Judgement

Not too long ago the ICTR was abuzz with news that the judgement in the Kalimanzira Case was about to be delivered, so pretty much everyone headed down to Courtroom I for the verdict. Some other interns and I arrived early and so we had front row seats in the public gallery right in front of the defence table. The ICTR courtrooms are actually quite small and crappy and the public gallery is long and narrow and separated from the courtroom by glass windows although everyone in the gallery can see in and everyone in the courtroom can see out.

The highest penalty at the ICTR is life in prison, as the UN is anti-capital punishment. This is actually one of the reasons the international community refuses to hand the remaining cases over to the Rwandan government, as Rwanda still uses the death penalty. Life is reserved for those most responsible for planning and orchestrating the genocide and for those who planned but also executed with particular enthusiasm. Additionally, the ICTR created the precedent in international criminal law of including rape as a crime against humanity and a tool of genocide. Kalimanzira had been charged with genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide and as the judgement was read, it became apparent that he had not won his case. It actually wasn’t until the court asked him to rise and hear their verdict that I realized I had been sitting directly in front of Kalimanzira the whole time.

I don’t know what this says about me as a person, but as soon as I made this realization and the man stood to hear his sentence, I did not feel excitement, righteous satisfaction that justice was being done, or even interest. Instead I had goose bumps all over and felt an overwhelming desire to be anywhere other than that public gallery. I was embarrassed to be sitting watching the determination of this man’s fate become a public spectacle. It was like he was an animal in the zoo and all of the people at the ICTR with nothing better to do that day came to see the rare (or maybe not so rare) species called génocidaire.

More than anything else, I felt sorry for Kalimanzira. I am aware that Kalimanzira is responsible for the deaths of at least thousands of people, but all I could think of was the guilt I have felt in times when I did something I knew was wrong, and the pain of the ensuing consequences, and obviously I have never done anything nearly as bad as orchestrating the extermination of a people. Maybe I was just emotional that day, but I feel like having to live with all of that guilt on his conscience is far worse punishment than anything the UN or “international community,” represented I suppose in that moment by the small gathering of mainly Western interns in the public gallery, could ever mete out.

Don’t get me wrong; I chose to do an internship at the ICTR, and in the Office of the Prosecutor in particular, for a reason. And I believe in fighting impunity and seeking justice and sending a message and everything else the ICTR attempts, and often succeeds, at doing. I guess it was just the first time I realized that what happens at the tribunal is not just an academic exercise like a term paper or an exam question. The lives of hundreds of thousands of dead Rwandans, and hundreds of thousands more who are scarred emotionally and physically, and the rights of all human beings who deserve to live without fearing the consequences of their own ethnicity, are weighted against the lives and freedom of a handful of other human beings who did terrible things. Yet somehow, my gut reaction was still to feel bad for one of those very bad human beings.

Kalimanzira as the judgement was read

Work

All of the difficulties aside, I absolutely LOVE my internship! I was assigned to an appeals team (ALAD) in the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) (note the UN’s excessive use of acronyms). My two supervisors are the team leader and her senior advisor, who are Swedish and Canadian women, respectively. They are both really amazing, super competent women. (Yesterday I watched them take on a whole room of men criticizing their brief and they basically took them all down. It was awesome.) They are both also very nice, make me feel a part of the team, are always open for questions, and actually ask for and respect my input. They are also both mothers of young children and happily married career women, which makes me think that maybe being a woman lawyer does not necessarily preclude having some sort of personal life.

Right now we are working on an appeal for the Zigiranyirazo case. Ziggy is the brother-in-law of the assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana and was an integral member of the akazu, which was the clique of Hutu political elites in Rwanda who planned and orchestrated the genocide. (As a creepy side note, just a few years before the genocide occurred, he was studying in Montreal and apparently had an altercation with a Tutsi man in the Montreal metro.) At trial he was found guilty of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, and not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, and murder as a crime against humanity. He was sentenced to 20 years.

The interesting thing about the ICTR trials is that the prosecutor can’t just get up and say “This person planned and was involved in the genocide” and then tell the story of what happened in Rwanda. The accused needs to be charged with specific crimes related to specific events during the genocide (for example, the massacre of several thousand Tutsi at one particular location on one particular day) and then needs to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was involved. This is why, for example, Ziggy could be found guilty of genocide but not of conspiracy to commit genocide, because although basically everyone knows he conspired, the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he attended meetings where the genocide was planned. The trial becomes very technical, and can hinge on small details like what he did or did not say at a certain roadblock at a specific time.

