RIGHTS-RWANDA: Looking for Confessions

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Chris Simpson

KIGALI, May 25 1998 (IPS) - With 130,000 genocide suspects still awaiting trial in prisons built to house a fraction of that number, the Rwandan authorities are looking to secure thousands of confessions to help ease an impossible legal burden.

Justice officials and other legal experts are now targetting individual prisons, explaining how prisoners can come forward and spelling out the obvious benefits for those ready to confess: reduced sentences and the possibility of a far swifter reintegration into civil society.

But despite a flood of confessions at prisons like Rurima and Gikongoro, both in the south of the country, the government accepts that only a fraction of the overall prison population has taken up the offer.

According to the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Justice, Gerald Gahima, one of the main problems is the continuing chain of command among those detained.

“The main prisons are still under the control of die-hard elements who are quite opposed to the confessions programme,” Gahima acknowledged. “These are educated people who were at the forefront of organising the genocide. It is not easy for the others to defy them”.

Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans died in 1994 during three months of massacres organised by extremists from the Hutu majority. The victims were mainly people from the country’s Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates.

Under the government’s own ‘Organic Law’ on genocide, adopted in September 1996, suspects fall into four categories: Category One – leaders and organisers, and those who perpetrated particularly brutal crimes; Category Two – those who committed homicide or sexual torture; Category Three – those who carried out serious assaults; Category Four – those who committed crimes against property.

It is prisoners in Categories Three and Four that the government is keen to get through the courts and out of prison as quickly as possible. But it is the Category Ones, who face the death penalty, who are obstructing the process.

Under the existing legislation, confessions should be as comprehensive as possible, giving clear details of the crimes committed and listing any other individuals who acted as accomplices.

Last week, Gahima and a visiting delegation of legal officials, diplomats and journalists heard different accounts from nine prisoners at Gikongoro jail of how they had come to be involved in the genocide. Mostly young men, but with one much older, they owned up to individual killings but emphasised how they had been coerced into taking part in the genocide.

Gahima later remarked: “I did not personally see any kind of remorse. But our law does not require people joining the confessions programme to show remorse”.

The nine were part of an overall group of 238 prisoners in Gikongoro who have confessed. But in a prison population of close to 2,500, that is still less than ten per cent.

Having heard from those who had come forward, Gahima spoke at length from a podium in the main prison courtyard, addressing hundreds of prisoners who had yet to show any interest in confessing.

While he spelled out the benefits of confession, he faced a barrage of questions and complaints, with prisoners demanding to know when they would be tried and what guarantees could be given in return for confession. There was a fierce scramble at the end for copies of a Ministry of Justice pamphlet outlining the moves to confession and how the legal system operated.

But out of earshot of the visiting delegates, some prisoners explained why they would refuse to come forward. “I am not confessing. I did nothing and I still want to know why I’m being detained,” one man argued.

A fellow prisoner acknowledged that many had committed serious crimes, but others were simply waiting for justice, not even knowing what they were accused of. “We were arrested quite arbitrarily and we have had no indication of when we’ll go to court,” he said.

Gahima later acknowledged that a small proportion of prisoners might prove to be innocent, but emphasised the likely guilt of the vast majority.

“The fact is that more than one million people died in this country,” he said. “They did not commit suicide. Some people out there killed them and these prisoners were arrested on the basis of those who came forward as first-hand witnesses.”