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In July 1993, an eleven-year-old Damascus Dukundane received a new pair of shoes. His mother bought them, unused, and paired them with a new blue suit. She was not terribly religious, and her son's baptism would be the only time in her life when she would enter the brick church of the banal village of Kaduha, in rural Rwanda. What the rest of the family looked like that day, in their best clothes, Damascus does not remember. There are no surviving photographs and no surviving witnesses either.
A year later, his father was missing and his mother, like so many mothers in the area, had taken refuge in the church with his five children. Outside, they huddled in a crowd of hundreds, praying for their lives. The men of the village surrounded them with protection, raising machetes and sticks in the hope of intimidating the Interahamwe the Hutu militias moving from house to house and from church to church in a race to exterminate the Tutsi population of the country's ethnic minority. 19659002] "At first we were stronger than them, because we were the ones who had nowhere to go," Damascus recalls recently. "We were the ones fighting for our lives, and then the soldiers arrived with rifles, and it was then that people realized that we could never fight with the military.
This is how the genocide unfolded in Rwanda – from hill to hill, across a country famous for its hilly landscape, interahamwe chased their neighbors with machetes and clubs. "They were trained, stubborn and successful, but the most effective and large-scale massacre took place when soldiers arrived with automatic weapons and seemingly unlimited ammunition." When they started shooting in the crowd, people ran. We realized this time that there was no way to fight, "Damascus said." It is so that the apocalypse has occurred. "[19659002ThemanwhobroughtthearmytotheDamascuschurchwasAloysSimbaIn1994Simbawasfifty-fiveyearsoldanex-colonelfamousforhelpingJuvenalHabyarimanathenpresidenttotakepowerinacoupd'etatintheseventiesIntheeveningofApril61994forreasonsthatremaincontroversialHabyarimana'splanewasshotdownAfterthecrashtheTutsisbecamethepreyoflegionsofarmedandagitatedHutumilitiamenThekillingsquicklybeganandthenspreadandpracticallyeveryhillbecameasiteofdeathduringtherainyseasonasHutuextremistskilledabouteighthundredthousandfromtheirneighborsinjustonehundreddays
Simba armed the soldiers who attacked Kadu Parish He ordered them to drive out all the remaining Tutsis who could escape and kill any Hutu comrade who had shown pity. He forced the convicts to dig their own graves. In 2005, Simba was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in an international war crimes tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. Other places where he killed – Murambi, Kibeho – are, in Rwanda today, touchstones of collective memory. His conviction was confirmed in 2007, after an appeal
Soon, if everything goes as planned – and there is little reason to believe that this will not be the case – Simba, a giant of the genocide, will be a free man . He should be released, as well as Dominique Ntawukulilyayo, who, having promised twenty-five thousand Tutsis, lured them to a hill in Kabuye before killing them, and Hassan Ngeze, a journalist whose hateful propagandist newspaper, Kangura Many Rwandans still see the real fuel of genocide. The court considers Ngeze's conviction for incitement to genocide a "landmark" in international justice, although his life sentence was reduced to thirty-five years on appeal
"We really thought somebody was going to be guilty. One like Ngeze, who really incited the extremists.To kill their neighbors, they should stay in prison for life, "said Freddy Mutanguha, vice president of Ibuka, a national association of survivors of the 1994 genocide. He has done too many victims in this country.It is really very insulting. "He called the practice of early release from the court" a new form of impunity. "
That the release of Three men report to a judge, Theodor Meron, the president of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, whose decision can not be appealed. Although thousands of procedural considerations have been introduced into the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the twin tribunals to try genocide perpetrators almost simultaneously, the ad hoc system has not been used. However, there are no clear standards for the reduction of sentences. Now, more than twenty years after the beginning of the trials, the guilty who were imprisoned in seventeen countries around the world ask to leave early. A 2014 study found that nearly half of the convicts in both courts were released, the vast majority of them before serving their sentence.
