J-D marston on Thu, 4 Dec 2003 07:19:46 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Court Finds Rwanda Media Executives Guilty of Genocide |
An interesting verdict from a despicable moment in contemporary history. There is obviously no question in this case, but it is interesting the larger questions on when free speech moves into incitement. The defense lawyer made a glib remark "This is very, very dangerous. This case would have been laughed out of an American court." But the prosecution made a wonderful affront in their summary, "The power of the media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility... Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences." Huh. Jd. usemenow.com nYc In the first verdict of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court today convicted three Rwandan news media executives of genocide for helping to incite a killing spree by machete-wielding gangs who slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda in early 1994. A three judge panel found that the three defendants used a radio station and a twice-monthly newspaper to inflame ethnic hatred that eventually led to massacres at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks. The radio station, dubbed Radio Machete in Rwanda, guided killers to specific victims, broadcasting the names, license plate numbers and hiding places of Tutsis. The Rwanda genocide is considered the worst ethnic killing since the Holocaust. In 100 days, an estimated 10 percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda were wiped out, along with many moderates among the Hutus, who make up the majority of the population. The efficiency of the killers, who chased down the Tutsis at roadblocks and in the streets with sharpened sticks, nail-studded clubs and grenades, surpassed even that of the Nazis, some historians contend. The United Nations, which failed to intervene during the genocide, set up the tribunal three months afterward to bring those who led the massacres to account. Today's verdict was the first conviction of news media executives for crimes of genocide since 1946, when the famous Nuremberg tribunal sentenced the Nazi publisher Julius Streicher to hang for his vitriolic campaign against the Jews. The Arusha judges sentenced two defendants to life in prison and the third to 27 years, reducing it from the life term they said he deserved because his rights were violated early in the case. "The power of the media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility," the court said in a 29-page summary of its judgment. "Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences." Elated prosecutors heralded the decision as a significant victory. "This is really a ground-breaking decision," said Stephen Rapp, the prosecutor in the case. "This is going to change things," said another prosecutor, Simone Monasebian. John Floyd, who defended one of the executives, a newspaper editor named Hassan Ngeze, denounced the verdict as a major setback for free speech and an invitation to dictators to close down any media outlet that is out of favor. "This is a terrible, terrible decision, the worst decision in the history of international justice," Mr. Floyd said. "This is very, very dangerous. This case would have been laughed out of an American court." Two of the defendants, Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, were founders of RTLM radio station, which prosecutors said had a huge influence in a country where people primarily rely on the radio for news. The case against the two turned on the question of whether they intended to create a frenzy of violence, or simply failed to control the station. The judges found that both men, as well as Ngeze, the newspaper editor, had to know that the broadcasts and articles would unleash violence given the political climate in Rwanda at the time. They cited the words of one witness who testified: "What RTLM did was almost to pour petrol, to spread petrol throughout the country little by little, so that one day it would be able to set fire to the whole country." Nahimana's attorney, Jean- Marie Biju-Duval, said the judges disregarded a raft of witnesses who testified that his client had only a slender connection to RTLM. "He was convicted as a symbolic scapegoat," he said. Besides drawing a legal boundary between protected speech and criminal incitement to mass murder, the tribunal's judges and prosecutors said the case vindicated the court's painfully slow and hugely expensive approach to delivering justice in a region where impunity of the powerful has long been the rule. The international court, one of three or four ad-hoc United Nations tribunals, has struggled in recent years to justify itself in the face of intense criticism of its handling of genocide cases. In nine years of adjudication, it has produced only 17 convictions despite having a staff of 872 and an annual budget of $88 million. By contrast, the criminal court at the Hague, set up to investigate alleged war crimes by the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and others during the Balkans war of the last decade, has achieved more than 30 convictions and guilty pleas in a decade of work. Officials here say the Arusha court has suffered from a shortage of judges, lack of leadership in the prosecutor's office and periodic resistance from the Rwandan government. The tribunal hit a low point in 2002, when two organizations of genocide survivors in Rwanda urged people who had witnessed acts of genocide to withhold their testimony in the trials. The groups complained the court was too slow, that it failed to pursue rape charges and that it had hired defense investigators who had themselves participated in the killings. But the tribunal officials said today's verdict, the second in a week, was a sign that the tribunal has overcome most of its troubles. The pace of trials has clearly picked up: in the past month, two new cases have begun against eight ministers of the interim Hutu regime that ruled during the course of the genocide. Four more verdicts are expected later this year. Since August, the United Nations has given the court more judges and appointed a new lead prosecutor, Hassan Jallow, to replace Carla del Ponte, who was splitting her time between the Yugoslavia and Rwanda cases. Mr. Jallow has at least temporarily patched up relations with the Rwandan government and the survivor groups and is reviewing all the ongoing investigations in hope of meeting the United Nations' 2008 deadline for the tribunal to finish. Still unresolved, however, is the contentious issue of what legal authority will pursue charges that members of Rwanda's current Tutsi-controlled government engineered the revenge killings of thousands of Hutus after they overthrew the Hutu's regime in the summer of 1994. Rwandan officials say they want to handle that inquiry themselves. Should the tribunal relinquish that investigation, some critics say, it will undermine trust that it delivers even-handed justice. Moreover, one intrinsic flaw in the tribunal was underscored in the process. Today's proceeding, like all the others, took place at an international conference center in Arusha, one nation and 1,200 miles from the capital of Rwanda. The tribunal set up shop here because the United Nations considered post-conflict Rwanda to be too unsafe and too traumatized to host an international court. But as a result, few Rwandans feel like they are a part of the process, except for the witnesses who are flown back and forth in the United Nations's twin-engine Beechcraft airplane. What today's verdict will do, according to Rapp, the prosecutor, is make clear that the media directors are responsible for broadcasts and articles that incite violence, even if they are not in day-to-day control of their news outlets. In closing arguments, he argued that the defendants each caused more deaths than any single, machete-toting Hutu because they whip up a mass hysteria which fostered thousands of killers. "The media was every bit as important as the weapons of war," he said in an interview. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net