The government will soon contact the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to find out if it is within the rights of a genocide convict to get airplay on a public television which he uses to cleanse his name and also negate the very genocide.
This follows a news programme by a British commercial television network, ITV, which aired on Tuesday evening, featuring Jean Kambanda, the former prime minister of the genocidal government currently serving a life sentence at Koulikoro high-security Prison in Mali.
Kambanda was in 1998 convicted on all the six charges he was facing, all connected to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
"It is obscene…ITV is a commercial television channel, and the only conclusion is someone is probably paying for this. The whole world knows Kambanda is a Genocide convict who was at the heart of the Genocide and for him to get airtime to try to cleanse himself of the very crimes he was convicted for, is shocking," Justice Minister Johnston Busingye told The New Timesyesterday.
During the ITV interview, Kambanda, who exhausted all legal procedures after the Appeals Chamber of the ICTR upheld his life sentence, said he was tricked into entering a guilty plea, which forms basis for human rights activists to link the interview to Genocide denial.
"Any court judgment that has exhausted all appeal processes automatically becomes law. Asking a convict about the same crime he was convicted of is not only holding in contempt the judgment, but most importantly, the crime for which the person was convicted," said Laurent Nkongoli, an international law expert and member of the Rwanda National Human Rights Commission.
He added that any interview can only be granted when a convict has lodged a case in court pertaining to the charges, and this has to be done through a lawyer.
Nkongoli said the problem in this case was not with Kambanda, but rather the people who gave him a forum to deny crimes for which he had time to plead against both in the trial chamber and on appeal.
In 1998, the trial chamber of the Tanzania-based ICTR disregarded Kambanda's plea bargain with the prosecution and sentenced him to life, the highest the court can award, basing on his lack of genuine remorse for what he did, and because of the powers he wielded.
He later changed his plea to not guilty on appeal, but the higher court upheld the ruling in 2000.
"We shall soon engage the ICTR or the Residual Mechanism, whoever is in charge, to know how a convict of crimes of such a nature can be given airtime. We have to get to the bottom of this because it is not the first time," said Busingye, who is also the Attorney General.
He said that Kambanda's role in the Genocide is known to all, including his widely-circulated footage during rallies where he brandished a gun, openly calling for the extermination of the Tutsi.
Despite claims by the ITV that this was the first time that Kambanda had been given a forum on the international media, in 2004 the convict was interviewed by the BBC Radio Kinyarwanda/Kirundi service, BBC Gahuza.
According to Nkongoli, British media should know better, than holding in contempt a final decision by the ICTR, an international tribunal that was instituted by the UN Security Council on which their country is a permanent member.
Action plan
Meanwhile, the head of Ibuka, the umbrella body of Genocide survivors' associations, Prof Jean Pierre Dusingizemungu, said he was not surprised by the interview, saying it was an execution of a well-laid plan to systematically undermine the Genocide against the Tutsi, to the extent that it would not be recognised any more.
"This should be seen in the same prism as the BBC documentary last year and the recent arrest by Gen Karenzi (Karake) in the UK. They are not isolated cases, they are connected and this is something that we know, but however much efforts they put in, they will never triumph against the truth," said Dusingizemungu.
He added that Rwandans should continue to openly challenge such cases by confronting them with the truth of what exactly happened in Rwanda 21 years ago.
Dusingizemungu also took issue with the ICTR for giving the convict access to the media, saying that since its inception, the tribunal has not acted in the interest of the survivors of the Genocide as ought to be the case. He gave an example of numerous former leaders who were acquitted by the UN court despite overwhelming evidence against them.
The ICTR, which winds up its activities at the end of the year, has been replaced by the Residual Mechanism for International Tribunals.
Efforts to get a comment from officials of both the ICTR and the Mechanism were futile, as either side referred us to the other.
Rwanda has on numerous occasions requested to have the convicts of the tribunal complete their sentences on Rwandan territory but the tribunal instead chose to transfer most of them to Mali and Benin.
Previously, there have been reports of convicts incarcerated in Mali who were operating businesses outside prison.
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