BLAKE FRANKS
Staff Writer
Those who committed war crimes in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide will be punished, if Barbara Mulvaney has her way. The former Los Angeles assistant district attorney, who now works with the United Nations War Tribunal, is in the process of prosecuting 66 war criminals who allegedly committed crimes against humanity. The Rwandan genocide left nearly a million corpses in its wake over a three-month period.
Both Mulvaney and Pepperdine University Professor of political science Dan Caldwell recently gained attention when they participated on a panel on Feb. 13 during the Genocide and Religion conference that was co-sponsored by Pepperdine’s Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
At the conference, Mulvaney said, “The real heroes are the witnesses,” referring to those who have testified in the trials.
According to the book “World Politics and You,” written by Caldwell, the situation in Rwanda escalated to the point of genocide after a series of conflicts arose between two different ethnic groups: the Hutu and the Tutsi, who have jointly inhabited the modern-day Rwanda for the past four centuries.
Historically, the Tutsi were primarily cattle herders and were wealthier than the more abundant Hutu farmers.
Between 1860 and 1895, the primarily Tutsi Rwandan kings, known as Mwamis, centralized their power and began a redistribution of land to individuals instead of lineage groups. This redistribution of land, enacted by Mwami Rwabugiri, resulted in an imposed patronage system, under which appointed Tutsi chiefs demanded manual labor in return for the Hutu’s occupancy of their land.
This system left Hutus in a serf-like status, with the Tutsi chiefs acting as their feudal masters.
When control of Rwanda was ceded to Germany in 1885, the German government recognized that the Tutsi held political power in Rwandan society, and therefore chose the Tutsi to rule the country. This only further increased the resentment the Hutu had toward the Tutsi.
After World War I, Rwanda became a colony of Belgium until 1959. When the Belgium government gave up control of Rwanda, both ethnic groups vied for power. Through elections that advanced the Hutu nationalist party, Belgium left the country in control of the Hutu, who sought revenge on the Tutsi for the mistreatment they had dealt them earlier.
By 1992, these conflicts had caused about 8 percent of the Rwandan Tutsi to leave the country and live in exile. When exiled Tutsi rallied to take back control of Rwanda, the Hutu felt it was the Tutsi’s goal to restore the kind of feudal system that had previously been in place, and thus enslave the Hutu race.
The United States and France stepped in to force a peace agreement, but it fell apart when violence erupted after the decisions that some radicals opposed. In 1993, this agreement, known as the Arusha Accords, was signed in Arusha, Tanzania, ending the civil war. The United Nations sent a relief mission to Rwanda to help ease tension, but the implementation of these accords was slow and escalated with acts of violence. These acts culminated with the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana when his plane was struck by missiles fired by members of the Rwandan Presidential Guard who opposed his negotiation with the Tutsis.
With Habyarimana’s death, the Rwandan genocide began.
Caldwell, said in an interview, that to better explain the Rwandan situation to others, he has them read an excerpt from a textbook he wrote six years ago and shows them the film “The Ghosts of Rwanda,” a production from the Public Broadcasting Service’s series “Frontline.” He calls it “the most powerful film [he] [has] ever seen on the subject.”
The 2004 movie “Hotel Rwanda,” nominated for best original screenplay by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is also based on this incident. It tells the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, portrayed by actor Don Cheadle, who saved more than 1,200 Tutsi refugees from genocide by hiding them at the Belgium-owned hotel he managed in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali.
The U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), “recognizing that serious violations of humanitarian law were committed in Rwanda,” decided in January 1997 to start prosecuting some of those responsible for these crimes.
The war crime trials are ongoing in Arusha, Tanzania, where 350 decisions have been reached thus far in the proceedings. According to the ICTR website, http://www.ictr.org, the most recent verdict occurred on Feb. 23 of this year with Joseph Nzabirinda, nicknamed ‘Biroto’, being sentenced to seven years imprisonment for one count of murder as crime against humanity. This charge was reduced from earlier, harsher charges when Nzabirinda pled guilty and showed remorse for his past actions. The trials are scheduled to end this year.
A t the conference, both Mulvaney and Caldwell appeared on a panel, where Mulvaney discussed the specifics of the trials and Caldwell discussed genocide and the Christian implications of the issue in general. “Sexual violence as a tool of genocide” was a factor that set the Rwandan situation apart from others, Mulvaney said during the panel.
Both Mulvaney and Caldwell agree that something can be done to aid this situation and prevent similar ones in the future. Mulvaney told her audience to continue to be a part of “the collective resistance to genocide.” In 2004, she told members of Human Rights Watch, an organization that she praised during the conference, that they could help by “letting others know we exist!”
Caldwell, an international security expert, suggested more specific ways to act. “Anyone can write to his or her congressional representative and put pressure on them to act,” he said in an interview. He hopes that the success of these trials sends the message that “Genocide can’t go unpunished,” and said that this was the lesson learned from the Nuremberg trials in Germany that prosecuted Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity.
In an interview, Caldwell says he feels an obligation to share these experiences he has outside the classroom with his students. “I look at the two as complimentary,” he said. “When I was younger, I wanted to change the world, and I hope my students will strive to do the same.”
Caldwell uses a quote by William Sloane Coffin as a philosophy in teaching his students: “A career seeks to be successful, a calling to be valuable. A career tries to make money, a calling tries to make a difference.”
Many may wonder why the U.S. did not act sooner to aid in the Rwandan genocide. In “World Politics and You,” Caldwell offers that the events in Rwanda occurred in the disastrous aftermath of the Somalia intervention. “Both the U.N. and the U.S. government were hesitant to involve themselves in another possible disaster,” writes Caldwell. “In addition, the U.N., NATO, and the U.S. government were trying to figure out what to do about the situation in the former Yugoslavia.”
Factbox
– Rwanda is one of the poorest countries in the world. In 1993, annual gross domestic product (GDP) equaled $290.
– Fifty Percent of Rwanda’s total GDP was derived from the agricultural sector, and coffee and tea historically made up 80 to 90 percent of exports. In 1987, the International Coffee Agreement collapsed causing the price of coffee to decline to 50 percent of its 1980 value.
– The original number of witnesses for the trials was 800, but was lowered to 100 to expedite the prosecution.
04-23-2007