Honouring the dead
“I saw backless pews, just like those in Kibuye church, but these were draped with the mummified and decomposing remains of a lot of people, their clothes both sticking to them and falling off, and everything sort of melting down onto the floor between the benches. It was difficult to see where the bodies ended and the floor began. It was difficult to see the floor at all.” --Clea Koff
In her book, “The Bone Woman,” forensic anthropologist Clea Koff pairs a big, soft heart with a smart, scientific brain to write about her stints in Rwanda digging up mass graves and analyzing the remains. The way she writes with clarity and simplicity is, in a way, more haunting than some of the flowery prose that the genocide evokes – and through her recounting of the way the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were found and the injuries their skeletons retained, she lets the victims of the country’s 1994 killing spree speak for themselves.
She writes about finding a baby with a plastic pacifier still clamped in its skeletonized jaw; a woman with pink beads looped around her neck; the gouges at the back of hundreds of distal tibias, a sure sign that someone had nicked the Achilles tendon in an attempt to immobilize their victim; the man obviously stomped to death, with a fractured mandible, fractured clavicle, fractured sternum, two fractured ribs, both humerii fractured and his right foot shattered; the rows and rows of skulls lined up in the analysis tent, all with identical smash marks, as though they had been killed on an assembly line.
These images float up as I sit in the back row of the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, where lawyers, prosecutors and judges have toiled since 1997, supposedly in an effort to shine a light on the truth of what happened in those horrible 100 days of 1994.
When I arrived here, I thought even the building itself would be pregnant with meaning, that everyone I encountered would walk with a certain stoop under the weight of working for so long on such a difficult subject. I fully expected the hallways and chambers to be hushed, reverent, hallowed, filled with a sense of history for the job that is being done here.
But it is not like that at all.
The chambers are so modern and brightly lit, filled with whites, blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Chinese and everything in between that it’s almost possible to forget you are in Africa. (Of course, just to bring you back to the continent and its quirks, the defense lawyer stood up yesterday to announce he had just lost his senior sister while she was undergoing heart surgery in “Tuck-son, Arizona” and he would have to leave the court for several days while he went to retrieve the body. “I am a chief, she is a princess and she cannot be buried anywhere but Cameroon. That is just how things are.”)
The ITCR building is loaded with security, translators, interpreters, clerks and lawyers – half of the tribunal’s budget goes to safety and administration. It sits at the foot of Mt. Meru, a lush green bump of a mountain, perennially shrouded in wispy clouds, which is appropriate considering Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills. But the courtrooms have no windows; you can’t even see it.
The tribunal is an odd tourist magnet, drawing visitors killing time until they leave on safari to see the rhinos in Ngorongoro or the cheetahs of the Serengeti. They come for the same reason I did, outwardly drawn to history, but secretly hoping to hear the gory details, to feel placed among the panic and chaos, to re-live those terrifying moments as the survivors lived them, to hear something, anything, that makes sense of the unimaginable.
But these are not those kinds of trials. These are not the men who slashed people to death with machetes. (I passed a man using a panga, as they’re called, to chop down a tree this morning on my way to the tribunal and could only think about the thud it was making compared to the sound it would have made pounding into human skin, fat, muscle and bone.)
They say that between 800,000 and a million people were killed in the space of three months in those gruesome days, often with tools no more sophisticated than a machete, a club or a sharpened hoe. That’s about 8,000 people a day and those numbers alone are enough to suspect someone somewhere formulated and implemented a plan to keep up a pace of killing that could only be described as a frenzy.
These are the men who are thought to be the genocide’s masterminds. In the proceedings I am watching, known colloquially as “Military II,” two of the defendants were the chief of staff of the Rwandan army and the chief of staff of the military police. It took me at least two days before I realized the defendants were in the room; they come to court so smartly dressed and look so innocuous I mistook them for lawyers. (Talking to their lawyers has made them oddly human – one of them lost his 15-year-old son to leukemia last year and was denied bail to attend either his final days or his burial. He has been detained in Arusha since the boy was 10. I watch him often during the trial and he looks my way frequently, as there is little else to look at. One of the witnesses testifying for the prosecution described him as “not thin, neither dark nor light, but a kind man who did not take things out on his subordinates and earned the respect he received.”)
