genocide), he would quickly have seen that she is absolutely nobody's fool about the important issues that concern Taylor. She has consistently gone on record to stress how few Hutu were actively involved in the genocide, has been energetically combatting attempts to brand all Hutu as participants, and has forcefully criticized the rush of so many international communities to embrace the current regime as champions of justice or to make Kigali their new powerhouse in Central Africa.

Taylor's speech wouldn't have been as rousing without all of these facile conclusions about people, complex institutions, and this deeply flawed process that is still probably better than Taylor's alternative which seems to be no inquiry at all. But accepting the tribunal uncritically or dismantling it entirely should not be the only two alternatives. Besides, last I heard, politics, manipulation and structural abuses were alive and well in Canadian courts as well. Maybe if Taylor were simultaneously calling for the dismantling of the Canadian legal system I'd have a bit more respect for his prescriptions on Arusha.

Maureen



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