Khmer Rouge prison chief Dutch

Dutch, 67, whose full name is Kaing Guek Eav, was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

He had admitted overseeing the torture and execution of thousands of men, women and children at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, and asked for forgiveness.

Prosecutors had asked the judges for a 40-year prison sentence. However, Dutch will not serve the full 35 allotted years as judges reduced the sentence by five years because he had been held illegally, and reduced it by a further 11 years for the time already served behind bars.

Only about a dozen people who were held at Tuol Sleng are thought to have survived, three of whom are still alive. Up to 17,000 people are believed to have died there.

1942 Kaing Guek Eav born in Cambodia’s central province of Kampong Thom
1962 Studies at the prestigious Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. After graduating in mathematics – and coming second in the entire country – he studied for a teaching certificate
1960s Becomes a secondary school teacher. Spends months in detention for leftwing activity
1969 Joins Khmer Rouge, the communist movement fighting Cambodia’s US-backed government
1970 King Sihanouk of Cambodia is deposed in a coup. General Lon Nol assumes power
1975 Khmer Rouge seizes power. Duch becomes head of Tuol Sleng prison. This serves as the foremost interrogation centre for “enemies of the regime”. As many as 17,000 people were interrogated and tortured there before execution
1979 Vietnamese forces topple Khmer Rouge regime. Remnants flee to Thai border and Duch goes into hiding
1999 Duch found living in a village in north-west Cambodia working for a US non-governmental institution under an assumed name and gets arrested
2005 Tribunal for surviving Khmer Rouge leaders gets UN approval after years of debate about funding
July 26 2010 Tribunal sentences Duch to 35 years in jail for his part in running Tuol Sleng

Victims of Khmer Rouge

“Kushayb will be tried in Sudan’s domestic courts. He is under investigation. He will be held accountable” Sabdarat said.The judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants last year for Kushayb and Haroun on 51 counts of alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes. But Khartoum has so far refused to hand them over.

Sabdarat did not say on what charges will Kushayb be prosecuted despite earlier assertions that he has been cleared from any wrongdoings.Khartoum has been lobbying world countries to freeze a move by the ICC to indict president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir. In mid-July the ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced that he is seeking an arrest warrant for Al-Bashir.
The ICC’s prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo filed 10 charges: three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. In early October ICC judges have officially started reviewing the case in a process that could possibly drag on to next year.

The accusations against Ali Kushayb

HIGH RANKING JANJAWEED LEADER & SUSPECTED WAR CRIMINAL
WANTED FOR OVER 40 COUNTS OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND WAR CRIMES, FOR DIRECTING AND PARTICIPATING IN KILLINGS, RAPE, DESTRUCTION AND FORCIBLE DISPLACEMENT IN FOUR VILLAGES IN WEST DARFUR

Real name: Ali Mohamed Ali. AKA: Ali Kushayb, Ali Kosheib, Ali Kouchib, Ali Kosheb, Ali Koshib and Ali Koship

On 31st March 2005, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1593, referring the situation in Darfur to the ICC. Following a 20 month investigation the Court decided that there was sufficient evidence to indict Ali Kushayb.

During 2003-4 Kushayb was the most senior Janjaweed commander in the Wadi Saleh area in West Darfur – he was known as the ‘colonel of colonels’. Eventually, he came to command many thousands of Janjaweed militiamen and, with government support, led the joint government-militia “ethnic cleansing’ operations in Wadi Saleh.

Kosheib himself led a number of attacks against civilian villages, during the course of which civilians were killed, women raped, property looted and buildings razed to the ground.

In one attack, in the Kodoom area in August 2003, Kushayb was seen issuing instructions to the Militia/Janjaweed who carried out the attack, killing numerous civilians, some of them shot as they were fleeing.

During an attack on Bindisi on or about 15 August 2003, Kushayb was seen in military uniform issuing orders. His forces pillaged and burned homes and shops. The attack on Bindisi lasted for approximately five days and resulted in the destruction of most of the town and the death of more than 100 civilians, including 30 children.

In an attack on Arawala, in December 2003, the evidence shows that Kushayb personally inspected a group of naked women before they were raped by men in military uniform.

The evidence indicates that Kushayb also personally participated in at least one mass execution. In or around March 2004 he was involved in the execution of at least 32 men from Mukjar. Witnesses report that Kushayb beat these men as they were being boarded into Land Cruisers. The cars then left with Kushayb in one of them. About fifteen minutes later, gunshots were heard and the next day 32 dead bodies were found in the bushes.

Present whereabouts:

At the time the ICC warrant was issued Kushayb was in Sudanese Custody in relation to other incidents. However, according to recent reports, Kushayb was released from prison on 1 October 2007 and is currently at liberty in Sudan.

Former brigadier general and DINA officer Pedro Espinoza Bravo was given 40 years for his part in the planning of the political assassinations. Espinoza has been charged several times for his roles in “Operation Condor” and the “Caravan of Death,” in which former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s political opponents were kidnapped and murdered.

In addition to sentencing Contreras and Espinoza, Judge Alejandro Solís announced that José Zara, Juan Morales Salgado and Christoph Willeke will each spend 20 years and two days behind bars for their involvement in the Prats case. Raúl Iturriaga and Mariana Callejas received sentences of 30 years and 10 years and one day, respectively. Judge Solís also handed down two 541 day sentences to DINA sub-official Reginaldo Valdés.

