Paul Rusesabagina Brussels, June 20, 2007

124 Avenue Baron Albert d’Huart

1950 Kraainem, Belgique

His Excellency Ban Ki-moon

UN Secretary General, ROOM 3800

United Nations Headquarters

New York, NW 10017

Subject : RWANDA: the need to extend the ICTR’s current term beyond the December 31, 2008 deadline

Mr. Secretary General:

Even as the ICTR’s detailed plan to end all court proceedings in 2008 and close all cases in 2010 is under consideration for approval by the UN Security Council, I have the honor, on behalf of millions of voiceless Rwandans thirsting for justice, to request your high authority to grant a term extension for the Arusha-based ICTR beyond its December 31, 2008 deadline.

Some 13 years after its inception, the ICTR in Arusha has fallen well short of its initial mission as assigned by the UN Security Council. UN Security Council Resolution 955 creating the ICTR clearly stated that the Tribunal’s goal was to “prosecute all persons guilty of the crime of genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law on Rwandan territory, and Rwandan citizens guilty of the crime of genocide and similar crimes in neighboring countries between January 1 and December 31, 1994” (ICTR Statute as adopted by UN Security Council Resolution S/RES/955 (1994) of 8 November 1994). The resolution resulted from the findings of a UN Secretary General Expert Commission which stated that “elements from both warring camps had committed serious violations of international humanitarian law as well as crimes against humanity” (The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993-1996, p.64). And yet, up until now, it is all too clear that the ICTR has only prosecuted members of one side to the conflict at the time, namely the former government and the former Rwandan armed forces (FAR), granting total enjoyment of impunity to members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its army the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). Not that there has been any kind of amendment to the original Resolution 955 allowing the ICTR to close its eyes on the RPF crimes. Quite the contrary. All subsequent ICTR resolutions, some of which have even specifically cited the RPF by name, have invariably stressed the need to prosecute all criminals without exception. One example is resolution 1503 of 28 August 2003, which “urges all States, especially Rwanda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Congo, to increase cooperation with the ICTR and provide necessary assistance, particularly as regards the Rwandan Patriotic Army…”.

To date, the ICTR has also failed to identify and prosecute perpetrators of the April 6, 1994 airplane terrorist attack that took the lives of Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprian Ntaryamira of Burundi, and set in motion the crime of genocide, the crimes against humanity, and unspeakable crimes of war in Rwanda in 1994. In light of the recent Security Council Resolution 1757 on May 30, 2007, creating a Special International Tribunal for Lebanon to try suspected perpetrators in the bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, it would appear unbecoming if the ICTR chose to overlook the April 6, 1994 airplane attack. It would be telling the world that the lives of 2 African Heads of State, even after their killing precipitated the immediate death of more than one million innocent Rwandans, have far less value than that of a former Lebanese Prime Minister. Unfortunately, the stance of current ICTR Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow that the April 6, 1994 airplane attack is not part of the tribunal’s mandate, runs counter to that of two of his predecessors, namely Richard Goldstone [1] and Carla Del Ponte [2], and risks driving the ICTR to that shameful conclusion.

Mr. Secretary General, if the ICTR goes ahead and concludes all proceedings on December 31, 2008 without prosecuting suspected criminals within the RPF, it will have contributed to compounding the Rwandan problem rather than solving it, because it will have served to entrench the very pattern of discrimination it had been destined to stamp out. It will also have betrayed all those left in deep grief by the killers within the RPF and who, like myself, had at one time believed in its justice system. Last November, I formally lodged with the ICTR a detailed complaint against the RPF for its horrible crimes against the Rwandan people and members of my family, but I am still impatiently waiting for justice to be served. In addition, the ICTR will have robbed the Rwandan people of the possibility of laying the foundations of genuine reconciliation, unlike the ICTY which not only endeavors to punish war criminals equitably among Serbs, Croats and Bosnians alike, but most importantly never allows either of the former belligerents to be judge and jury as the ICTR is trying to do by transferring cases to Rwanda. In the end, it will have only served to set all of humanity backwards in its noble fight against impunity and discrimination.

Truthfully, unless all criminals guilty of the worst kind of crimes against humanity are punished, there is no hope for genuine reconciliation among Rwandans. That is the overriding conviction among Rwandans, which also happens to be the position defended staunchly, and rightly so, by many specialists of the Great Lakes region of Africa, such as Professor Filip Reyntjens of Antwerp University in Belgium, who has terminated all collaboration with the ICTR for as long as no one within the RPF is indicted [3]. It is also the position defended by some of the well regarded human rights organizations, namely Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Mr. Secretary General, I insistently urge you to take all these great concerns into full consideration, and to extend beyond the December 31, 2008 deadline the term of the ICTR in Arusha, for the greater good of the Rwandan people, present and future.

Respectfully,

Paul Rusesabagina

CC:

UN Security Council Members (all)

His Excellency John Kufuor, African Union President

Her Excellency Angela Merkel, European Union President

Mr. Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium

Mr. Dennys Byron, President of the ICTR

Mr. Hassan Jallow, General Prosecutor of the ICTR

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

His Excellency Nelson Mandela

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Madam Speaker of US Congress

Amnesty International

Human Rights Watch

[1] According to Agence Hirondelle on December 13, 2006, Mr. Goldstone declared when interviewed by the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende: “In the final analysis, it was the trigger element of the genocide and it’d been highly important, from a judicial and a victims point of view, to make that clear.”

[2] Carla Del Ponte, current Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia , very pertinently declared on April 17, 2000 to the Danish newspaper “Aktual” that “if it were to turn out that the airplane attack was the work of the RPF, the history of Rwandan genocide would have to be re-written”.

[3] In a letter sent on January 11, 2005 to Hassan Jallow, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Professor Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp (Chair, Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp, Venusstraat 35, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium) announced that he will not longer be able to co-operate with the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the ICTR “unless and until the first RPF suspect is indicted.” Reyntjens has closely collaborated with the Tribunal and the OTP since 1995.

Professor Reyntjens says that crimes committed by the ruling RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) are well documented. Although they “fall squarely within the mandate of the ICTR,” they have as yet remained unprosecuted. According to Reyntjens, the ICTR thus fails to eliminate one of the root causes of genocide and other crimes – impunity. In addition, by meting out victor’s justice, the ICTD fails to meet another of its stated objectives, namely to contribute to the process of national reconciliation and the restoration and maintenance of peace. The full letter to Prosecutor Jallow is attached.