The first genocide court decisions cited the parole rules. one sentence was served; Over time, as Meron noted, the courts have come to rely on two-thirds of the time served as the standard of admissibility. But critics question any parole system for the world's most serious crimes. The early release of rehabilitated criminals may seem logical in states attempting to reduce the costs of incarceration and where the authorities can monitor the activities of parolees. But criminals convicted by international tribunals have committed a scale and degree of harm that national regulations were not supposed to take into account; in addition, they are not supervised after their release, and there is no legal reason to detain them if they start fanning ethnic hatred or worse yet. In a letter to the court, the Rwandan government categorically protested against this claim, saying that the crimes of men "offend all standards of humanity, morality and decency" and continue to harm Rwanda and to Rwandans a quarter of a century later. Damascus fully agrees. "It may not be something that the whole world is ready to understand – it's just my opinion – but, if we're moving towards justice, Simba can not be released," m & r He said. "It would be unfair to the little people who took these machetes, who came after us, who had no idea what was going on in the chain of command."
More than one million of these "small people", the small genocidaires, were tried for nearly a decade in the gacaca of Rwanda, or "grass courts", a system intended to ensure that no Hutu crime has remained unpunished. The first releases occurred after confession and contrition, which the accused often demonstrated by showing the community where he had left the bodies of those he had killed. At gacaca remorse, like innocence, required proof.
The system is different for people convicted in the United States Courts. By granting early release to the convicted, the courts presume their rehabilitation, even if they show precisely the opposite. Until now, we know very little about the remorse of the three men who are now demanding early release: a rule of confidentiality protects the content of their requests. Johnston Busingye, Rwanda's Minister of Justice, said the government has twice asked for applications before his response, but the court has never responded. "This is not an agreement with the thought for the victims," he said. In fact, according to Mr. Busingye, it is the first time since the early release of Rwandan genocidaires began in 2012 that the court has taken the trouble to seek the Rwandan government's opinion at all. The court is not obliged to consult the Rwandan authorities before ruling on the applications for early release, and it is not obliged to inform the eighteen hundred people who have been offered witness protection services in exchange for their testimony. In 2016, when Ferdinand Nahimana, co-founder of a hate radio broadcasting the names and places of Tutsi survivors, was released after serving two decades of his thirty-year sentence, the Rwandan government and its citizens, including those who testified against When the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda concluded its last trials, in 2012, its sixty-two convictions were hailed as a triumph of justice, both in the criminal sense and, more generally, as a historical documentation method and a basis for reconciliation. Up to now, nearly 20% of its convicts have been released prematurely. If all three pending applications succeed, Rwandan government lawyers expect Theoneste Bagosora, considered to be the brains of the genocide, to file a similar application later in the year.
Human rights defenders claim that all the logic of international criminal law. "You're condemning people for genocide, they're getting relatively low sentences, and then they're eligible for early release, it's completely undermining the process," said Toby Cadman, co-founder of Guernica's 37-member law firm. international justice in London.
Or, as Damascus says, "If Simba is left out, who is left?"
More than hate, more than fear, more than machetes or machine guns The scale has always been that of the genocidaires. most powerful weapon. The world remembers the mass murder of the Mass of rape, of the Mass crimes, and speaks with pathos of anonymous and faceless victims – and the courts tell us, through millions of pages of testimony and other overwhelming evidence, that these mass crimes were committed by these relatively few men. The ability of perpetrators to commit atrocities is beyond our ability to imagine. We can not understand it. The overwhelming evidence overwhelms us. A countable collection of authors has become as absurd, as abstract, as the thousands and thousands of people they have killed.
This is not, of course, what Damascus thinks of Aloys Simba. Damascus, whom I met for the first time in Rwanda almost 15 years ago, is now the father of three children and an adoptive member of my family. But after the soldiers sent by Simba fired into the crowd at Kaduha Parish, he never saw his own family again: his mother ran, a newborn baby in his arms, and brothers and sisters from Damascus behind her. Damascus, at eleven o'clock, refused to follow. He fled the hill instead, and he was pushed by a stranger into the priests' quarters. He hid under a bed, while the slaughter that began at dawn dragged at dusk. "There was screaming, screaming – there were so many people to kill – and more screaming, until it was the last voice," he said. "And then it was that."
This, Damascus learned, is the injustice of international justice: killers, like their victims, become anonymous and faceless statistics. And if we can not name them, and we can not imagine their crimes, we will hardly notice when they are released.
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