The police under this man’s command are thought to have encouraged scared citizens to seek refuge in the churches, which they then used as a convenient killing chamber, hacking and slashing until all was quiet. Then, just to be certain they had thoroughly accomplished their goal, they’d push a few bricks out of the structure, toss in some tear gas, wait for the tell tale coughing and then go straight to the sound and kill the survivor.
This man and his co-accused are not the men who did the actual murder, those men are being tried in Rwandan courts and housed in Rwandan jails. These men are accused of writing the script, then pumping up the actors. They are suspected of creating lists of enemies who needed to be killed, of creating a campaign of hate where the enemy was akin to a cockroach awaiting extermination. They are accused of lighting the match, then fiddling while Rome burned.
The testimony – especially about something so horrifying – is neither fast-paced nor gripping like the courtroom dramas shown on TV. Instead, it’s like hearing the cryptic crossword read aloud, a jumble of acronyms and multi-syllabic last names, poetic-sounding place names. (When not called “Military II,” this trial is known as Ndindiliyimana et al, which is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled: n-di-n-did-ee-imana.) Some of the witnesses cannot be identified, apparently for their own protection. (At least two people connected to the tribunal have been killed since it began.) If the public is allowed into the proceedings at all, then the witnesses sit behind a blue curtain, their disembodied voice coming out through the headsets, in snippets, between translations. There are moments when someone is being talked about who cannot be mentioned for some reason that is never explained, so the courtroom sounds like a Harry Potter book, where everyone refers to the “man who cannot be named” as though he were Lord Voldemort. There are very few witnesses that I would consider survivors. In seven days of visiting the tribunal, I have seen a Spanish priest who was best buddies with a mayor now accused of using the church as a death chamber, a British physiotherapist who was evacuated before things escalated, a high-ranking police officer who the defense made sound like a spy and a soldier who apparently survived the genocide without any blood on his hands – a virtual impossibility.
The testimony is never linear and for the most part, the tourists leave completely confused, not entirely sure what they just saw, although all are certain that in the end, the men will be convicted. They remember well the pictures of 1994, the bodies stacked up like cords of firewood, the streams of refugees carrying nothing more than a fabric-wrapped bowl on their heads as they walked, forever damaged, to the refugee camps of the Congo (Zaire), where thousands more died in a devastating cholera outbreak.
The questioning is like listening to someone read aloud a manufacturers warrantee; it is so sanitized with legalese, so seemingly inconsequential. It isn’t about psychology or hatred, sinister plots or murder most foul; it’s about who was where when and what orders were given to do what and whether someone saw someone do something or just heard about it.
An all-too-typical exchange: “Do you remember telling the investigators at your meeting on 27 May 1995 that after you heard the radio announcement that the president’s plane had been shot down at 10 p.m. you went to Kigali camp on foot?” A pause, while the question, spoken in French, is simultaneously translated into Kinyarwanda and English. “Well, it has been 10 years and I am not a computer…”
Instead of reverence, there is open animosity between the prosecution and defense lawyers, who snipe at each other, answering questions posed to witnesses as though that were standard procedure or giving a disdainful “Oh, sit down!” when an objection is made. There is condescension from defense lawyers who have come to the conclusion that their clients are getting a raw deal. A typical exchange:
Lawyer: “She can’t say that! She can’t say what she heard. She can only say what she saw. She’s saying, ‘I heard they got Kalishnikovs, they got guns.’ That’s hearsay and I want it struck.”
Judge: “It will be evaluated within the scope of its context. You have been hearing that throughout the trial. Are you going to do this every time?”
Lawyer: “Yes, because that’s not justice.”
Judge: “Well, I’ll continue to rule the way I have.”
Lawyer: “And I’ll continue to object; I don’t care.”
Judge: “I don’t care either.”
Lawyer: “I know you don’t.”
In seven days, I have met only one Rwandan, an investigator working with one of the defense lawyers, who cannot sit in the chamber for fear he will recognize and endanger a witness. Instead, he sits in the public gallery, the only man who has his headset on ‘0’ since he understands all three languages and has no need for translators.
