The Trial of the Century

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No, not Michael Jackson. Keep an eye on the trial of Col. Theoneste Bagosora. This is the man accused of planning and putting into operation the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Without exaggeration or irony, the current trial in Arusha, Tanzania is the equivalent of what might have happened had Hitler been caught alive at the end of WWII. Ret. Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who headed up the ill-fated UN mission to Rwanda during the genocide, is currently giving testimony. What happened today, courtesy of the Toronto Star, is copied in below.

Dallaire recalls Rwandan death threat
Canadian general tells of 'coup' that followed president's death

SUKHDEV CHHATBAR
ASSOCIATED PRESS

ARUSHA, Tanzania — Retired Canadian Lt.-Gen Romeo Dallaire, the peacekeeping commander in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, told a UN tribunal today that he was threatened with death by the former Rwandan ministry of defence chief of staff who is now on trial for crimes against humanity.

Dallaire began testifying today against four senior Rwandan military officers, including then-chief of staff Col. Theoneste Bagosora. The Hutu officers have been charged with organizing the 100 days of massacres in 1994 that left more than 500,000 people dead, most of them Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

"I was threatened with a pistol (by Bagosora) and was told that next time he will kill me," said Dallaire, 57.

Dallaire, dressed in a dark blue suit, recognized Bagosora in the courtroom when asked by the prosecution to point him out. Dallaire was in command of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda between October 1993 and August 1994. He retired in April 2000 because of post-traumatic stress and has complained of nightmares from his experiences in Rwanda.

Dallaire said he had met Bagosora and other senior Rwandan officials, seeking to stop the massacres, which began shortly after the Rwandan president's plane was shot down over the capital on April 6, 1994. With the minister of defence absent, Bagosora took control of the country, Dallaire said.

The prosecution alleges that Bagosora orchestrated the genocide after assuming control of the army and the political affairs of Rwanda.

Bagosora clearly looked in charge the night the plane was shot down, Dallaire said, and Bagosora rejected the authority of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimina. Dallaire said he was surprised at Uwilingiyimina's absence from the crisis meeting and said the meeting was "something like planning a coup."

Rwandan troops raped Uwilingiyimina and killed her, as well as 10 Belgium peacekeepers the next day. The presidential guard started the killing in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, and even had a list of people to be killed and their addresses, Dallaire added.

Bagosora also chaired military meetings April 7 and 8, which led Dallaire to believe that Bagosora was behind the killings, he said.

Dallaire said he knew that genocide had been planned from a ``variety of sources" and had notified his superiors at UN headquarters in New York three months before the killing began. Instead of giving him the additional troops he requested, UN officials ordered the withdrawal of all but 270 of the peacekeepers.

Dallaire said he did not have enough troops to contain the violence and that even though the peacekeepers set up five sites to protect people, there were persistent incursions by the extremists.

Dallaire was scheduled to continue his testimony tomorrow.

Bagosora, Brig. Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva and Maj. Aloys Ntabakuze have pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for their roles in the massacres, which only stopped when Tutsi-led rebels drove the Hutu extremists out of power in July 1994.

This is the second time Dallaire has testified before the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In 1998, he testified at the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor who was convicted of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The tribunal was set up in November 1994 and has so far convicted 16 people and acquitted one.

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Day 2

Dallaire's testimony stuns hearing
Was told death squads compiling lists
Warnings ignored, ex-commander says

ALLAN THOMPSON

Roméo Dallaire stunned the Rwanda war crimes tribunal yesterday by revealing new details about information obtained from a secret informant months before the 1994 genocide, including an allegation that Theoneste Bagosora supplied death squads with weapons in late 1993 and kept a stock of grenades at his home.

Dallaire, the retired Canadian general who commanded the ill-fated United Nations force during the slaughter that claimed 800,000 lives, testified for a second day as a key prosecution witness in the trial of Bagosora, indicted along with three other senior military officers.

The former army colonel is regarded by the prosecutors as one of the architects of the genocide.

The warnings received on Jan. 10, 1994, from an anonymous informant, an insider in the Interahamwe death squads, formed the basis of Dallaire's famous message to U.N. headquarters in New York on Jan. 11, 1994, saying he'd been warned that death squads were compiling lists of people to kill and training to massacre up to 1,000 people every 20 minutes.

Dallaire said the U.N. responded by forbidding his plan to raid arms caches identified by the informant.

Months later, after the April 6, 1994, death of president Juvenal Habyarimana plunged Rwanda into crisis, the informant's predictions came true.

"(The order from New York) destroyed the first real capability we had to corroborate so much other information and also to wrest the initiative from the hardliners and extremists," Dallaire testified yesterday, repeating sentiments he has expressed often.

But then Dallaire went beyond anything made public before. According to Belgian intelligence reports he received, the informant also alleged Bagosora was involved in distributing weapons to the death squads in November, 1993.

"(The informant) indicated that during the month of November of 1993 that Col. Bagosora himself was involved in distribution of weapons ... and indicated that there were still 20 grenades at Col. Bagosora's home," Dallaire told the tribunal here.

Dallaire said the informant revealed army vehicles were being used to transport weapons at night to arms caches; army bases and paracommando units were being used to train the militias and 20 sites were being used to hide weapons.

The prosecution is trying to establish that Bagosoraeffectively took control of the country after the president died in a plane crash and that the top official in the defence ministry used his control to put into motion the well-laid plans for genocide.

Bagosora has pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

At one point, Dallaire said for more detailed information, he would have to refer to intelligence reports prepared for him by Belgian officers. They were based on meetings with the informant.

Dallaire's reference to the reports caused an uproar from Bagosora's defence lawyers, who claimed they were being ambushed by new information and documents.

They pointed out the information was not in the public record or in Dallaire's book, now an exhibit in the trial. The lawyers demanded that the documents be made public.

Dallaire, who carries a large black briefcase into the court with him each day, told the presiding judge, Erik Mose, that yes, he did have the documents with him in Arusha.

Tribunal prosecutors admitted they did not have the intelligence reports and had no interest in delving into Dallaire's personal collection of papers from Rwanda.

"This witness has a huge body of notes and we have not had access to those," prosecutor Barbara Mulvaney told the court. "We don't want to open the door to all these documents."

After defence lawyers threatened to hold up proceedings unless the documents were released, a lawyer from the Canadian military's judge advocate's office said neither Canada nor the U.N. had any objection to releasing the reports.

They are expected to be tabled today.

Dallaire, who wept on the stand during a one-day appearance in another trial in 1998 and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, has shown no sign of distress this time and yesterday described in an almost detached manner some of the horrors he witnessed in Rwanda: Heaps of twisted corpses and the bodies of 10 slain Belgian soldiers piled up like "sacks of potatoes."

At one point he described the roadblocks where minority Tutsis were pulled aside and slaughtered.

"Some would simply have bodies piled in the ditch," he said. "At other times they had them neatly laid out as if it was a sort of a score card or some damn thing. Most of the ones we saw, if not all, were chopped up by machetes."

The victims were always civilians and there were many women and children among the dead, he said.

Many of the bodies had been mutilated, genitals hacked off. Many women and young girls had their dresses pulled over their heads, their legs spread and semen splattered on their bodies.

"In many cases, still the eyes were open and it was like a face that seemed horrified," he said. "There were some men who were mutilated also, their genitals and the like. A number of women had their breasts cut off and their stomachs (sliced) open."

And he said the extremist radio station RTLM was egging on the killers, using its broadcasts to urge the slaughter of babies and even unborns.

Prosecutors finished their direct examination of Dallaire yesterday and defence lawyers for Bagosora are scheduled to being cross-examination this morning.