Lies, Lies, Lies

So I lied about putting up the paragliding pictures. I have been to three different internet cafes now and chewed out three different internet cafe attendants and it still doesn't seem to work. It's hot. I'm hungry. I've gotta pee. I've spent a couple bucks now to have my time wasted and my hair torn out. Sometimes I really hate this place.

In Gil Courtemanche’s book, “A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali,” his main character implies that the Rwandan people are disingenuous, that they lie so beautifully and so often and so simply, the words dripping out of their mouths just as the listener wants to hear them. I think Gen. Romeo Dallaire talks about the same thing, about how loyalty was not a quality he would ascribe to the Rwandans he worked with during the genocide.

This week at the tribunal, the prosecution introduced a young woman who was the first “survivor” I have heard testify. She was giving her testimony from behind a blue curtain, but from what I could piece together from her answers to the prosecutor’s questions, she is a 29 year old mother of at least one small child, a Tutsi who was a 16-year-old school girl when the president’s place crashed and triggered the genocide. She hid in the bush to escape the Interahamwe with an aunt and her cousin, and her cousin was killed. She was beaten up at at least two roadblocks and she was stripped by Interahamwe who stole her fabrics and her skirt. She watched men and small boys be massacred at a commune office, was hit with a machete at another roadblock, saw a military man throw a grenade into a crowd of refugees at a church. She was walking with a huge group of refugees when two vehicles full of soldiers and gendarmes pulled up and started shooting and then was raped twice at a huge “internally displaced persons” camp at some place called TrafiPol.

We all went on break feeling absolutely wretched for this poor girl. Imagine three solid months of fending for your life in the bush, being shot at and beaten and raped. There seemed to be no safe place in the entire country for a Tutsi to go.

But then the defense began to question her. She was born in 1976, so she was 18, not 16, a fact that can be easily forgiven in a culture where birthdays are unimportant. But she couldn’t read – not French, not Kinyarwanda – making her story about being a school child somewhat unbelievable. The beatings at each of the roadblocks consisted of being hit on the back with a club and the strike from a machete was on the buttocks, with the handle, not the blade. In the course of questioning, she told the court her aunt was beheaded and one of her little girls was also decapitated and the other was hit in the leg with a spear. But then the story changed, so that the aunt was simply cut on the neck with a machete – was still alive, in fact – and the little girl was nicked in the heel with a spear. It was never clear whether the second girl actually existed. The defense counsel asked her if she showed up at the commune office naked, having had her skirts stolen by the Interahamwe. Well, no. She was wearing several skirts and they simply took the one they felt was most valuable. Was that the one on top? No, it was on the bottom, like a petticoat. So they stripped you and took the skirt on the bottom, closest to your skin? No. No, it was in the middle.

The vehicles with the soldiers in them, what did they look like? I don’t remember. (At least 10 minutes of questioning on this, even the judges were trying to get a straight answer.) She had said that one vehicle had soldiers, the other had gendarmes, but when asked which one she was closer to – the soldiers or the gendarmes – she said she was exactly in the middle. Then the soldiers and gendarmes were mixed in the vehicles. And even though she was traveling with at least two thousand refugees – according to her estimate, and to be fair, she can’t read so I’m not sure she would be able to visualize two thousand people – she saw all of this from the middle of the pack, yet still only about 50 metres away from both vehicles.

The most damning bit of evidence she gave was in response to the defense asking her to describe who was an Interahamwe. (The Interahamwe, by the by, were the Hutu militias who manned the roadblocks and herded people into churches. They were largely street boys and other thugs who grabbed whatever weapons they could and took full advantage of the chaos of war to indulge in a vendetta against Tutsis and the moderate Hutus who refused to fight alongside them.) Anyway, the girl responded that all Hutus were Interahamwe. “So let me ask you this,” the counsel responded. “What about a three year old Hutu child. Is he an Interahamwe too? Are you born an Interahamwe?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Of course he is Interahamwe. His father was Interahamwe and was hunting Tutsis and he was probably following his father, so yes. He is an Interahamwe.”

So much for this tribunal spreading tolerance and understanding.

I have done interviews with both sides now – the defense and the prosecution – and they both lament this tendency for stories to shift and change, for details to emerge and disappear. The prosecution explained that from their perspective, these kinds of impartial eye-witnesses are the perfect kind of witnesses, since they don’t have blood on their hands. They rely also on “insiders,” who give testimony against their former colleagues in exchange for a cushier sentence in a European court and assistance for their families. Their third option is to put the young boys who did the killing and raping on the stand, to show that they received direct orders from the men on trial for genocide. But Rwanda has the death penalty and for the most part, the defense paints these witnesses as scared boys who will say anything to save their skin.

