Why ICTR was always going to leave behind a tattered legacy

Editor, RE: “What legacy is the ICTR leaving behind?” (The New Times, November 15). I long ago concluded that the ICTR was not established to grant justice to victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi, its survivors, their families or the general Rwandan society. No, that has never been its aim, especially when you take account of the fact it was established by the UN Security Council in such a way as not to offend one of its permanent members — and therefore veto-holder — and an active ally of the genocidal Bagosora-Sindikubwabo-Kambanda interim extremists’ government. Everything was done to constrain the ICTR from looking at the role of that foreign power in the conception, planning, organizing for, and the execution of that genocide. Everything was similarly done to try and blur the distinction among perpetrators, their victims and those who stopped the Genocide by sometimes attempting to create moral equivalency between crimes of genocide and any and all killings that might take place in the fog of battle, especially from fighting in which many of the genocidal killers were non-uniformed militia. As a result of the context in which the ICTR was established and in which it functioned, clearly under instructions to keep off officials of complicit major powers, the ICTR is seen by many Rwandans as having failed to deliver on justice and to support our society’s necessary closure and reconciliation. The tribunal may have been good for international bureaucrats and the global legal fraternity as well as the NGO activists, but it was less so for those it was ostensibly set up to help. I give it a failing grade. No wonder Rwandans refuse to have anything to do with the International Criminal Court (ICC), a close clone of the ICTR. Having seen the ICTR in action, there was no way we would fail to be cynical about so-called international justice mechanisms that are established in such a way that decision-makers from powerful nations (the most often guilty of crimes of international aggression and crimes against international peace) will always be given immunity while the highest officials from countries considered as less powerful and without powerful allies will be hauled before such ‘courts’ even on the most frivolous of grounds. Realpolitik is the only guiding principle of so-called international justice. Mwene Kalinda

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Why ICTR was always going to leave behind a tattered legacy