News
Accused boycott Rwanda tribunal; Slam prosecution's 'mafia-style' methods Toronto lawyer seeks suspension of trial
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
459 words
24 January 2006
The Toronto Star
A18
Arusha, Tanzania Prisoners charged with planning the Rwandan genocide boycotted trials at an international tribunal yesterday as a protest against what they called "mafia-style" methods used by prosecution investigators.
Defence lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda claim investigators collecting evidence against their clients are coercing witnesses into providing false testimony or threatening them with indictments if they don't co-operate.
"We renew our oft-repeated request to assure some transparency filters into these interrogations ... so that the habit of fabricating evidence and influencing witnesses will forever disappear," said a statement signed by the detainees.
"We are requesting that these trials be suspended pending an investigation into what's going on," said Christopher Black, a Toronto lawyer defending a general who was chief-of-staff for Rwanda's military police at the time of the massacres.
The allegations come in the wake of the disappearance of Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, a former Rwandan minister whose body turned up in a Belgian canal before Christmas.
Although an indictment was issued against Uwilingiyimana in the summer, he had apparently been co-operating with tribunal investigators, crossing from Belgium into France each day for almost two weeks to meet with investigators until late November, when negotiations over his testimony broke down.
Uwilingiyimana was believed to be a member of the ex-Rwandan president's inner circle. He disappeared on Nov. 21. On Dec. 17, his naked body, its hands missing, was pulled from the Charlebois canal in Brussels.
A letter written by Uwilingiyimana before he died and released by his wife turned up on the Internet a few days later, claiming investigators - including two Canadians - had told him that if he did not provide testimony against "certain persons," he would be "lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the streets and dogs will piss on me."
The letter has not been authenticated.
The prosecution, meanwhile, claims that Uwilingiyimana wrote a letter stating he was fearful of other Rwandans living abroad.
"How can you ask for these proceedings to be suspended on conjecture?" asked Cire Ba, prosecutor for a group of four high-ranking military men. "We should see who has benefited from this crime. We would not murder our own witness. Up to now it is our witnesses who are being killed, our witnesses being pulled out of canals," he said.
In 1994, between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans died during a three-month killing spree. At least 50 former army officials and community leaders have been indicted for war crimes; the Rwandan government claims there are hundreds more living in exile.
In her book, “The Bone Woman,” forensic anthropologist Clea Koff pairs a big, soft heart with a smart, scientific brain to write about her stints in Rwanda digging up mass graves and analyzing the remains. The way she writes with clarity and simplicity is, in a way, more haunting than some of the flowery prose that the genocide evokes – and through her recounting of the way the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were found and the injuries their skeletons retained, she lets the victims of the country’s 1994 killing spree speak for themselves.
She writes about finding a baby with a plastic pacifier still clamped in its skeletonized jaw; a woman with pink beads looped around her neck; the gouges at the back of hundreds of distal tibias, a sure sign that someone had nicked the Achilles tendon in an attempt to immobilize their victim; the man obviously stomped to death, with a fractured mandible, fractured clavicle, fractured sternum, two fractured ribs, both humerii fractured and his right foot shattered; the rows and rows of skulls lined up in the analysis tent, all with identical smash marks, as though they had been killed on an assembly line.
These images float up as I sit in the back row of the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, where lawyers, prosecutors and judges have toiled since 1997, supposedly in an effort to shine a light on the truth of what happened in those horrible 100 days of 1994.
When I arrived here, I thought even the building itself would be pregnant with meaning, that everyone I encountered would walk with a certain stoop under the weight of working for so long on such a difficult subject. I fully expected the hallways and chambers to be hushed, reverent, hallowed, filled with a sense of history for the job that is being done here.
But it is not like that at all.
The chambers are so modern and brightly lit, filled with whites, blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Chinese and everything in between that it’s almost possible to forget you are in Africa. (Of course, just to bring you back to the continent and its quirks, the defense lawyer stood up yesterday to announce he had just lost his senior sister while she was undergoing heart surgery in “Tuck-son, Arizona” and he would have to leave the court for several days while he went to retrieve the body. “I am a chief, she is a princess and she cannot be buried anywhere but Cameroon. That is just how things are.”)
The ITCR building is loaded with security, translators, interpreters, clerks and lawyers – half of the tribunal’s budget goes to safety and administration. It sits at the foot of Mt. Meru, a lush green bump of a mountain, perennially shrouded in wispy clouds, which is appropriate considering Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills. But the courtrooms have no windows; you can’t even see it.
