Arusha, Tanzania

This summer, I decided to follow up my amazing trip to Turkey with another summer trip, this time to Rwanda. The program is through the UNC Honors program, which also hosted our last trip. The point of the trip is to study the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its effects on international law. Accordingly, we are visiting the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania, and the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands. In Rwanda, we are staying in Kigali for 3.5 weeks, with 2.5 weeks at a guesthouse and another week in a homestay. We are also staying in the university town of Butare, located in the south of the country, for a week. The trip starts out in Arusha, goes to Kigali, Butare, and then The Hague. 

I left the US on May 14 and went through Philadelphia to Amsterdam. Because of how the way the flights worked out, I ended up staying up a night in Amsterdam and I toured around the city. After the layover in Amsterdam, I met up with the rest of our group in the airport and boarded our KLM flight to Arusha, Tanzania. Arusha is a small city of about 200,000 people which is the main gateway for tourists heading on safaris to the Serengetti and Ngorongoro National Parks, a few hours away. It lies in a valley between Mt Meru and Mt Kilimanjaro. 

The first day there we went on a safari in Arusha National Park. The National Park is a lot smaller than Serengetti and Ngorongoro, but it's still relatively large. The trucks we went on were stereotypical safari cars - Land Rovers with raisable roofs that lets you stand up and watch the animals. We saw tons of giraffes, zebras, warthogs, African buffaloes, little deer-like antellop

e called dik dik, flamingos, colombo monkeys and one elephant. Because of poaching, there are relatively low amounts of predators, so we didn't see any.

Here are some pictures I took (click on the pictures to enlarge):

This was one of our two guides.

After the safari, we went back to our hotel. The hotel was nice and had a patio on the second floor where our rooms were, so we could sit outside and talk to each other. To hang out, we would go to the Hotel Arusha, a very nice hotel designed for safari goers, the Via Via restaurant which gave us slow but free internet. The worst thing about Arusha were the salesmen - street vendors who pushed their touristy wares very hard, to the point where they followed us for fifteen minutes. Although Tanzanians are very nice, our impressions of them were marred by the constant stream of salesmen who seemed to think that they had a right to our money. Still, they were a part of the experience and in several instances they showed us to the different markets, with the promise that we would visit their shops to buy from them.

We stayed in Arusha specifically because the International Tribunal Court for Rwanda (ICTR), an international court established by the UN in the aftermath of the genocide in 1994. The court, which is related to the International Criminal Court in The Hague (which we’re visiting after Rwanda) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, has focused on indicting and trying top genocidaires - ranking party, government and military leaders that planned and perpetrated the genocide. As opposed to the Rwandan courts, which still have more than 100,000 low level genocidaires in its overcrowded prison system, only 92 people have been indicted for genocide, crimes against humanity (rape and extermination) and conspiracy to commit genocide; of those, 79 have been arrested.

Our time at the ICTR was short but informational and somewhat depressing. The court itself is a complex of several white six story buildings that was initially designed as a meeting point for the African International Congress. The buildings had been adapted to fit the courts and as a result were of somewhat shoddy construction. Still, the court rooms themselves were pretty high tech and had multiple cameras and computers dispersed throughout the room. The room was laid out in a rectangle, with the prosecutor on one side, the defendant on the other, the judges in the middle front and the witness stand on the middle back. Anyone from the public could sit in a room adjacent to the court room separated by glass windows.

We saw two cases in session - one dealt with a provincial leader called Dominique Ntawukalilyayo who had been charged with multiple counts of genocide; the second case dealt with Eduard Karemara, a minister for the interim government during the genocide that was charged with conspiracy to commit genocide. I felt that the first day was fascinating and that this could possibly be a career for me. The second day proved me wrong. We sat in on Karemara’s court case for several hours and observed all the characteristics for which courts and law are criticized. The questions by the defense, posed to Karamera himself, were dull and uninforming, his testimonial was obfuscating and misleading, and the rest of the court seemed apathetic and uninterested. At one point, we saw one judge nodding off and the other playing solitaire on his laptop. Not inspiring for a court that is meant to serve international justice. 

The speakers we heard that day confirmed what we had already witnessed. The cases are long, drawn out, and full of technicalities and legal procedures that in my mind seemed to undermine the court. One joint case that was trying multiple defendants took 10 years to conclude, even though there was no doubt that those involved were perpetrators of genocide. 

What bothered me most about the court was the seeming hypocrisy of it all. To be sure, the men and women who work there are from many countries, ethnicities and backgrounds. They have different religions, skin colors and ideals, but all of them are resolute in their search for justice. They genuinely believe that they are doing good, and by most measures, they are. The idea of an international court bent on seeking justice regardless of position or nationality is an appealing one. But I can’t help but feel that the court, for all the good it does, is just a way for the international community to try to atone for not having done anything to prevent the genocide in the first place. It is a way for Westerners in particular to placate their own conscience - no, we did not stop the killing, but at least we did this. This feeling made me feel depressed about the situation. For whom is this justice? It’s certainly not for the Rwandans, who protested the creation of the court and took it as an insult to its own judicial system. Indeed, the ICTR refuses to transfer cases to Rwanda and has no Rwandan judges of its own because it’s fear of bias. But should the perpetrators of the genocide not be tried in their own country by their own people?

A few days after I thought about the court I found a passage in a book we’re reading about Rwanda by Phillip Gourevitch that described the same hypocrisy that I had observed: “The tribunal was created essentially to appease the conscience of the international community, which has failed to live up to its conventions on genocide. It wants to look as if it is doing something, which is often worse than doing nothing at all.”

A few days later, in Kigali, we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial where more than 250,000 of the victims are interred. A plaque in the front entrance symbolized this hypocrisy. The plaque listed the names of people and governments that had made the memorial possible. The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation was one of the eight names in the list. A wave of embarrassment and shame hit me. Here we were, at the final resting place of more than a quarter million people, and here was the name of the president who very easily and cheaply stepped in to stop the killing, stopped these hundreds of thousands from being buried here. Instead, all there is is a plaque that commemorates his donation to a memorial, a way of saying “Sorry I didn’t do anything to keep your son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother, brother or sister from being killed. Maybe this money will help.”

A government official once said, “The United States does not have allies. It has interests.” Did we not have interests in Rwanda? Is that why we didn’t stop more than 800,000 people from dying in 100 days? Do the Conventions on Genocide, which explicitly state that countries must act to prevent acts of genocide from occurring, not apply to the US or the rest of the world? How is it that people saw this happening on their TV monitors and did nothing? How is it that the same day that the UN Security Council passed a resolution stating that it was appalled by the mass killings, it passed another resolution withdrawing the majority of its peacekeepers from Kigali at the protest of the peacekeepers’ general? How is it that General Dallaire, the UN General, said he could effectively stop the genocidaires with 5000 troops, but was rejected by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan? These questions’ have one answer. Nobody cared. Nobody cared about Rwanda, about the Hutus and the Tutsis, because they didn’t have interests there. Would it have made a difference if Rwanda was next to Kuwait and was full of oil? Absolutely. But because there was nothing here for people in the state department, in the Security Council, in the UK Parliament and the Russian government to care about, nobody did anything. I find that highly depressing.

I find it somewhat worrisome that this early in the trip I’m already disillusioned by the international system. As my time in Rwanda continues, I want to see how my thoughts on the issue progress. Maybe there is some good out of this. I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to find out.