Rwandan rulers given life sentences for 1994 genocide

[Bernkastel]

From The Guardian. Posting without comment for now, beyond expressing expressing happyness that at least some justice has been done.

A UN war crimes court has found two leading figures in Rwanda's former ruling Hutu-led party guilty of genocide for their key roles in the 1994 massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Life sentences were handed to Mathieu Ngirumpatse, 72, former chairman of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development party, and his deputy, 60-year-old Edouard Karemera. The party's youth wing, the Interahamwe, carried out most of the atrocities.

The pair had pleaded not guilty to the charges laid by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

"The chamber unanimously condemns Ngirumpatse to life in jail," said the presiding judge, Dennis Byron, before pronouncing the same sentence for Karemera.

The indictment at the Tanzanian-based court said the men had had a "superior responsibility" within the NRMD. They were members of a criminal endeavour that was set up to destroy Rwanda's Tutsi population.

During the genocide, 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of systematic killings.

The court said in a statement the two men also bore "extended liability for the widespread rapes and sexual assaults of Tutsi women and girls, which were a foreseeable consequence of the joint criminal enterprise".

In November the UN-backed court found Gregoire Ndahimana, a former mayor, guilty of genocide for planning the slaughter of more than 2,000 Tutsi refugees in 1994. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

In September the court acquitted two former ministers of key roles in the genocide, a verdict Rwanda's chief prosecutor described as "shocking". But two other former cabinet ministers were convicted.

[Pelranius]

I wonder how many of the war criminals from this genocide are still at large?

They caught someone wandering around in the EU last year, IIRC.