Rwanda Won’t Work With U.N. Tribunal
The Rwandan government suspended cooperation with a U.N. tribunal on Saturday after the court freed on a technicality a former official accused of helping organize the nation’s 1994 genocide.
The government criticized Wednesday’s decision by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to immediately release Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, a former Foreign Ministry official who was being held in Arusha, Tanzania, where the court is based.
“Barayagwiza’s release serves as a pretext for all other perpetrators of the genocide to live with impunity all over the world,” said a statement sent by Foreign Minister Augustin Iyamuremye to tribunal officials.
Tribunal spokesman Kingsley Moghalu said in Arusha that suspending cooperation “will have serious consequences on the tribunal’s ability to conduct its trials” because most of the prosecution witnesses come from Rwanda.
Judges at the appeals chamber in The Hague said Barayagwiza had been held too long without trial and ordered him returned to Cameroon, where he had originally been arrested. He was transferred to the tribunal in November 1997.
More than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed when an extremist Hutu government began the genocide in April 1994.
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