This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Recent developments, including in the United States and within the United Nations, have been celebrated as indicating the successful pursuit of justice for the genocide. The truth, however, is more complicated.
On May 15, the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) announced that all fugitives indicted by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had been "successfully accounted for.” (The IRMCT is the combined successor to the only two ad hoc international criminal tribunals that the UN Security Council has established: the ICTR and the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).)
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In the same announcement, the IRMCT’s chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, characterized the result as "a testament to the United Nations’ unwavering commitment to bring to justice all persons indicted by the ICTR and the ICTY. This is a tangible demonstration that the international community can ensure accountability is achieved.”
The IRMCT issued its declaration after recently concluding that the final two ICTR fugitives, Ryandikayo (who had no first name) and Charles Sikibwabo, were dead. The ICTR indicted both of these genocide suspects in 1995 (a year after the UN Security Council established the ICTR) and now we know that both of them died in 1998. It thus took the UN 26 years to determine the fate of these fugitives.
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It took almost as long—23 years—to finally catch one of the ICTR’s most notorious indictees, Félicien Kabuga. Kabuga is accused of facilitating and financing much of the genocide, including by co-founding and leading the radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, that helped incite and orchestrate the genocide as well as by importing hundreds of thousands of machetes that were used to perpetrate the genocide.
The extreme delay in apprehending Kabuga led the IRMCT to rule that, given what the IRMCT concluded to be Kabuga’s declining health, he was now "unfit to participate meaningfully in his trial and is very unlikely to regain fitness in the future,” and thus that he could not be convicted.
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To be sure, the ICTR did contribute significantly to justice for the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda by holding accountable many of the 93 individuals it indicted. The ICTR convicted some of the most egregious perpetrators of the genocide and established significant legal precedents.
It was the first international court to have jurisdiction over atrocity crimes committed during an internal conflict, to receive a guilty plea for genocide, to impose a genocide conviction, to indict and subsequently convict a head of government for genocide, to clarify the definition of rape in international law and hold that it could constitute genocide, and to hand down a genocide conviction of journalists.
In the course of these meaningful achievements, however, the ICTR was criticized for nepotism, mismanagement, incompetence, inefficiency, waste, insensitive treatment of witnesses, and early release of convicts.
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The few dozen genocide perpetrators the ICTR held accountable is a small fraction of the number of such individuals. As the IRMCT itself has acknowledged, more than 1,000 individuals suspected of participating in the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda remain at large in foreign countries.
The United States has been one such destination for genocide offenders from Rwanda, as arrests over the past few years of Beatrice Munyenyezi and Jean Leonard Teganya illustrate. Indeed, it was only in March that another genocide suspect from Rwanda, Eric Tabaro Nshimiye (also known as Eric Tabaro Nshimiyimana), was finally arrested, this time after living in Ohio for almost 30 years.
Contrary to Brammertz’s framing of the IRMCT’s recent milestone, the fact that Kabuga, Ryandikayo, Sikibwabo, and so many other alleged fugitive genocide perpetrators were not or still have not been prosecuted demonstrates a massive failure: the international community cannot or at least will not necessarily ensure that accountability is achieved.
These and other suspects are "successfully accounted for” not because the ICTR or IRMCT successfully enforced
Of course, the UN’s decades-long delay or outright failure in obtaining custody of or even determining the whereabouts or fate of some ICTR indictees is not all its fault. International criminal tribunals have always relied on state governments to enforce their arrest warrants.
Too often the countries to which fugitives flee are uncooperative, despite many of these states’ obligation to be so under the UN Charter or the tribunals’ statutes. In addition, some fugitives have employed sophisticated means to disguise their identities, hide their location, and obscure whether they are even still alive.
The recent arrest of Nshimiye is a reminder that genocide suspects, including from Rwanda, live in the United States. In an era of many actual or alleged genocides, the U.S. and all other governments should redouble their law enforcement, diplomatic, and intelligence services’ efforts to enforce valid warrants from foreign and international courts to arrest and transfer suspected genocide offenders.
Doing so would represent a meaningful legacy of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Zachary D. Kaufman, J.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. An expert on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, he is the author of United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics and co-editor of After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond.