War Crimes Prosecution Watch

Cambodian Extraordinary Chambers (ECCC)

The Official Website of the Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force

Official: Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister not immune from prosecution
AP via International Herald Tribune
October 26, 2006

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia A spokesman for a special Cambodian genocide tribunal said Thursday that a decade-old royal pardon does not guarantee full immunity from prosecution for Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister.

Ieng Sary, 76, received in 1996 a royal pardon from former King Norodom Sihanouk in exchange for leading a mass surrender of Khmer Rouge guerillas to the government. The pardon was granted at the request of the government, grateful to have thousands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas cease their struggle.

"He is saved by the pardon from (only) one crime — genocide. You can get away with one crime but not (with) every crime that you have committed," said Reach Sambath, a spokesman for a joint Cambodia-United Nations tribunal officially called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

The pardon effectively nullified a conviction for genocide handed down against Ieng Sary by a special tribunal in 1979. Some observers have said that the trial was essentially a political show trial held by a communist regime installed by Vietnam after Hanoi's troops ousted the Khmer Rouge from power.

Reach Sambath made his comments as prosecutors build their cases for prosecuting surviving Khmer Rouge leaders responsible for the deaths of nearly 2 million people during their 1975-79 period in power.

He added, however, that it will be up to prosecutors and judges to decide on the exact charges and who to indict.

Reach Sambath said Cambodian and U.N.-appointed prosecutors are expected to hand over preliminary results of their investigations to the mixed group of Cambodian and foreign judges before the end of the year.

The judges will then act on the prosecutors' work, he said, adding that indictments could be announced early next year.

The spokesman was clarifying an answer to a question about the pardon that appeared in the frequently-asked-questions section of the tribunal's official Web site, launched Thursday.

"It will be up to the judges to decide on the scope of this pardon" for Ieng Sary, the answer read. "Even if he cannot be retried for genocide, there may be other charges that could be brought against him on the evidence available."

Ieng Sary, as one of the Khmer Rouge's inner circle, has been considered a potential candidate for trial, but many people feared he might escape justice due to the pardon.

Reach Sambath said many people have asked questions about Ieng Sary in various public forums held to raise awareness about the purpose of the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

"They try to get a clear message from us. They want to know whether if you've got amnesty for one crime, you cannot be tried for another crime," he said.

A Friend of the Dead Ready for a Khmer Rouge Tribunal
World Politics Watch
by Luke Hunt
October 26, 2006

In late 1979 Craig Etcheson was an impressionable 23-year-old who divided his time between rock concerts and first year Ph.D. studies in mathematical models of war at the University of Southern California School for International Relations. The Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple and The Grateful Dead were his bands of choice. Then Vietnam invaded Cambodia and lifted the veil on the true scale of carnage committed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Images from the Killing Fields shocked the affable Etcheson. The slaughter of about one third of Cambodia's population in the previous three-and-a-half years was something the young mathematician found incomprehensible.

His immediate response to those feelings was to study the events in detail.

After digging through records and recent histories, he wrote his first book: "The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea." That was in 1984. Field work followed in the years ahead and again he divided his time -- this time between family duties in Washington, D.C., and crawling through mud and bones with a shovel as a forensic scientist in Cambodia.

A quarter of a century on, Etcheson became affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and became a conduit for the dead. He used his forensic science skills to demonstrate beyond legal doubt that surviving leaders of the ultra-Maoist movement committed one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

Routinely I would meet with Craig after a dig. Normally he was exhausted and more than slightly disturbed by his latest finds and in need of a chat over a single malt.

"After you have seen hundreds and then thousands of mass graves you gradually find a certain kind of peace with the dead, and then eventually one forms a curious social alliance with them," Etcheson said.

That alliance is deeply personal for the stocky 51-year-old, whose latest book, "After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide," was released in March. Another two manuscripts on the same subject are pending. Now he is bracing himself for the long-delayed Khmer Rouge tribunal, where his work will be scrutinized and attacked by those prepared to defend what's left of Pol Pot's hierarchy.

Potential defense lawyers, seeking to make names for themselves, are already conducting forays into Cambodia and preparing an initial strategy based on attacking the validity of the evidence and the legality of the court itself, as well as seeking to throw doubt on reports that genocide occurred.

The United Nations is also setting up the case for the prosecution, and a tribunal could begin its first hearing within the next six months.

Etcheson is unruffled. "For me it's always been about the victims," he said.

"For other people who have worked on this it's about abstractions like establishing legal precedents and defining terms like genocide, instead of addressing issues like these were once actual living human beings."

Unlike the physical evidence produced at the Rwanda, Sierra Leone and former Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals, the remains that lie in the 20,000 uncovered mass graves that dot Cambodia's picturesque landscape have been exposed to decades of human intervention and erosion by violent tropical storms.

Grave robbers seeking gold teeth and valuables stashed on body parts and in clothes of the dead have also taken a toll. The pillaging has not helped the prosecution's case.

This contamination of evidence is expected to underpin the defense case and could prove pivotal as to whether the defiant Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, live out their twilight years as free citizens or as felons behind bars.

But Etcheson does hold one trump card up his sleeve.

He is the keeper of the coordinates, the secret locations of untouched mass graves in Cambodia's remote eastern provinces, where thousands of men, women and children -- those he now calls friends -- were battered to death, dumped and buried.

"There could be hundreds or 10,000 there, or more, or less," he said.
Known collectively as the Primary Site, these mass graves are untainted by human hands and weather. They will provide the stuff forensic scientists dream of: hard evidence that has the potential to withstand the rigid tests of international law.

"This is a nice little chunk of evidence that provides a snapshot of what happened in the east during the first and second quarters of 1978 when Ta Mok and Ke Pauk came in and killed everybody," Etcheson said. The Primary Site, the size of three to four football pitches, is where Etcheson and a small team of forensic scientists from Canada have painstakingly unearthed initial samples they say justify an excavation on a grand scale.

The findings, which Etcheson believes will directly link Pol Pot's government with the belligerent and deliberate murder of thousands, will be offered to the tribunal's prosecution as prima facie evidence.

"What they did was pretty simple," Etcheson said.

He chuckles, not out of mirth but out of a sense of irony over the abstractions of Western justice versus the simplicity of the brutality exercised by the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge. "A Khmer Rouge sense of justice is much easier to understand. Just bring in the trucks, get 'em on, truck 'em off, then whack 'em. And that's what they did in village after village after village."

Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and Ke Pauk escaped their day in the dock through death. But one of their surviving close colleagues, Kang Kek Ieu -- or Comrade Duch -- who ran the notorious S21 torture camp, is in jail awaiting trial after being charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

If convicted, Pol Pot's surviving henchmen and women will probably go to jail, a comfortable existence in comparison with conditions imposed during Brother Number One's regime.

But comfortable or not, such a result will mean Etcheson's efforts, made for his friends, will have proved pivotal in finding justice for all Cambodians, dead or alive.

"Maybe then I can find a job that actually comes with a paycheck," he said with a grin. "But more than likely I'll find another country where similar work needs to be done."

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Democratic Republic of the Congo (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

DR Congo: Army Abducts Civilians for Forced Labor
Human Rights Watch - Press Release
October 16, 2006

(Brussels, October 16, 2006) – The Congolese armed forces must immediately end their practice of abducting civilians and using them for forced labor in the country’s northeastern Ituri district, Human Rights Watch said today. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo must investigate and prosecute soldiers suspected of these crimes.

On September 17, nine civilians, including four women and two children, were abducted by government soldiers and taken to the military camp near Olongba village, an area just south of Ituri’s capital, Bunia, from where they have since “disappeared.” Family members believe that these civilians were killed, and last week held funerals to mark their deaths. In another incident on August 11, soldiers abducted 20 civilians in the nearby town of Gethy and forced them to harvest and transport manioc. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

Congolese army spokesmen say local militia groups are responsible for abducting these civilians, a claim countered by eyewitnesses and local human rights monitors who allege that government soldiers carried out the abductions and have in recent weeks been seen forcing some of the civilians to transport items.

“Congolese government soldiers were sent to Ituri to protect civilians against abuses by local militias, but they themselves are devastating the area,” said Alison Des Forges, senior Africa adviser at Human Rights Watch. “Civilians being held without charge to provide free labor to the soldiers must be released at once.”

In August and September, Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of victims and witnesses in Ituri, many of whom described a pattern of forced labor by government soldiers who abducted civilians and then forced them to work in local gold mines, to harvest and collect food or to transport goods. One elderly man described how government soldiers in August took him from a displacement camp at Kagaba village for five days and forced him to carry firewood and manioc to their military camp.

On August 9, Human Rights Watch witnessed two government soldiers forcing six civilians, including two women, to carry chairs, benches and corrugated metal roofing looted from a nearby church to their military camp. The soldiers claimed they were “escorting the people for their own safety,” a claim contradicted by the victims themselves, who explained how they had been forced at gunpoint to take the metal roofing from the church and to carry the items for the soldiers. The soldiers threatened to kill them all if they failed to obey.

Victims also told Human Rights Watch how, for one month in late 2005, soldiers forced more than 100 men and boys from eight villages to dig gold at a mine near Bavi village. The soldiers threatened to kill the people if they refused to comply. They arrested one of the local chiefs, beat him and put him in a hole used as an underground prison. The victim told a Human Rights Watch researcher, “I had tried to stop what they were doing, to defend the people. They tied me up and hit me. We were powerless against them.”

Since 2004, Congolese government soldiers supported by United Nations peacekeepers have conducted military operations against militia groups in Ituri that have refused disarmament and integration into the national army, including the Patriotic Resistance Force of Ituri (Forces de Résistance Patriotique d’Ituri, or FRPI). On October 6 and 7, fighting restarted between FRPI militias and government soldiers supported by UN peacekeepers after a brief lull during the first round of the presidential election. Two peacekeepers were seriously injured.

Combatants from the FRPI and other militia groups have also attacked civilians, killing, raping and torturing those who they considered to be their enemies. In late 2005, FRPI combatants arrested and tortured local authorities suspected of providing support to government soldiers. Some of these local authorities were later killed.

Congolese authorities have failed to act effectively to end abuses by militia leaders and soldiers in their own army. On October 2, government authorities confirmed the rank of colonel to Peter Karim and Matthieu Ngojolo, commanders from the former Nationalist and Integrationist Front (Front Nationaliste et Intégrationnistes, or FNI), a murderous armed group in Ituri responsible for widespread human rights abuses, including ethnic massacres and torture. In October, authorities also promoted Gen. Gabriel Amisi (also known as “Tango Fort”) to the head of ground forces – one of the most senior positions in the army – while ignoring serious allegations of his involvement in summary executions and other war crimes in Kisangani in May 2002.

On October 29, Congo is due to hold a presidential run-off election between current President Joseph Kabila and Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba. Voters will also go to the polls to select provincial assembly members.

“The Congolese army has become known as the country’s biggest human rights abuser,” said Des Forges. “The authorities need to take action against all war criminals, including those in their own ranks. Candidates should make this a key pledge in their election platforms. ”

DRC: 'Sexual terrorism' in South Kivu leaves HIV in its wake
IRIN
October 22, 2006

BUKAVU, 22 Oct 2006 (IRIN) - In 2004 the United Nation’s World Health Organisation estimated there were 25,000 survivors of sexual violence in South Kivu, the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern province, but those working to rebuild shattered lives consider this a fraction of the real number.

"I have no doubt that over 100,000 women have been raped in this province," said Christine Schuler-Deschryver, of the German Technical Corporation (GTZ), who remained in Bukavu, the provincial capital, during the war, and registered more than 14,000 rape survivors.

The people of South Kivu lived through 10 years of unfathomable violence inflicted by foreign rebel groups and Congolese militia as they fought each other. Most notorious are the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), comprised mostly of Rwandan Hutu militiamen who fled across the border after the 1994 genocide in their country. Many local people blame them for spreading the virus.

"It was the Interahamwe [Rwandan Hutu génocidaires] that brought AIDS," said Honorata Zakumwilo, 54, who was raped and tortured by the Interahamwe for 14 months. "They would cry out 'A manger' [food time] but they weren't calling for dinner, they were calling for us." The sexual atrocities and humiliation Honorata was subjected to are hard to comprehend. "We were sexual slaves, but simply raping us wasn't enough."
Precise statistics are impossible to compile. An overwhelming sense of shame and guilt stops many women admitting to their ordeal, and areas in the province remain insecure.

Schuler-Deschryver is convinced that the widespread sexual violence committed across the eastern region has nothing to do with satisfying sexual needs. "People don't realise they are using rape as a weapon of destruction - it's sexual terrorism."

GTZ supports the local nongovernmental organisation, Commité de Rayon d'Action Femme (CRAF), in counselling known rape survivors who are reluctant to seek medical attention after the trauma of sexual abuse, and who may also have to face having contracted sexually transmitted diseases.

According to Aldegonde Kyakim, project director at CRAF, there has been a marked increase in HIV rates directly linked to rape.

"From the blood tests carried out on sexual violence victims, we see a prevalence rate varying from five to 15 percent," Kyakin said. She believed the fluctuation to be largely due to geographical location and the armed groups operating there.

"The highest prevalence rate of 15 percent is among women raped by the FNL [Forces nationales de liberation] from neighbouring Burundi, while those believed to have been raped by the Interhamwe have an estimated prevalence rate of 10 to 12 percent," she said.

Official 2005 figures from the National Programme for the Fight Against AIDS (PNLS) put the infection rate among South Kivu's rural population at 4.5 percent.

The conflict has directly contributed to the spread of HIV in South Kivu, said Dr Rebecca Adlington, a medical supervisor and HIV/AIDS specialist with Medécins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Bukavu.

"In the South Kivu territory of Uvira, the sero-prevalence among blood donors in 1994 was five percent, yet by 1998 the prevalence rate among donors was up to 12 percent, so you have to ask yourself, 'why?'" Adlington said.

"This was not a sample group who considered themselves at risk. In general, they were relatives of those who needed blood. Something was spreading the virus, and it was more than likely the military and armed groups."

Women seeking medical help as a result of injuries sustained during rape, or found by organisations like CRAF, are taken to Panzi General Hospital, high in the hills outside Bukavu.
Many arrive suicidal, said Dr Cecile Kamwanya, head of the hospital's psychological support programme. "Marginalised by their family and community, raped women feel they have committed a wrong. A raped woman is worthless to her family. There's nothing worth living for in their eyes."

The hospital performs up to 100 operations a month on women in need of reconstructive surgery; each woman brought through the hospital doors receives trauma counselling and is encouraged to take an HIV test. "Nearly all accept," said Kamwanya. "It's even the first thing some demand when they arrive."

War has destroyed health services in South Kivu and prevented local and international organisations from running HIV/AIDS sensitisation programmes in rural areas. Tens of thousands of sexual violence survivors live unaware of the risks of infection and are unable to access the limited care and treatment programmes available in and around Bukavu.

The longer the province's health services remain woefully inadequate, health workers fear, the further HIV will embed itself in communities.

Military Prosecutor in Kilwa Trial Recalled to Kinshasa: Political Pressure Intensifies After Former Anvil Mining Staff and Congolese Military Charged with Commission of or Complicity in War Crimes
Action Against Impunity for Human Rights (ACIDH), Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), and Global Witness
October 26, 2006

The non-governmental organisations Action contre l’impunité pour les droits humains (ACIDH), Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) and Global Witness today condemned political interference in the Kilwa trial and appealed to President Joseph Kabila to demonstrate his determination to defend the rule of the law in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The NGOs expressed concern that Colonel Eddy Nzabi Mbombo, a military prosecutor at Katanga’s Military Court (Auditeur Militaire Supérieur près la Cour Militaire du Katanga ), may be coming under intense political pressure following his decision to commit three former employees of Anvil Mining Congo and nine members of the Congolese army for trial for the commission of or complicity in war crimes.

In October 2004, after the town of Kilwa had been briefly occupied by a hitherto unknown and ill-prepared rebel movement calling itself the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Katanga (Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Libération du Katanga , MRLK), soldiers of the 62 nd Infantry Brigade of the Congolese Armed Forces (Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo, FARDC), under the command of Colonel Ilunga Ademar, launched a counter-offensive to recapture the town in southern DRC. In the course of the counter-offensive, serious human rights violations were perpetrated against the civilian population.

The indictment 1 names three former Anvil Mining employees: Pierre Mercier, a Canadian national who was the General Manger of Anvil’s Congolese subsidiary, Anvil Mining Congo, and the Deputy General Manager of the Perth-based company, 1 Décision de renvoi, Colonel Magistrat Eddy Nzabi Mbombo, Auditeur Militaire Supérieur près la Cour Militaire du Katanga, dated 12 October 2006. The indictment charges Colonel Ilunga Ademar and eight other soldiers on various charges related to breaches of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols in connection with events in Kilwa in October 2004 and in Pweto between January and April 2005.

Anvil Mining NL; Peter Van Niekerk, a South African national, Anvil’s former head of Security at the Dikulushi mine; and another South African national identified only as Cedric (believed to be Cedric Kirsten, Anvil’s former Security Manager at Dikulushi, although Anvil has not confirmed this). The three men are accused of having “voluntarily failed to withdraw the vehicles placed at the disposal of the 62 nd Brigade in the context of the counter- offensive of [15-18] October 2004 to recapture the town of Kilwa” and of having “knowingly facilitated the commission of war crimes by Ilunga Ademar and his men”. 2 The most serious crime, which was carried out by the Congolese Armed Forces, was the summary execution of twenty men and five women, none of whom, according to the indictment, had taken part in the smallscale rebellion that was the justification for the military’s counter-offensive. In a public reaction, Anvil Mining Limited stated that “the allegations against Anvil Mining Congo sarl and the above mentioned persons are unfounded and without merit.” 3

For months the Congolese authorities obstructed all attempts to investigate the incident. Nevertheless, investigators from the United Nations peacekeeping operation in the DRC, MONUC, conducted an inquiry. Their report described how soldiers of the 62 nd Brigade carried out summary executions, arbitrary detentions, torture, rape and looting on the defenceless civilian population of Kilwa. 4

ACIDH, RAID and Global Witness are also calling on Bill Turner, the Chief Executive of Anvil Mining, who paid a visit to the DRC shortly after the military prosecutor’s decision was made public, to cooperate fully with the Congolese judicial authorities in their search to establish the truth about the precise circumstances in which Anvil’s logistical support was provided to the 62 nd Military Brigade which facilitated the human rights violations.

Anvil Mining, which has enjoyed the support of Augustin Katumba Mwanke, an influential figure in President Kabila’s party, the Parti du peuple pour la reconstruction et la démocratie (PPRD) and an adviser to President Kabila, who was also on the board of Anvil Mining Congo, failed to make clear in its quarterly reports to the Australian and Toronto stock exchanges the scale and gravity of the human rights violations that had occurred in Kilwa in October 2004. In June 2005, Australian television’s flagship current affairs programme, Four Corners, broadcast a documentary, “The Kilwa incident”, which prompted Colonel Nzabi, with help from MONUC’s Human Rights Division, to conduct an in situ investigation at Kilwa. Despite a singular lack of cooperation from the 6 th Military Region, the prosecutor managed to gather sufficient evidence from a range of sources to identify the alleged principal authors. On 12 October 2006 he notified the Military Court of Katanga of his decision to commit for trial nine members of the Congolese Armed Forces and three former employees of Anvil Mining Congo (the Congolese subsidiary of the Australian-Canadian mining company).

The NGOs deplore the fact that while the decision of the Katangan military prosecutor has been hailed by international observers as a milestone towards an end to impunity in the DRC and a critical step towards bringing justice to the people of Kilwa, intense political pressure may be brought to bear on the prosecutor, apparently with a view to obstructing prosecution. It is reliably reported that a few days after the indictment was released, Colonel Nzabi was summoned urgently to Kinshasa where he remains. It is not the first time that pressure has been brought to bear on the military judicial authorities to drop prosecutions of members of the Congolese Armed Forces accused of human rights violations.

In the DRC, a case in which military personnel and civilians are implicated would come before a civilian judge. However, at the present time, only the Congolese military penal code incriminates war crimes and crimes against humanity and it is therefore the military courts which have jurisdiction in these cases.

See entire release here.

DR Congo: Annan ‘very concerned’ at rising violence ahead of Sunday’s elections
UN News Service
October 27, 2006

As the United Nations Mission in the strife-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reinforced security and placed military observers throughout the vast country ahead of Sunday’s run-off presidential election, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today expressed deep concern at the increasing level of violence.

“The Secretary-General urges the Congolese people and, in particular, the presidential candidates, to take all possible steps to ensure that the elections are conducted in an atmosphere of calm and that the process is transparent and free,” he said in a statement on the contest between President Joseph Kabila and Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba, the final stage of the largest and most complex elections the UN has ever helped organize.

“The overwhelming majority of the Congolese people are determined to exercise their democratic right to freely elect their leaders through participation in the polling. And the successful holding of peaceful and credible elections is vital for future peace and stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” he added.

Provincial assemblies will also be elected on Sunday, the closing chapter of an operation that began with first-round voting at the end of July and is aimed at cementing the DRC’s transition from a six-year civil war, widely considered the most lethal fighting in the world since World War II, costing 4 million lives through fighting and attendant hunger and disease. Factional fighting has continued since then, particularly in the east.

Throughout the long election process, UN agencies have helped to deliver tens of millions of ballots and other supplies to some 50,000 polling stations, train 12,000 polling supervisors and plan for the safety of the 25.7 million Congolese registered to vote.

The UN Mission in the DRC, known as MONUC, said results are expected on 19 November. Earlier this week it called on the two candidates to maintain the unity of the country both before and after the polls and not repeat the first round behaviour of unilaterally proclaiming themselves the winner.

Mr. Annan’s Special Representative in the DRC, William Swing, met this week with Mr. Bemba to discuss security and public safety arrangements for a rally planned for today in Kinshasa. They also discussed broader security issues, including allegations of the discovery of unlawful weapons at the residence of an adviser to Mr. Bemba.

UN Force Commander Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye condemned a decision to prevent a UN weapons verification team from inspecting a logistical camp run by Mr. Kabila’s supporters.

MONUC condemned isolated incidents of violence in Lubumbashi, Mbandaka, Lodja, Kinshasa and Kindu.

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Darfur, Sudan (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Darfur, Sudan

Darfur refugees lash out - Peacekeepers are little help, they say
Associated Press via Detroit Free Press
October 16, 2006

KASSAB, Sudan -- Refugees in the camps scattered across Darfur live in fear, saying the African Union peacekeeping mission does little to protect them even as rising violence is driving away crucial humanitarian aid.

"You have been here for three years now, and what have you done for us?" a tribal leader bitterly asked a delegation of African Union soldiers and police that came to the Kassab refugee camp last week.

As they often must, the peacekeepers patiently explained to camp delegates that they had come to Darfur only to monitor the violence and have no mandate to fight it.

"You are witnessing what happens, but you aren't helping," retorted Attaieb Adem, a leader of the 25,000 refugees in Kassab.

Since fighting between rebels and the Sudanese army and a militia of Arab nomads began in 2003, some 200,000 people have died in Darfur and 2.5 million have been displaced.

The African Union mission came in 2004, and refugees' anger over their perceived ineffectiveness is strong.

"If there is nothing you can do, then you might as well go home, so that the United Nations comes," Adem said.

He referred to refugees' widespread hope that August's UN Security Council resolution to send 20,000 UN peacekeepers to Darfur will be implemented. The African force's mandate expires at the end of the year.

However, Sudan's president fiercely opposes the proposal, saying it would breach the country's sovereignty. For now, the UN seems bent on buying time by sending more than 100 military and civilian advisers to reinforce the African mission and pushing for its mandate to be prolonged in order to avoid a dangerous security vacuum.

Refugees in Kassab say they do not see how their security could get any worse in their camp, on the frontline of a murky war zone where some 2,000 rebels clash with about 5,000 Sudanese soldiers and another 2,000 militia.

The militia, called the janjaweed, was recruited among nomad Arabs to help quell the ethnic African rebels and is blamed for much of the looting and violence against refugees.

But rebel violence and hostility to aid workers also has escalated since May, when one rebel faction signed a shaky peace agreement with the government.

Humanitarian groups and African Union police say they withdrew from Kassab in September mostly because of rebel violence.

The camp's clinic closed, so refugees in need of treatment trudge to the nearest town. Refugee women say taking that road, or even collecting firewood around the camp, exposes them to robbery and rape.

Tribal leaders say security has grown so bad that armed men now plunder the camp at will. "We go to bed with our shoes on," in case they have to flee, Sheik Abdallah Shariff said.

UN receives reports of deadly Government bombing in Darfur, arrest of aid workers
UN News Service
October 19, 2006

Amid increasing insecurity in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region, the United Nations mission in the country has received reports that a Government aircraft bombed an area in North Darfur, killing an eight-year-old boy, and that two aid workers were arrested in the south of the region.

The reports to the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) said the aircraft “dropped an unconfirmed number of bombs” near Birmaza yesterday, spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York.

Referring to the arrests in the south, he said that two staff members from an international non-governmental organization (NGO) had reportedly been arrested on Tuesday for taking photographs without the required permit. Separately, Mr. Dujarric also said that armed bandits had tried to break into an NGO compound in West Darfur.

As many as 2 million people are displaced within Darfur, a remote and impoverished region in western Sudan that has been beset by brutal fighting between Government forces, allied Janjaweed militias and rebel groups since 2003. An estimated 200,000 others have been killed during that period.

Despite the deteriorating security situation, Mr. Dujarric said a new UN assessment had found that overall malnutrition rates in the region had “mostly stabilized this year,” while food insecurity had also improved slightly due to a stronger international response to the suffering there.

The survey, which sampled households from the 3.7 million people receiving aid out of the total 6 million people in Darfur, was undertaken by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

“Preliminary results… found that 70 per cent of war-affected Darfurians were food insecure, slightly down from 74 per cent last year. While the remaining 30 per cent of this year’s war-affected people required some form of assistance, they had more diverse diets, spent less than 50 per cent of their income on food, and relied less on food aid,” UNICEF said in a joint press release.

“The assessment also found that while the malnutrition rate among children under five rose slightly, from 11.9 per cent last year to 13.1 per cent this year, hovering just beneath the emergency threshold of 15 per cent, they remained significantly below the 2004 malnutrition rates in Darfur, which stood at 21.8 per cent.”

But the UN agencies cautioned that the continued flow of aid is under threat because of escalating violence, which is restricting access to war and drought-affected people, exacerbating the already fragile situation.

Furthermore, the number of families who said they could reach feeding centres for malnourished children had halved as the result of deteriorating security and because some feeding centres closed after malnutrition figures improved last year.

Khartoum Expels U.N. Envoy Who Has Been Outspoken on Darfur Atrocities
The New York Times
by Warren Hoge
October 22, 2006

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 22 — Sudan’s government on Sunday ordered the chief United Nations envoy to leave, saying he was an enemy of the country and its armed forces.

Secretary General Kofi Annan said that he was reviewing the letter from the Khartoum government and had asked the envoy, Jan Pronk, to return to New York for “consultations.”

The Sudanese order said Mr. Pronk had to leave by Wednesday. United Nations officials confirmed he would depart before then and said he would need the permission of the Sudanese government to return.

Mr. Pronk, a blunt-spoken former Dutch cabinet minister, has been outspoken in reporting on the killings, rapes and other atrocities in Darfur, the region in the western part of the country where at least 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes.

He has become increasingly pointed in his comments about the government, as violence in the region has increased despite a May peace accord between Khartoum and a major rebel group and as the government continues to refuse to allow United Nations peacekeepers into the country. The United Nations force would take over the duties from African Union troops, who have been mostly unable to stop the fighting.

Mr. Pronk is known as a forceful presence at the United Nations from his frequent appearances before the Security Council, where he often delivers unflinching accounts of the continuing mayhem and political breakdown in Sudan in a rhetorical style that includes finger jabbing and dramatic pauses for emphasis.

Sunday’s action against him was apparently provoked by an entry he made in his blog (www.janpronk.nl) last weekend that said the armed forces had suffered two major defeats with extensive casualties against rebels in Darfur in the past six weeks. He also reported that generals had been cashiered, morale had sunk and the government had collaborated with the feared janjaweed Arab militias, which are held responsible for pillaging villages and killing and raping their residents.

The Sudanese armed forces on Thursday cited the blog entry in calling Mr. Pronk a threat to national security and asking that he be expelled.

The fact that one of its top officials has put delicate findings in a personal blog has embarrassed the United Nations. When the matter arose Friday, they resisted rebuking Mr. Pronk for the practice for fear that it would appear to be a vote of no confidence in the mission, rather than just a reprimand for his professional lapse.

Questioned Friday over whether the United Nations stood by the statements in Mr. Pronk’s blog, Stéphane Dujarric, Mr. Annan’s spokesman, said the opinions were Mr. Pronk’s “personal views.”

Mr. Dujarric indicated that this was not the first time the problem with Mr. Pronk’s blog writing had come up. “There have been a number of discussions with Mr. Pronk regarding his blog and the expectation of all staff members to exercise proper judgment in what they write in their blogs,” he said.

The conflict in Darfur began when black African rebels took up arms in early 2003, accusing the government of neglect. Khartoum responded by arming and financing Arab militias who conducted a campaign of violence against civilians that the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing and the Bush administration has called genocide.

In a statement distributed Sunday by the official Sudanese news agency, the country’s Foreign Ministry accused Mr. Pronk of demonstrating “enmity to the Sudanese government and the armed forces” and of involvement in activities “that are incompatible with his mission.”

The activity in question was apparently a trip that Mr. Pronk made into Darfur to make direct contact with rebels.

In his Oct. 14 blog entry, Mr. Pronk wrote that losses suffered by Sudanese armed forces in two recent battles “seem to have been very high,” adding, “Reports speak about hundreds of casualties in each of the two battles with many wounded and many taken prisoner.”

“The morale in the government army in North Darfur has gone down,” it continued. “Some generals have been sacked; soldiers have refused to fight. The government has responded by directing more troops and equipment from elsewhere to the region and by mobilizing Arab militia.”

Victor Tanner, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies who returned from Sudan a week ago, said the blog’s references to defeats suffered by the Sudanese Army had caused a furor there.

“Comments on the disarray that seemed to be reigning within the Sudanese armed forces was an amazing thing to see in the blog of a U.N. official,” he said. “Refreshing, but wild.

“That the armed forces had suffered these losses was something that everybody was talking about as a rumor swarming around Khartoum and Darfur, but it took on a new reality and became ‘the truth’ when it was uttered in print by Pronk.”

In Washington, the State Department said it was withholding comment until it learned more from Khartoum about the incident.

In London, the Foreign Office also denounced the decision and called for it to be reversed. “This step is counterproductive and will contribute nothing to solving the problems of Sudan,” said Lord Triesman, a foreign office minister for Africa.

In what has become a standoff with the United Nations, Sudan has adamantly refused to accept the deployment of 22,000 United Nations soldiers and police officers despite global public outcries over the increasing danger in Darfur.

The force, called for in a Security Council resolution on Aug. 31, would replace the 7,200-member African Union force. In light of Sudan’s defiance, the African Union agreed a month ago to strengthen its force and extend its presence in Sudan until Dec. 31.

Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, has characterized the United Nations’ plan as an American-inspired plot to recolonize his country and plunder its oil, and he has threatened to attack any United Nations soldiers sent to Darfur.

At the United Nations in September, Mr. Bashir said the reports of deaths and displacements in Darfur were “fictions” spread by international aid groups and Jewish organizations to raise money to benefit themselves.

And commenting on the international campaign that has arisen to try to end the violence in Darfur, he said, “Those who made the publicity, who mobilized the people, invariably are Jewish organizations.”

No Justice for Darfur Rape Victims
Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)
by Stephanie Nieuwoudt in Nairobi
October 25, 2006

Activists call on ICC to bring alleged rapists in Darfur to trial, as reports speak of a massive upsurge in rape cases.

Whenever I have taken a camera into one of the many camps for refugees in Darfur, the children have immediately arranged themselves into a group. They want to be in the picture. And they insist on seeing the digital image. They smile and laugh while they point themselves out.

At first glance, the burgeoning camps always seem happy places because of the uninhibited excitement of the children - that is if you ignore the tattered clothes and the reports from aid agencies, which paint a bleak picture. For the truth is that the settlements - known in international bureaucratic jargon as camps for Internally Displaced Persons - are places, once you move beyond the children's cheery welcomes, where human suffering can be smelled, seen and touched. And women and girls seem to bear the brunt of the suffering.

Fiona Laird, a midwife posted until recently at southern Darfur's Kalma camp with the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontiéres, MSF, spoke in a BBC radio interview about the horrific rape cases she had seen on a daily basis.

The worst case was that of a nine-year-old girl who had left the refugee encampment to gather grass for thatch and as fuel. A smiling man approached her and asked her to help him. She agreed, but as they moved further from the camp she told him her mother had told her not to wander so far.

Turning ugly, the man gagged her and tied her on top of the bundles of grass before raping her repeatedly. On release, she staggered back to the camp where Laird treated her for bleeding so severe that the child was unable to walk for many days afterwards.

In new reports to the United Nations Security Council, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and six separate UN agencies have condemned what they describe as a “massive upsurge in rape in Darfur”. The reports come as the Nairobi-based African Women's Development and Communications Network, FEMNET, has urged the International Criminal Court, ICC, in The Hague to bring alleged rapists in Darfur to trial. "The ICC offers an alternative avenue for justice - other than that provided by Sudan - for the women and girls who comprise almost ninety per cent of the victims in the Darfur conflict," said FEMNET communications officer Christine Butegwa.

The UN reports say that attacks on women and girls occur both inside and outside the refugee camps, with many different groups participating in the crimes. Warring parties seek retribution against their opponents by inflicting humiliating punishment on civilians in complete disregard of obligations under international law.

As in the case of the little girl described by Laird, it is not only the “enemy” who rape women and children. In many cases it is also those who should protect them - policemen, elders from the communities and soldiers of the national Sudanese Army, as well as rebel fighters from the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army, SLM/A, and the Justice and Equality Movement, JEM.

In 2005 there were many reports of members of the Janjaweed - Arab militia supported by the Sudan government - raping darker skinned African women, telling them they would bear light skinned babies. Human rights activists have described rape of this kind as a form of ethnic cleansing, a claim that goes to the heart of the allegation that “rolling genocide” is slowly but surely taking place in Darfur.

It is a story that is told from Darfur on a daily basis many times over. In the Darfur settlement of Rokero, an international aid worker described to Washington Post reporter Emily Wax the mass rape by Sudan government militiamen of some 400 women. "It's systematic," said the aid worker. "Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture [of Sudan]. They [the militiamen] want more Arab babies [by Darfur's African women] to take the land.

"The scary thing is that I don't think we realise the extent of how widespread this is yet."

Since the conflict began in Darfur in February 2003, more than two million people have been displaced and between 200,000 and 400,000 killed. The uprising by rebel groups can be traced back to the discontent of black African tribes with what they initially described as Khartoum’s “marginalisation” of the people of Darfur, an arid area the size of France in western Sudan.

After peace talks brokered by the African Union, the Sudan government and a faction of the SLM/A under the leadership of Minni Minnawi signed a peace deal in May. But other rebel groups refused to sign and stepped up their anti-government guerrilla warfare. Minnawi's faction turned on its former resistance allies and joined in attacks on them with government forces.

In a situation of increasing complexity, civilians inevitably bear the brunt of the violence. Government and rebel forces create fear as they raid and capture villages, destroy or grab crops and rape and kill members of the local population.

The conflict is widely interpreted along ethnic lines: brown-skinned Arabs against black Africans. Years of intermarriage between Arabs and Africans have diluted distinguishing physical characteristics, but the cultural divides established down the centuries persist.

Ordinary people flee their villages in panic during the daily attacks. They walk for days on end to reach one of many refugee camps in Darfur or across the border in neighbouring Chad. In September, Jan Egeland, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said the UN was feeding more than three million Darfurians.

Those who reach the camps do not always find the security they long for. Egeland said around a million people in refugee camps are out of reach of humanitarian aid because the fighting makes it impossible for aid workers to get to many areas.

The United States government has accused the Sudan government of genocide in Darfur. Late in the twentieth century there were genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. In both cases, rape was used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, as in Darfur.

During the Yugoslav war, thousands of Muslim women were raped by Serbian and other forces. According to "Women War Peace", an assessment of the impact of armed conflict on women published by the UN Development Fund for Women UNIFEM, tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim women were deliberately raped and impregnated by Serbian men to “dilute” the Bosnian identity.

Little attention was given to rape as a war crime until comparatively recently. This changed in 1998 when Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor in Rwanda, was convicted of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.

Akayesu was indicted on various counts, including rape. It was the first time the crime was included as a component of genocide in an international court ruling.

Aid organisations working in Darfur have found that women raped there are often further traumatised if they dare to report the incident to the police. Sally Chin, an analyst working in Sudan for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said that women often find the policeman they report a rape to is the same man who raped them. They are often also accused by police of waging war on the central government.

A Médecins Sans Frontiéres report describes how a 16-year old Darfur girl who became pregnant after being raped came up against Sudan's archaic and discriminatory laws which demand, among other things, that any woman alleging rape has to do the impossible and provide four male witnesses to support the charge. When the girl was eight months pregnant, police officers charged her with contravening a Sudanese law that makes extra-marital sex illegal. She was locked up with 23 other women - all victims of rape - and beaten up daily.

She was released after ten days, but only after paying a fine to atone for her “sin” of having sex out of wedlock and becoming pregnant.

Jane Lindrio Alao, a psychologist working with the Amel Centre for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, based in Darfur, said of the requirement that four male witnesses are needed for rape to be proved, "All four should witness the actual penetration. So even if you could get two such witnesses, the accused could not be charged. How many women have the luxury of having witnesses to their rape?"

Huge numbers of abandoned babies are among the consequences of unwanted pregnancies resulting from rape in Darfur. An aid worker who spoke to IWPR on condition of anonymity said, “Life in the camps is extremely hard. The women cannot deal with the stigma attached to babies born out of rape and often abandon the infants.

“These communities often shun the woman when they find out she is pregnant. It does not matter that she was raped. According to their beliefs, a woman who has had pre-marital sex and has become pregnant is tainted.”

There are no reliable social services to care for the abandoned children, according to a report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, “Children born out of rape/wedlock”. Babies are brought to the police who take them to hospitals: but many are found too late to save their lives. For those who survive, there is no standard procedure or service offered after the hospital examination.

Access to medical care is yet another trauma. In Darfur's traditional societies, it is seen as an aberration for a woman to be treated by a male doctor. And raped women who can get access to medical care may not want to seek help for fear of the unknown, which in turn leads to health and emotional problems like sexually transmitted diseases and depression.

In Rwanda, rape victims get a sense of justice, which aids the healing process, when they see their perpetrators being brought to the Rwandan tribunal or taken through traditional “gacaca” village assembly courts where perpetrators of lesser crimes are brought to justice. Victims of the Yugoslavia genocide also see justice done at the International Court for the Former Yugoslavia.

In Darfur, there is not yet any kind of retribution. Countless thousands of raped women and girls live with the knowledge that they may die from HIV infections or other complications caused by rape without ever seeing justice being done.

Although the ICC has severe limitations, Christine Butegwa of FEMNET said she and other members of the two-year-old Darfur Consortium, which brings together more than 200 African civil society organisations, hope that current investigations into war crimes in Darfur by the court’s chief prosecutor, Argentina's Luis Moreno-Ocampo, will result in fair trials and compensation for victims of sexual violence. The Amel Centre's Jane Lindrio Alao said, "Refugees and rape victims among the women are keeping silent and protecting themselves, waiting for the day of the ICC."

Stephanie Nieuwoudt is a freelance South African journalist based in Nairobi who frequently reports from Arusha on the ICTR trials.

UN envoy expulsion exposes Sudan's fragile coalition
Reuters
by Opheera McDoom
October 26, 2006

KHARTOUM , Oct 26 (Reuters) - With a myriad of regional peace deals under his belt, Sudan's president proudly touts his coalition government with former enemies in senior posts as a model of reconciliation and power-sharing.

But a series of moves culminating in the expulsion of top U.N. envoy Jan Pronk has left the former rebels who are now part of Sudan's government wondering if they have any real say over policy in Africa's largest country.

"This decision puts Sudan closer to the brink of confrontation with the international community," said Yasir Arman, spokesman for the former southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM).

Both the SPLM and former rebels from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region who are now part of a coalition government with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's dominant National Congress Party say they were not consulted on the expulsion, and opposed it.

Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP) expelled Pronk after he wrote that the Sudanese armed forces had lost two major battles against Darfur rebels, morale was low, generals had been sacked and soldiers were refusing to fight.

The move has highlighted fissures in the fragile ruling coalition in a country already divided, often along ethnic and religious lines, after multiple rebellions.

Both southern and western former rebels control a small percentage of Sudan's ministries, a few top posts and some other government positions under peace deals signed with Khartoum.

The SPLM became a major partner in government after a 2005 north-south peace accord to end Africa's longest civil war, and a former Darfur rebel group joined this year after signing a peace deal with Khartoum.

But key posts are still held by Bashir's NCP, which uses its majority in parliament and government to dominate decision-making.

DARFUR FORMER REBELS NOT CONSULTED

The leader of the only one of three negotiating rebel factions to sign the Darfur peace deal, Minni Arcua Minnawi, is now the fourth-ranking official in Sudan.

But his former rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) said it was not consulted about the move to expel Pronk, which has serious implications for U.N.-Sudanese relations.

"Any decision against (Pronk)... should have be done after a wider consultation within the government of national unity," said Mohamed Bashir, head of Minnawi's office.

A source close to Pronk said he was reassured by a foreign ministry official that the affair would blow over, only to be summoned by that same junior minister, Ali Karti, two days later to be given 72 hours to leave the country.

Karti, a member of Bashir's party, remains technically subordinate to Foreign Minister Lam Akol of the SPLM.

Outside government ranks, Darfur rebel leader Khalil Ibrahim said the expulsion proved the government was as dominated by the military as it was when it took over in a 1989 bloodless coup.

"This decision is one made by the army not by the government," Ibrahim told Reuters.

Ibrahim is one of a coalition of rebels who refused to sign a May peace deal to end 3-1/2 years of revolt in Darfur, and instead renewed hostilities with the government in June.

Eastern rebels who signed a separate peace deal earlier this month, the third regional deal Khartoum has concluded in less than two years, are cautiously watching the coalition discord.

COLLISION PATH OVER DARFUR

Khartoum is already on a collision path over its rejection of a U.N. Security Council resolution to send around 22,500 U.N. troops and police to Darfur, a move Bashir has likened to a Western invasion bent on regime change.

Both the SPLM leader First Vice President Salva Kiir and Minnawi back a U.N. mission in Darfur to take over from African Union troops who have failed to stem the violence.

But their voices, from within the governing coalition, have not persuaded the dominant party to change its policy.

Experts estimate 200,000 have been killed in Darfur and 2.5 milion forced to flee their homes during violence that has included rape, killing and looting since rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing the central government of neglect.

Bashir, himself a military man, gives almost daily speeches swearing to personally fight in any battle against U.N. troops.

Critics say he really fears U.N. troops would be used to arrest any officials likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court investigating alleged war crimes there.

Some say the United Nations is unlikely to take hard action against the government, for fear of collapsing peace deals which took years of painstaking negotiation to achieve.

"They are not going to push the government and threaten the (southern) agreement," one Western diplomat in Khartoum said.

Southern and Darfur former rebels have questioned whether there is a real coalition when the NCP still dominates decision-making, but both have so far refrained from threatening to pull out of government or back out on peace deals.

[back to contents]

Uganda (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Uganda

Will Kony come out of the bush?
The Economist
October 19, 2006

IT HAS been presented as a classic struggle of peace versus justice. Talks aimed at ending one of Africa's longest and most savage civil wars are on the verge of collapse as the leaders of Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army ( LRA) insist that there can be no peace deal unless the International Criminal Court ( ICC) drops its indictments against four of their number. The court remains adamant that there can be no impunity for crimes against humanity. But as the faltering talks limp into their fourth month, a hint of possible compromise is in the air.

For the past 20 years, the LRA has hacked and raped its way through northern Uganda, abducting thousands of children to serve as fighters and sex slaves and forcing nearly 2m terrorised Acholis to flee their homes for the relative safety of overcrowded, disease-ridden government camps. Unable to destroy the rebels by armed force or to lure them in from the bush with promises of amnesty, Uganda's government referred the conflict in January 2004 to the ICC for investigation. A year ago the court, set up in 2002, issued its first indictments for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Joseph Kony, the LRA's holy-spirit-possessed leader, and four of his henchmen (one of whom has since been killed “in battle”).

Local leaders protested that this would mean the end of the peace process that Betty Bigombe, a former Ugandan government minister, had been trying to broker for years. Ms Bigombe herself accused the fledgling court of seeking “to prove itself at the cost of peace”. Acholi delegations travelled to The Hague to beg the court to withdraw its arrest warrants and allow traditional African ceremonies of reconciliation and forgiveness to prevail instead. Even Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, appeared to be having second thoughts, talking at one point last year of “convincing the ICC to drop their indictment if the LRA rebels surrender”.

But the court's efforts to bring the LRA to justice have the full backing of the United Nations and human-rights groups. Even the Americans, usually fierce opponents of the ICC, have urged co-operation with its prosecution of Mr Kony. To let the LRA leaders off completely would be to send the wrong message to other potential perpetrators, they say. Besides, under international law no amnesty is possible for war crimes and other such atrocities.

With both sides digging in their heels, the peace talks, being mediated by the southern Sudanese in the town of Juba, seemed doomed to failure. Hopes were briefly raised in August when a truce was announced pending agreement on a comprehensive peace settlement, under which all the rebels were to assemble at two designated points in southern Sudan. But the four indicted commanders refused to surrender unless the ICC warrants were first withdrawn, saying they feared a trap.

Since then, each side has blamed the other for breaking the terms of the truce. Accusing Uganda of deploying large numbers of soldiers around one of the designated “safe havens”, the LRA has ordered its own troops to disperse back into the bush. Meanwhile, Uganda continues to insist that the indictments will remain in place until there is clear evidence that peace has been achieved “and that no impunity has been condoned”. At the same time, Jan Egeland, the UN's head of humanitarian affairs, talks of the need to be “creative...[and] flexible” in bringing to an end “one of our generation's worst wars”, while the ICC's chief prosecutor says that the warrants should not be “an obstacle to the peace process”.

What does all this mean? In Juba, New York and The Hague, interested parties are quietly exploring an alternative way out of the present impasse. Under the ICC's statutes, the court cannot simply drop the proceedings against Mr Kony and his henchmen unless this is deemed to be “in the interests of justice”—which it clearly is not. But it might be able to transfer the case back to Uganda for trial under some kind of yet-to-be-devised combination of Western-style criminal justice and traditional reconciliation ceremonies.

This approach, say its advocates, could allow the hobbled peace process to proceed. But without a guaranteed amnesty, which would upset those urging accountability, such a system is unlikely to do any better at luring Mr Kony and his accomplices out of the bush and into court.

Commander denies LRA rebels killed civilians in Sudan
Reuters
by Tim Cocks
October 20, 2006

KAMPALA, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Ugandan rebels denied on Friday killing at least 38 civilians in a string of attacks in southern Sudan and accused Uganda's military of trying to frame them.

South Sudanese officials said unknown gunmen shot dead the victims on Wednesday between the southern capital Juba and the eastern banks of the Nile, where Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) guerrillas have long had bases -- and terrorised villagers.

Uganda's army blamed the LRA, but the rebels' top commander in the area told Reuters his fighters were blameless.

"No LRA has attacked civilians in southern Sudan," Caesar Acelam said by satellite telephone.

"If attacks took place, it is more likely UPDF (Uganda People's Defence Forces) who are deployed around Juba. They do this, then accuse LRA," he said.

Uganda's army spokesman denied the charge.

"The evidence points to the LRA. The survivors mentioned dreadlocked people. Dreadlocks are not allowed in the UPDF," Major Felix Kulayigye told Reuters. "We did not have forces around Juba town, and we would have no reason to do it."

Southern Sudan's regional government is hosting stop-start peace talks between Uganda and the rebels that began in July.

Under a landmark truce in August, the LRA were supposed to gather at two places in the south, but Uganda's military has accused them of regrouping to resume hostilities instead.

Independent monitors representing different parties at the talks were investigating who was behind Wednesday's killings.

The head of the monitoring team said witnesses told him the attacks had been carried out by shabbily dressed young men and women sporting dreadlocks -- a trademark of the LRA.

