Word: bagosora
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...moment of triumph this week for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the U.N. court in Arusha, Tanzania, set up to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. Bagosora, the senior Defense Ministry official of Rwanda who allegedly put the killing in motion in those first, crucial days of April 1994, was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life imprisonment. No country has agreed to incarcerate him but many of the ICTR's convicts are now being held in Mali. (See the Top 10 Underreported Stories...
...with Bagosora's conviction, human rights campaigners are in a forgiving mood. As far as it can be said about anyone, Bagosora was evil. In his book Shake Hands With The Devil, Romeo Dallaire, the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission when the Rwandan genocide began, described meeting Bagosora after the worst of the killing ended. "With menace in every line of his face, he promised that if he ever saw me again he would kill me," wrote Dallaire, who would later testify for the prosecution in Bagosora's case. The fact that such a man will spend the rest...
...Bagosora was convicted with two other military officers (another man was acquitted), and their trial, known as "Military I," was massive. It began in 2002, and eventually heard 242 witnesses over 408 court days, with tens of thousands of pages of documents and 300 written decisions. It was to be the great symbol of the tribunal's power to bring justice for the 800,000 victims of the genocide. Prosecutors had said it was one of the most important cases since the term "genocide" was legally defined in 1948. It is the kind of conviction that could go a long...
...died to procedural stalling to the difficulty of flying in witnesses or providing them with proper protection back home. "This case in some ways shows that these international justice tribunals can make a difference and can actually change the course of history to break the cycle of violence because Bagosora and the other two really were the key characters who were pulling the strings at the time the genocide started," says Binaifer Nowrojee, director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, who was an expert witness in the trial...
...apart from its 2008-2009 operating budget of more than $230 million. "It will be very wrong for anyone to compare how much it costs to the value that ICTR has achieved," says court spokesman Roland Amoussouga. "Have you seen how the message coming out of the Bagosora case was received by whole international community? That value has no price...