The UN Tribunal’s verdict on Col. Theoneste Bagosora sends a powerful message to tyrants across Africa and beyond, said The Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
The systematic slaughter of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 was one of the most horrific crimes perpetrated since the Holocaust, and one of the few that can genuinely be called genocide. The verdict by the UN Tribunal that Col. Theoneste Bagosora, the chief instigator of the massacres, was guilty of crimes against humanity is entirely appropriate. Life imprisonment will seem to many a mild sentence, and will do little to assuage years of grief. But it sends a powerful message to tyrants across Africa and beyond. Whatever the attempts to explain away barbarism with the cliché of only obeying orders, those who carry out, as well as those who order, mass killings will be held responsible and prosecuted — by the United Nations, if not by their own compatriots. It is a message that needs to be clearly understood in Zimbabwe as well as in Sudan.
The verdict is also vital in the attempt to promote reconciliation. Societies torn apart by violence cannot be healed if no one is held accountable. Unless blame is formally established, a victim community will hold all their oppressors collectively responsible. If Muslims were not to see all Serbs as murderers, it was important to set up trials for the main instigators of the massacres in former Yugoslavia. The same is true of Rwanda. The legal process in Arusha, the Tanzanian town where the Rwandan accused are being tried, has already taken 14 years, as defence lawyers have been able to manipulate the trial procedures. So far, the tribunal has already convicted thirty-four people and acquitted six others. If this was the price for draining Rwanda of its poisonous legacy, it was worth paying.
