2 Resign From U.N. Tribunal on Rwanda

In what was widely seen as an early test of his resolve to crack down on incompetence in the U.N. bureaucracy, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has obtained the resignations of two top officials for the Rwanda war crimes tribunal, it was announced Wednesday.

The resignations follow by two weeks a report by the U.N.’s inspector general detailing wholesale mismanagement in the international court, which was set up to put on trial those responsible for crimes against humanity in the 1994 genocide in the Central African nation.

“Serious management and operational deficiencies [at the court] required decisive action,” United Nations spokesman Juan Carlos Brandt said in the announcement. Annan was in London on Wednesday meeting with British Prime Minister John Major and other officials to discuss U.N. reforms.

Andronico Adede of Kenya, the tribunal’s chief administrator, and Honore Rakotomanana of Madagascar, a deputy prosecutor, resigned from the court and the world body.

Adede will be replaced by Agwu Okali, a Nigerian graduate of Harvard Law School who has most recently been an official with the U.N. office on housing issues in Nairobi, Kenya. Rakotomanana will be replaced soon, Brandt said.

Adede and Rakotomanana were singled out for criticism in the inspection report, which concluded that the court was dysfunctional in virtually every administrative area. It cited questionable accounting practices, inconsistent hiring procedures, internal feuding and poor oversight by U.N. headquarters in New York. Inspectors found no evidence of corruption or criminal misappropriation of funds.

The report also concluded that the administrative woes had hindered efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the slaughter of as many as 800,000 people in ethnic-political violence in Rwanda three years ago. The court has indicted 21 suspects and completed just one trial. The Rwandan government has set up a rival court.

The U.N. tribunal operates out of offices in Arusha, Tanzania, and Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

The excesses cited in the inspection report occurred during the term of Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.