Justice Served, but is it Enough for Rwanda?

Ten Year Sentence, but Will Deportation be the Answer?

Through 2 trials and three years since her indictment in 2010, a mistrial in 2012 and three years of being without her children, justice has been served on 43-year old Rwanda native Beatrice Munyenyezi. She was convicted in February of entering the United States and obtaining citizenship by false claims regarding her role as a commander of one of the infamous roadblocks where Tutsis were singled out for slaughter. She also denied association with any political party, even though her husband had a leadership role in the extremist Hutu militia party.

On Monday, a federal judge sentenced her to the maximum ten years in prison for lying about her involvement in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The judge made it clear that the United States cannot be a safe haven for those who slaughtered out of hatred and ignorance. She did not take advantage of her right to address the court after U.S. District Judge Steven McAuliffe handed down her sentence.

"She was not a mere spectator," McAuliffe said. "I find this defendant was actively involved, actively participated, in the mass killing of men, women, and children simply because they were Tutsis."

He also acknowledged the fact that since entering the U.S. she has lived a crime free life since her arrival in New Hampshire in 1998 but said it was a life lived as a lie.

Midway through the hearing, Munyenyezi started crying. There was no visible reaction from her adult daughters during the preceding.

"It's very, very traumatic," defense attorney David Ruoff said afterward. "She's been anxious about this. Regardless of what happened in Rwanda in 1994, it's traumatic for any person to face their kids under these circumstances."

McAuliffe said she essentially stole a citizenship opening away from a deserving refugee, perhaps one who also had daughters and was a victim of cruelty and persecution.  Ironically, Munyenyezi took the oath of citizenship a decade ago in the exact courthouse where she was sentenced. McAuliffe stripped her of that citizenship when she was found guilty. Her lawyers will appeal her conviction with the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. This appeal will be expected to delay deportation proceedings.

Federal prosecutors had looked for the maximum prison sentence, saying she's as guilty as if she brandished the machete herself.

In April of 1994, Hutus began slaughtering the Tutsis in the African country of Rwanda. Lasting 100 days, the Rwanda genocide left approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu partisans dead.

At the end of her ten-year prison sentence, she could face deportation, which her lawyers say will be a death sentence.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Aloke Chakravarty said prosecutors knew the case would be a challenge, and that no case similar to this link to the Rwanda genocide had ever been prosecuted in the United States. "But tolerating genocide was not an option," he said.

Munyenyezi's husband, Arsene Shalom Ntahobali and his mother were both convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes of violence and are serving life sentences. They were regarded to be high-ranking members of the Hutu militia party that coordinated the brutal attacks on the Tutsis.

Munyenyezi's sister, Prudence Kantengwa, was found guilty and convicted last summer in Boston, on charges of fraudulently obtaining a visa to enter the United States by lying about her own Hutu political party associations. She was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison.

I wonder how many are still in hiding, living a good life with no worries about being slaughtered for who they are. I have no sympathy for these people: Do I understand it? Possibly, but killing innocent people is wrong for any reason.

 

Ghosts of War, Rwanda's Living Dead

In Rwanda and the neighboring Kivu provinces of the DR Congo, ghosts wander above the Great Lakes. These ghosts are survivors of a horror they will never manage to forget-those that the Rwandans call "bapfuye buhagazi" or "the walking dead." These are the young girls who had abortions after being raped by the interahamwe or Hutu militia. These are the widows, the mothers who saw their children slaughtered before their eyes, children who grew up after seeing their parents die, the killers haunted by remorse and the killers who feel no remorse at all.

 

 

They are also the bystanders who pretended there was nothing they could do, the innocents later unjustly accused of murder, the guilty harbingers of death who are afraid of being discovered. These are the ones who are known and who are being blackmailed, the Hutu refugees who never came home, the Tutsi refugees from the Congo who ran from the massacres and still linger in Rwandan camps, the madmen and the broken women.

In many ways the genocide has succeeded, managing to encase the whole country in a huge airless bubble, pretending life goes on but in too many ways it actually stopped on April 7th, 1994.

The sad thing is no one has ever apologized, no truth and reconcilitation commission has been offered them, where the real perptrators are actually present and can be cross-examined. Instead there isa  stricture of the gacaca curts-set up by the Rwandan governments based on a system of community justice, where the deninciators themselves are often guilty and those attending seem more interested in staying on the good side of the present regime, rather than digging into the black past.

The new regime has made using the words Tutsi or Hutu strictly forbidden by law. How can a clear examination of the relationship between Tutsi and Hutu be made? How can you talk about disease without mentioning germs or contagion?

What about the ghosts that walk in the Western world?

Has guilt kept the West fixated on the genocide? Guilt of the Belgian colonizers who were vaguely suspected of having contributed to this mess through their old colonial policies. The guilt of the French government which had supported some of the worst excesses of the Hutu regime beyond the normal limits of political alliance. Guilt of the Americans who refused to use their military intervention when it was called for and finally guilt of the international community when the United Nations compounded it's initial blindness by displaying a massive case of multilateral cowardice.

