Rwanda Genocide Trial in Sweden
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War criminals wearing no djälvulshorn
On the screens behind drawn green curtains in room 37 of the Stockholm District Court was shown yesterday questioning a 40-year-old woman who lost over 200 relatives during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
A neatly dressed engineer listened concentrated on her gruesome story, recorded frequently and occasionally whispered to his lawyer.
With this testimony, which was broadcast via satellite from the Supreme Court premises in Kigali, was Sweden's first genocide trial into a new phase.
The entire court - judge, jurors, prosecutors and lawyers - have moved there for three weeks listening to testimony from 40 people who survived the 100-day killing of 800,000 men, women and children.
Remaining in Stockholm is the engineer, 54 years old, charged with genocide and crimes against international law. He listens attentively, fix his red tie a few times and sometimes takes a cautious sip of water.
Are not allowed
He may not come along to Rwanda, but then the rule of law requires that suspected war criminals to take part of the case against them has been organized links, satellites and cameras.
The woman says grimly, obviously taken by the seriousness of the moment. She worked in april 1994 at a Catholic hostel in the town of Kibuye when senseless killings began.
She hid under the roof. "I dare to leave the hiding place only at night., I had to step over all that had been killed."
Prosecutors Tora Holst down their questions carefully, the interpreter is asked to spell all the names mentioned, and when it's time for lunch breaks some confusion out: Is at 12.30 in Sweden when it is 13:30 in Rwanda? Or is it vice versa?
"As he was the leader"
Witness pointing to the defendants. She knew vaguely who he was in the past, she knew his mother.
- I heard several of the other who shot shout his name to get orders. It was as if he was the leader.
It is a story that certainly gives some weight to the prosecutor's statement that the accused was involved in the murder of thousands of people.
Can it really be true? Can this gentle, bespectacled man and father of a family who was a lecturer at a university in Rwanda who fled to Sweden during the war, this man who now sits just a few feet from me, he may have been guilty of these atrocities?
Yes, why not. War criminals wearing no djälvulshorn revealing them.War criminals look like you or me. The fact is that war criminals painfully often you or me before all hell breaks out.
But it's been almost 20 years since the genocide, memories fade, myths are woven. Some details of the woman's testimony is not itself perceived, but things others have told her.
May be freed
One need not be Silbersky to understand that the use of such shortcomings.
The well-dressed man corrects once again to his tie. Maybe he will be freed. Stranger things than that have happened in the Swedish courts. But that's not what's important. The key is that a suspected war criminal at all to justice.
It should go without saying, but according to various estimates live over 1000 concentration mode guards, torturers and mass murderers in the best of health in Sweden.
This in a country that sees itself as a moral superpower and first of all tend to require the other to investigate war crimes.
And in hall 37 are two bored prison guards and solve crosswords, possibly only vaguely aware that the other side of the green curtains pouring down rain over Stockholm for others or if it's the third day.
translated via google translate
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