Part of these ever mutating stories is culture, but some of it is time. Almost 14 years have elapsed, afterall, and with so much happening, there is a tendency to get dates and events confused.

But it leaves a question in the viewer’s mind. An Irish woman and a Brazilian woman were in court yesterday and when we talked on the break, they were both saying how horrible the evidence was. But when we broke for lunch, their minds were changed completely. “At one point I wanted to tell her to shut up, that she really wasn’t doing much to help herself,” the Irish woman said.

A few days ago, one of the Quebecois counselors lost his cool with a witness who was a former soldier, a marksman to be precise, assigned to protect a top-ranking military man. He asked if he was briefed before he took the assignment. “No,” he answered, and he stuck to it. I think the defense was trying to show that the RPF were far more of a threat than most people realized, that that’s why this man needed protection. Or that this man was actually a spy. Who knows? He couldn’t ask the question. You could see him getting increasingly frustrated by what he saw as an obvious lie. It led to the defense counsel saying to him: “Do you think I’m an imbecile? Do you think this whole court is full of imbeciles?”

My favourite quote from the testimony so far belongs to a woman who is a top-ranking police officer who was asked about why she was transferred before the war from active duty to an administrative job. Because she had given more than 10 years of exemplary service, she responded. The defense pointed out that military people might characterized the move as a demotion. She disagreed, said she saw it as a promotion and never asked anyone anything about it. Then the defense asked if her transfer had anything to do with allegations that she was a spy working for the Tutsi-led RPF.

“Oh,” came the translation. “What the counsel has said has jolted my mind.” And then she proceeded to talk about how, yes, she had been found in possession of some very sensitive documents, but it was all a mistake and she was never reprimanded. And besides, look at her how she had climbed the ranks since then. She was now a top-ranking police officer. Under the RPF government.

FF Features
It's a lying shame War criminals are being offered cash, plastic surgery and parole to appear as prosecution witnesses at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, writes Karen Palmer
1250 words
22 March 2006
South China Morning Post
14
English
(c) 2006 South China Morning Post Publishers Limited, Hong Kong. All rights reserved.
Clandestine interrogations between investigators and an alleged war criminal come to an abrupt end when his naked body is pulled from a Belgian canal, his hands so mangled that they are initially reported as missing. Then a letter surfaces - seemingly from beyond the grave - suggesting the very people charged with finding the truth behind the massacres in Rwanda may be on a one-sided witch-hunt, writing a script dictated by western powers and pressuring witnesses to follow it.

It sounds like a racy publisher's blurb on the back of the latest paperback thriller, but the courtroom drama is playing out for real in Arusha, Tanzania, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where defence lawyers are crying foul over tales of witnesses paid to testify, plastic surgery for convicted war criminals and testimony created by survivor groups.

"The sad fact is that a lot of people have been convicted on very questionable evidence," said Canadian lawyer Peter Zaduk. Both sides at the tribunal seem to repeatedly fall victim to lying witnesses, said Peter Robinson, a defence lawyer from California.

"Here, it's just rampant," he said.

"I don't know exactly why. Maybe it's a character thing, it may be the culture of Rwanda, maybe the witnesses need to incriminate authorities of the previous regime."

Rwanda's Hutu majority was in power in 1994 when the president's plane was shot out of the sky, triggering a three-month killing spree. International journalists reported on a Hutu campaign of hate, one that included lists of every Tutsi in the country, who were labelled "cockroaches" in radio broadcasts and marked for extermination.

An ex-Tutsi rebel witness known as "BBB" signed an affidavit saying he attended at least three meetings orchestrated by a Rwanda-based survivor's group, Ibuka, where witnesses plotted false testimony.

Another says he listened from his living room while an Ibuka representative dictated the evidence his wife was to give. In some cases, the prosecution paid witnesses, ostensibly for travel-related expenses.

"Witness G", a former leader of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias blamed for carrying out the killings, admitted in court on October 24, 2005, that he received US$30,000 in cash from the prosecution, explaining it was a reward from the prosecution for helping build cases against Hutus.

Another Interahamwe leader, known as "Witness T", admitted he received US$16,000 in cash.

