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After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda pursued justice through the ICTR and Gacaca courts—two contrasting systems that defined reconciliation and accountability.
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Introduction In April 1994, Rwanda became the scene of one of the most intense episodes of mass killing in modern history. In roughly one hundred days, between 500,000 and 800,000 people—mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were slaughtered. What distinguished this genocide from others was not merely its speed, but the precision and coordination of the violence in a largely rural society with few telephones or newspapers. That coordination was achieved, to a chilling degree, through the radio. The privately-owned station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) played a decisive role. It became the voice of the extremist “Hutu PowerHutu Power…
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Table of Contents Introduction: The Bureaucrat’s Trap The Nazi state was a paperocracy. It was a regime that believed in the power of the document—the form, the report, the memo, the stamped order. This obsession with meticulous record-keeping, which had been the very engine of the Holocaust, became, in its aftermath, its greatest vulnerability. As Allied forces advanced into the heart of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, they did not just liberate camps and capture soldiers; they seized mountains of paper. Hidden in salt mines, buried in castle cellars, and stacked in government offices were the detailed…
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When World War II ended in 1945, the Allies confronted unprecedented crimes – the Holocaust and aggressive wars of conquest. Determined to ensure “justice, not vengeance,” the victorious powers quickly turned to international law. In June 1945 the United Nations Charter was signed and came into force that October . Simultaneously, plans were underway to try the Nazi leadership. The Allies announced as early as the 1942 St. James Declaration that “those guilty of or responsible” for Nazi aggression would be punished by “organized justice” . In October 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill and StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5…