According to Contreras’ testimony, the DINA planned and executed the Prats family assassination on direct orders from Pinochet.

Prats served a Commander and Chief of the Chilean Army during the presidency of socialist Salvador Allende. Following civil unrest, Prats stepped down on August 22, 1973. His resignation allowed plans for a military coup to continue in full force. His replacement was Gen. Augusto Pinochet, at that time believed to be a staunch Allende loyalist.

After the September 11, 1973 coup, Prats went into exile with his wife to the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. Pinochet viewed Prats, a constitutionalist who remained popular among the military ranks following his resignation, as the primary barrier to achieving military unity behind the governing Junta.

Human rights advocates see the convictions, which come 34 years after the car bombing that killed Prats and Cuthbert on September 30, 1974, as a key milestone in Chile’s struggle to mend its troubled human rights past. Before Monday’s decision, the only conviction in the Prats case had been handed down by an Argentine court on July 15, 2007.

Angélica Prats, the victims’ daughter, was filled with emotion following the court’s decision. “These 34 years have been spent searching for truth and justice,” she said. “There were some very difficult moments when we feared the killers would never be punished. Judge Solís handed down a clear judgment for the perpetrators of the crime. Although Augusto Pinochet is unable to be punished for his numerous crimes against Chile, this ruling brings a sense of justice for the murder of my parents and for all the victims of the military government.”

In a Monday press release, Socialist Party President Camilo Escalona welcomed the court’s decision. “This ruling is an act of justice against the military regime’s terror against Chile and its people,” he said. “The judgment today is a message that cannot be ignored by civilians and future military personnel. … Judgments such as these allow our society, particularly the victims and their families, to regain its moral consciousness.”

Escalona also repeated his disgust for what he called Senate President Adolfo Zaldívar’s “thesis that trials against the military should end.” “To entertain Zaldívar’s recommendation is to ignore the countless cries for closure by the victims’ families,” said Escalona. “Judge Solís’ successful convictions show that indictments are still a legitimate means of delivering justice in Chile.”

Amnesty International Chile also praised the court’s decision, but said much work remains to be done to achieve justice for victims of Pinochet-era human rights violations. “We welcome the conviction of Manuel Contreras and others for the killing of Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife. We view the judgment as a significant step towards ending impunity for human rights violations during the military regime. Ongoing cases concerning human rights violations should continue to be investigated, as well as the actions of other military officers – both retired and active – who may have been involved,” Amnesty told The Santiago Times.

Contreras and Espinoza have been in the spotlight for decades concerning their alleged roles in countless human rights violations following the 1973 coup against Allende. In 1993, Contreras and Espinoza were convicted for their role in the Washington, D.C. car bomb plot that claimed the lives of Marcos Orlando Letelier — who served as Chile’s Ambassador to the United States under Allende —and his assistant Ronnie Moffet on September 21, 1976.

While the involvement of the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency in destabilizing Allende’s government prior to the coup continues to be debated, declassified documents reveal a deeper relationship between the CIA and the DINA concerning the political operations designed to eliminate the political opponents of Pinochet.

According to a series of documents declassified on September 19, 2000, the CIA “maintained contact with Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda” between 1974 and 1977. The report added that Contreras was “necessary to accomplish the CIA’s mission, in spite of concerns that this relationship might lay the CIA open to charges of aiding internal political repression.”

”This is, in fact, the unraveling of a cover-up of U.S. ties to repression during the Pinochet dictatorship,” said Peter Kornbluh, a Senior Analyst for the National Security Archive.

“As a result of lessons learned in Chile, Central America and elsewhere, the CIA now carefully reviews all contacts for potential involvement in human rights abuses and makes a deliberate decision balancing the nature and severity of the human rights abuse against the potential intelligence value of continuing the relationship,” a 2000 Senate report stated. “These standards, established in the mid 1990′s, would likely have altered the amount of contact we had with perpetrators of human rights violators in Chile.”

SOURCES: LA TERCERA, EL MERCURIO, THE NEW YORK TIMES, US NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVES
By Jason Snyder

BUTARE, Rwanda — Some of the men in the dusty yard of Butare Central Prison
remember Pierre Célestin Halindintwali as a schoolmate or party guest. But more
often, he’s recalled as the man who hid bodies.

During Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, inmates here say, the then-director of Butare’s
public works department allegedly donned a camouflage jacket and devoted his
department’s fleet of Caterpillar tractors to digging Butare’s mass graves.
According to one prisoner’s account, he also helped fill them.

Joseph Nzabirinda, a Hutu chauffeur, was giving a Tutsi friend a ride on
April 21, 1994, when armed men stopped his car at a roadblock.

Halindintwali worked down the street from Nzabirinda, the chauffeur says,
and was easy to recognize among the crowd.

Also present was Désiré Munyaneza, the son of a prominent local businessman,
Nzabirinda says.

Halindintwali stabbed his passenger to death, Nzabirinda says, because the man
refused to hand over his identity card. When a truckload of Tutsi refugees
arrived, Halindintwali’s compatriots took their cue.