Acelam -- who said he was speaking from the eastern assembly point near Uganda's border, Owiny-Ki-Bul -- admitted some of his rebels had scattered north of his position towards Juba, but not as far north as where the killings took place, he said.

"The UPDF surrounded us. We had to move for fear of being attacked," Acelam said. "They did not go that far."

Negotiations have stalled in recent days as both Uganda's army and the LRA accused each other of violating the truce many hoped would draw a line under two decades of war.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was due in Juba this weekend to meet mediators, whose efforts had been hailed as the best chance yet of ending one of Africa's longest conflicts.

The LRA's insurgency has killed tens of thousands and displaced 1.7 million in northern Uganda, and has also caused deaths and suffering in impoverished southern Sudan, where the LRA until recently received support from Khartoum.

The rebels' top leaders are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and have said they will not sign a peace deal unless the indictments are dropped.

Ugandans welcome 'terrorists' back
Christian Science Monitor
by Abraham McLaughlin
October 23, 2006

In the first of a four-part series, the Monitor examines how Africans are developing a unique form of reconciliation based on community and forgiveness.

Today a doe-eyed 20-something named Betty Atto, a former member of one of the world's most-brutal rebel armies, finally gets to take her first step toward redemption - toward the forgiveness she now seeks from the people she terrorized for so long.

It's a sun-drenched afternoon here in Africa's heartland, and Betty stands beneath a "blessing tree," fidgeting with the pleats in her fanciest skirt. She's waiting with 400 other former rebels for a ritual to begin that will welcome them back into their community.

"We did bad things," Betty says of her six years in the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a group infamous for chopping off lips and other body parts of civilians - and forcing children to become sex slaves and soldiers.

Today's main event involves Betty and other ex-rebels stepping on an egg - an act that symbolically breaks open a new life and returns them to innocence. It's the first step in a long process of earning forgiveness from their community. And it stands as one example of how African notions of justice differ from the approach typical in the US and other Western nations.

Indeed, Western civilization - with its emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities - might tilt toward severely punishing people like Betty and her one-time commander, LRA chief Joseph Kony. After all, Mr. Kony presides over a "terrorist" group largely responsible for as many as 200,000civilian deaths during two decades of war. Last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague issued indictments for Kony and his top commanders for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Yet here in Uganda, there's serious talk of reconciling even with Kony if peace talks succeed. Such an impulse echoes Nelson Mandela's famous forgiveness of his South African captors. It emerges from a unique continental ethos of communalism, in which the desire to punish individuals for their crimes is balanced against the need to restore wholeness to the community - to unite victims, perpetrators, and their families. Indeed, it's often a practical response enshrined in tribal jurisprudence: Villages in small, poor communities need every last person to survive. These days, the tendency is often magnified by the spread of Christianity - with its focus on forgiveness - across the continent.

But Africa's reconciliation ethos now faces several difficult tests. The number of major armed conflicts on the continent has fallen, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, from 11 in 1999 to just three in 2005. Yet the aftermath of war is not simply peace. As conflict-weary societies such as Burundi, Rwanda, and Liberia start to rebuild, a common conundrum looms: How to reconcile bitter enemies so all can move forward, while also ensuring justice for those who committed atrocities.

If these nations succeed - as South Africa largely did a decade ago - they may stand as models of how victims and their attackers can move out of the violent past. With its "uncomfortable commitment to bringing the perpetrator back into the family," says Alex Boraine, deputy chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, " Africa has something to say to the world."

It wasn't as if Betty Atto wanted to become a "terrorist."

During a raid on her village when she was a teenager, she was kidnapped and forced to become a sex slave and soldier in a rebel group the US has labeled a terrorist organization. If she dared refuse an order from a commander, she faced almost-certain death. So, gradually, she became an active member of the LRA, which, diplomats point out, has killed more people than Al Qaeda (not including insurgents in Iraq), Hizbullah, and Hamas combined.

Then, early one morning in 2004, after six years of captivity, she and three others made a risky escape, running through high grass to a Ugandan Army barracks.

Suddenly, Betty was free. But her homecoming was complicated. During her absence, her two brothers had been killed by the LRA - the same army Betty had been forced to join. It contributed to "many problems" Betty has with her family and community. Fellow villagers mutter "terrorist" as she and others walk past.

In some ways, the war in northern Uganda is a vicious family feud. The LRA is dominated by the Acholi ethnic group. When rebels began their quest to overthrow the Ugandan government in 1987, they had tacit support from many Acholis, who complained of economic and political marginalization by the government. But amid wartime destruction, civilian support waned. Then the LRA turned on villagers, raiding their houses for recruits and food - and killing or maiming resisters. It is one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. Most of the region's 2 million displaced survivors now cluster for safety in fetid camps rampant with alcoholism and crime.

But recently the LRA has lost momentum, in part because of declining support from its longtime sponsor, Sudan. A cease-fire was signed in August as a prelude to a comprehensive peace agreement that so far remains elusive.

This weekend, Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni met LRA negotiators in Sudan for the first time since the talks began in July. Although the meeting reportedly consisted of a bitter, five-minute exchange, his appearance was intended to demonstrate the government's commitment to the talks.

The moves toward an accord have meant an influx of ex-rebels coming home. Increasingly, the Acholis face a tough decision: How to treat the returning "terrorists" who are often members of their own ethnic group - and even their own families. A poll last year by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in New York highlights the problem: 76 percent of Ugandans want wrongdoers "held accountable," yet 65 percent support amnesty for ex-LRA members.

Betty, meanwhile, feels the hostility. She constantly, almost reflexively, looks over her shoulder in fear. Sometimes she considers going back to the LRA. At least there she has a "husband" - a rebel commander who made her his wife. She has a lot riding on today's egg-stepping ceremony.

Indeed, the ritual's practical purpose is to begin to reunite families and communities divided by war - to help siblings, parents, and cousins resume lives together. Then they can try to lift themselves out of the region's crushing poverty.

Sounding unsure, Betty says of the ritual, "I hope it will help."

Ugandans, and other Africans, don't usually advocate instant forgiveness - a snap absolution of sins. The process can take years. In one case in northern Uganda, for example, a murder in 1977 wasn't resolved through traditional means until 2005.

But in all cases, restoring harmony is paramount.

If, for instance, a man from one clan kills a man from another clan, traditional justice dictates an immediate separation of the two groups. Members of each clan don't dare draw water from the same well or go to the same market. It's a cooling-off period meant to avoid revenge killings.

Then the wait begins. The perpetrator is never forced to divulge his crime. Instead, many Ugandans believe that spirits - or departed ancestors - will punish him until he confesses. If a string of misfortunes befall a person, it's assumed he's covering up a misdeed.

Seen from this paradigm of truth-getting, the logic of Western justice seems flawed. As many here see it, when Western lawyers duel before a judge or jury, they're simply trying to outsmart each other - and avoid having the truth about their client come out. Latim Geresome, an adviser to the Acholi paramount chief, says of Western justice, "You stand up and swear on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and then it's lies, lies, lies all the way."

Here, once the wrongdoer confesses, shuttle diplomacy begins: An elder mediates an agreement by which the perpetrator's clan agrees to pay the victim's clan a certain amount. Traditionally, the currency was cows. Now it's often cash.

When a deal is struck, every member of the perpetrator's clan pitches in to fund the settlement. All in the group are seen as responsible for allowing the perpetrator to err. So punishment is distributed. Each family is assigned an amount. "A child does not belong to the parents alone," Mr. Geresome explains. "And the crime has affected the whole clan," so all must pay.

With details arranged, a final ceremony is set. One ritual involves each group bringing a goat to a neutral spot. Each animal is cut in half, and two halves are swapped. Symbolically, this creates two goats that are whole again.

In a society still heavily reliant on groups of people to haul water, build houses, and do other tasks, normal life could fall apart if two groups were forever separated. Reconciliation is crucial, explains Erin Baines, a Canadian researcher working in the region. "It's all about ensuring the unity and harmony of the clans."

The prelude to the egg-stepping ceremony includes a phalanx of about 30 dancers with ostrich-feather headdresses who are high-kicking, shout-singing, and beating drums in a raucous display for the tribal chiefs.

The royal dance seems like a throwback to primal times. Yet peeking out from beneath the dancers' cow-skin skirts are nylon gym shorts like those sold at Target - stamped with names such as "Sport Collection."

Traditionally, the egg-stepping ceremony was used to welcome villagers home from long journeys. Now Acholi chiefs are trying to adapt it to help salve, or end, Africa's longest civil war. And many Ugandans put great faith in age-old methods. In the ICTJ poll, 30 percent of residents said peace could be achieved through dialogue; 26 percent through amnesty, forgiveness, and reconciliation; 14 percent through military means; and just 5 percent through justice.

The dialogue-and-reconciliation focus, including the ceremonies, is "part of a cultural revival," says Dr. Baines. By sponsoring the rituals, she explains, the chiefs are saying, "We're really trying to put our house in order" - in a traditional African way.

They're also trying to head off the imposition of Western-style justice: The ICC issued arrest warrants for five top LRA leaders last October, trying to end the conflict by punishing the individuals responsible. The move raised hackles among tribal chiefs, who see it as contradictory to their conciliatory approach. Yet their traditional method has major flaws . With so many atrocities, for instance, it's not clear which perpetrators hurt which victims, and one-on-one reconciliation is impossible.

There's also plenty of skepticism. "The ICC is a good idea," says Edward Ochken, a dissenting chief. After all that the LRA leaders have done, he adds, "No one can say they should not be tried." Indeed, 66 percent of residents say top commanders should be punished, according to the poll. Many, however, distinguish between the leaders and young soldiers who were following orders.

