Rwandan genocide: The long road to justice
Mike Mclaughlin / THE CANADIAN PRESS file illustration
In October 2009, Desire Munyaneza stood to hear the Quebec court
sentence him to life imprisonment, the first person convicted under
Canada's war crimes legislation for his role in the Rwandan genocide.

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By: Wendy Gillis News reporter, Published on Sat Apr 05 2014
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The train was pulling into Montreal's Sauvé station, the faces of
passengers slowly coming into focus, when Jean-Paul Nyilinkwaya locked
eyes with a killer.
Through the window of the train, out to the subway platform where
Nyilinkwaya stood, came a familiar gaze he had not met for more than a
decade, since the men were high school classmates in Butare, Rwanda.
The man had aged, but there was no mistaking him. It was Désiré
Munyaneza, or "Gikovu," Kinyarwanda for Scar Face.
The mark spanning the side of his face, left from a childhood
accident, had earned him the title amongst the Tutsi women he had
brutally raped during the Rwanda genocide. Everyone feared the one
with the scar.
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"I was shocked, and I went numb ... I couldn't speak, I couldn't
react," said Nyilinkwaya, recalling that winter day in late 1996 or
early 1997. "It was impossible to talk about the genocide in Butare
without mentioning Désiré."
Tens of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the
southern Rwandan area during the 1994 genocide, which ended with more
than 800,000 dead. Nyilinkwaya, studying in the U.S. at the time, lost
40 extended family members, including his father.
Munyaneza had been at the forefront of the killings, a notorious
militia leader who killed Tutsi "vermin," used sticks to beat to death
children who had been tied up in sacks, raped Tutsi women and pillaged
Tutsi-owned homes and businesses.
Among the Rwandans who had fled to Montreal in the massacre's wake,
rumours were circulating that Munyaneza had entered Canada and was in
town. Nyilinkwaya had run scenarios through his mind, rehearsing what
he would say, how he would react if he one day saw him.
"But when it happens," he said, "you don't even remember how to breathe."
The train stopped. Nyilinkwaya stood frozen on the platform, watching
as Munyaneza ran out the doors to freedom.

Canadian Press file photo
Désiré Munyaneza was the first person to be charged under Canada's
Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act for his alleged crimes
during the Rwandan genocide.
Fake names, refugee claims
It is not a question of if there are war criminals in Canada but how
many are living within Canada's borders. Estimates range from 30 to as
many as 1,500 alleged participants in atrocities in Rwanda, the former
Yugoslavia, Latin America, South Asia and elsewhere.
They entered using fake names or made false refugee claims. They have
settled into communities, raised families and even, in the case of
accused genocide instigator Léon Mugesera, lectured at a Quebec City
university.
Their freedom prevents victims' wounds from healing, and their
impunity encourages future atrocities, standing as evidence that even
the most horrific crimes can go unpunished.
Although efforts have been made in Canada to end the injustice —
foremost among them the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act,
legislation allowing international war crimes to be tried in Canadian
courts — Canada is failing to prosecute war criminals.
Munyaneza is the sole exception. Today, the 48-year-old is in
Millhaven Institution serving life imprisonment without parole for 25
years, the harshest sentence in Canadian law.
Tips from Nyilinkwaya and other genocide survivors sparked a
years-long probe and lengthy trial that heard 66 witnesses, including
some who testified from Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and France, and cost
an estimated $4 million. When the verdict came down in the spring of
2009, Nyilinkwaya was among the Rwandans in the Montreal courtroom. It
had been more than a decade since the subway run-in.
"We're going to keep working for justice for the survivors," he said.
While many hoped the ruling marked Canada's debut as an aggressive
pursuer of international justice, Munyaneza remains the lone
conviction under the nearly 15-year-old legislation. It is under
review by the Quebec Court of Appeal.
Only one other man has been prosecuted, Jacques Mungwarere, an ethnic
Hutu alleged to have participated in two attacks. Last year an Ontario
Superior Court judge ruled Mungwarere's guilt had not been established
beyond reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile Mugesera, a Laval University lecturer alleged to have given
a seminal speech encouraging the genocide, is standing trial in Rwanda
after fighting extradition for 16 years — a drawn-out legal battle
that former immigration minister Jason Kenney said made Mugesera "a
poster child for what's wrong with the system."
Genocide prosecutions face substantial, sometimes insurmountable,
hurdles. Investigations and trials are complex and expensive.
Witnesses, if they have not been intimidated from testifying, are
recalling events that occurred, in Rwanda's case, 20 years in the
past. Judges must wade through murky waters where retaliatory lies
exist amongst true testimony.
As the years pass, optimism is giving way to fear that justice has stalled.
"We feel that not enough is being done," said William Mugenzi, a
Rwandan living in Windsor who carefully watched the Mungwarere trial.
"We still believe that there are people here in Canada that
participated. There are several, there are many of them, because we
still run into them."