Both the prosecution and the defence appealed this decision and since I have arrived I have been helping with the response to the defence’s appellant brief. Since I am working in appeals, I mostly look at previous ICTR and ICTY (Y = Yugoslavia) judgements to find legal arguments against the defence position. This is really interesting from an international criminal law point of view, and is good practice in legal research and argumentation.

Since appeals tend to be bigger picture issues, however, sometimes it is easy to forget I am working on a genocide case at all. A fellow intern, who works in defence at the trial level, on the other hand, spent a whole day reading witness statements from a young girl who had had both of her arms cut off, and basically broke down at the end of the day. So from a mental health point of view, my assignment is very fortunate, but I find I need to remind myself just how awful the crimes people like Ziggy committed in order to “stay hungry” as the Chief Prosecutor Hassan Jallow put it.

It would also be pretty cool to get sent on a fact-finding mission to Rwanda as a couple of lucky interns at the trial level have been able to do. One intern told me about interviewing a witness on the side of the road as he pretended to give them directions so that he wouldn’t be seen talking to ICTR people. (I edited out the rest of this post because I probably write too much...)

Getting started

I figure it’s about time I talk a little a bit about the reason I am here: my internship. The fact that I had been abandoned at the airport and that I received no answer to my frequent email requests to begin working a few days early (I wanted to beat the rush of interns, and to be honest, I was pretty bored) made me a wee bit nervous, so when I showed up at the visitor’s entrance to the ICTR I was pretty relieved that the guard told me I was expected. The internship coordinator Felicia took me to get my UN ID badge and then escorted me to the Office of the Prosecutor (which is actually several floors of a building, not one office) for my assignment.

I’m not sure if it’s the UN or Africa (probably actually a combination of both), but getting started was extremely slow and complicated. To get my assignment I had to talk to one person, but to get my computer I had to talk to someone else, and to get a computer log-in I had to talk to yet another person, etc. etc. and everything has to be done in a particular order (i.e. before you get your computer you have to get a log-in), but no one really tells you what you need to do, who you need to talk to in order to do it, or where those people are, and if you do manage to find their office, they probably aren’t there anyway. Some other interns arrived before I did so they helped me through the process, but I still spent a few days without an assignment, then with an assignment but with no computer, then with a computer but it didn’t work, and even now sometimes I don’t have all of the programs I need and everything is more or less 2 small steps forward and one big step back. The comforting part is that everyone is in more or less the same boat so we try to have a sense of humour about it. One girl I work with quipped that EDP, which is the UN tech department, stands for “Everything Doesn’t Perform” and another, noting that the elevator doors are the doors of death and are always shutting abruptly on people, said “They are the only thing that works fast here.” And one day the fire alarm went off, but rather than being alarmed we were all giggling uncontrollably because no one was really surprised that the ICTR would, with all of its other malfunctions, catch on fire. (Turns out it was just a fire drill and that we need to reduce our exit time from 12 to 3 minutes). To be honest, I shouldn’t complain because I was more or less set up in three or four days, whereas some of the interns who came later than me were waiting weeks for a computer.

All of this, however, has made me realize that just the enormity of the UN is probably the main reason that it hasn’t always (ok, usually) been successful at solving the world’s problems. Being down at the bottom of the enormous UN totem pole (unpaid interns don’t rank very high), I now have a much better grasp of just how hard it is when something goes wrong to pinpoint who exactly is responsible or, at the very least, who to complain to. I did consider calling up Ban Ki Moon if my internship goes awry, but somehow I don’t think this would be effective as I’m sure he has more important things to deal with, like civil wars, AIDS, denouncing Israel, etc.

Prologue

So I know it is cliché, but I have decided to start a blog. I had always resisted the idea, but I am really doing a crap job at writing in my journal, want to hold on to the experiences I have here, and I figure journal writing to an audience might force me to organize my thoughts somewhat and keep on top of things. I am also doing a crap job at sending emails (partially because UN computers and African Internet are so slow, but I’m just generally bad at it anyway) and this way I will be able to update everyone on what is happening. Also, the AUCC Students for Development, which is mercifully funding my African jaunt, recommend blogging as a public engagement activity that makes up part of my responsibility as an award recipient. Finally, to be perfectly honest there isn’t much to do on weekend evenings in Arusha when the power is out, so this is a creative project to keep me occupied. I figure since only people who love me will read this anyway, at least none of you will be judging me based lameness and lack of writing ability (hopefully).

So as a basic intro, I am spending three months this summer in Arusha, Tanzania working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is the UN court for government, military, and other leaders responsible for the 1994 genocide that resulted in over 800,000 dead in under 100 days. This blog will hopefully be a more or less accurate picture of my experiences working at the tribunal and living in Arusha. Enjoy!