“They took the Tutsi refugees one by one from the truck and killed them with
machetes and clubs studded with nails,” says Nzabirinda, who estimates that he
and a small group of observers watched 40 people die that day. “We refused (to
help) and they sent us away, telling us we were not men.” Halindintwali has
been charged with participation in the Hutu government-led genocide in the
spring and summer of 1994, when Rwanda’s majority Hutu population massacred
more than 500,000 fellow citizens of minority Tutsi ethnicity.

But the former public works director can’t be found among the men milling
outside their barracks at Butare Central Prison or those working the fields of
the prison farm. He lives in Canada, Rwandan prosecutors say, where both he and
Munyaneza fled when the genocidal government collapsed. But unlike Munyaneza,
whose arrest and ongoing trial in Montreal marks the first application of
Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, Halindintwali is still
living free.

And he’s not the only one, Rwandan prosecutors say. Of 93 top genocide suspects
living abroad, five are said to be residing in Canada. But even that list, say
the prosecutors who put it together, is not complete.

“There might be 15 more or 100,” says Jean-Bosco Mutangana, a prosecutor who
directs Rwanda’s Genocide Fugitives Tracking Unit in Kigali, the country’s
capital.

“Munyaneza’s case is not different from what others did – they have all killed
people.” The five men have been formally charged in Rwanda, and if they
returned there, they would face arrest. But only one has run into trouble in
Canada: Léon Mugesera, a former professor at Rwanda’s National University. He
has spent 12 years fighting deportation orders stemming from a speech he made
in 1992 calling for Hutus to fill Rwanda’s Nyabarongo River with Tutsi corpses.

The others – Halindintwali; former environment and tourism minister Gaspard
Ruhumuliza; former Butare sub-prefect Evariste Bicamumpaka; and a man named
Vincent Ndamage – have not been in the public eye.

A spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Canada says there is no record
of anyone entering the country under the men’s names. Should they have entered
Canada using false identities, she notes, that act alone would be grounds for
deportation. No one who could be found through public records admits to being
one of the men.

Rwanda has requested their extradition through Interpol. RCMP and federal
Justice Department officials will not say whether the five are indeed in
Canada, though Rwandan prosecutors insist their Canadian counterparts became
aware of the men’s presence long ago. Not only has Mutangana talked over the
suspects’ cases with them, he says, but they have made repeat investigatory
trips to Rwanda. (In Butare Central Prison, one inmate accurately recalled the
first name and physical description of a Canadian prosecutor, specifically
mentioning that she had questioned him about Halindintwali.) But even without
public confirmation by authorities, members of Canada’s Rwandan expatriate
community are convinced that Halindintwali made it here – they say they’ve seen
him.

- – -

Paulin Nteziryayo, an economist for the Quebec government, left Rwanda two
years before the genocide claimed five siblings and his parents. In the years
since, he has taken a lead role in PAGE Rwanda, an organization formed to aid
genocide survivors, remember victims and track killers.

While living in Quebec City in 2002, Nteziryayo says, he met a man named
“Célestin” through their respective wives, and this man eventually ended up
attending a party celebrating the birth of Nteziryayo’s second baby. A friend
recognized the guest as Halindintwali and pulled Nteziryayo outside, aghast
with the news.

Neither man could think of anything to do about it. They went back to the
party, avoiding the guest until he left. To this day, Nteziryayo says, he’s
not sure how he should have reacted.

“I was just astonished,” he says. “I’d like him to be arrested, for him to
explain what happened. I don’t know how to say my feelings.” Running into those
believed responsible for the killings is a destabilizing but not infrequent
event in Canada, says Jean-Paul Nyilinkwaya, PAGE Rwanda’s spokesperson.

Before Munyaneza was arrested in 2005, Nyilinkwaya says, many genocide suspects
saw no reason to hide.

A graduating senior at the University of Michigan when the genocide began,
Nyilinkwaya had planned to return to Rwanda in summer 1994 and open a business
with his father, an opposition politician in Kigali.

“All that was wiped out in a couple of hours,” he says.

“My kids will never know their grandparents, and they ask me what happened. I
have to tell them, because it is part of my history now. To know that someone
remotely responsible for that is enjoying their life here to me is
unthinkable.”

- – -

Of the five genocide suspects Rwanda says it has tracked to Canada, four
have ties to the former prefecture of Butare. That might not be a coincidence.

Located in Rwanda’s southwest, Butare is home to the National University,
founded in 1963 by a Canadian Dominican priest.

The university built on its close ties to Canadian academic institutions
over the years, and the head of the National University rector’s office
recalls partnerships with such institutions as Université Laval and the
Université du Québec.

While more went to France and Belgium, a sizable number of Rwandan academics
also studied in Canada.

Rakiya Omaar, the director of Kigali-based African Rights, says the academic
and social ties between the countries might have provided an escape route for
some perpetrators. When military defeat drove the genocidal government’s
supporters into squalid camps in the eastern Congo, members of Butare’s elite
would have seen Canada as an obvious and perhaps even familiar destination.

Omaar’s opinion is based on more than speculation. The Somali-born human rights
researcher, who arrived in Kigali in the genocide’s waning days, and his small
staff have tracked alleged perpetrators to their new homes in Western
countries, sometimes publicly outing them.

Like Mutangana, she maintains that Canada is host to far more than the five
genocide suspects that Rwandan prosecutors have already named.

“We know of a number of others who are not on that list,” she says.

