Rwanda’s Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama recently took up the attacks against international tribunals at a UN General Assembly meeting on international justice and precisely mentioned the International Criminal Court based in Hague as a court for the powerful nations that was created to try some leaders of less powerful nations though he fell short of saying whether these so called leaders tried in the International Criminal Court are innocent.

Karugarama

The Rwandan Justice Minster‘s utterances were adding to another voice of an African leader who argued that  ICC IS  now  tool of  powerful nations  who use  it to install leaders of their choice in Africa and eliminate the ones they do not like.  The Rwandan Justice  Minister’s argument is hypocritical though, because the most beneficiaries of the so called selective justice  is Rwanda whose entire cabinet and military officials  would not be in Kigali today,  but rather in the Hague. How come then the Ministers is accusing this International Criminal Court of favoring some countries and he fails to list his own as one of the beneficiaries of this generous offer.

Rwanda under Kagame has gone beyond simply being a willing member of global bodies with an anti-African bias. Kagame’s presidency has been used by  some powerful nations his Minister  does not want to mention which actually have protected them from being indicted by ICC to an extend of giving a safe haven to some war criminals irrespective  of being wanted by ICC. Furthermore these powerful nations the Rwandan Justice Minister is talking about have given orders to his President   to exempt all their soldiers from the country’s judicial system. It is in this context that the US Lawyer Peter Erlinder was released after too much pressure from the US with some empty promises by the US that he will be returned for trial.
Therefore the Rwandan Ministers’ ICC concerns cannot be about African independence or selective justice as the Minister is trying to portray it, the ICC comes as the latest in a long line of international attempts to create institutions to manage the troublesome aspects of international relations, such as trade and human rights. This reaches all the way back to the creation of the United Nations itself in 1945, in attempts to avoid a return to the tensions that gave rise to the just ended 1939-1945 war that sucked in the global powers and their colonized peoples alike.

The Rwandan Justice Minister should draw an example from RP/A which is dominated by people who started the rebellion against Kigali government of the time by the majority refugees who had fled to Uganda and joined NRA of Musevini, so are these big International Institutors such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank- are yet to become truly democratic in respect to voices of rich versus poor nations. The United Nations system, for example, is really dominated and often controlled not by the votes of its 193 member General Assembly, but the veto and “super-votes” of the five Permanent Members on its Security Council. This committee (to which the ICC reports) is made up of basically those countries that emerged militarily triumphant after the 1939-1945 war. There are no African countries among them.

As the Rwandan Justice Minister, cited the fact that the majority of ICC suspects and convicts are from Africa, to portray the court as having degenerated into a Western focus group on African  court to try to African leaders , is not only misleading , but the Minister is simply exchanging one fraudulent argument for another.

During Rwanda’s 2010 elections, the RPF blocked the nomination of opposition presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire of FDU-INKINGI whose has been now sentenced to 8 years on the grounds that he was facing criminal charges in the High Court. The Minister of Justice who is also the Attorney General with all his legal machinery even invented a wholly new legal concept in declaring Ingabire ineligible for nomination due to being “less innocent”.  The Minister who is a lawyer by profession knows very well the legal principle of innocence of a suspect until proven guilty by a competent court; therefore the Minister’s concern on ICC cannot be about justice.

Attacking the ICC for an anti-African bias at this time is also simply disingenuous. We have repeatedly heard the same argument in reverse when the RPF leadership responds to criticisms that only some government corruption suspects end up spending nights in  Prisons or are just exempted from further questioning or are not questioned at all when the RPF interest are at stake. For Instance the Parliament Report on the misuse of funds for the electricity project in which many RPF officials were implicated, the report died a natural death and instead some members of parliament were asked to make an apology for making utterances without permission from the RPF secretariat but actually from Kagame himself. Therefore, the Minister is trying to tell us that just because some people may be appearing to get away with it, this should not mean that those who can be caught should not be caught.

The Minster’s who is the legal advisor to the government and the President  should appreciate the good work done by the International Criminal Court of Justice  to bring to justice many war lords  as far as Liberia,  the former Yugoslavia,  Congo,  and  he should now be looking for ways how his president will be spending his retirement  rather than  astonishing the whole World when Rwanda and Kagame in particular is the best beneficiary of  what the Rwandan Minister calls selective justice.

 

Jacqueline Umurungi

Brussels.