The tribunal is an odd tourist magnet, drawing visitors killing time until they leave on safari to see the rhinos in Ngorongoro or the cheetahs of the Serengeti. They come for the same reason I did, outwardly drawn to history, but secretly hoping to hear the gory details, to feel placed among the panic and chaos, to re-live those terrifying moments as the survivors lived them, to hear something, anything, that makes sense of the unimaginable.
But these are not those kinds of trials. These are not the men who slashed people to death with machetes. (I passed a man using a panga, as they’re called, to chop down a tree this morning on my way to the tribunal and could only think about the thud it was making compared to the sound it would have made pounding into human skin, fat, muscle and bone.)
They say that between 800,000 and a million people were killed in the space of three months in those gruesome days, often with tools no more sophisticated than a machete, a club or a sharpened hoe. That’s about 8,000 people a day and those numbers alone are enough to suspect someone somewhere formulated and implemented a plan to keep up a pace of killing that could only be described as a frenzy.
These are the men who are thought to be the genocide’s masterminds. In the proceedings I am watching, known colloquially as “Military II,” two of the defendants were the chief of staff of the Rwandan army and the chief of staff of the military police. It took me at least two days before I realized the defendants were in the room; they come to court so smartly dressed and look so innocuous I mistook them for lawyers. (Talking to their lawyers has made them oddly human – one of them lost his 15-year-old son to leukemia last year and was denied bail to attend either his final days or his burial. He has been detained in Arusha since the boy was 10. I watch him often during the trial and he looks my way frequently, as there is little else to look at. One of the witnesses testifying for the prosecution described him as “not thin, neither dark nor light, but a kind man who did not take things out on his subordinates and earned the respect he received.”)
The police under this man’s command are thought to have encouraged scared citizens to seek refuge in the churches, which they then used as a convenient killing chamber, hacking and slashing until all was quiet. Then, just to be certain they had thoroughly accomplished their goal, they’d push a few bricks out of the structure, toss in some tear gas, wait for the tell tale coughing and then go straight to the sound and kill the survivor.
This man and his co-accused are not the men who did the actual murder, those men are being tried in Rwandan courts and housed in Rwandan jails. These men are accused of writing the script, then pumping up the actors. They are suspected of creating lists of enemies who needed to be killed, of creating a campaign of hate where the enemy was akin to a cockroach awaiting extermination. They are accused of lighting the match, then fiddling while Rome burned.
The testimony – especially about something so horrifying – is neither fast-paced nor gripping like the courtroom dramas shown on TV. Instead, it’s like hearing the cryptic crossword read aloud, a jumble of acronyms and multi-syllabic last names, poetic-sounding place names. (When not called “Military II,” this trial is known as Ndindiliyimana et al, which is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled: n-di-n-did-ee-imana.) Some of the witnesses cannot be identified, apparently for their own protection. (At least two people connected to the tribunal have been killed since it began.) If the public is allowed into the proceedings at all, then the witnesses sit behind a blue curtain, their disembodied voice coming out through the headsets, in snippets, between translations. There are moments when someone is being talked about who cannot be mentioned for some reason that is never explained, so the courtroom sounds like a Harry Potter book, where everyone refers to the “man who cannot be named” as though he were Lord Voldemort. There are very few witnesses that I would consider survivors. In seven days of visiting the tribunal, I have seen a Spanish priest who was best buddies with a mayor now accused of using the church as a death chamber, a British physiotherapist who was evacuated before things escalated, a high-ranking police officer who the defense made sound like a spy and a soldier who apparently survived the genocide without any blood on his hands – a virtual impossibility.
The testimony is never linear and for the most part, the tourists leave completely confused, not entirely sure what they just saw, although all are certain that in the end, the men will be convicted. They remember well the pictures of 1994, the bodies stacked up like cords of firewood, the streams of refugees carrying nothing more than a fabric-wrapped bowl on their heads as they walked, forever damaged, to the refugee camps of the Congo (Zaire), where thousands more died in a devastating cholera outbreak.