Genocide came late to Butare prefecture. While the downing of Hutu President
Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994, provided cover for a hard-line
Hutu coup and death squads in the capital, Butare remained calm; it was
governed by Rwanda’s only Tutsi prefect, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, and had
a Tutsi population of 130,000, the largest in the country.

As bordering prefectures caved in to government-sanctioned mob violence,
Habyalimana stood his ground. He organized joint Hutu-Tutsi militias to keep
order and, cowed by his force of will, his subordinates carried out his orders.
Phone lines were down, but word of Butare’s stand spread; Tutsi refugees
streamed in.

Radios broadcast news of Habyalimana’s sacking on June 17, and the former
prefect was murdered soon after. Administrators who had obeyed his call
for order abruptly realigned themselves with the paramilitary Interahamwe
and, in some cases, entire villages joined in the “work.” As many as
three-quarters of the Tutsis in Butare were massacred, most within weeks.

- – -

What roles the indicted Canadian residents from Butare might have played
in the genocide is unknown; the Rwandan prosecutor-general’s office declined
to make its evidence public prior to trial.

But, in the instance of Halindintwali, Valerie Bemeriki says she knows. A
former voice of Hutu extremism, Bemeriki is a plump and expressive middle-aged
woman who sports dirty white sneakers, an inmate’s standard pink dress, and
rosary beads.

As a star journalist for RTLM, a hard-line Hutu radio station in Kigali
that beat the drum for genocide, her broadcasts equated killing Tutsis with
patriotic duty and self-defence.

She revealed the hiding places of survivors on air.

“I thought radio was my weapon, and I thought I had no other choice,”
Bemeriki says.

She was captured in the eastern Congo in 1999, and now lives within the
brick walls of Kigali Central Prison. Only recently has she conceded that
the killing was genocide, not a war.

During visits to Butare in May and June 1994, Bemeriki says, she often
saw Halindintwali.

The director of public works was a busy man, she recalls, distributing money,
food, gasoline, and equipment to the Interahamwe.

Bemeriki says she never saw any killing take place in Halindintwali’s presence.
“By the time I reached Butare, so few (Tutsis) were alive,” she says.

Bemeriki saw Halindintwali supervise the Caterpillar backhoes that dug
mass graves in at least four locations, she says, among them the site of a
church and a primary school.

The purpose was not to bury the genocide’s victims, she says, but to hide
their bodies.

Without the support of leading public officials like Halindintwali,
Bemeriki says, many of the worst massacres might never have occurred.

“They’re the ones who gave the orders, even to me,” she says. “These people
should be in prison.”

Three other inmates independently said that Halindintwali’s crews constructed
mass graves in and around the city. Among them is Faustin Munyeragwe.

The former warden of Butare Central Prison, Munyeragwe is now incarcerated
there.

He is jailed, he says, because he participated in a security council tied to
the killing. He also failed to fulfill his duties, he says, when he did not
intervene to prevent his prison’s Hutu inmates from killing their Tutsi fellows
in late April 1994.

But Munyeragwe says he was never a fanatic; he claims he even hid Tutsi friends
in his home.

When Halindintwali found out, Munyeragwe says, the public works director
personally confronted him. Munyeragwe denied their presence, but soon heard
from a prominent neighbour that Halindintwali had ordered a raid on his house.

Munyeragwe says he hurriedly sent off his Tutsi friends and their children
to hide with acquaintances. None survived the genocide.

“I can’t say the people died because I was irresponsible,” Munyeragwe says.
“They’re dead because (Halindintwali) drove them from my house.”

The three inmates who spoke about Halindintwali said they were motivated
to do so partly by repentance and partly by spite for people who they
believed should be in prison. Prosecutor Mutangana says inmates do not
receive lighter sentences for accusing others of genocide crimes.

- – -

If anyone in Canada is investigating Halindintwali, it is likely Terry
Beitner’s War Crimes Unit.

Formed in 1998 as a joint effort by immigration, police, border, and
justice officials, the unit spent 61/2 years quietly building its case
against Désiré Munyaneza before his 2005 arrest.

Beitner, its chief counsel, oversees a $15.6-million budget, a legal support
crew and 11 war crimes investigators split between two geographically defined
teams: One handles Africa, the other everywhere else.

As of 2006, the full unit reported 57 cases under review. Allegations stemming
from Rwanda’s genocide account for a significant portion of its workload,
Beitner and a RCMP colleague say, though they decline to give a specific number
of cases – or confirm whether they have looked into allegations against the five
indicted men, as Rwandan prosecutors say they have.

“I am comfortable in saying they have co-operated with us extensively,” Beitner
says of his Rwandan counterparts.

Building a case against a genocide suspect is slow work. Modern war crimes
cases are often built on eyewitness testimony, Beitner says, and gathering it
requires substantial time and money.

The ongoing Munyaneza trial proves the point: It has required months of court
dates, thousands of pages of testimony and more than $500,000 for research
abroad.

But there are simpler ways to handle credible genocide allegations. Obtaining a
deportation order requires far less proof than winning a criminal conviction;
prosecutors need not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Beitner expects his unit to keep both options at hand. There will likely be
more deportations.

“We’re going to apply the appropriate remedy to the appropriate facts,” he
says.

