Original subtitles

[Thierry Cruvellier] What was absolutely striking was the silence.

There was nobody.

It was an empty country.

I haven't thought about that for a while.

You know.

It's... Yeah.

I think I have put this in a very dark place

that I haven't opened for a while, so...

[Gilles Peress] I keep hearing rumors of weapons movements.

I keep hearing rumors of something going down.

[Philip Gourevitch] People said after the Holocaust,

"Without all that technology, those Germans couldn't have killed all those Jews."

That it was a sort of freak of modern science.

[Chuck Roberts] It's being called the most efficient genocide in history.

[Gourevitch] It was announced on the radio

that we must not let them get away.

We must exterminate them.

The idea was total elimination.

[Roberts] Up to one million people killed in 100 days

in the small African nation of Rwanda.

[Gourevitch] The Hutu majority was to wipe out the Tutsi minority.

Extremist Hutus, who feared the loss of majority power.

[Tom Squitieri] The way people grabbed power

to try to keep it was to seek to divide and conquer

by showing how they are different than us.

[Peress] It's not like, poof!

Out of the blue, mad genocidaires take over

and improvise a genocide.

No, no, no. Everybody knew.

The church knew. French intelligence for sure knew.

The Americans knew. Everybody knew what was coming.

[Squitieri] If people chose not to act,

if world governments chose not to act,

that was on them.

It wasn't going to be because they didn't know about it.

Because we told them about it.

Well, I'm watching the news, but the news

was all about OJ in Los Angeles.

[Gourevitch] General Dallaire was a Canadian general

in charge of the UN Peacekeeping force.

The fax that Dallaire sent to the UN in January of 1994

gave a speed of killing.

[Peress] Dallaire had a conscience

of what was the right thing to do.

He had a conscience

of what the international community should do.

And he couldn't manage it.

I really felt for this guy.

[Gourevitch] April to July of 1994,

the Hutu Power mobilizers realized, if they could swing the arms

that were swinging the machetes,

that they didn't have to worry about having low-tech.

Civilians against their fellow civilians.

Neighbor to neighbor,

with the ordinary, hand-held implements of Rwandan peasant life.

[Peress] It's like a tsunami that you're following,

and you're seeing what's left.

[Gourevitch] The scale, the enormity, the scope.

It's happening in every town, in every village, on every hill.

[Peress] You breathe them. You breathe them.

You breathe them in. They're inside you.

[Squitieri] Bosnia, you had to sneak across the borders,

survive Sniper's Alley in Sarajevo.

But the menacing feeling was worse in Rwanda.

[Peress] Having gone through the Balkans,

I could accept the notion that maybe there was a 50-50

between good and evil in human nature.

But when I come out of Rwanda,

evil is at 80%, and goodness of man is at 20%.

[Patricia Sabga] Chuck, if you take a look at what's happening

in Bosnia right now, and then you take a look at Rwanda,

you have to wonder when and what the international community

is going to do about it.

Horrible, heinous things have happened.

The international community has turned away.

And so there's no reason not to do it again.

[Peress] Of course they thought they had impunity

because they acted, and the world did nothing to stop them.

[Roberts] The United Nations announced the creation

of the first international criminal tribunal

since World War II and Nuremberg.

A tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

and a tribunal for Rwanda

will prosecute the individuals responsible

for planning and carrying out crimes against humanity.

[Patricia Sellers] Unlike national criminal codes,

most of the international crimes were not broken down into elements.

And rape was no different.

Every single conflict,

sexual violence is used as a tool.

Why? Because it's extremely effective.

[Lindsey Hilsum] It's what the victors do

to prove themselves to be victorious.

[Sam Kiley] That is what war is.

It is the total and utter moral and civic collapse of mankind.

[Hilsum] It is a crime. It's an international crime.

And yet we don't seem to be able to stop it.

[Sabga] The Soviets and the Japanese

used rape as a tool of war in World War II.

We saw it used again by the Pakistanis in Bangladesh in 1971.

But, Chuck, it has never been prosecuted as a crime of war.

[Roberts] Never prosecuted?

[Sabga] Never prosecuted.

[Peress] Um, how can there be hope?

You know, I've come to look at those 20%,

the people who do good, as real heroes.

And heroes are more than just heroes in themselves.

But heroes that have, uh, redemption

for the rest of us.

It was something that just kind of

kept ticking, ticking like, "Man, how does this happen?"

I saw this international tribunal was being set up.

I was just absolutely thrilled and said to myself,

"There's got to be a way I can partake in this.

I'm going to be able to practice criminal law again."

[Sara Darehshori] And I remember when I was in fourth grade,

giving a talk to a first grade class about Lincoln.

Then I really wanted to be a lawyer.

Do good things with it. [laughs]

I saw the list of judges.

I cold-called. You know, I'm really not a cold-call person.

Richard Goldstone asked me

to become the legal advisor for gender for both tribunals.

[Pierre Prosper] My title going in was Assistant Trial Attorney.

[Darehshori] So I was hired as an investigator.

These investigations would go towards criminal prosecutions.

[Binaifer Nowrojee] I went to law school

because I was interested in justice,

and I found that law school has nothing to do with justice.

It's all about the law.

And that, actually, the law has nothing really to do with justice many times.

I had a very keen sense of injustice

in terms of wanting to do something about it.

I was working for Human Rights Watch as an investigator,

looking specifically at human rights violations against women.

But I was, what, 31?

I was 33.

I was 27.

Mmm-hmm.

[Cruvellier] I was young, too.

I had no experience in covering trials,

let alone genocide cases.

This idea that, um,

we were reviving the dream that Nuremberg represented,

that crimes against humanity

was a concern to the whole humanity by definition.

It took me a while before I understood that it's not that simple.

[Prosper] So Sara arrived to Rwanda.

My first words in Rwanda were, "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

I arrived at night. There was nobody at the airport.

I was expecting that someone from the tribunal would be there.

And I had no address.

A car from Medecins Sans Frontieres

happened to drive by the airport.

And it was so dark

because the streetlights had been shot out.

We got to a hotel. My door didn't close.

I was trying to use a wire hanger

to get the door to at least shut.

And there was a bloody hand-print on the wall,

which was a pretty stark reminder of what I was there to do.

We were in an office that used to be UNICEF's office.

Oh, my God, the office supplies situation was really, really bleak.

There hadn't been tribunals like this.

We thought, "Well, let's just go in the field

and see whether people are willing to speak with us."

We went out to Kibuye,

which was a place where a lot of killings had occurred.

And we found people who had been killed escaping, running to the lake.

And it was pouring rain, with the bones and out the mud...

It felt like a horror movie.

We were so focused on establishing that a genocide had occurred.

The idea was to get some of the basics covered

to establish the main elements of crimes

that we would have to show for every case.

All kinds of genocide crimes were being documented.

Historically, sexual violence, rape,

these have been seen as something lesser.

Not serious war crimes.

Sad, unfortunate, but never given the same kind of, uh,

attention as crimes of murder and other crimes.

We kept saying, you know, "Well, what happened to the women?

Where are the women in this?"

[guide speaking]

[Sellers] You know, there had been reports of rape in Yugoslavia.

In Rwanda, why did people not report what they saw right before their eyes?

1919, after World War I,

a commission got together

and gave a list of 33 war crimes.

And number five on the list is rape.

Rape was a war crime since 1919.

I'm not saying they were enforced.

I'm just saying the law was on the book.

[Darehshori] We got a phone call in our office.

It was someone from the Zambian government

informing us of the very good news

that they had in custody

seven people from our "Most Wanted List."

This was, obviously, very confusing to us

because we did not yet have a "Most Wanted List." [laughs]

We all thought that, of course, it had to start

with the big, big guys, with Bagosora.

But it never works like this

because it depends on when you can arrest.

And Akayesu was unlucky to be caught very early.

He's a mayor of a small town, Taba, not far from Kigali.

I've never questioned a suspect before,

so this is my first suspect interview.

Akayesu was brought in.

He was tall. He was very polite and well-spoken.

[Cruvellier] During the beginning of the massacres,

Akayesu resists the famous Interahamwe,

the militia, which is remarkable.

And then, after two weeks, he changes.

[Darehshori] Akayesu goes to this big political meeting.

Then he came back from that meeting,

and, immediately, the killings began in Taba.

Prior to the meeting, Akayesu had prevented killings in his town,

but now, he wasn't.

So my assumption was that he would say,

"I was forced to do this.

At that meeting, I was told that I would be killed if I did not."

But he didn't say that.

He said that he didn't see what happened,

that he was hiding in his house

and not at the Bureau Communal.

It wasn't at all what I expected.

[Nowrojee] It was the first time I had been to Rwanda.

I remember it being just beautifully green.

The flowers, the birds,

and just this stunningly beautiful hilly landscape.

And then just right under that surface of beauty,

the ugliness, the tears, the hatred, the trauma,

all of it, just one layer underneath that beauty.

It was just so broken.

The women's rights groups in Kigali basically said

that women have many other important things to worry about.

They are having trouble putting food on the table.

They can't pay their children's school fees.

They have medical issues.

They've lost everything.

That international justice was low on that list.

[Darehshori] Akayesu had to be released in 90 days.

There was definitely a sense of time pressure.

We had to start from the beginning

since we hadn't been investigating him.

It resulted in a very quick investigation in Taba.

[Rosette Morrison] I went to find witnesses every day.

We moved house to house.

And if we found someone who was a potential witness,

we would go back, take a witness statement.

Go back, read the statement to them.

Go back and confirm it.

[Darehshori] We didn't know how secure any of our information was.

I was really afraid that if I wrote down people's names

that it would create a security risk.

So, instead, I just put in letters for their pseudonym.

If I had put more thought into it I wouldn't have done letters

because we quickly ran out of letters.

This is the first indictment for genocide ever.

[Nowrojee] I went to Taba three times

because there were so many rape victims.

You can't just approach people directly

and say, "Tell me about your sexual violence experience."

You need to be brought by an interlocutor who women trust.

I got bounced around until I met Godelieve.

Godelieve had started her own group called SEVOTA,

and she had gotten the women in Taba together every Saturday

and started to begin to break the silence.