Yet, according to the survey, 22 percent would forgive even the top LRA leaders. In a community full of traditional beliefs, spirits are often assumed to be controlling people. A wiry ex-rebel named Samuel Watmon explains how he would approach Kony, the LRA's mystical leader: "I would say to him, 'It was a ghost that was leading you, so let's forget about the past.' "

As the sun grows hotter, the returnees, including Betty, wait in long, snaking lines for their official welcoming to begin. With a forceful stomp, the first ex-rebel in line sends bits of shell and yoke splattering. Hundreds of onlookers cheer.

One by one, the former rebels step on the ever-dwindling remains of the egg. Then they pass through a gantlet of smiling chiefs who shake their hands vigorously. Many women returnees carry babies who were born in the bush, often as a result of rape. When they arrive at the egg, the avuncular elders insist the children's feet be placed on the egg, too. A spirit of reconciliation is in the air.

Afterward, as night falls, Betty relaxes. "I feel cleansed," she says. After a day of being welcomed and celebrated, she adds, "Some of the bad things in my heart: they are gone."

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International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

Official Website of the ICTY

Glavas Finally Behind Bars
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
by Goran Jungvirth
October 27, 2006

One of the most powerful Croatian politicians of the past decade or so, and an independent member of the parliament, Branimir Glavas, was detained in Zagreb district prison on October 26, shortly after he was stripped of his immunity for the second time in the last five months.

Glavas, who was a mayor and defence commander in the eastern Croatian town of Osijek in the early days of the country’s 1991-1995 war, is being investigated in connection with two ongoing cases of having ordered the torture and killing of Serb civilians in Osijek in 1991.

One of the founders of the ruling Croatian Democratic union, HDZ, and a close ally of the late president Franjo Tudjman, 50-year-old Glavas is the highest-ranking Croatian official to be arrested in connection with war crimes so far. In Osijek and other parts of Croatia, especially Slavonia, he is still regarded as a hero for his role in the country’s war of independence.

Speaking to his friends at his Osijek home before he left for Zagreb to turn himself in, Glavas, a former army general, said, "I am embarking on a path which, at the time when we created the Croatian state, was unimaginable to me and all Croatian soldiers, and particularly those who lost their dearest ones.”

He also told the reporters he was not responsible for what he was charged with and that proceedings against him were politically motivated.

Glavas’s arrest this week marked the end of one of the most controversial legal and political affairs in Croatia’s recent history, which the country’s president, Stjepan Mesic, described as “a judicial scandal”.

The Croatian parliament's privileges and credentials committee initially stripped Glavas of his immunity in June this year, so that he could be investigated in connection with the murder of at least two Serb civilians and the unlawful detention and mistreatment of many others.

The investigation followed claims by Krunoslav Fehir, a former member of a Croatian unit under Glavas’s command, that the general ordered the extrajudicial executions of Serbs in Osijek.

But despite repeated requests from prosecutors to place him in custody because he posed a threat to witnesses, Glavas remained a free man.

Last week, six Croats from Osijek were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the killings of at least six Serbs in Osijek in 1991. This was dubbed in the local media as the “sellotape case”, because the victims’ hands were bound and their mouths taped. Their bodies were later found floating in a river.

Immediately after the arrest, state prosecution spokeswoman Martina Mihordin said Glavas has been linked to the case, but declined to comment further.

Glavas’s arrest this time seemed inevitable.

The privileges and credentials committee - the only body which can strip a parliamentary deputy of his immunity - first met on October 13 to discuss the Zagreb county court judge Zdenko Posavec's motion for Glavas's detainment. The same body decided last June that Glavas could be investigated in connection with the crimes in Osijek, but another ruling was necessary to make his arrest possible.

Even before the meeting was over, Glavas packed his bags and said bade farewell to his family, convinced he would be detained the same evening.

“They can lock my body, but never the spirit!” he was reported in the local media as saying.

However, the committee rejected Judge Posavec’s request, claiming he had made some procedural errors, much to the dismay of the judge, prosecutors and many Croatia’s politicians and independent observers.

The president of the Helsinki Committee in Croatia, Zarko Puhovski, said this situation showed “a lack of will and courage” on the part of Croatia’s judiciary to confront powerful politicians such as Glavas.

Former minister of justice Ingrid Anticevic-Marinovic said in an interview for the Zagreb television Nova TV that this clearly showed the Croatian state is “strong towards the weak, and weak towards the strong”.

Shortly after the committee’s ruling, Mesic told the local media “there is no doubt that this is a judicial scandal”.

Finally, after four days of legal wrangling and another meeting of the privileges and credentials committee, Judge Posavec’s request for Glavas’s detention was granted on October 26, on the grounds that he could influence the witnesses and the gravity of the crime he is suspected of.

Only after the committee made this decision could Judge Posavec issue an order for the police to arrest Glavas.

The general turned himself in the same evening.

As the Croatian media reported, a day later Glavas went on a hunger strike in his prison cell in Zagreb, in order to draw the attention of the public to his case, which, as he continues to claim, is fabricated and politically motivated.

Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect detained
DPA via B92
October 27, 2006

SARAJEVO -- Members of Bosnia's State Investigation and Protections Agency (SIPA) detained war crimes suspect Jadranko Palija.

According to reports, the detention which occurred Thursday in the northern Bosnian district of Brock was ordered by the Office of Bosnia-Herzegovina's State Prosecutor.

During the operation SIPA also searched Palija's house in Brčko.

Palija, 37, according to report, was suspected of being involved in crimes against Bosnian Muslims in the area of Sanski Most in May 1992.

Bosnian Serb troops executed in May 1992 some 20 Bosnian Muslims in Sanski Most by firing squad at a bridge over the Sanica River.

Bodies of the victims were then thrown into the river.

Jadranko Palija, according to some witnesses who survived the massacre, participated in the killings on the bridge.

According to unofficial sources, Palija is also wanted by Croatian authorities for war crimes he allegedly committed against the Croatian population during the war in Croatia.

Ramic Denies Guilt
Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) Justice Report
October 27, 2006

Former territorial defence member charged with murdering four Serbs in Visoko municipality pleads not guilty.

BIRN - JUSTICE REPORT - October 27, 2006 - Niset Ramic, a member of the territorial defence organisation during the Bosnian war, has pleaded not guilty before the Bosnian State Court to charges that he murdered four Serb civilians in a village in Visoko municipality.

According to the indictment filed by state prosecutors, Ramic entered the village of Hlapcevici on June 20, 1992, armed with an automatic rifle and escorted by eight fighters. The group is said to have surrounded a number of houses and asked all townspeople of Serb nationality to give up their weapons.

After a number of civilians had been detained, Ramic allegedly ordered the other fighters to tie their hands with rope. When he failed to get a satisfactory response from the prisoners to questions about weapons stashes and minefields, he is said to have opened fire on the group, killing four people and injuring two.

Prosecutors say that during the investigation of the incident, Ramic admitted that he had fired two clips - each containing 30 bullets - in the direction of the detainees. They also say that nine witnesses have identified Ramic as the man responsible for the crime.

The indictment against Ramic was confirmed on October 12, 2006, after which the State Court ordered that he be transferred to Sarajevo from Zenica prison, where he is currently serving a 20-year sentence for robbery committed after the war.

Seselj to Conduct His Own Defence After All
Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)
by Katherine Boyle
October 27, 2006

The appeals chamber at the Hague tribunal this week decided to allow Serbian ultra-nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj to conduct his own defence, despite his history of notorious courtroom outbursts.

In their October 23 ruling, the appeals judges overturned the decision issued by the trial chamber in August this year to bar Seselj from representing himself due to his volatile and insulting remarks in the courtroom and the obscenities contained in the briefs he submitted to the court.

But the appeals chamber noted that if Seselj continues to “substantially obstruct…proceedings in this case” the trial chamber will be justified in assigning him counsel after it has heard his explanation for his behaviour.

Seselj’s past comments have been both offensive and disruptive to court proceedings.

At one point, he declared that “the smell of crematoriums and gas chambers comes into the Hague courtroom” with a certain member of the court.

Seselj also insulted his assigned counsel, David Hooper, who wore a wig to a September 14 status conference, describing him as “that man with the bird’s nest on his head”.

He later said that he would “never speak to Hooper or any other spy…who denies me my right to represent myself. I am a calm and balanced person, but until you restore my right to represent myself, I will not participate in the proceedings”.

Although Seselj will now be allowed to represent himself, the tribunal’s registry has been ordered by the trial chamber to assign him a new stand-by defence counsel. The counsel will be able to assist Seselj if the defendant chooses to accept help, and will be ready to take over the defence case temporarily or permanently if Seselj’s outbursts continue.

Seselj, a close ally of the former Yugoslav president Slobadan Milosevic, is charged with the extermination and murder, persecution, deportation and the forcible transfer of non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia from 1991 to 1995.

The trial chamber, led by Presiding Judge Alphons Orie, has also decided to postpone Seselj’s trial, which was supposed to begin on November 2, because the defendant currently has neither stand-by nor permanent counsel. Instead, a status conference will be held on November 1.

If all conditions have been met by the registry at the status conference, a date for the pre-trial conference will be chosen at that time.

Sljivancanin Blames Others for Vukovar Killings
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
by Katherine Boyle
October 27, 2006

Former Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA, officer Veselin Sljivancanin, who testified in his own defence this week, told the court that the mass execution of some 260 patients and civilians taken from the Vukovar hospital in November 1991 was committed without his knowledge and by forces which were not directly subordinated to him.

The defendant also told the judges that he had believed people taken from the hospital were to be bussed to safety in Croatia, and that local Serbian territorial defence units were responsible for the killings, not the JNA.

Sljivancanin, along with Radic and Mrksic, is charged with overseeing the November 1991 killings of some 260 Croat patients and civilians from the hospital after the town was overrun by Serb forces.

According to the indictment, Sljivancanin and Radic personally participated in the selection of detainees who were loaded onto buses on the morning of November 20 and transported to Ovcara farm. Detainees were humiliated and abused there for hours, the indictment further alleges, and in the evening, they were executed at a site near Ovcara by troops under the command and supervision of the three co-defendants.