In fact, Rwanda’s government would prefer to see genocide suspects deported
so they face justice at home. But where the trial takes place is less a concern,
Mutangana says, than ensuring that the men are tried somewhere.

“Why should Canadians feel safe when they’re living next to a genocide
suspect?” the prosecutor asks. “There cannot be immunity. It cannot end with
Munyaneza.”

- – -

Rwanda’s arrest warrants for Halindintwali and the other suspects abroad
come at a crucial time. For nearly 13 years, the United Nations-led
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has handled the top genocide cases,
sending prosecutors around the globe for its investigations and holding trials
in Arusha, Tanzania.

But the tribunal is slated to conclude new trials by the end of next year.
With ranking genocide suspects still scattered across Africa, Europe and
North America, African Rights’ Omaar says, the question is whether nations
that failed to intervene during the genocide will now tolerate its alleged
perpetrators.

The success of Rwanda’s efforts at justice and reconciliation hang partly
in the balance, Omaar contends. In 2001, the nation of 8.6 million adapted
a traditional form of local dispute mediation to handle a backlog of 130,000
genocide suspects.

Gacaca courts, as they are called, are tribunals given wide discretion to
investigate and try genocide crimes on the village and neighbourhood level,
putting a premium on rapidly disposing of cases.

Since its adoption on a national scale, the Gacaca system has elicited
thousands of confessions, leads and even apologies from genocide participants.
Never have investigators had so much information at hand, boasts Steven
Balinda, director of Rwanda’s national prison service.

“One half of the people confess,” he says. “The genocide was carried out
in broad daylight. … Many are ready to talk about what happened.”

Along with verdicts, Gacaca produces a sketch of the killers’ local
hierarchies. But in some jurisdictions, the top tier of the genocide’s
leadership is nowhere to be found: Unlike the subsistence farmers whom
they encouraged, bribed and sometimes forced to kill, many among the
deposed Hutu elite had the resources to flee.

“There’s an element of unfairness in who’s on trial,” Omaar says.

- – -

Joseph Nzabirinda, the former chauffeur who says he saw Halindintwali kill,
is older than most of his fellow inmates at Butare Central Prison, a thin man
with a slight stoop.

He admits to joining a massacre in his hometown, five kilometres from
Butare’s city centre, though he denies some of the worst allegations about
the things he did there.

He never wanted to kill anyone, he says, but he feared that he would be
murdered alongside the Tutsi victims if he refused.

Nzabirinda acknowledges that he might never be released.

In a cramped room just inside the prison’s gates, he apologizes when asked
about genocide suspects whose names he says he does not know.

At the end of an interview, he shakes hands and asks for a kilo of sugar.

Nzabirinda still thinks frequently about the genocide, he says, and of
Leopold Ruvurajabo, his Tutsi friend whom Halindintwali allegedly stabbed
to death.

April 21, 1994, was a Thursday, and Nzabirinda had just picked up his friend
on his morning drive to work when the roadblock came into sight. As Nzabirinda
brought his car to a halt, he and Ruvurajabo spotted a group of Tutsi captives
just off the road.

Like all Rwandans then, the men carried national identity cards stating
their ethnicities. In Nzabirinda’s mind, the genocide began the moment
the armed men at the barricade demanded to see them.

His friend began to run.

“It was the first time since I was born that I saw a person killed,”
Nzabirinda says.

- – -

Five suspects in genocide who are at large in Canada

* Léon Mugesera – The only one of the five men to have been arrested in Canada,
Mugesera was a professor and high-level government adviser who now faces
deportation because of his anti-Tutsi speeches. “We the people must take
action and wipe out this scum,” he allegedly said in a 1992 radio address,
though he left for Canada two years before the genocide began. In deportation
hearings, Mugesera unsuccessfully argued that recordings of his speech had
been falsified; Rwandans in every walk of life vividly remember his comments.
Mugesera is currently fighting his deportation on the grounds he would be
subject to mistreatment in Rwanda.

* Pierre Célestin Halindintwali – The former director of MINITRAP, Butare’s
public works department, Halindintwali is alleged by multiple genocide
participants to have constructed Butare’s mass graves. Regularly remembered
as armed and in the company of local paramilitary leaders, Halindintwali is
said to have diverted his department’s formidable resources toward aiding
the killers with food, money, gasoline, and tools. According to one inmate’s
account, he was among a group of men who clubbed and hacked Tutsi refugees
to death as they were unloaded from a truck.

* Gaspard Ruhumuliza – The minister of environment and tourism both before
and during the genocide, Ruhumuliza was also a leading politician in the wing
of the Christian Democratic Party that supported President Juvénal Habyarimana.
According to reports by Human Rights Watch, when high-level Hutu extremists
convened on April 8, 1994, to form the interim government that spearheaded
the genocide, Ruhumuliza was among them. A former local politician from Kigali
who is now incarcerated recalls that Ruhumuliza regularly delivered speeches
in the early 1990s railing against Tutsi governance and urging the Hutu majority
to stand up and fight.

* Vincent Ndamage – Prison officials and inmates offered little information
on Ndamage. Prosecutors list him as a mason by occupation, making him an
unusually low-profile addition to the government officials, businessmen and
military commanders on Rwanda’s list of top genocide suspects living abroad.

