Le Tribunal des Vaincus

"Yes, there’s a terrific book by, again, a French writer, named Thierry Cruvellier, and it’s called Le Tribunal des Vaincus – The Court of the Defeated . And it is the only serious, and by far the best, account of the workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania – which followed the model of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. And, while Rwanda has grappled with hundreds or thousands of genocide cases internally (and been criticised for failing to be up to the highest standards of international justice, when it never even pretended that it could meet those standards – nobody could), this was set up with tremendous international support. Something like a billion dollars was spent – about $150 million per year and it has existed for 15 years. And it has tried fewer than 50 cases and achieved maybe 40 convictions. The court has been important, because in a conflicted international community it established that this was genocide, that rape was a crime of genocide, etc. But it’s been really problematic and the trials themselves have barely been noticed by the outside world. Which is fascinating, because you can’t imagine a Milosevic trial having been ignored, had he lived. But nobody knows the names of the Rwandans. It’s part of the story of Rwanda, that nobody’s ever paid much attention. Ask anybody if they know about the Rwandan genocide and they’ll say yes. But ask them if they know who the Pol Pot figure was, or what was the name of the party, it strangely draws a blank. And Cruvellier wrote a really interesting, thoughtful, analytic, deep book about how tangled, messed up, and compromised this pioneering international court for Rwanda has been. Happily, it is just now being translated into English – and will come out in America next year. Well probably the biggest name has been Bagosora, who was convicted last December by the tribunal. Théoneste Bagosora. But there’s a bunch of them, part of the point is that there are multiple names."