"These payments were laundered through the United States government and were subject to approval and review by lawyer Neil Karbank of Aspen, Colorado," states a motion filed by Mr Robinson asking the judges to order prosecutors to disclose payments they made to witnesses. The motion was rejected in August, when three judges decided "an oral hearing to investigate these allegations would be no more than a fishing expedition".

Stephen Rapp, a state prosecutor from Illinois who joined the tribunal in 2001 as its chief of prosecutions, admits prosecutors have a very difficult job unravelling the web of political influence in a demure culture with deep ethnic roots and tensions, where lying is not only tolerated but sometimes encouraged.

In Rwanda, as in most of Africa, time is not important, language is imprecise and familial relationships are confusing, making court testimony difficult.

"If you read the accounts of these individuals, it's not the kind of thing that any of us would know enough about to put words in people's mouths, about what really occurred, who was there and how this worked. This is a really Byzantine political situation," he said.

To understand it, prosecutors rely on "insiders". In exchange for their testimony, prosecutors have promised to provide at least five "insiders" - who each admit to war crimes, committing murders or ordering executions - with a new identity as well as at least two years of financial support for the war criminal and their families once they've been relocated somewhere in Europe.

All will serve their sentences in a European prison and enjoy European guidelines on parole. Some have even been promised plastic surgery once they've finished serving their sentence.

Mr Rapp admits Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, the former Rwandan agricultural minister and one-time minister for national parks and tourism, would have received a similar deal if he'd signed a statement and agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

Instead, on November 21, he disappeared. A month later, his badly decomposed body was pulled from a Belgian canal. Two weeks before he went missing, Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote a letter to the prosecutors at the international court. In it, he spoke of threats levelled at him by two Canadian investigators working for the court, of pressure to provide false testimony that would "demolish" key members of the Hutu government believed to be the masterminds behind a plan to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority.

"I do not wish to lie to please the investigators," Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote. "I am prepared to assume all of the consequences set forth in detail by the investigators [Rejean] Tremblay and [Andre] Delvaux: I will be lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the street and the dogs will piss on me [the terms used by the investigators]." Mr Rapp dismissed the letter as a fake and said investigators deny making any threats.

Uwilingiyimana was secretly indicted last summer for his role in helping prepare for the genocide, in which peasants took up hoes and machetes to kill more than 800,000 people in 100 days.

For nearly three months, Uwilingiyimana staved off arrest by travelling each weekday from his home in Brussels to Lille, in France, under the guise of attending a university course. In fact, he was being interrogated by tribunal investigators and was on the verge of landing a sweetheart deal in return for signing a 92-page question-and-answer-style statement that would be the basis for his insider testimony against key purported war criminals.

That is motive enough for desperate defendants to make him disappear, prosecutors say. But more than one defence lawyer claims Uwilingiyimana was going to testify on behalf of their clients.

Montreal lawyer John Philpot expected he would take the stand and help exonerate his client. Investigators working with Mr Robinson met with Uwilingiyimana on November 26, 2002, and December 4, 2003, and expected him to testify in Arusha refuting evidence given by one of the tribunal's "insiders".

"His death actually does more harm to us than the prosecution," Mr Robinson said. Mr Rapp is adamant his investigators are neither building false cases, nor pressuring witnesses to lie.

"You don't gain anything if the insider sits there and tells you a whole pack of lies about what was going on. It's gotta be stuff that's consistent with the human rights reports that were happening at the time, with the people on the inside and the outside that you've had information from," Mr Rapp said.

He also dismisses the fabrication allegations as a diversionary tactic by desperate defence lawyers.

"Those aren't legal arguments. They don't excuse murder, they don't excuse mass murder," Mr Rapp said. "It doesn't win the case. It may make some accused persons feel better to have that sort of argument, but it doesn't make the case."

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JUSTICE IN JEOPARDY; Clandestine interrogations between investigators and an alleged war criminal come to an abrupt end when his naked corpse is pulled from a Belgian canal, its hands so mangled that they were first reported as missing. Then, a letter surfaces, seemingly coming from beyond the grave, suggesting the very people entrusted with finding the truth behind the brutal massacres in a tiny East African nation could be on a witch hunt, writing a script dictated by governments in the West and pressuring witnesses to follow it.
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
2087 words
26 March 2006
The Toronto Star
ONT
A10
English
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star
The accusations read like a racy blurb on the back of a paperback thriller, but the twisting plot actually comes from a handful of Canadian lawyers defending politicians and businessmen blamed for one of Africa's darkest moments.