More and more women came,

and more and more women started

to speak about what had happened.

I think it was just one of those things. We clicked, right?

But why? Who knows? Something...

She didn't know me. I didn't know her, so...

She took a leap of faith to trust me.

I've interviewed, in my time, hundreds of rape victims.

The Rwandan testimonies were really some of the most brutal.

A young woman had been gang-raped,

and then somebody took a pair of scissors

and cut out the outer area of her vagina.

And then they put it on a stick

and displayed it.

Some of these women were raped repeatedly.

They'd flee from one place, be raped.

They'd continue to flee. They'd be found and raped again.

Some of them were held, individually, as sexual slaves,

but some were held in groups,

naked, moved from place to place.

I remember feeling exhausted,

just physically drained, from just hearing these stories.

I remember my ears ringing.

I actually remember, like, hearing a ringing sound in my ears.

They would tell you, and again and again,

they would say, "We begged to be killed after the rapes.

We'd say, 'Please kill us. Kill us.'

And a lot of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias would say,

'No we're going to leave you alive, so that you will die of sadness.'"

And that's what these women said,

that "we are dying of sadness now."

You know you are holding in your hand the possibility to do something.

I left Rwanda with these testimonies,

completely driven to do something about it.

At that point, I was really worried.

I would have these moments of thinking,

"Oh, my God, this is so important,"

and, "Shouldn't there be some other people?"

"Boyz in the Hood were always hard."

In closing argument, I've been known to drop

a few lines in there,

just to see if anyone's paying attention.

When I was in hardcore gangs,

I was carrying about 22 murder cases at a time.

Before hardcore gangs, it was murder, assault and battery,

kidnapping, rape, burglary, whatever it would be.

There were some unusual cases.

I convicted... Well, I'll tell you anyway because it's the truth.

I convicted a blind man for burglary.

I remember speaking to Pierre,

talking about his involvement in trying gang cases in Los Angeles.

And I thought, "This is going to be good."

[Prosper] I get to Rwanda.

And I remember walking down the hall and meeting Sara,

and it was just, "Come into my office."

[Darehshori] Having Pierre show up just in time for trial preparation

was a huge relief.

We were looking at indictments.

There were 15 people in the room

from 11 different countries.

Francophone, Anglophone, Chinese who were speaking in French...

Eleven different jurisdictions.

It was just, "The crown would do this."

So we would debate, "This is how the cover page should look."

I'm serious.

One time, we had to have a meeting, an emergency meeting,

because we had one packet

of paper, of copying paper left, literally just one,

and the whole meeting was about

how we're going to use this paper.

Are we going to write this letter?

Are we going to do this indictment?

It felt as though we were dropped on Mars,

and our job was to make something happen.

We were young. We were energetic. We were ambitious.

We had me, Sara, Rosette.

[Morrison] We were also living in the same apartment.

[Prosper] When we'd go out to eat, we'd say,

"Do you want to go get some racing chicken?"

We called it "racing chicken."

They were the toughest, chewiest chickens.

It was kind of like a thoroughbred, a horse.

It was just lean. It was all muscle.

It was really a struggle to get

the meat off the bones.

We had drinks at this restaurant.

We came out, and we had a flat tire.

I thought that Pierre would roll up his sleeves to...

I looked at him, and he said "What? It's a silk sweater!"

I did not own a silk sweater.

We would go out, have dinner,

come back and just worked and worked.

My job was to build Akayesu.

And I think just about everyone felt

that Akayesu was a loser case.

There was a period where he actually protected his population.

And then when he began the violence,

people thought that he was not involved, or he was threatened.

There was nothing that he could do.

Akayesu was the mayor.

Rwanda is a society, where the people

show great deference the mayor,

the"bourgmestre," as it's known.

They go to thebourgmestre for everything.

For advice, family advice,

to resolve neighborly disputes,

to help with education, medicine, you name it.

April 18, the new interim prime minister

comes down near Taba, to give a speech.

It was significant that,

A, an interim prime minister travels down to the South,

B, that the interim prime minister is trying to quell differences

among themselves,

C, that the interim prime minister

is of the same party as Akayesu,

and, D, it was the tipping point

because, after that meeting, the genocide started in Taba.

The whole issue then boiled down to,

"Well, why did it happen?"

What shot down the theory that he was being threatened

is that he had plenty of opportunities to run away.

He didn't have someone with a gun at his head.

He could have fled. And Akayesu didn't flee.

He could have continued to save people,

and he did not.

People do things for political motivation. Like Milosevic.

You may have people at lower levels

that are pure butchers. It's all ethnic hate.

But, usually, the person at the top,

there's a political drive behind it.

He was an opportunist.

He thought the wind was blowing in that direction

and made a calculated decision.

[Nowrojee] I got back to Human Rights Watch

and did my report.

"Shattered Lives" is the first comprehensive documentation

of sexual violence testimonies

during the genocide.

There was shock at just the brutality of the violations.

There was a huge amount of publicity

and sudden awareness around this issue

that I think had not been present before.

You always think when you're writing these human rights reports,

like "Nobody will read these. Who reads these except us?"

[Sellers] I remember reading the document, and I said,

"Well, the facts are there."