Ian Barrett / Toronto Star file photo
Jean-Paul Nyilinkwaya spotted fellow Rwandan Desire Munyaneza on a
Montreal subway and was instrumental in having him charged under
Canada's war crimes legislation.
Legal experiment flopped
One month before the massacre in Rwanda began, Imre Finta, accused of
overseeing the deportation of 8,617 Hungarian Jews to a Nazi death
camp, was acquitted by Canada's highest court.
It was the final blow to Canada's first attempt to try Second World
War war criminals after 40 years of inaction. The legal experiment
proved a flop, and not one of the four prosecutions resulted in a
conviction.
Canada was back on the defensive and refused entry to suspected war
criminals or revoked their citizenship.
The failure to mete out justice is not just regrettable, it's
dangerous. In her study of what happens in the human brain to permit
genocidal acts, neuroscientist Kathleen E. Taylor writes that
downplaying the chances of punishment is a strategy often used by
leaders to encourage participation in a massacre.
The claim that participation has no negative consequences, she writes,
"is not difficult, as the lamentable history of western responses to
genocide suggests."
But the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, alongside the conclusion that
the international community failed to adequately intervene, spurred
action to help prosecute the estimated two million participants, some
of whom fled around the world.
"Rwanda, in some ways, was very important in Canada and elsewhere to
bring (genocide) cases forward to trial," said Matt Eisenbrandt, legal
director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the
United Nations Security Council, completed 75 genocide-related
prosecutions before it ended in 2012. Forty-seven ended with
convictions.
Its efforts buttressed the traditional gacaca courts, Rwanda's attempt
to expedite the estimated two million cases stemming from the genocide
and to promote national reconciliation. The small, usually open-air
courts encouraged community involvement. Between 2002 and 2012 they
tried 1,958,634 people, finding 86 per cent of them guilty.
Sentences, however, were sometimes little more than community work or
orders to apologize to victims, who were encouraged to forgive.
In 1998, the Rwandan genocide had helped establish the International
Criminal Court (ICC), a The Hague-based tribunal to oversee crimes
against humanity. The idea for the court was first discussed at the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Two years later, then foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy gave a
House of Commons speech urging MPs to pass the War Crimes Act and
ratify the international criminal court, arguing Canada could at last
play a part in "implementing a new legal order."
"We must move forward so that we can affirm very clearly Canada's
commitment to ensuring that the world's worst criminals do not escape
justice," he said.
Those words "hurt to read" today, says Axworthy, now the president of
the University of Winnipeg. "The expectations were so high, and the
result has been so limited."
That is, in part, he and others say, because of limited funds. Since
1998, the annual budget for Canada's War Crimes Program — a joint
venture between the Department of Justice, Canadian Border Services
Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and the RCMP — has
remained at $15.6 million per year.
"It's clearly not enough money to be able to undertake credible
investigations, and enough prosecutions to be serious about this,"
said Fannie Lafontaine, law professor at Laval University and author
of Prosecuting Genocide, Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes in
Canadian Courts.
Each year $9.1 million goes to the border services and immigration
departments. The RCMP, which investigates tips and builds cases, gets
$682,000 — or just over 4 per cent.
The concern is that Canadian officials simply ship alleged war criminals away.
"Deporting somebody does virtually nothing," says Axworthy. "It gets
them out of our country. But it doesn't do anything for the victims
themselves or for the country itself. It is really an expedient
measure as opposed to a principled measure."
Carole Saindon, spokesperson for Justice Canada, said the War Crimes
Program process takes "a holistic approach to respond to persons
believed to have committed or been complicit in war crimes, crimes
against humanity or genocide."
There are many remedies at its disposal, she said, including denying
entry, extradition and citizenship revocation, as well as surrendering
to the ICC.
She added that within the past six months two cases have been brought
before the Federal Court of Canada to revoke the citizenship of two
alleged participants in war crimes, including Rwandan Pierre-Célestin
Halindintwali, a former politician accused of inciting the massacre.
"Criminal investigations and prosecutions are complex and expensive,"
she wrote. "This remedy is employed when appropriate."