Genocide In Rwanda Part 3

Politics in Rwanda were dominated by the Tutsi which was just 17% of the population and virtually all the rest of the population was Hutu with 1% aboriginal Twa. Starting in 1959 during the transition to independence the Tutsi were abandoned by their Belgian colonial sponsors, which allowed the Hutu to seize control, setting in motion the idea of throwing off hundreds of years of Tutsi oppression.

The new Hutu rulers targeted former Tutsi officials and their supporters for retaliation forcing several thousand Tutsi to flee the country. The first refugees left Rwanda in 1959 for neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire. Sometime in 1969 some of these Tutsi refugees started calling themselves inyenzi ("cockroach" to signify their persistance) and attempted to return to power in Rwanda and reinstall the Tutsi mwami or king. Attacks were launched from bases in Uganda and Burundi which in turn caused Rwanda's hard line Hutu nationalist government to retaliate by escalating oppression of, and attacks against, Tutsi within the country.

The most successful attacks occurred in 1963 when Tutsi from Burundi came within ten miles of the Rwandan capital, Kiqaali. This then triggered the most intense outburst of reprisal killing against Tutsi in Rwanda. Though horrific, this proved effective in reducing the inyenzi attacks, which stopped in 1967. All told from 1959 to 1967, 20,000 Tutsi were killed and 200,000 were driven from the country as refugees. The Tutsi population now dropped from 17% to 9%. After the inyenzi invasions the remaining Tutsi of Rwanda were spared major outbursts of violence for over two decades, with the exception of one minor occurrence in 1973 when the failing regime of Rwanda's first president tried to win popular Hutu support by scapegoating the Tutsi. This was quickly cut off by the overthrow of the regime in July of that year by a Hutu army officer from northwestern Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana.

Once Habyarimana seized power, Hutu from his northwestern region came to dominate Rwanda garnering resentment from both the Tutsi and other Hutu. The Tutsi were also given quotas for education and other government benefits as part of an affirmative action program on behalf of the historically deprived Hutu. Habyarimana also blocked the return of Tutsi refugees which he saw as a potential threat to his power. In the absence of any further invasions by Tutsi refugees, the Rwandan Tutsi were spared any organized violence for 17 years.

What Is The Conflict In Darfur?

Photo credit Jerry Fowler ushmm
Iridimi refugee camp, Chad. Hawa Salihdin and her children. Her father, her brother, her cousin and 30 other people were killed when the militias attacked her village. Her mother, Hadiya Ahmed, disappeared and is still missing.


Do you know what the Darfur conflict is? The Sudanese military and the Janjaweed ( a nomadic
militia group recruited by the government) are pitted against various rebel groups, most notably the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement.

With the Sudanese government’s arming and mobilization of the Janjaweed a stream of vicious attacks on the nation’s civilians in the towns and villages from which the rebels draw their support, is taking place. This viciousness has rapidly increased to the point where it is now considered genocidal in nature.

“The World’s Greatest Humanitarian Disaster”

The conflict in the Darfur region in Western Sudan has been portrayed as “the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster.”
The UN estimates that as many as 450,000 have died from the result of violence and disease, and as many as 2.5 million have been displaced. The most appalling detail is that many of these casualties have resulted from outright attacks on non military civilians.
“A Mockery Of Our Claim, To Shield Our People From The Worst Abuse”

In December of 2006, secretary general Kohi Annan left office. When he left he had these words to say: “The tragedy in Darfur made a mockery of our claim, as an international community, to shield people from the worst abuse.”

Another Community

Now another type of community exists and all of it’s members have the power to voice their outrage against these atrocities. Of course this other international community is the community of the Internet. A community you are all part of.


Thank you!

Israel Marks Holocaust Memorial Day

President Shimon Peres vowed the Jewish state would never allow the Jewish genocide to be repeated as Israel begins marking it's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

At the main ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, he said," We will never forget, we will never hide and we will never stop asking ourselves what we must do to prevent what happened to ever repeat itself". Six torches were lit to honor the six million Jews who were killed during WWII.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that anti semitism and Holocaust denial was on the rise across the world. "Still 63 years later, who would believe, the ugly face of the hatred of Jews and Israelis appears on different stages across the planet. You wish to deny the right of existence of the Jewish state, and you are wrong to believe the the Jewish state was created due to Holocaust". He was referring mainly to Iran.

Iran's firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has branded the Holocaust a "myth" and in 2006 Tehran hosted a controversial revisionist Holocaust conference, sparking an international outcry.

A study published by Tel Aviv University earlier on Monday, said the worldwide number of anti-semitic incidents in 2007 increased be nearly 7% from the previous year.

May 2nd marks the day of remembrance for 2008