In real life, the courtroom drama goes something like this:

Last Nov. 5, Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, Rwanda's former agriculture minister and one-time minister for national parks and tourism, allegedly wrote a letter to the ICTR - the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is prosecuting alleged war criminals in the 1994 genocide.

The letter spoke of threats levelled at Uwilingiyimana by Rejean Tremblay and Andre Delvaux, two Canadian investigators working for the tribunal, of pressure to provide false testimony that would "demolish" key members of the Akazu, the kitchen cabinet of the Rwandan Hutu government that allegedly masterminded a plan to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority in the spring of 1994.

"I do not wish to lie to please the investigators," Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote.

"I am prepared to assume all of the consequences set forth in detail by the investigators Tremblay and Delvaux: I will be lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the street and the dogs will piss on me (the terms used by the investigators)."

The last words, including the brackets, are the letter writer's, emphasizing that the words used in threats were not of his choosing.

Uwilingiyimana was secretly indicted last summer for ordering executions at roadblocks, for allowing the training of Hutu militias in Rwanda's dense forests and for his role in helping prepare for the genocide, which saw peasants take up hoes and machetes to kill more than 800,000 people in the span of 100 days.

For nearly three months, Uwilingiyimana staved off arrest by co-operating with court investigators.

Each weekday, under the guise of attending a university course, he travelled from his home in Brussels to Lille, France, to be interrogated by court investigators.

Uwilingiyimana was on the verge of landing a sweetheart deal in return for signing a 92-page question-and-answer style statement that would be the basis for his testimony against key war-crimes suspects. Then, on Nov. 21, he disappeared.

Almost a month later, his badly decomposed body was pulled from the Brussels-Charleroi canal.

The United Nations-backed court in Tanzania, already widely dismissed as poorly designed, ponderously slow and lacking in authority, released a statement saying it would review security measures provided for tribunal witnesses to ensure they were adequate.

Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow said Uwilingiyimana had "voluntarily agreed to co-operate in the search for truth and justice."

The prosecutions office rejects Uwilingiyimana's allegations against its investigators and suggests the letter is a fake, written by people who feared the Rwandan was about to testify against them.

But defence lawyers - including some prominent Canadians - are convinced the mysterious death lends credibility to what they've been alleging for years: that tribunal staff is making up evidence and strong-arming witnesses into supporting it.

"The sad fact is that a lot of people have been convicted on very questionable evidence," says Toronto lawyer Peter Zaduk, best known for his successful defence of O'Neil Grant in the 1999 Just Desserts murder case.

Rwanda's Hutu majority was in power back on April 6, 1994, when President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane exploded while landing at Kigali airport, triggering a killing spree that lasted three months.

International journalists reported on a Hutu campaign of hate, one that included lists of all the country's Tutsis, who were labelled "cockroaches" in radio broadcasts and marked for extermination.

Video footage documented the aftermath of bloody attacks carried out by Rwandan peasants wielding machetes and farm implements.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led rebel group that invaded from Uganda, emerged the winner of what is now seen as a vicious civil war.

The group's founder, Paul Kagame, took over the presidency and still leads the country today.

As Rwanda's prisons fill up with farmers, clergymen and ordinary folk convicted in Rwandan courts of lesser offences than genocide or crimes against humanity, the UN tribunal in Arusha, near Tanzania's border with Kenya, has completed only 26 cases. All but three ended in convictions.

Most of the convicted genocidaires will remain in prison in Mali, a French-speaking desert country in West Africa, until they die. Another 26 cases are currently before the ICTR court, 19 indictees still at large and at least 20 detainees are waiting for their trials to begin. The tribunal's mandate is set to run out in 2008.

Stephen Rapp, a state prosecutor from Illinois who joined the tribunal in 2001 as chief of prosecutions, admits prosecutors have a difficult job unravelling the web of political influence in a closed culture with deep ethnic tensions, where heavy-handed political regimes have made lying not only tolerable but sometimes encouraged.

In Rwanda, as in most of Africa, time is not important, language is imprecise and familial relationships are confusing.

Defending his staff, Rapp says: "If you read the accounts of these individuals, it's not the kind of thing that any of us would know enough about to put words in people's mouths, about what really occurred, who was there and how this worked. This is a really Byzantine political situation."

Since opening its first trial in 1997, the tribunal has issued nearly 90 indictments. Those charged are virtually all Hutus, leading many to complain the tribunal is nothing more than a theatre of victor's justice.