* Evariste Bicamumpaka – Bicamumpaka is listed by prosecutors as a Butare
sub-prefect. Several inmates in Butare Central Prison claim they knew
Bicamumpaka before 1994, but did not know what, if any, role he played in
the genocide.

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=df323b39-77a3-45a7-9d49-2ef8486c646e&k=32791

The Kenyan Attorney , Mr. Keriako Tobiko, requested Tuesday the High Court of Kenya to temporarily put under sequestration the rents of the “Spanish Villa” property, located in Nairobi, which have been up to now deposited into an account in Belgium, that is in the name of the wife of Mr Kabuga, Josephine Mukazitoni.

“It is good news but additional efforts must be deployed (by Kenya) to ensure his arrest”, reacted the spokesperson of the ICTR, Roland Amoussouga. “Our absolute priority is obviously the arrest of Kabuga. Any additional action by Kenyan authorities in the direction will be highly appreciated”, added Amoussouga. He said that Mr Kabuga is the subject of a particular resolution from the Security Council.

At the end of September 2006, the Prosecutor of ICTR), Hassan Bubacar Jallow, had pressed Kenya to arrest Mr Kabuga, who has been hiding in the East African country and conducting business activities. He said intelligence reports from their tracking team had reportedly pointed that Kabuga was in Kenya.The following month, the Kenyan police had renewed its calls for his arrest, presenting him as an “extremely dangerous fugitive”.

Accused of having ordered machetes which were used in the massacres of 1994, Kabuga is the ICTR’s most wanted suspect.

He had initially taken refuge in Switzerland before escaping to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), then to Kenya; where he escaped at least three from attempts to arrest him.

He is suspected of having received protection on behalf of the former Kenyan President, Daniel Arap Moi. Kabuga’s son-in-law, Augustin Ngirabatware, former minister of planning, was arrested in Germany in September 2007. The indictment was issued by the ICTR; but the tribunal has not obtained his transfer to Arusha yet.

A member of the Rwandan presidential party of the time, the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), Mr. Kabuga was also a family relative of the former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, whose assassination on 6 April 1994 sparked the genocide.

Besides Kabuga, 12 others persons accused by the ICTR are still at large as the Security Council has requested the tribunal to finish this year the first instance trials.

The Center, named after a famous Nazi-hunter, gave Croatia a F-2 mark which means failure in practice. Australia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine also received the same mark.

The report particularly singled out Hungary for failing to apprehend a well known Nazi officer.

“The most disappointing result in a specific case during the period under review has been Hungary’s failure hereto to bring to justice Dr. Sandor Kepiro, one of the officers who carried out the mass murder of hundreds of civilians in Novi Sad, Serbia on January 23, 1942 who was convicted but never punished for the crime and who was exposed by the Wiesenthal Centre living in Budapest in the summer of 2006,” the report points out.

Serbia, Austria and Poland received a C mark, reserved for countries with some but still insufficient results.

The top A mark was given to the United States, among 30 countries covered by the report from April 1 2007 to March 31 2008.

The only Croat on the Centre’s list of most wanted Nazis is Milivoj Asner, who was the police chief in the Croatian town of Slavonska Pozega, during the Second World War and suspected, according to the report, of having an “active role in persecution, deportation and deaths of hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies.”

Croatia indicted Asner and in 2005 requested the then 92-year-old’s extradition from Austria.

Vienna “initially refused the request because he ostensibly held Austrian citizenship. But when it emerged that he had lost his Austrian citizenship, his extradition was refused on medical grounds,” said the report.

One year after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for two war crimes suspects in Darfur, human rights organizations around the world are launching a “Justice for Darfur” campaign, calling for the two to be arrested.

The organizations behind the campaign, including Amnesty International, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Coalition for the International Criminal Court, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch and Sudan Organization Against Torture, have joined forces to call on the United Nations Security Council, regional organizations and individual governments to press Sudan to cooperate with the ICC.

The ICC has been investigating crimes in the region following a decision three years ago by the UN Security Council to refer to it the situation in Darfur. One year ago today – on April 27, 2007 – the ICC issued two arrest warrants against Sudan’s former State Minister of the Interior Ahmad Harun and Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb for 51 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Today the two men – who face charges of persecution, rape, and killing of civilians in four West Darfur villages – remain at large.

“The thousands of people who suffered murder, rape and persecution in Darfur deserve justice,”
said Dismas Nkunda, Co – Chair of the Darfur -Consortium, a group of African and Middle Eastern NGOs. “Instead, all they have had is disdain from their own government, and empty words from the international community. It is time for that to change.”

The Sudanese government has publicly and repeatedly refused to surrender either Ali Kushayb or Ahmad Harun to the Court. Instead, Ahmad Harun has been promoted to State Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, responsible for the welfare of the very victims of his alleged crimes. As well as having considerable power over humanitarian operations, he is responsible for liaison with the international peacekeeping force (UNAMID) tasked with protecting civilians against such crimes. The other suspect, Ali Kushayb, was in custody in Sudan on other charges at the time the ICC warrants were issued, but in October the government announced he had been released, reportedly due to “lack of evidence.”

“The Sudanese government has shown blatant disregard both for the authority of the Security Council and for the victims of their brutality,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. “So far, Sudan has faced no consequences for this brazen snubbing of the Court and the Council”.

