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NEWS & LETTERS, APRIL 2003
Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Rwanda verdicts
The International Criminal Court in Arusha, Tanzania has
just handed down an overly mild sentence of ten years in jail, for aiding and
abetting the 1994 genocide, to the Seventh Day Adventist Minister Elizaphan
Ntakirutimana and his physician son, Dr. Gerard Ntakirutimana. Both of them are
members of Rwanda's majority ethnic group, the Hutus. That year, in the worst genocide since World War II, up
to 800,000 people, most of them members of Rwanda's Tutsi minority, as well as
some Hutus who refused to go along, or who were suspected of not going along,
were slaughtered in a state-sponsored orgy of torture, rape, and murder, down to
the smallest infant. During those days of horror, while the U.S. and the
world sat on their hands (there is no oil in Rwanda), hundreds of Tutsis
attempted to take shelter in Reverend Ntakirutimana's church. The group even
included ministers from his own Adventist denomination. While feigning support,
both father and son instead guided the Hutu militias to the church, where they
killed nearly everyone. The case has received a lot of publicity because of a
letter that six Tutsi pastors sent to Reverend Ntakirutimana, which stated:
"We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our
families." The case was notable for another reason as well, the involvement of former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. A longtime critic of U.S. imperialism who frequently appears at anti-war rallies, Clark's support for perpetrators of genocide has received too little attention on the Left. In addition to his work on Slobodan Milosevic's legal team, Clark also serves as the Ntakirutimanas' principal lawyer. After they fled to Texas to avoid prosecution in Africa, Clark succeeded in delaying their extradition for six years, taking advantage of the fact that the reactionary Texas courts tend to oppose international law of any kind. |
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