This week, Sljivancanin suggested that local army reserve units known as the territorial defence were the perpetrators of the Vukovar massacre.

Sljivancanin, at the time a major in the Guards’ Brigade, also implied that he would not have had the authority to issue orders to the territorial defence or to other units during the Vukovar operation.

The defendant downplayed his own role in the battle for Vukovar. He said if he wanted to issue an order to a subordinate unit, the JNA’s rules of service mandated that he ask Colonel Mrksic, commander of the Guards’ Brigade, first.

Sljivancanin did note that he was able to offer “guidance” to subordinates, but said his job consisted primarily of drafting programmes and plans for military police training, controlling and helping with the training and analysing any tasks handed out by military police.

He was particularly emphatic in disassociating himself from the territorial defence.

“I was not in charge of providing guidance to the territorial defence nor did I provide it,” he said.

Sljivancanin implied professional soldiers looked down upon the territorial defence unit.

“It wasn’t [the Guards Brigade] that wanted volunteers,” said Sljivancanin. “We sent back many because of mental instability and a lack of discipline. We were there to provide order and discipline as much as possible.”

The defendant said his role in the Vukovar battle was to rescue comrades from JNA barracks that were surrounded by Croat forces.

This week, Sljivancanin also challenged the testimony given by the prosecution witness Herbert Okun in November 2005.

Okun was the special advisor and deputy to Cyrus Vance, the UN envoy to the former Yugoslavia in 1991. In his testimony last year, Okun said that during the envoy’s October 1991 visit to Vukovar, Sljivancanin raised his voice and pointed a rifle at Vance when he insisted on being taken to the Vukovar hospital.

Okun said he and Vance did not believe Sljivancanin’s claim that the bridge was mined, but decided not to push the issue any further once he raised the gun.

Sljivancanin flatly denied Okun’s story, saying that the reason he did not take Vance to Vukovar hospital was not because there was anything to hide there but because the area was still unsafe. He offered JNA intelligence reports that described a cellar near the hospital as a Croatian paramilitary headquarters as evidence supporting his claims.

He also noted that his superior officer, General Aleksander Vasiljevic, had once scolded him for taking a high-ranking officer near the front lines, and said he did not want to be blamed for putting a UN envoy in a similarly dangerous situation.

“If I pointed a rifle at a man of Vance’s age I should have been locked up and sectioned off a long time ago,” he said.

Sljivancanin is the last defendant to present his case in the trial, which has been going on for over a year. Lawyers for the third co-defendant, former JNA commander Mile Mrksic, have already completed their defence case.

Sljivancanin’s defence team has said they expect to finish their case by December 8, 2006.

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International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)

Official Website of the ICTR

Witness accuses Rwandan musician of inciting genocide
Rwanda News Agency - BBC Monitoring via COMTEX
Excerpt from report in English by RNA news agency
October 4, 2006

A famed musician accused of inciting mass murder through his music during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was also part of an extremist Hutu militia blamed for much of the slaughter, a UN war crimes court heard on Friday [20 October] , RNA reports.

A former member of the Interahamwe [extremist Hutu] militia told the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that Simon Bikindi had been a leading member of the group and performed songs that encouraged the slaughter of minority Tutsis.

"Bikindi was a very important Interahamwe," said the witness, a former butcher known as AHB who is serving a life sentence in Rwanda for his role in the killings of some 800,000 mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The witness testified that Bikindi, a renowned traditional composer who founded the popular Irindiro Ballet, had performed with the group in Interahamwe uniform before at least one meeting of the former ruling party.

"He wore Interahamwe dress at a meeting of the MRND [National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development], he sang with his ballet at the time," AHB told the court, adding that the songs contained lyrics that urged Hutus to kill Tutsis as well as other Hutus who sympathized with them.

"In these songs, Bikindi said we had to fight the Tutsis with all our strength, that the Tutsis wanted to bring back serfdom," he said.

"The songs were full of allusions and images, the meaning of which was clear to any Rwandan," AHB testified. "Rise up against the Tutsis, that was the kind of message in his songs."

The witness also said that he had personally seen Bikindi, a one-time senior official in Rwanda's Ministry of Youth and Sports, participate in several massacres in his northern home region of Gisenyi.

Bikindi, a 52-year-old Hutu and the first entertainer to face trial before the Arusha, Tanzanian-based ICTR, has pleaded not guilty to six counts of genocide and related charges.

The ICTR has in the past tried and convicted media personalities and at least one journalist on genocide charges, but Bikindi's trial will be its first of a creative artist, according to court officials.

His lawyer, Wilfred Nderitu, has denounced the charges as blatant violations of Bikindi's human rights and a denial of his artistic liberty, freedom of thought, expression and speech.

On Friday, Nderitu raised what he called inconsistencies in AHB's testimony and on cross-examination, the witness admitted to "minor errors" but said they were inherent when discussing events that occurred more than a decade ago.

Rwanda begins probe into alleged French genocide role
Reuters via CNN
October 24, 2006

KIGALI , Rwanda (Reuters) -- A Rwandan government-appointed commission launched a probe on Tuesday into allegations French troops supported soldiers behind Rwanda's 1994 genocide and helped facilitate mass murder.

Rwanda 's Tutsi President Paul Kagame, whose government came to power after the genocide, has accused France of training and arming Hutu militias who were the main force behind a 100-day slaughter that killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Kigali says France backed the government of Rwanda's former President Juvenal Habyarimana, providing military training for government forces, despite knowing that some within the leadership were planning to use the troops to commit genocide.

France , which sent in soldiers under an operation authorized by the United Nations, has always denied any involvement in the killings.

Officials said a seven-man commission, appointed by the government in April, will hear testimony from 20 witnesses over the next week. The testimony could be used as evidence in any legal action taken by Kigali against France.

"We will summon people like former militiamen who were trained and commanded by the French to kill as well as female survivors who accuse some French soldiers of rape," Jean Paul Kimonyo a member of the commission told Reuters.

"We are also going to invite foreign witnesses including French nationals to testify before the commission."

A French parliamentary commission in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said "strategic errors" had been made.

"The French sent troops, weapons, trained killers and manned roadblocks to facilitate murderers in achieving their mission of exterminating Tutsis," Jacques Bihozagara, a former Rwandan ambassador to France, told the commission.

Bihozagara, who was part of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, which launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, said French officials had warned the group to stop its fight.

"You will reach Kigali to only find all your relatives perished," Bihozagara quoted them as saying.

"I wonder whether these French officials were prophets or indeed were part of the planning process," he added.

Chaired by Rwanda's former justice minister, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, the panel is made up of legal experts, historians and a former army commander.

In one case, French soldiers have been accused of facilitating the murder of up 50,000 Tutsis in Bisesero, a hilltop village in western Rwanda, by luring them out of hideouts.

Survivors say the Tutsis were abandoned and left vulnerable to militia attacks.

Six genocide survivors filed a complaint in a Paris court last year accusing French soldiers of complicity in crimes against humanity.

Justice for many perpetrators in the genocide is still being meted out through the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Tanzania and village courts known as gacaca.

The ICTR has indicted more than 80 people for genocide-related crimes since its establishment in 1994.

Rwanda launches probe; Say French aided in slaughter of Tutsis
Reuters via Toronto Star
by Arthur Asiimwe
October 25, 2006

Female survivors accuse soldiers of rape

A Rwandan government-appointed commission launched a probe yesterday into allegations French troops supported soldiers behind Rwanda's 1994 genocide and helped facilitate mass murder.

Rwanda's Tutsi President Paul Kagame, whose government came to power after the genocide, has accused France of training and arming Hutu militias who were the main force behind a 100-day slaughter that killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

France had replaced ex-colonial power Belgium as Rwanda's main Western backer. When Kagame's Tutsi-dominated rebel army launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, France sent soldiers to Kigali.

France helped stop the advance of Kagame's forces and then stayed on, as military advisers, up to the start of the genocide.

Kigali says France backed the government of Rwanda's former president Juvenal Habyarimana, providing military training for government forces, despite knowing that some within the leadership were planning to use the troops to commit genocide.

France, which sent in soldiers under a UN-authorized operation, has always denied any involvement in the killings.

"We will summon people like former militiamen who were trained and commanded by the French to kill as well as female survivors who accuse some French soldiers of rape," said Jean Paul Kimonyo, a member of the commission.

"We are also going to invite foreign witnesses including French nationals to testify before the commission."

A French parliamentary commission in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said "strategic errors" had been made.

Bihozagara, who was part of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, which launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, said French officials had warned the group to stop its fight.

"You will reach Kigali to only find all your relatives perished," Bihozagara quoted them as saying. "I wonder whether these French officials were prophets or indeed were part of the planning process," he added.

Rwandan convicted of war crimes to be deported from Switzerland after jail term
Associated Press via International Herald Tribune
October 27, 2006

Switzerland 's highest court on Friday confirmed a deportation order against a Rwandan convicted of war crimes during the African country's 1994 genocide.

The 42-year-old man, who was once mayor of the central Rwandan town of Mushubati in the province of Gitarama, 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of the capital, Kigali, was found guilty by a Swiss military court in 1999 of murder, attempted murder, incitement to murder and war crimes.

More than 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were massacred in the Hutu government-orchestrated genocide, which ended when Tutsi-led rebels won power in July 1994.

Fulgence Niyonteze, who was tried in Switzerland because he applied for asylum here in 1994, was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment and subsequent deportation, but challenged his expulsion before the Swiss Federal Tribunal.

The tribunal said in a decision dated Sept. 11, but only published Friday, that Switzerland should not provide refuge for war criminals and that under the circumstances, Niyonteze had no right to remain with his family, who live in the western city of Fribourg.

Niyonteze had argued that he could face torture and maltreatment in his home country, but the federal court dismissed this concern as he was not being forced to settle in Rwanda.

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