U.S. May Back Creation of Special Atrocity Tribunals

The Bush administration is giving careful consideration to endorsing special tribunals to prosecute atrocities in Sierra Leone, Congo, Sudan and other countries embroiled in brutal civil conflicts, the new chief of the State Department’s war crimes bureau said in an interview.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, who took office as ambassador at large for war crimes issues about two weeks ago, said this week that the special courts would be modeled after the U.N.-created tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda.

The Bush administration, he said, has not softened its opposition to a proposed worldwide war crimes court. Opponents of a global court have raised concerns that such a tribunal could be used to prosecute American soldiers who are carrying out humanitarian missions.

And, Prosper noted, it might not be possible to prosecute everyone implicated in war crimes. But “those that bear the greatest responsibility have to be brought to justice,” he said. The former war crimes prosecutor brought charges of genocide in Rwanda before the tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, between 1996 and 1998.

In a 14-month courtroom battle, Prosper successfully prosecuted the former mayor of a district in central Rwanda, one of the highest-ranking officials charged in the slaughter of more than 800,000 people in 1994, during the African nation’s ethnic violence. The mayor, Jean-Paul Akayesu, was sentenced to life in prison, the first person convicted under the 1948 international Genocide Convention.

Prosper said separate tribunals are appropriate because each conflict is different. But it also seems to be the only approach that is acceptable to President Bush and Congress, which have rejected creation of a proposed international criminal court to prosecute crimes against humanity.

On Dec. 31, President Clinton signed a treaty establishing the U.N.-sponsored court, but the Senate refused to ratify the pact out of concern that U.S. soldiers on peacekeeping missions might fall under the jurisdiction of the tribunal. Bush has made it clear that he opposes the plan, although the administration has not completed its review of what to do about the issue.

Prosper said the administration’s objective is to establish firmly the principle that war crimes and other crimes against humanity can be prosecuted. Before the outbreak of the ethnic wars that accompanied the breakup of the Yugoslav federation a decade ago, the international community had seldom tried to enforce those laws.

Prosper, 38, a Southern California resident who worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, is the son of Haitian immigrants. His parents are doctors.

Establishing tribunals to prosecute crimes resulting from the conflicts in Sierra Leone, Congo and Sudan could raise sensitive issues. In Sierra Leone, for instance, a U.S.-backed peace plan offered amnesty to leaders of the Revolutionary United Front, a brutal insurgent organization that drafted child soldiers and hacked off the limbs of civilians.

But Prosper said it is no longer acceptable to allow war criminals to escape justice.

“Amnesty is not on the table,” he said.

In Sudan, more than 2 million people have died since 1983 in a conflict pitting the government, dominated by Muslim Arabs from the north, against rebels from the south who are mostly black Christians or practitioners of native African religions.

Prosper said there have been plenty of atrocities on both sides.

Many fundamentalist Christian groups in the United States openly support the rebels, accusing the Sudanese government of wanton killing of civilians and of forcing Christians to convert to Islam under threat of death.

Prosper said the administration’s overall Sudan policy offers improved relations with the government if the human rights abuses end. But he said U.S. Christian groups that are demanding tougher action against the Sudanese government have a useful role.