Where Is the Will to Bring Mass Murderers to Justice? : Rwanda: The country needs a Nuremberg prosecution to punish the authorities responsible and get on with life.

During more than two decades of research on the Holocaust and efforts to bring its perpetrators to justice, I have visited many of the sites of the mass murder of European Jewry. In some, like the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek death camps, a few of the buildings where the crimes were committed are intact; in others, like Treblinka and Chelmno, only monuments mark the spot where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered. The same is true in the killing fields of Lithuania and Latvia.

In Rwanda, by contrast, the sites of mass murder retain their immediacy. In the town of Ntarama, hundreds of skulls neatly arranged on a table alongside the local church attest to the murders that took place inside this house of worship. In Mugombwe, the skulls of hundreds of Tutsis who were drowned in excrement lie in open-pit latrines, testimony to one of the favorite execution methods of the Hutu extremists.

Those images return this month, the second anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. Sadly, almost none of the planners and key implementers of the premeditated slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus have been apprehended. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority escaped following the fall of the Sindikubwabo regime, which carried out the genocide. Many of those primarily responsible for the genocide crossed into Zaire, where they control the refugee camps and prepare for the next round of violence. Others have found a warm welcome in Kenya and until recently in Cameroon.

The United Nations International Tribunal for Rwanda was established to dispense justice, but to date it has indicted only eight perpetrators, for the murder of several thousand Rwandans at Kibuye. Only two are in custody and none is among the leaders of the genocide.

The United Nations investigators are looking for incriminating documents. But in cases of genocide, written orders rarely exist. Historians of the Holocaust still are searching for Adolf Hitler’s order launching the Final Solution. The lack of such proof has not, however, prevented the prosecution of leading perpetrators of the Holocaust.

What is lacking in the case of Rwanda is the political will to prosecute the major criminals, which partially can be attributed to the fact that they were neither rebels nor renegades, but government officials. Thus, people like former President Theodore Sindikubwabo and Maj. Gen. Augustin Bizimungu are the beneficiaries of protection not normally granted to others accused of crimes. The men believed responsible for these murders are living openly in Zaire and Kenya. Protected by their host regimes, they apparently have no reason to fear the U.N. tribunal.

Justice is critical if any semblance of normalcy is ever to happen in Rwanda. One of the primary factors that led to the genocide was the culture of impunity. Recurrent cycles of violence claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1959, but not a single person ever was tried for these crimes.

Rwanda needs its own version of the 1946 Nuremberg trials, which sentenced the surviving leadership of Nazi Germany to death or lengthy prison terms. Such a cathartic process would expose the crimes of the murderers, achieve a measure of justice and serve as a warning to those around the world who may be considering mass murder as a solution to political or ethnic conflicts.

Those of us who have devoted years to the hunt for Nazi war criminals did so not only to punish the guilty, but also to prevent a recurrence of those heinous crimes. The only way to defuse the genocidal time bombs about to explode in Burundi and elsewhere is to prove at the highest level that crime does not pay. To date, the Rwanda experience has only proved the opposite.