Rwanda and Nuremberg trials: comparative analysis

Rwanda Nuremberg Sources

Genocide and Justice:

Nuremberg and Rwanda and the International Court

In 1994, following the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyrimana, Jean Kambanda effectively stepped over those who outranked him to assume a position as the head of state. An ethnic member of the Hutu ruling party, he devoted his short reign to carrying out the Habyrimana's vision of a state cleansed of the Tutsi tribes. This would amount to a systematic, premeditated and governmentally incited pursuit of a policy of terror, murder rape and the perpetration of civil war. Amongst several dozen others, Jean Kambanda was tried before an international tribune designed to hold those in noted positions of influence responsible for that which had transpired. Over the course of roughly one hundred days, the government's endorsement of the ethnic cleansing, explicitly prodded onward by state-sponsored radio broadcasts and other propaganda methods, would help to stimulate the murder of somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis. It would result in the torture, maiming and sexual violation of countless others, leaving Rwanda in a state of shattered psychology and political despair that remains very fresh still more than a decade hence.

This is because by and large, the effort to bring those most identifiably responsible to justice persists still today, and remains very much an issue at the forefront of the Rwandan consciousness. This is why the consideration of Jean Kambanda is a very interesting case for our evaluation. As the head of state during the time of the government-endorsed atrocities, Kambanda would be in a position that might justifiably be seen as an effective target for the allegations brought by the international community. However, as we consider the nature of such a case, it is useful to reflect on a notorious historical example of a tribunal on war crimes which is rhetorically considered to have failed in many ways to bring a sense of justice in spite of its tenacity and harshness. In the trial of Nazi figure Adolf Eichmann, who was in many ways held symbolically responsible for the enormous breadth of crimes committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, history denotes an incredible difficulty in properly brokering justice in such instances. Given the speed and hugeness of the crimes in Rwanda, as well as the efficient and fast prosecution of Kambanda, there is a sensibility to this analogy, suggesting that a consideration of both in parallel will bring greater insight to our evaluation of the efforts concerning the events in Rwanda's recent history.

Background: The Rwanda Genocide

The case in question concerns one amongst a comparably small handful of individuals who are accused of having actively endorsed a politcy of genocide as a way to relieve the nation of its ethnic conflict. The Kambanda case would officially begin only three years after the commitment of his crimes. According to a timeline on the trial, "Jean Kambanda is arrested in Nairobi, Kenya on 18th July 1997 and transferred to Arusha, to the International Penal Court for Rwanda on the same day." Thus would begin a remarkable trial, somewhat unprecedented, but arguably driven by the conditions which would be established by the events of World War II. Kambanda's trial is contextualized by the recent and more distant elements of Rwanda's ethnic and political history.

The notorious ethnic cleansing of Rwanda which occurred in the early 1990's had actually been the long-standing product of decolonization. When the political power vacuum had left the nation to the disposal of leadership by force, Rwanda's 1959 revolution for independence did not just separate it from the authority of its German oppressors. It additionally exiled countless numbers from its own population which the emergent leadership viewed as sympathizers to colonialism. This is a recurrence of an important theme in Africa's structural problems as characterized in the earlier breakdown of its continental factioning. With his power threatened in 1990 by the invasion of refugees from neighboring Uganda and their implied subversion of his rule through majority, despotic President Juvenal Habyarimana orchestrated a military propaganda initiative "to redefine the population of Rwanda into "Rwandans," meaning those who backed the president, and the "ibyitso" or "accomplices of the enemy," meaning the Tutsi minority and Hutu opposed to him."