The members of “Justice for Darfur” are urging the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling on Sudan to cooperate fully with the ICC and immediately arrest Ahmad Harun and Ali Kushayb and surrender them to the Court.

“Now is the time for the Security Council to act to ensure that the men are arrested and surrendered to the ICC without further delay, as a first step towards ending impunity for the vast scale of horrific crimes committed in Darfur,” said Christopher Hall, Senior Legal Adviser for Amnesty International’s International Justice Project.

The group also called on the European Union, a strong supporter of the Court and key player in bringing the Darfur crimes to the ICC Prosecutor, to press Sudan to cooperate with the ICC and comply with the warrants. They called on other states and regional organizations to do so too.

“Through the ‘Justice for Darfur’ campaign, organizations will work together to generate as much pressure as possible on the international community to follow through on its commitment to justice for the victims of these crimes,” said Moataz El Fegiery, Executive Director at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

Editor’s Notes:

* The following organizations are part of the “Justice for Darfur” campaign:
* Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture – France
* Aegis Trust
* Amnesty International
* Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession
* Bahrain Centre for Human Rights
* Bahrain Human Rights Society
* Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
* Center for Peace, Legal Advice and Psychosocial Assistance – Vukovar
* Civil Resource Development and Documentation Centre – Nigeria
* Coalition for the International Criminal Court
* Collectif Urgence Darfour
* Darfur Consortium
* Darfur Union UK
* Fédération Internationale des ligues des Droits de l’Homme
* Human Rights First
* Human Rights Watch
* International Criminal Court Student Network UK
* Kalangala District NGO Forum
* Land Center for Human Rights
* League of Human Rights
* Prepared society Kenya
* Recherches et Documentation Juridiques Africaines
* Save Darfur Canada
* Society for Threatened Peoples International
* Socio-Economic Rights & Accountability Project
* Students Taking Action Now: Darfur – Canada
* Sudan organization against Torture
* UN Watch
* Waging Peace

For more information on the “Justice for Darfur” campaign, see: www.justice4darfur.org

A German public prosecutor is preparing to file charges this week against an 86-year-old former SS soldier accused of killing three people in the Netherlands in 1944. If the case comes to trial it could be the last war crimes trial to take place in Germany.

Heinrich Boere shot dead three unarmed Dutch civilians between July and September 1944 when he was part of an SS hit squad that killed dozens of people in reprisals for attacks on Dutch Nazis by resistance fighters.

He confessed to the killings after he was captured by US forces at the end of World War II but he escaped from his prison camp and fled to Germany before he could be put on trial.

A Dutch court sentenced him to death in absentia in 1949 but legal loopholes, extradition hurdles and disagreement over the nature of his crimes enabled him to escape justice to this day.

Now Boere, born of a Dutch father and a German mother, may become the last person to be put on trial in Germany for Nazi war crimes.

Ulrich Maass, senior state prosector in the Dortmund public prosecutor’s office, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that he would file the charges with a German court this week, beginning legal proceedings that could lead to a trial. “It will take some time,” possibly months, Maass said, because a court will need to determine whether Boere at 86 is still fit to stand trial.

“I interviewed him on March 11 and it’s my impression that nothing stands in the way of this coming to trial, although my opinion isn’t relevant here, the decision will depend on the testimony of other people such as medical experts,” said Maass.

“I can’t take any account of his age,” said Maass, who specializes in hunting Nazi war criminals. “There is no statue of limitations for murder. According to my interpretation of the law I will continue to pursue any case that is unatoned.”

Boere’s lawyer has so far not made any claim that his client is unfit to stand trial, although he may yet do so, Maass said.

Never Too Old to Face Justice

Last year authorities in Germany failed to obtain any convictions or file any indictments of war criminals, prompting criticism from the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff.

The argument that Nazi war criminals are now too old to stand trial isn’t acceptable, Zuroff, whose campaign “Operation Last Chance” aims to bring surviving perpetrators to justice, told SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview in January.

“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrator. If we were to set a chronological limit on prosecution we would be saying that you could get away with genocide, which is morally outrageous,” said Zuroff.

He launched his campaign in Europe in 2002 and extended it last year to South America, where many Nazis fled after the war.

Operation Last Chance started targeting the hundreds if not thousands of surviving lower-level officials, guards and soldiers who committed war crimes.

Such people are more likely still to be alive than the higher-ranking Nazis who have never been brought to justice such as Austrian SS medic Aribert Heim, also known as Doctor Death, who would now be 93 and who conducted gruesome medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.

‘I Pray for the Dead’

Maass said Boere took part in an SS operation codenamed “Silbertanne” or “Silver Pine” which killed 54 civilians in retaliation for the killing of prominent Dutch Nazis by Dutch resistance fighters.

“They were citizens who had a certain standing in civilian life, who were opposed to the German occupation and who were suspected of being part of the resistance,” said Maass.

Dutch-born Boere, who now lives in an apartment complex for retired people in the western town of Eschweiler, could not be reached for comment on Monday. He told SPIEGEL ONLINE last August: “I’m not interested in what happened back then. I’m alone, don’t have much longer to live and am just waiting to die.”

He joined the Waffen-SS, the elite military arm of Hitler’s murderous SS organization, in 1940 and served on the Eastern Front for two years before returning to occupied Holland to join the 15-strong hit squad “Special Command Feldmeijer” in 1942.