What Binaifer did was to wake up the rest of the world

and put it out in a book that you can hold in your hand like this.

The facts that Binaifer has put down are so compelling.

They're just so compelling that, after you read that book,

you say, "Game over, okay,

why aren't we doing something about this?"

The tribunal needed to try another approach.

[Lisa Pruitt] I was 32.

They gave me the title of Gender Consultant.

I had worked as a rape crisis counselor,

and I had just finished writing

my dissertation in feminist legal theory.

So I think I represented the praxis candidate, right?

Wow! I was going off to work for the United Nations!

I was very excited.

My brief was to focus on the sexual assaults

in the Akayesu case.

Where do we have, in all of our witness statements,

that Akayesu saw acts being committed,

and how could we link that to him?

My concern was that the investigators were often too dismissive.

For example, the statement of Victoire Mukambanda

was labeled by investigators as "Not credible."

"Less than coherent."

Lost, quote, "her train of thought."

What would you expect someone

who is describing the sort of trauma

that she's describing?

Might you not anticipate that their story

would be a bit garbled

to the objective legal ear?

It seemed to me that there were many women here

whose testimonies were not taken seriously.

There was a real block I was up against.

A presumption of,

"Well, everybody knows that, in war, men rape."

Is this about sex,

or is this about power?

Many of the investigators said,

"Well, we can't be concerned about some women who got raped.

We can't divert resources to investigate those crimes.

We had a genocide down here."

"Hey, little lady, don't you know what happened down here?"

It's easy to kill the message by ridiculing the messenger.

"I've got 80,000 bodies here.

You want me to talk to a couple women who've been raped?"

Or "Those couple of women aren't going to talk to me,

so we can't get the evidence,"

or, "Look, it wasn't systematic. You know?

I would do it, but it's not systematic," or, or, or.

I submitted this report.

I thought we had a good case.

First-hand witnesses and enough evidence

that the tribunal, the Office of the Prosecutor,

should try to amend the indictment

and that they should go back out to find these women.

I remember having a conversation with Patricia

when I was still in Kigali.

She said, um, "I'm really pleased

with how your consultancy is going."

So I started a little memo,

"Tips for How to Conduct an Interview."

Make them comfortable. Ask them where they'd like to sit.

Would they like a glass of water?

I knew I was going out on a limb.

They weren't likely to be moved

by my touchy-feely recommendations.

I guess it got around the building pretty fast. [laughs]

My friend,

who drove me to the airport that day, said,

"You know, Lisa, you've just become

the laughing-stock of the building."

And I think I already knew that,

but it was... It was irrefutable, I guess,

once he said it.

And he turned to me and said,

"You were raped. Weren't you?"

And I said, "Yes."

And he said,

"I knew that the day you arrived."

So maybe he knew that because...

Or he deduced that from the passion

and the commitment that I felt

and exhibited around the issue.

I remember the flight from Kigali to Nairobi,

crying the whole way.

I wound up back in The Hague

before the Office of the Prosecutor.

They said this work that I had done

was not going to be used,

that the case was going to go forward

under the existing indictment, which did not include

sexual assaults.

I could deal with the humiliation

of being the laughing-stock on the ground in Rwanda,

but it was even worse

to be confronted

with what appeared to be the reality

that sending me to Rwanda, to do this work,

had really been a ruse.

I remember being in the meeting.

Her disappointment... I remember walking out of that office,

and certainly didn't want to show her my disappointment

because I'm thinking about, "Okay, now,

how do we go about it? Now what do we do tactically?"

I really just tried to put it out of my mind.

I could only assume that my document was going nowhere.

[Cruvellier] So, in late '96,

when Louise Arbour is taking over as Chief Prosecutor,

it's a mess.

The Office of the Prosecutor has no strategy,

has no sense of, how do we handle this?

The decisions that Arbour are going to take

are crucial before they say, "Forget it. Close down."

Judge Arbour asks me point-blank, she says,

"Pierre, we have problems here.

I have one question for you.

If I put you in charge, can you do this?"

I was in London for Christmas,

and I saw the news.

I immediately flew back to Kigali.

It was very obvious

that it was because this person intended

to go and testify that he had been attacked.

Pierre Prosper, with ten years' experience,

cannot possibly be in charge of the case.

You could only be very experienced

to handle

the most complicated crime one could imagine.

So, obviously, the one in charge

would have to get more than 20 years' criminal experience.

That's what I think everybody had in mind.

[James Stewart] I've been a prosecutor

for over 30 years in Canada.

I started out dealing with shoplifting and minor assaults

and thefts and things like that

before I was allowed anywhere near a more serious case.

And I was thinking, "Here we are starting

with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes."

They created a single team under my leadership

to handle three cases, including Akayesu.

Pierre and Sara Darehshori,

they were the ones who carried the ball.

The trial is set to start on Thursday.

So it's now Monday. I have no witnesses.

[Morrison] People were scared. Do you blame them?

I would be scared. They killed this witness.

It was not just a bit of intimidation.

And we came down here on, uh...

I think it was probably a Tuesday.

We were in the bush.

We were trying to get the witnesses to come forward.

