RIGHTS-RWANDA: Killing in Kenya Puts Spotlight on Witness Safety

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 1998 (IPS) - The assassination last weekend of a former Rwandan official set to testify at a U.N. war crimes tribunal has sparked questions over the safety of witnesses to the 1994 genocide in that country.

Seth Sendashonga, who was Rwanda’s interior minister for a brief 1994-95 stint, was shot dead on Saturday along with his driver, Jean Bosco Kalyubukeye, in Nairobi.

The killing of Sendashonga – a prominent critic of late President Juvenal Habyarimana’s Hutu-majority regime, and of the multi-ethnic, rebel-formed government now in office – came after he declared he was ready to appear as an expert witness at the U.N. tribunal on Rwandan war crimes based in Arusha in Tanzania. Pascal Besnier, an attorney for two Rwandans suspected of involvement in the 1994 genocide, said in Arusha that Sendashonga was prepared to testify in his clients’ defense “despite threats made against him.”

As an official in the initial post-genocide government and a Hutu critical of Habyarimana’s regime, Besnier noted, the late interior minister would have been the highest-level Rwandan politician to appear for the defense.

The killing came at a time when the beleaguered Arusha tribunal was being criticised for lacking staff members experienced in witness protection. In a report by Karl-Theodor Paschke, U.N. under-secretary-general for internal oversight, the inexperience was a “major logistical problem” which hampered the ability to protect key witnesses for both the prosecution and defense.

“As the trials progress, this lack of experience – including risk assessment – can make the situation for important at-risk witnesses even more dangerous,” the report said.

The tribunal’s registrar, Agwu Okali, called that assessment “grossly unfair and inaccurate,” and told IPS this week that there was no connection between Sendashonga’s killing and the tribunal’s witness-protection programme.

“The important thing is that he was not one of our protected witnesses; therefore, (the assassination) really should have no effect on the tribunal at all,” Okali said. Sendashonga, he said, had decided on his own not to be included in the witness- protection programme at Arusha, and had expressed his desire not to be named as an expert witness until he appeared in court.

The fall-out over the killing affected not only the tribunal, but also the Kenyan government, which was urged by the United Nations to improve its own security. Klaus Topfer, director- general of the U.N. Office at Nairobi, told Kenyan Foreign Minister Bonaya Godana on Monday that the government must do more to ensuyre the safety of all U.N. staff and families, noting that Sendashonga had been a longtime U.N. staffer in Nairobi until 1994.

“Together, we must do the utmost to ensure the best possible living and working conditions in the country,” Topfer said.

U.N. officials and the Kenyan government did not offer any clues on who might have assassinated Sendashonga but several non- governmental groups, including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH), left little doubt whom they suspected.

In a joint release issued Monday, the two groups noted that Sendashonga had left the post-1994 government former by the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) after sending Vice President Paul Kagame – believed to be the central figure in the current leadership – some 600 memoranda asking the Tutsi-dominated army to restrain its troops.

Shortly after leaving Rwanda for Nairobi, Sendashonga and a nephew were wounded in a failed assassination attempt in February 1996. “A man apprehended with a firearm at the site of the attack was identified as an employee of the Rwandan embassy in Nairobi,” FIDH and HRW said in the joint release. “Although arrested, the assailant was never prosecuted by Kenyan authorities.” (The Rwandan government denied any involvement in the attack.)

Rwanda’s relations with the United Nations have been strained for years, with the government in Kigali accusing the tribunal of dragging its feet in determining responsibility for the massacres, blamed on a short-lived Hutu regime which took power following Habyarimana’s still-unexplained death in an Apr. 6, 1994 plane crash. In the three months between that death and the RPF’s seizure of power, as many as one million people are estimated to have been killed.

The tribunal, frustrated for years in setting up trial chambers and netting prominent genocide suspects, had a major victory in convincing Kigali of its effectiveness on May 1, when Jean Kambanda, the prime minister in the post-Habyarimana regime, pleaded guilty to six counts of genocide. With that plea, Okali argued, “we have had an important – perhaps the most important in terms of official position – accused person pleading guilty. That plea of guilt undercuts any argument over whether there was a genocide or not.”

Moreover, Kambanda now was likely to be an important witness for the prosecution in subsequent trials, he said.

Okali, who was appointed registrar last year after the United Nations dismissed the previous registrar and deputy prosecutor amid allegations of corruption and incompetence, added that the tribunal is moving ahead on several fronts. The U.N. Security Council this month approved the creation of a third trial chamber in Arusha, which can finally allow the body to conduct three trials simultaneously.

Okali said a decision was expected in the next few weeks in the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor suspected of war crimes – just 15 months after the tribunal began trying cases. The U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based at the Hague, did not reach its first judgment until more than two years after it began work – but that body, he noted wryly, has not attracted the criticism that its Arusha-based partner has faced.

Considering that the tribunal for Rwandan war crimes already had seized some of the senior political and military officials linked to the genocide, he argued, “we are bound to feel that we are being judged by different standards.”