The questioning is like listening to someone read aloud a manufacturers warrantee; it is so sanitized with legalese, so seemingly inconsequential. It isn’t about psychology or hatred, sinister plots or murder most foul; it’s about who was where when and what orders were given to do what and whether someone saw someone do something or just heard about it.
An all-too-typical exchange: “Do you remember telling the investigators at your meeting on 27 May 1995 that after you heard the radio announcement that the president’s plane had been shot down at 10 p.m. you went to Kigali camp on foot?” A pause, while the question, spoken in French, is simultaneously translated into Kinyarwanda and English. “Well, it has been 10 years and I am not a computer…”
Instead of reverence, there is open animosity between the prosecution and defense lawyers, who snipe at each other, answering questions posed to witnesses as though that were standard procedure or giving a disdainful “Oh, sit down!” when an objection is made. There is condescension from defense lawyers who have come to the conclusion that their clients are getting a raw deal. A typical exchange:
Lawyer: “She can’t say that! She can’t say what she heard. She can only say what she saw. She’s saying, ‘I heard they got Kalishnikovs, they got guns.’ That’s hearsay and I want it struck.”
Judge: “It will be evaluated within the scope of its context. You have been hearing that throughout the trial. Are you going to do this every time?”
Lawyer: “Yes, because that’s not justice.”
Judge: “Well, I’ll continue to rule the way I have.”
Lawyer: “And I’ll continue to object; I don’t care.”
Judge: “I don’t care either.”
Lawyer: “I know you don’t.”
In seven days, I have met only one Rwandan, an investigator working with one of the defense lawyers, who cannot sit in the chamber for fear he will recognize and endanger a witness. Instead, he sits in the public gallery, the only man who has his headset on ‘0’ since he understands all three languages and has no need for translators.
News
Accused boycott Rwanda tribunal; Slam prosecution's 'mafia-style' methods Toronto lawyer seeks suspension of trial
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
459 words
24 January 2006
The Toronto Star
A18
Arusha, Tanzania Prisoners charged with planning the Rwandan genocide boycotted trials at an international tribunal yesterday as a protest against what they called "mafia-style" methods used by prosecution investigators.
Defence lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda claim investigators collecting evidence against their clients are coercing witnesses into providing false testimony or threatening them with indictments if they don't co-operate.
"We renew our oft-repeated request to assure some transparency filters into these interrogations ... so that the habit of fabricating evidence and influencing witnesses will forever disappear," said a statement signed by the detainees.
"We are requesting that these trials be suspended pending an investigation into what's going on," said Christopher Black, a Toronto lawyer defending a general who was chief-of-staff for Rwanda's military police at the time of the massacres.
The allegations come in the wake of the disappearance of Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, a former Rwandan minister whose body turned up in a Belgian canal before Christmas.
Although an indictment was issued against Uwilingiyimana in the summer, he had apparently been co-operating with tribunal investigators, crossing from Belgium into France each day for almost two weeks to meet with investigators until late November, when negotiations over his testimony broke down.
Uwilingiyimana was believed to be a member of the ex-Rwandan president's inner circle. He disappeared on Nov. 21. On Dec. 17, his naked body, its hands missing, was pulled from the Charlebois canal in Brussels.
A letter written by Uwilingiyimana before he died and released by his wife turned up on the Internet a few days later, claiming investigators - including two Canadians - had told him that if he did not provide testimony against "certain persons," he would be "lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the streets and dogs will piss on me."
The letter has not been authenticated.
The prosecution, meanwhile, claims that Uwilingiyimana wrote a letter stating he was fearful of other Rwandans living abroad.
"How can you ask for these proceedings to be suspended on conjecture?" asked Cire Ba, prosecutor for a group of four high-ranking military men. "We should see who has benefited from this crime. We would not murder our own witness. Up to now it is our witnesses who are being killed, our witnesses being pulled out of canals," he said.
In 1994, between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans died during a three-month killing spree. At least 50 former army officials and community leaders have been indicted for war crimes; the Rwandan government claims there are hundreds more living in exile.
posted by Palmer in Africa at 6:44 AM
2 Comments:
If Harding's going for a visit, I'm coming too.
You can all come. It's a big continent and there's room for everybody! (Although too many Edmontonites all in the same place at once might be asking for trouble. You're all Edmontonites. Did you know that?)
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