Rosette and I had to say, "Hey, look, we really need you."

The people agreed to come out and testify.

[siren blaring]

[journalist] Please, sir...

[indistinct chatter]

[journalist] This is not the guy.

[camera shutters clicking]

[journalist] No, that's not the guy, either. He's here.

Laity Kama was the presiding judge.

Senegalese, an extraordinary character

with an incredible face,

a lot of charisma, deep voice, a natural authority.

Then you had this Swedish judge, Aspergren.

He was an intelligent man, could speak excellent French and English.

And then there was Pillay, the South African judge

who came with a huge reputation

because of her fight against Apartheid.

[Prosper] Akayesu walks into the courtroom.

He's in a suit.

He's tall, good-looking man.

And I remember sitting back and saying,

"I didn't necessarily have a vision in my mind

of what a war criminal looked like,

but he doesn't look like a war criminal."

[speaking French]

You feel like... I know this is historic and important,

but there was nothing that indicated that that was the case,

apart from the robes.

There was no air conditioning.

It was extremely hot and muggy.

That courtroom was so hot!

No one cared about us.

The occasional backpacker

or the tribunal staffer that had nothing to do.

The court assistant, he would come in

and then almost immediately fall asleep

throughout the entire day and then wake up in time to leave,

which always seemed like not a good omen.

[Prosper] I'm sure Akayesu looked over at us,

thinking, "This will be a cakewalk."

[Morrison] The first witness.

She was 68 years old,

and she couldn't see very clearly.

And so when they asked her

if she saw Akayesu in the courtroom,

she said she didn't know.

And then the judge,

graciously, asked her to go closer

and see if she could identify.

She started from the side of the prosecutor,

and she would go to every individual,

kind of lift their faces and look them in the eyes.

She looked at the judges as well!

Mmm-mmm.

Then she eventually made it to where Akayesu was,

and when she saw him,

she just screamed, like... [imitates screaming]

"It's him! This is him! This is him!"

And Akayesu kind of smiled.

I'm coming from a common law system.

The judges are coming from a civil law system.

At the start of the trial,

we put on a witness.

The defense attorney gets up

and really begins to badger my witness.

I stand up, and I say, "Excuse me, Your Honors, objection.

He's badgering my witness."

And I look at Judge Kama.

This man is about literally seven feet tall.

Fingers were about this long.

And he leans back to Judge Aspergren, and he says,

"Objection? What is this? Do you have this in your system?"

And Aspergren is like, "No, no, no."

And then he leans to Judge Pillay.

He says, "Do you have this in your system?"

And she shakes her head, "No."

And then he just says,

finger to his mouth, and goes,

"Mr. Prosecutor, there will be none of that. Sit down."

So I sit down. The defense attorney gets up and continues.

And of course, I was prosecutor in LA, in Compton. I get up again. I say,

"Your Honors, this is just not right. Objection."

And the judge said, "Sit down."

The defense attorney continues again.

I get up, and all he did is wave his long finger, and he would just...

He would just flick at me. "Sit down. Sit down."

Make sure it plays.

[man speaking French]

Where's the microphone?

Your Honors, if you recall, this is the prosecution exhibit number 6.

As little experience as we had,

nobody else had prosecuted a genocide case

in an international court before.

With the first trial establishing the elements of the genocide,

we needed to do it in such a way

that it could be used by future trials.

[Stewart] We had to prove as a fact

that genocide had occurred.

We worried that everybody in the world

would know that there had been a genocide in Rwanda in 1994,

except our trial chamber.

There were all these indictments against Akayesu,

but not a single one of them contained sexual violence.

I was outraged when I saw that.

The prosecutor's team and all the lawyers there

were working to try and get things off the ground.

The last thing they wanted

was some pesky activists coming to tell them to amend their case.

Now, I remember meeting Binaifer.

I remember her making the case to me about the sexual violence.

And I remember this very clearly,

Pierre Prosper telling me,

"We're very committed to prosecuting rape,

but you've got the wrong guy.

You're barking up the wrong tree.

We'll get rape prosecutions. Don't worry.

But this is not the right case."

There wasn't enough for me.

There wasn't enough to say,

"Women were raped in Taba. Therefore, Akayesu should be prosecuted."

It's not that simple.

We had to prove Akayesu knew, allowed it to happen,

did it himself, or whatever it may be,

and therefore should be prosecuted.

When you're a prosecuting lawyer,

what you do is you look at the elements of the crime

that are contained in the law that you're prosecuting,

and then you try and match them

to what you have from the testimony.

It's not rocket science.

I told them that this is something that we were going to pursue.

I told them that, if we found the evidence, that we would push it.

I saw myself as an ambassador for the voices of these Rwandan women,

and I was damned if I was going to disappear.

[Prosper] Witness H, that was one of our final witnesses.

As part of the trial process,

Pierre and I would go and spend time

with our witnesses in preparation for their testimony.

Go through their statement,

make sure it remains accurate.

And then, just in the course of questioning,

she said, "Then I saw the women being dragged to the back

of the Bureau Communal, and I saw them being raped."

The Bureau Communal is the mayor's office.

"Whoa, whoa! Hold on."