"The civilian deaths on both sides were roughly equal and substantially less than some of these wild estimates that are out there," says Toronto lawyer Zaduk, adding that human rights groups have blamed the Tutsi-led RPF rebels for 200,000 civilian deaths during raids in neighbouring, resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo.

Another Toronto defence lawyer, Christopher Black, says the RPF has used the tribunal to finish the annihilation of the Hutu political elite, when it should shoulder the blame for the country's mass killings.

In fact, a high-ranking Tutsi military police officer testifying against Black's client, the former chief of staff for the Rwandan military police, told the court that Tutsi rebels had infiltrated virtually every segment of Rwanda's security forces blamed for the killings.

When she deserted her military unit to join the rebels, the Tutsi officer was initially confused because some were dressed like the unit of the Rwandan government forces she had just left, others were wearing gendarme uniforms and some had berets that suggested they were part of an elite fighting force.

"They were wearing military uniforms when they came toward me," she told the court. "At first, I did not know they were RPF."

While the genocide has always been portrayed as the majority Hutu eradicating the minority Tutsi, an ongoing, controversial University of Maryland study, "GenoDynamics: Understanding Genocide through Time and Space," notes that since 500,000 Tutsis were likely killed during the genocide, that means at least 300,000 also must have been slaughtered.

Chief prosecutor Rapp says the numbers are not the question. What concerns the tribunal are the men and women responsible for three things: the alleged hit lists, the hate propaganda and the training of Interahamwe Hutu militias to ensure the efficient murder of up to 8,000 Tutsis and "Hutu moderates" a day.

"There's no question that a break was crossed and it was decided that the Tutsis were the enemy and then major efforts were then made to create a killing force who would win a total war if that became necessary," says Rapp.

"Not that that was always Plan A," he allows. "But it was Plan C and it became Plan B and eventually became Plan A - and there were a number of people working to make it Plan A.

"It needed a moment when it would be kicked in - and that was going to occur as sure as God made green apples because the peace process was aborted."

(The downing of the president's plane ended UN-mediated talks between the Rwandan government and the RPF, and is widely seen as triggering the genocide.

A French inquiry, partially leaked to Le Monde newspaper but never officially released, found the RPF responsible for shooting down Habyarimana's plane. But his death is outside the tribunal's scope.)

Figuring out who devised and implemented the genocidal plan is where "insiders" like the late Juvenal Uwilingiyimana come in.

In exchange for their testimony, prosecutors have promised to provide a new identity to at least five insiders - each of whom admits to committing murders or ordering executions. All will serve their sentences in Europe and enjoy European guidelines on parole.

Their families will be eligible for at least two years' support once they've been relocated in Europe and some of the men have even been promised plastic surgery once they've finished their sentences.

Rapp admits Uwilingiyimana would have received a similar deal if he'd signed a statement and agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

That is motive enough for desperate defendants to make him disappear, prosecutors say.

But more than one defence lawyer claims Uwilingiyimana was going to testify on behalf of defendants.

Peter Robinson, a defence lawyer from California, says investigators met with Uwilingiyimana on Nov. 26, 2002, and Dec. 4, 2003, and expected him to testify in Arusha refuting evidence given by one of the tribunal's "insiders."

"His death actually does more harm to us than the prosecution," Robinson says.

Montreal lawyer John Philpot, who expected Uwilingiyimana would take the stand and help exonerate his client, says the former minister became an embarrassment to prosecutors when he refused to lie.

"This process is very damaging if he came and testified here about how they are trying to string up (defendants)," Philpot says.

Rapp, however, insists his investigators are not building false cases or pressuring witnesses to lie.

"You don't gain anything if the insider sits there and tells you a whole pack of lies about what was going on," he says.

"It's got to be stuff that's consistent with the human rights reports that were happening at the time, with the people on the inside and the outside that you've had information from."

Toronto defence lawyer Black has called for the tribunal to be suspended pending an investigation into the tactics Uwilingiyimana alleges were used by the prosecutor's office.

"How can this tribunal continue to operate when this may be true, when these allegations are happening all the time," he asks.

But the chief prosecutor dismisses the fabrication allegations as a diversionary tactic by desperate defence lawyers.

"Those aren't legal arguments," says Rapp. "They don't excuse murder: they don't excuse mass murder.

"It doesn't win the case. It may make some accused persons feel better to have that sort of argument, but it doesn't make the case."

Karen Palmer is the Star's freelance writer in Africa.