Planner of Rwandan massacres convicted of genocide
By SUKHDEV CHHATBAR – 1 day ago
ARUSHA, Tanzania (AP) — A former Rwandan Army colonel behind the 1994 slaughter of more than 500,000 people was convicted of genocide Thursday and sentenced to life in prison, the most significant verdict of a U.N. tribunal set up to bring the killers to justice.
Col. Theoneste Bagosora was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and the court said he used his position as director of Rwanda's Ministry of Defense to direct Hutu soldiers to kill Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Former military commanders Anatole Nsengiyumva and Aloys Ntabakuze also were found guilty of genocide and sentenced to life in prison. The former chief of military operations, Brigadier Gratien Ka
Rwandan convicted of genocide
[TamilNet, Saturday, 20 December 2008, 00:27 GMT]
A senior Rwandan military officer charged with being one of the masterminds of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was convicted on Thursday by a United Nations court in Tanzania of genocide and sentenced to life in prison. The court used the doctrine of "command responsibility," to convict the "highest authority in the Rwandan Defense Ministry," and also found him "guilty in connection with the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers by soldiers at Camp Kigali, and in the organized killings by soldiers and militiamen," International Herald Tribune reported.
Excerpts from IHT article follows:
Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, 67, is the most senior military official to have been convicted in connection with the genocide, in which bands of Hutu massacred 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. He was a leading Hutu extremist and the cabinet director for Rwanda's Defense Ministry at the start of the slaughter. He and three other senior army officers had been on trial since 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is based in Arusha, Tanzania.
In a statement, the United Nations tribunal said it had sentenced Bagosora and two other Rwandan military officers who were also on trial, Major Aloys Ntabakuze and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, to life imprisonment for "genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes." A fourth co-defendant, General Gratien Kabiligi, was acquitted of all charges and released by the court. The court said Bagosora was "the highest authority in the Rwandan Defense Ministry, with authority over the military" in the days after the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.
Bagosora was also found guilty in connection with the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers by soldiers at Camp Kigali, and in the organized killings by soldiers and militiamen throughout Kigali and Gisenyi, in the west of the country.
However, the court cleared Bagosora and the others on trial of conspiring to commit genocide before April 7, 1994. The trial lasted six years, during which 242 witnesses were heard.
Human rights officials hailed the conviction of Bagosora, calling it a strike against impunity but also a reminder to anyone committing atrocities in armed conflict. It has particular resonance for the belligerents spawning chaos in eastern Congo, said Paul van Zyl of the International Center for Transitional Justice, a rights group based in New York.
"The conviction should send a signal to all people with ongoing responsibility for atrocities in Congo," he said. "If they are in effective control of armed forces, whether they are state troops, a rebel group or guerrillas, they are potentially criminally liable."
biligi, was cleared of all charges and released.
"It's been a very important day in the tribunal here with judgments given in respect of very important cases which shed a lot of light on really what happened on that fateful day, on 6th April 1994, and the few days following thereafter," Hassan Bubacar Jallow, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, told French international news channel France 24.
The court said that Bagosora "was the highest authority in the Rwandan Ministry of Defense with authority over the Rwandan military" and was responsible for the deaths of former Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers who tried to protect her as she was killed at the outset of the genocide.
Bagosora, 67, said nothing as the verdict was delivered Thursday, and there was complete silence from the scores of people who had packed into the aisles of the tiny courtroom to hear the judgment.
His conviction was welcomed by genocide survivors, who still live uneasily among perpetrators in the central African nation nearly 15 years later.
Some 63,000 people are suspected of taking part in the genocide, although many of them have been sentenced by community-based courts, where suspects were encouraged to confess and seek forgiveness in exchange for lighter sentences.
"Bagosora ... is the person behind all the massacres," said Jean Paul Rurangwa, 32, who lost his father and two sisters. "The fact that he was sentenced to the biggest punishment the court can give is a relief."
The Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was set up by the U.N. in 1994 to try those responsible for the killings and had its first conviction in 1997. There have been 42 judgments, of which six have been acquittals. It does not have the power to impose the death sentence.
Eighteen trials remain under way but none of the defendants is as senior as Bagosora. His lawyer, Raphael Constant, has said he will appeal the verdict within a 30-day deadline.
More than 500,000 minority Tutsis and political moderates from the Hutu majority were killed in the 100-day slaughter organized by the extremist Hutu government then in power. Government troops, Hutu militia and ordinary villagers spurred on by hate messages broadcast over the radio went from village to village, butchering men, women and children.
Bagosora was captured in Cameroon in 1996 and has been in custody in Tanzania since 1997.
Reed Brody, a specialist in international justice for Human Rights Watch, said the sentence sent a clear message to other world leaders accused of crimes against humanity and genocide, like Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.
"It says watch out. Justice can catch up with you," Brody said. "The authors of genocide can and will be punished by the international community."
According to the indictment, Bagosora had participated in international talks arranged in the early 1990s with the aim of ending Rwanda's long-simmering political crisis. Bagosora grew angry with government delegates he deemed soft on Tutsi-led rebels and said he was returning to Rwanda to "'prepare the apocalypse,'" the indictment quoted Bagosora as saying.
The killings began on April 7, 1994, the day after a plane carrying ethnic Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down by unidentified attackers on its approach to Kigali airport. Bagosora was commander of the Kanombe air base in Kigali when the president's plane went down.
Hours after the crash, militants from the Hutu ethnic majority known as Interahamwe set up roadblocks across Kigali and the next day began killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The slaughter eventually ended after Tutsi rebels invaded from neighboring Uganda and drove out the genocidal forces.
Also Thursday, Protais Zigiranyirazo, 70, was convicted of organizing a massacre in which hundreds of Tutsis died, and was sentenced to 20 years. Zigiranyirazo — the brother-in-law of the Rwandan president who was killed in the 1994 plane crash — gets credit for seven years already served in prison.
The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said "it would appear to me that 20 years for a genocide may be on the low side."
"We are reviewing that aspect of it and will eventually decide whether to pursue an appeal against the sentence or not," Jallow told France 24.
Chris Hennemeyer, who worked as a relief worker in Rwanda and is a vice president at the U.S.-based International Foundation for Electoral Systems, said "the important thing is that he's behind bars and at his age he won't get out until he's very elderly."
Bagosora masterminded the world's most efficient slaughter
THEONESTE BAGOSORA
Born 16 August 1941 in Gisenyi prefecture, west Rwanda
Region home to many former Hutu elite including late President Juvenal Habyarimana
Graduated as officer in 1964 and later attended advanced military studies in France
Made cabinet director of Rwanda's defence ministry in June 1992
Retired from army in 1993 but retained defence ministry post until he fled Rwanda in July 1994
He wrote in his memoirs that the colonel was a "known extremist" who "controlled - as well as anyone could - the genocidal militia".
It was the colonel who introduced the militia leaders to Gen Dallaire when the UN commander thought it might help save lives to meet them.
After talking to the militia leaders, one of whom had blood stains on his shirt, Gen Dallaire wrote that he felt he had "shaken hands with the devil".
At their last meeting on Rwandan soil, in 1994, the Rwandan colonel reportedly said that the next time he saw the Canadian general he would kill him.
He never did. Shortly after that meeting, Bagosora fled to Cameroon, where he remained in exile until his arrest in 1996. He was then detained until his trial in Tanzania in 2002.
The next time the pair met was in court, where Gen Dallaire testified for the prosecution.
end:
In Sri Lanka over 12,000 have bdied in the past 3 years of fighting in 2006 to 2008.
Among the dead are Singhalese armed forces, LTTE freedom fighters, unarmed Tamil and Singhalese civilians.
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