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Mastermind of Rwandan Genocide Convicted

December 20, 2008 1:17 PM

HILARY BROWN, Correspondent, ABC News London

There was one item of good news from the African continent this week. That was the conviction  of Colonel Theoneste Bagosora by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Bagosora was found guilty of being one of the masterminds behind the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Six years after Bagosora first took the stand, the tribunal’s judges ruled that, as chief of staff in the Rwandan Defense Ministry in 1994, he was responsible for forming, training and arming the notorious Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that went on the rampage in the spring of 1994 against the Tutsi minority. Bagosora was also found to be responsible for drawing up target lists of prominent Tutsis and moderate Hutus who believed in  peaceful tribal coexistence. In his trial, Bagosora consistently denied there was any conspiracy and characterized the killings as "a spontaneous eruption of ethnic hatred."  He admitted that the killings were "excessive" but asserted that "they do not amount to genocide." 

Outside of Rwanda and the Rwandan Tribunal (which is based in the Tanzanian town of Arusha), very few people have heard of Bagosora, or of the 29 other war criminals convicted so far  by the tribunal . But most people have heard of the genocide in Rwanda, a slaughter in the space of 100 days between April and July in 1994. The victims were butchered with machetes in their own homes, herded into churches and burned alive, stopped at army roadblocks and shot on the spot. The killing fields stretched from the capital of Kigali to every corner of  the small, once-beautiful  country.

The bloodbath ended only when the Tutsi rebel group based in Uganda, the RPF, invaded Rwanda and put the Hutu Interahamwe militia to flight. They fled across the border into Goma, in neighboring Zaire, along with  hundreds of thousands  of panic-stricken Hutu civilians who had been part of the massacres and who feared the Tutsi’s revenge. At its height, the surge of people across the border reached 12,000 an hour. 

Since it was set up  in Arusha in  1995, the  U.N. Tribunal has detained more than 70 suspected war criminals and convicted almost 30, including a former prime minister, former mayors, journalists and priests. The best-known was Jean Kambanda, the former prime minister jailed for life for crimes against humanity in September 1998. Former Mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu was convicted of mass torture, rape and murder in October 1998 and sentenced to life. The journalist Ferdinand Nahimana, co-founder of Radio Mille Collines, was convicted of war crimes in December 2003 and sentenced to 30 years. 

But in spite of these convictions, many involved in the genocide are still free, living comfortably  under new identities. The tribunal names at least 13 suspected war criminals who are still at large.

Bagosora himself was picked up in Cameroon in 1997 where he must have thought he was safe. Apart from responsibility for the wholesale slaughter of his compatriots, he was also found guilty of the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeepers in Rwanda just before the genocide started. In the cold, dispassionate demeanor he maintained throughout his trial, he said: "I never killed anybody, nor did I give orders to kill." The court did not believe him.

When one considers some of the great genocides of the 20th century, it is too often the case that those responsible –- Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot -– are either allowed to die in their beds, or kill themselves with one clean, painless shot. In Rwanda at least, the monsters, some of them, have been made to pay for their atrocious crimes. 

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December 20, 2008 in Hilary Brown | Permalink | User Comments (3)

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Posted by: olin tucker | Dec 20, 2008 1:46:13 PM

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