John Ulan
Hosea Niyibizi of Edmonton saw his former Rwanda neighbour and
childhood acquaintance Jacques Mungwarere on a bus in Windsor in 2003.
He contacted the RCMP and an investigation led to a trial.
Hundreds killed in church
Forty-four witnesses testified in Jacques Mungwarere's trial, the
second under the War Crimes Act. Most sat in a Kigali hotel room,
their faces beamed to a high-definition television screen inside a
large Ottawa courthouse.
Mungwarere faced one count of genocide by murder and one count of
crimes against humanity by murder, stemming from his alleged
participation in two massacres, including the notorious Bisesero Hills
attacks, in which fleeing Tutsis were hunted and killed.
Among the allegations against the former school teacher: he fatally
shot an infant and a 5-year-old, decapitated a teenage girl and
participated in killing hundreds at a church.
In 2003, nearly a decade after the genocide, Mungwarere, a Hutu native
of Rwanda's Kibuye province, had been spotted on a bus trundling down
a Windsor street by Hosea Niyibizi, a former neighbour.
Niyibizi struck up a conversation, and he claims the men agreed to
meet the next week to catch up. Mungwarere never showed. Niyibizi
started hearing accounts that Mungwarere had participated in the
genocide.
Niyibizi reported the allegations to the RCMP, spurring a six-year
investigation that led to Mungwarere's arrest in November 2009 outside
the Windsor factory where he worked.
When the trial began in spring 2012 the case began to unravel.
Prosecution witnesses claimed they were 100 metres away from
Mungwarere when they saw him shooting, too far to make out facial
features. Two witnesses claimed Mungwarere had killed and decapitated
a woman — but her body had been found intact.
Marc Lishchynski, the lead RCMP investigator who travelled to Rwanda
several times to interview witnesses, testified that some allegations
against Mungwarere had been fabricated.
According to the thousand-page disclosure, one victim was killed in
five or six different ways in various different places, said Marc
Nerenberg, Mungwarere's lawyer.
During closing arguments, the prosecution acknowledged some witnesses
were not credible.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Michel Charbonneau agreed. His ruling
stated frankly that while he had difficulty believing Mungwarere's
testimony, he also found some prosecution witnesses had exaggerated or
fabricated evidence.
"The Crown did not prove, beyond reasonable doubt, all of the
essential elements of the accused crimes," Charbonneau ruled last
July. "I declare Mr. Mungwarere not guilty."
In the first interview since his acquittal, from the Windsor home he
shares with his wife and two young sons, Mungwarere told the Star that
Niyibizi and other accusers had made up evidence simply because he is
Hutu — "that is all."
Lying, he said, is commonplace in his region of Rwanda.
"Our region has a specialty in these kinds of things," Mungwarere said
in French, his voice rising as he spoke. "They are people who invent a
lot and they have experience in this kind of thing."
His acquittal was "very, very, very painful," said Mugenzi.
Now working with PAGE Rwanda, a genocide survivor group in Montreal
that tracks alleged Rwandans war criminals in Canada, Nyilinkwaya says
he understands that reliable accounts of genocide activity can be
difficult to find.
"Even as a Rwandan, being able to find credible information, credible
witnesses, is very hard, let alone a Canadian who is trying to find
that information. We are very much aware of how difficult a job it
is," he said.
Mungwarere's status in Canada is being reviewed by the Immigration and
Refugee Board of Canada. Deportation cases, according to Eisenbrandt,
tend to have a lower burden of proof than criminal convictions.
For now, Mungwarere is enjoying his life in Windsor, where he says he
walks the streets with his head high.
"I am not hiding. I am free."

Sarah Wallace / THE CANADIAN PRESS
Jacques Mungwarere was acquitted in 2012 of genocide in Canada's
second trial under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
Counselling the better route
Of 13 people in her home in the Kigali suburb of Kanombe, Alice
Musabende was the sole survivor of the genocide. Her mother, her
father, her siblings, her grandparents — all gone. She was 13.
Since moving to Canada, she has followed her adopted country's
attempts to bring her and her family justice and is thankful there is
movement, however glacial.
But she also does not look to the courts for comfort. No matter how
many genocide criminals sit in jail, her family is not coming back.
"Just because somebody goes on trial and is found guilty, that is not
something that is necessarily going to bring closure. We are just
trying to learn how to live again, how to be normal and not go crazy
every day," she said.
Régine King, who lost two brothers in the genocide and spent three
months hiding from Hutu killers in the bush, has made it her life's
work to understand the psychological trauma caused by horrific
experiences like genocide.
Now an assistant professor of social work with the University of
Winnipeg's Centre for Human Rights Research, she says trials may play
a part in the recovery process, but they are often seen as flawed, the
result determined by who argues the best case.
That is one of the reasons, she says, the court system is not the
channel to promote individual healing, which is better handled by
psychosocial services, such as counselling.
"Some people may feel some relief that justice has been rendered,"
said King. "Whether that contributes to healing is another issue."
If not healing, the pursuit of justice for victims nonetheless means
the genocide is not forgotten. While those in the Rwandan community
would like to see more trials, they also appreciate the complexities
of prosecution and are grateful that Canada has made attempts.
"Honestly, it's very easy to justify that it's just impossible to do
this work," Nyilinkwaya said. "But they are forging ahead, and we are
very thankful that they are, despite all the difficulties."
"It gives us hope that one day we can have 'Never Again' be
materialized," said Hiram Gahima, a Rwandan who lost his parents and
brothers and is living in Windsor.
"We keep saying it, but people keep dying."
Actions against war criminals from 1998 to 2008 (the most recent available)
Entries prevented: 4,047
Suspects excluded from seeking asylum: 621
Intervention in refugee hearings: 1,969
Removals: 466
Visa cases reviewed abroad: 19,967
Cases reviewed in Canada: 16,293
Modern war crimes cases concluded: 36,260
Criminal prosecutions: 2
Convictions: 1
Source: Canada War Crimes Program 2008 report
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/04/05/rwandan_genocide_the_long_road_to_justice.bb.html
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