Rwanda genocide tribunal concludes mission 29 yrs later: The Guardian
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On the list of 92 indictees, the final two names of Charles Sikubwabo and Ryandikayo, a restaurateur, were crossed off.
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Newly discovered skulls and bones of some of those who were killed during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, displayed as a memorial to the thousands who were killed, in Nyamata, Rwanda, Friday, April 5, 2024. (AP)
The last remaining fugitives in the 1994 slaughter that killed more than 800,000 Rwandans were indicted for genocide by the war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, putting an end to its 29-year mission to deliver justice, reported The Guardian.
This took place in a video conference on April 30 between the prosecutor of the tribunal, Serg Brammertz, and the two leaders of the fugitive tracking team who work on resolving cold cases left amid genocide, The Guardian said.
During their conversation, according to The Guardian, all three decided that they had enough evidence to meet the court's standards, and confirmed that the final two suspects they were tracking have been dead for a long time and were in unmarked graves in different places of central Africa.
On the list of 92 indictees, the final two names of Charles Sikubwabo and Ryandikayo, a restaurateur, were crossed off.
Both of them had been charged with genocide and crimes against humanity and were powerful local organizers in Rwanda's Kibuye prefecture, acting as leaders of the murderous mobs of the Interahamwe Hutu militia responsible for the mass killing of Tutsis.
"This is a tangible demonstration that the international community can ensure accountability is achieved, no matter how long it takes," Brammertz emphasized.
The tracking team
Brammertz, who became the prosecutor of the international residual mechanism for criminal tribunals in 2016, was joined by key members of the tracking team who aided in pursuing Bosnian war criminals, like Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, to help hunt down the final eight Rwandan suspects.
After getting rid of a network of paid informants dropping continuous fake leads in the case, the members of the tracking team reconstructed their files on the fugitives virtually from point zero by digging into all witness interviews and open-source data, The Guardian reported.
A former British army officer and a co-leader of the tracking team, Ewan Brown said, "Starting from the minute their feet left the Rwandan border in 1994, it is about source exploitation and investigation and witness interviewing until we got to the last piece of the puzzle."
The final two
Sikubwabo and Ryandikayo were the final targets of the eight-person team because they did not have a major role in the killing in 1994, The Guardian said.
So the trackers mainly focused on finding the warlords involved in the Rwandan genocide like Protais Mpiranya, once the chief of the presidential guard, whose grave was found in Zimbabwe in May 2022, it added.
Also, as per The Guardian, suspects who were still alive were also a top priority. One example is Fulgence Kayishema a former police chief arrested in May 2023. He was disguised, had taken up a false name, and was working as a security guide in the vineyards outside Cape Town in South Africa.
On the other hand, Skubwabo was a small-town mayor and Ryandikayo was a restaurant manager until their involvement in the slaughter, The Guardian reported.
Charles Sikubwabo
One of the worst massacres of the genocide – the slaughter of Tutsis who had sought refuge in the compound around a Seventh-Day Adventist church at a place called Mugonero – was orchestrated with the help of Sikubwabo.
On 15 April 1994, seven Tutsi pastors appealed to him saying, "We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we shall die with our families."
According to The Guardian, Sikubwabo and the Hutu pastor at Mugonero, who later drove a convoy transporting Interahamwe killers armed with guns and machetes to Mugonero, were not suspected by the Tutsis.
In the months following the slaughter of around 12,000 children, women, and men, Sikubwabo led search parties to find Tutsi survivors in his fiefdom and murder them.
Ryandikayo
Ryandikayo had a role in many of the massacres that came after which killed tens of thousands in the area, including a 12-year-old Tutsi girl by the name of Mukanyemera who was bludgeoned with a club and then cut to pieces with a machete by Ryandikayo.
After a 100-day genocide and the collapse of the Hutu government in Kigali, both of them fled to camps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was called Zaire, The Guardian reported.
Riyandikayo then went to the capital, Kinshasa via the smaller Republic of Congo, it added.
Before reaching Chad in 1997, Sikubwabo went through the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
The Guardian said that as none of them was seen or heard from for years, their friends and relatives were sure they were dead, however, proving required many years especially since in both cases it was not possible to look for a body and DNA.
Sikubwabo was buried in 1998 in the N’djamena cemetery, but the location has repeatedly seen floods since that time, and Riyandikayo was suspected dead around the same time due to an unspecified disease in disease in Kinshasa, but it is unclear where he was buried.
So how did they get evidence?
They built the evidence of their death through multiple detailed interviews that were looked into against other witness accounts and open-source information, The Guardian said.
In late April, a final piece of corroborating evidence was found and it was an interview with an eyewitness who was at Sikubwabo’s funeral in the Chadian capital, which made a breakthrough in the investigation, leading to the agreement to close both cases on April 30 through the video call between Brammertz and the two leaders of the tracking team Brown and Kevin Hughes, chief of staff in the prosecutor’s office, The Guardian added.
"A lot of people never believed something like this was possible – the investigations, the prosecutions, and finding the fugitives," Hughes said.
"I hope people walk away from this experience with the fact that all this is very possible when you get a good bright group of dedicated people together, even a small little team. It’s amazing what people can do," he stressed.
The relentlessness of the trackers was specified by Brown as one of the lessons of the tribunal's achievement as he said, "It would have been easy to have forgotten about Ryandikayo, it would have been easy to have forgotten about Sikubwabo but the fact is, if you don’t stick with it if you don’t find these people, there are costs."
"The issue is predominantly for the victims and their traumas to be kept in the public mind," Brown added while emphasizing the importance of international justice in cases of genocide.
"Some of these fugitives and their supporters have peddled narratives that the genocide didn’t happen," he said.
It is not over
Brammetz said, "In a world where international justice is really not doing well, it is a good feeling for us to be able to say: mission accomplished."
"At least it’s accomplished for our fugitives, but this story is not over," he added as even though these tribunals were created to hold the main protagonists accountable, The Guardian said, thousand lower-level war crimes suspects are still wanted by the Rwandan authorities.
During the call on April 30, Brammertz, Brown, and Hughes said that they barely took a moment to enjoy this success before directly proceeding with discussions on how to aid Rwanda's prosecutor general track down suspects of genocide still unfound.
"We already found indications after a few weeks of research, where we could locate a number of individuals who are hiding under fake identities in third countries, and we have already started approaching these third countries," Brammertz said, adding, "There is work still to be done."