She talked about how it seemed actually systematic,

that people would sign women out to be raped

and then bring them back.

"You saw this?"

This moment of...

She said, "Yes, I saw women being raped."

This was potentially, a game changer.

We never heard about women being at the Bureau Communal.

That was always the missing link.

Rapes at the Bureau Communal would've been

something that Akayesu couldn't have missed.

I called Patricia Sellers in The Hague.

Bingo.

We want to see what is the judges' reaction to it, okay?

I don't want to get in trouble for producing evidence

that had not been previously disclosed.

There was a possibility it could be stricken.

There are many reasons when evidence

that is not part of your original statement

comes in that you want to see,

what is the reaction from the bench?

[Judge Pillay speaking]

[court translator speaking]

[Judge Aspergren speaking French]

[court translator speaking]

This is close to the end.

The prosecution is winding up its case.

Witness H comes onto the stand

and begins to talk about rape.

Rape happened in Taba.

It's coming into the courtroom.

It's coming through the voice of a woman witness

who's not there because she's a rape victim,

but she's talking about it.

And yet no rape charges.

Pierre asked for the adjournment.

You know that's a very difficult position.

You don't want to have a case that you're putting on,

and then you call for a recess in your own case.

[Judge Kama speaking French]

[gavel bangs]

[Sellers] Pierre and I start talking tactically.

The evidence that we needed

was to show that Akayesu had knowledge of it.

We had the inside document.

I can't remember how it got on my desk.

We really paid attention to Lisa Pruitt's analysis,

and then we used it to find women

that were at the Bureau Communal

during a specific two-week period.

We sent another team out to look further into this issue.

[Prosper] But this time, what I wanted to do

was come in with a sensitive and subtle approach.

Sometimes, things don't happen on your time,

but it's good that they were done.

I'm drafting the amendment here in The Hague.

Patricia could focus with a laser beam.

So I went back and studied the preparatory works

on the genocide convention, read all the Nuremberg laws,

read all the subsequent trials.

"Genocide" is the intent to destroy, in whole or part.

Well, do you have to kill them?

What if you just cause serious bodily, mental harm, and they don't die?

Is that still a genocide?

The assault goes beyond

the physicality of the assault.

It's as if someone has reached inside of you,

and some of them talk about just pulling out their soul.

"Genocide" envisions something

that falls short of death. It's not just mass extermination.

We're talking about the power.

We're talking about entitlement.

We're talking about access and means, humiliation.

[Prosper] We were ready.

We were going to amend the charges

to include rape as a crime of genocide

and a crime against humanity.

When your trial has started, and you're looking for best evidence,

you're in trouble.

You should have best evidence going in.

I remember, I met with a group of women activists.

And I said the Akayesu case needed to really be salvaged,

and there was a discussion about what we could do.

[Sellers] Binaifer called me on the phone and said,

"Look, we're gonna call an amicus."

We realized that you could pioneer new jurisprudence.

The "friend of the court" brief.

An amicus.

We could get the bench to take judicial notice of the fact

that rape had happened and to push to prosecute it.

It was a catalyst to do the right thing.

The Office of the Prosecutor is discouraging us from doing it.

We were really worried

that the amicus brief was going to be grounds

for certainly reversal on appeal

if not a mistrial altogether.

The amicus was filed.

And it was accepted by the bench.

And the bench urged the prosecution

to go back and look at this issue again.

I had no reaction. I was happy for them.

Well, I wasn't so upset about the amicus.

If an amicus comes in and says,

"They've got to amend the indictment,"

and we're calling for the amendment,

I would say that that's a nice parallel effort.

[Morrison] I went back to Taba. It was shocking.

I said, "Oh, so how are you?"

And she said, "I've decided now,

I'm going to let it out. I want to get if off my chest."

I didn't, you know, "Why didn't you tell us this in the beginning?"

No, that wasn't what we wanted.

What we wanted was her to come out and speak.

The amendment. I was there, for sure.

[Judge Kama speaking French]

So Pierre explains why the prosecution

has moved to amend the indictment.

[Prosper speaking]

[Darehshori speaking]

[defense attorney speaking French]

[Judge Kama speaking French]

[gavel bangs]

[women singing and clapping]

[Victoire Mukambanda in native language]

[speaking native language]

[speaking native language]

[Godelieve Mukasarasi speaking French]

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

[speaking French]

-[indistinct chatter] -[car honking]

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

[Mukambanda speaking native language]

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

[women singing in native language]

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

[women continue singing]

[Cecile Mukarugwiza speaking native language]

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

[Serafina Mukakinani speaking native language]

[laughs]

[laughs]

[Mukambanda speaking native language]

[laughs]

Pierre was there. Sara was there. You're trying

to do a little bit of preparation,

but you're also just trying

to make sure that there's a calm atmosphere.

[Darehshori] Patty had a nice connection with the women.

Well, yes, and I have a gap.

That's the other thing that helps me in Africa, period.

Whenever I go to Africa,

there are so many people with gaps in their teeth.

That's the first five or ten minutes, okay?

You always have an image in your head

when you read someone's statement of what they will look like, you know?