His job was to help eradicate the Dutch resistance by shooting civilians deemed to be sympathetic to it. “We didn’t know the men,” Boere told SPEGEL ONLINE last August. “The security service of the SS gave us the name and off we went.”

According to Dutch and German court documents, he and a companion shot dead a pharmacist, a bicycle dealer and another civilian.

In the case of the pharmacist Fritz Bicknese, Boere and a companion — both dressed in civilian clothes — walked into his drugstore in the town of Breda on July 14, 1944, asked him his name and then opened fire. Bicknese bled to death on the floor.

Boere admits that he was a “fanatic” at the time. “I’m sorry about what happened in 1944. I pray for the dead every night and for everyone who died in the war.” He said he only realized after the war that he had believed in “total nonsense.”

Protected by Law

Boere worked as a miner in Germany after the war and has repeatedly managed to avoid jail.

A Dutch court applied for his extradition in 1980 but the request was denied because of uncertainty about whether he had acquired German citizenship by joining the SS. German law prohibits German citizens from being extradited.

At the same time an investigation into him by German prosecutors collapsed because wartime reprisal operations such as his were deemed to be in line with international rules of engagement.

But legal proceedings against him continued and a German court in Aachen ruled that he should serve his original Dutch sentence — now commuted to a life term — in a German prison.

However, a higher court last year accepted Boere’s appeal against the ruling because he had not been allocated a defense lawyer in the 1949 trial, rendering the verdict null and void because the trial had not met international standards.

Now prosecutor Maass believes he has enough evidence to bring Boere to trial again. “I have one witness, all the others are dead.”

He added that Boere’s case might not be the last. “We’ll probably still file indictments in one case or another.”

The trial of Jovica Stanisic, the head of Serbia’s notorious state security under the rule of late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, and his deputy Franko Simatovic is due to continue by the end of April.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, based in The Hague, has indicted the two with crimes against non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1991-1995 Balkan wars.

Last week, Stanisic was declared unfit by Dutch psychiatrist Joseph de Man who said he showed “the psychotic manifestations” that follow depression.

However, based on other doctors’ opinion, the Trial Chamber ruled Stanisic was fit to stand trial from his cell and decided to establish a video and audio link between the courtroom and the cells where both accused reside, to enable them to follow the trial and communicate with their defense teams.

But on Monday, the link was not established and the trial was postponed.

In the ruling approving the video link, the Trial Chamber said the solution was provisional and that Stanisic would have to appear in the courtroom when completely fit.

“If not, he will give up the right to be present at his own trial,” the Chamber said in the ruling.

Background and Indictment

Jovica Stanisic was born on 30 July 1950 in Ratkovo in the Automomous Province of Vojvodina, Republic of Serbia. He commenced work in the State Security Service (Drzavna bedzbednost or “DB”) of the Ministry of the Internal Affairs of the Republic of Serbia (“MUP”) in 1975. He held the position of Deputy Head of the DB throughout 1991 and was de facto head of the DB until his formal appointment to the position of Chief of the DB from 31 December 1991 to 27 October 1998.

The Bill of Indictment alleges that, from or about 1 April 1991 until 31December 1995, Jovica Stanisic, acting together with Franko Simatovic, planned, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted the persecution of Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats in the autonomous region of Krajina, in the Croatian regions under Serbian control as well as in the municipalities in the north and east of Bosnia-Herzegovina. These persecutions were perpetrated on discriminatory grounds and included various forms such as murder, forcible transfer and deportation on non-Serb civilians.

According to the Indictment, the defendant was part of a joint criminal enterprise whose aim was the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of Muslims and non-Serbs from around one third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia and a large part of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where it was foreseen to create a new State dominated by the Serbs. This joint criminal enterprise came into being on 1st August 1991, and is said to have gone on until 31 December 1995.

Based on the Indictment, Jovica Stanisic, acting individually and/or in concert with other members of the joint criminal enterprise, participated in this enterprise in the following ways:

1. By participating in the formation, financing, supply and support of special units of the Republic of Serbia DB and the Republic of Serbia.
2. By directing members and agents of the DB who participated in the perpetration of the crimes in this Indictment;
3. By providing arms, funds, training, logistical support and other substantial assistance or support to special units of the Republic of Serbia DB and the Republic of Serbia that were involved in the commission of crimes in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1 August 1991 and 31 December 1995.

Jovica Stanisic was arrested on 13 March 2003 by the Serbian authorities and transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on 11 June 2003.

It stated to be “first electronic data base of this type in the world”. Contrary to a site like Wikipedia, each contribution will have to receive the approval of qualified specialists.

So we at Terroritory.com, are putting them to the test and submitting an article on Didier Bourguet

Didier Bourguet, the U.N. senior official who is charged with running an Internet pedophile ring in the Congo. Pictures taken from his personal computer contained thousands of photos of him with hundreds of girls. Police say Bourguet had turned his bedroom, plastered with mirrors and rigged with remote-control cameras, into a stealth porn studio. He was caught in a sting operation while allegedly preparing to rape a 12-year-old girl. He was shipped back to France to disappear from the public eye…or so they hoped.

I think Didier Bourguet could be part of a “Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence”.

But the French site doesn’t have any returns on the pedophile… or should I say, because of resistance of the French Justice system to prosecute him…. alleged pedophile.