Everyone always looks different than the picture,

and sometimes, you're surprised to see that,

"Oh, they're so tiny!"

"I didn't think that she would be that young or that old."

Witness JJ had a very tiny baby,

a brand-new newborn.

What struck me about OO was that she was young.

Witness NN was Witness JJ's sister.

We had to use very explicit terms

for "penis" and "vagina" and "penetration"

to illustrate that a rape had occurred.

And so Pierre explained this to Witness JJ,

and she thought that was hilarious.

Well, she said, "we never use the term "penis.'"

And then she just cracked up.

JJ seemed to be a bit of a leader of the group.

Apparently, she only drank beer.

But the tribunal had a policy not to give beers to witnesses

because apparently they had had some incident in the past,

which did not go over well at all with Witness JJ.

I think they only agreed to give her beer after she had testified.

I brought her in,

and all the witnesses,

to the courtroom before they testified.

"Okay, this is where you'll sit.

This is where I will be. I will be asking you questions."

And I had Sara stand up there, and I said,

"The judges will be here.

The defense attorney will be over here.

The audience will be behind you, but we have..."

We had a screen up so people could not see them.

It was a rather crude way of protecting people.

There was a little curtain that would sort of go around them

so people in the courtroom could see them,

but not people in the public gallery.

It was so much to ask to come to the tribunal

and to basically have to relive, what,

the worst moments of their lives.

It must have been terrifying.

And even, in fact, Witness JJ was terrified.

I began to tell her about what happened in Bosnia,

in Japan, and elsewhere,

and how none of these cases

had been prosecuted, and no one had ever been prosecuted

for rape in time of war, ever.

And I explained to her, I was like,

"You have the opportunity to speak for those women

who cannot speak today,

who've never had this opportunity.

You have a chance to make a difference."

We're in the safe house. I remember that.

And then she said, "Okay, I will do it."

The women decided that they were going

to pray before the beginning of the next day

they were going to be testifying.

And they said a prayer,

and as soon as it was beginning to be translated to me,

I wrote it down. They said, "We speak only the truth,"

and to say what they saw and not what they heard,

and that they want justice, not revenge.

[siren blaring]

[Cruvellier] I don't know why it felt so particularly heavy.

There was a much heavier feeling

than at some other hearings when it was about

massacres on the hills.

I went in the public gallery.

It was packed. It was full.

-Academics. -Journalists.

-NGOs. -There was this tingle in the air.

I was just hushed.

I walked them

to the stand, and I sat there,

sort of to say, "Come on. Go for it."

[judge Kama speaking French]

[Mukambanda speaking native language]

[Judge Kama speaking French]

She had this little, tiny, timid voice

and was obviously very nervous.

She had found her stride.

It was really remarkable. Her voice was strong.

She began to sit up.

And she said...

And she said...

[court translator speaking]

After she came out, she had tears.

And I hugged her, and I said, "Why are you crying?"

And she said, "They are tears of joy!

I'm so happy! I have got this off my chest."

I think she also knew that she had done fabulously well.

Did we get her beer?

They were all holding hands in this type of circle.

These were women who survived a genocide

and had such heart, you know?

Sometimes, when you're in the face of such evil,

it's so much easier to just become evil, too.

But they couldn't have. It wasn't them.

By the time we got to OO,

you could actually see the other side becoming deflated.

Akayesu was really upset

by the rape testimony.

He seemed really noticeably downcast

and had his head down. And the women who still had yet to testify said,

"Just wait till we get on the stand."

One witness, um, who, when the judges say,

"Do you want to say anything at the end of testifying?"

She looks at Akayesu, and she says,

"Well, can't you at least say you're sorry?"

[laughs]

They expected, they hoped,

they trusted us to bring justice.

And one of the biggest fears that I had was,

"Well, what if we lost?"

[Judge Kama speaking French]

[repeats in French]

The accused speaks, finally.

And that's his one chance to make his case.

He was hungry.

The resistance of Akayesu

was pretty strong on the most damning facts.

[Akayesu speaking French]

[Cruvellier] Akayesu did a rather good job

putting his case forward and saying,

"I was not in charge. It wasn't me.

It was the head of the militia."

For eight hours, Akayesu, essentially, had the floor,

and he was able to present a masterful story

that he wove

that answered all the allegations

that many of the witnesses had made.

And I said, "Wait till tomorrow."

I had something he obviously had forgotten about.

Pierre had the advantage of statements

that Akayesu had given to Sara Darehshori.

[Darehshori] At the time, we didn't know for sure

that he would testify, but if he did, having this was gold.

[Prosper speaking]

[Akayesu speaking French]

This is something that we would do when I was a DA.

You make the witness read their own testimony. You say,

"This is a transcript of your interview.

Please read this. What you said."

And you force them to do it in their words, and you say,

"Okay, fine. Now, yesterday you said this."

[Darehshori] Akayesu testified the Interahamwe,

the militia, was in charge.

But in my interview, he didn't say that.

He didn't even say he was threatened.

And when he testified that no one was raped

at the Bureau Communal,

he told me he wasn't even at the Bureau Communal,

so how could he know?

[court translator speaking]

And then, suddenly, something just breaks.

Akayesu loses control of his version.

[court translator speaking]

[Prosper speaking]

[Akayesu speaking French]

And Pierre cross examined him on,

I think, about ten points of inconsistency.

Every word spoken was... Poom!

Was sent in the air, was floating over everybody

until it drops and makes a sort of heavy sound.

[court translator speaking]

[Judge Pillay speaking]

[court translator speaking]

Sara got his story. [laughs] Good for her.

[Prosper speaking]

And the case is closed an hour later.

[Prosper] Your Honors, on behalf of the Office of the Prosecutor,

on behalf

of the people of Taba,

on behalf of the international community,

I ask you to find Jean-Paul Akayesu

guilty of genocide

and all counts for which he is charged.

Thank you.

You have a sense that you've got the truth.

You've got the truth that you need.

[singing in native language]

They usually give you a few days' notice.

Um, well, I mean,

it's sort of like

waiting for a jury to come back.

[continues singing]

On the days leading up to the judgment,

Pierre would call just to give a nervous giggle, and he would say,

"Judgment Day minus two, minus one."

[continues singing]

[Sellers] I remember Pierre telling me,

"I saw the law clerk,

and the body language let me know I think we're okay."

I said, "Pierre, let's not even think about that."

[Prosper] We alerted all the witnesses

and the bourgmestre, and everyone knew.

[continues singing]

Today will be the day.

-[man 1] All rise. -[man 2] All rise.

Please be seated.

[speaking French]

I remember just, phew, relaxing my shoulders.

All that stress and frustration at different times

when we weren't sure what the outcome would be.

[Stewart] Pierre and Sara made up

for a certain lack of experience

by sheer hard work and smarts.

Sara called me. She said, "We did it! Mrs. Morrison, we did it! We did it!"

What did James say? They were popping champagne? Yes.

[Nowrojee] I was in the United States.

We were waiting for the judgment. This group

of women lawyers that had worked on the amicus,

we were waiting for the judgment.

And I remember just being bowled over.

It was one of the days, when, really,

there becomes a before and an after.

Now, we were standing on firmer,

factually recognized grounds by the court,

legally recognized grounds by the court.

And it's as if you had run the first marathon.

You can train for the next one, but the first one,

you'd crossed the line.

You couldn't un-run it now.

The judgment was there and it was real.

I was working in London

for the law firm I joined after I left Rwanda.

I recall reading it in the International Herald Tribune.

And I recall my boss,

being on the phone with my boss, and having him say,

"Lisa, did you see what happened in Arusha yesterday?

Did you see what happened in the Akayesu case?"

And I said, "I did! Yeah."

And it's amazing,

but I can't take any credit for it.

I remember feeling that this is a great moment in history,

but I had been under the impression,

in the intervening period, that my memo had been deep-sixed. [laughs]

Put in some file folder somewhere, never to see the light of day.

I mean, how would I know? [laughs]

How would I know that Pierre Prosper or anyone read it

after that very dismal meeting

with the Office of the Prosecutor in The Hague.

I wasn't aware that the indictment had been amended.

It was 17 years,

until last fall, when you made contact with me

and said,

"Are you the Lisa Pruitt who worked in Rwanda in 1996?

I have the Pruitt Memo!"

You called it the "Pruitt Memo," so that's wonderful.

[Prosper] It was Witness H who set off the chain of events

that brought us back to Lisa's memo.

It was a blueprint to go after the rape charges.

I think a lot of rape survivors,

for some reason, remember

the date when they were raped.

And, for me, it was March 5th.

[Prosper] And we spoke with Witness H on March 5th...

1984.

[Prosper] ...1997.

Wow.

Wow!

Thirteen years.

[Prosper] I saw the UN guard, and I say,

"I want to go see Akayesu."

He's sitting down. One arm is shackled to the table,

and he's smoking a cigarette.

So I say to him, I go, "Mr. Akayesu, goodbye."

We were like, "Do we shake each other's hands?"

And, simultaneously,

at the same time, we said, "No way."

You could see I was just like...

That was his fate,

that a simple mayor of a small town

would actually become the judicial symbol

of the genocide in Rwanda.

That's the story of Akayesu,

which is always

a bit extraordinary

because it should have never been.

Without Godelieve, she was the person,

the bridge, between the international justice and the women.

[Mukasarasi speaking French]

You know, when you read history books,

we're taught about heroes,

and who our heroes should be and who they are,

but people like Godelieve are my heroes.

When I think back to Akayesu,

one of the things that I always say is that,

you know, "What a word!"

I mean, it's almost become like

an abstract word or painting.

If you went to someone and said, "Akayesu,"

what does that mean? What does that word mean?

It should be as well-known asBrown vs. Board of Education,

as well-known as the case

from the Inter-American court on Gonzales.

Because of Akayesu,

genocide is an international crime.

A person can be guilty for genocide,

and it includes acts of sexual violence.

The fact that you have women from rural Rwanda,

where they had no electricity, no running water.

And they were able to change the landscape

of not only international criminal law

but of legal theory and principles

so that, to this day, when people study

rape and sexual violence in time of war,

they study the story of Witness JJ and the others.

[man speaking French]

[whispering]