Dream Team Brings Information to Bear on Problem of Genocide

By Mary Lynn Lyke

When iSchool professor Batya Friedman landed in East Africa last fall with a multi-disciplinary team of information scientists, legal experts, and cinematographers, she had her eyes on the future. She wanted to give voice to the personnel of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), creating a digital record of their reflections on being a part of an international court prosecuting those accused of masterminding the Rwandan genocide. She envisioned a way to make these personal insights accessible and reusable for future generations. Friedman and her team imagined this digital collection forming the core of an information system that could enrich an array of projects, from those supporting healing and peace building in Rwanda to initiatives developing a Pan-African justice system.

"The scary part of these proceedings is that you realize that the horrible events that lead to genocide or crimes against humanity either here or in the former Yugoslavia could have taken place anywhere given the right social circumstances," said Judge Inés Mónica Weinberg de Roca. "It doesn’t take more than each of us saying I won’t … wouldn’t do this, I’m not doing this, for a genocide or a crime against humanity not to occur."

Friedman knew it would be critical to design a highly accessible information system that reaches across decades — even centuries — to share with the world, the insider’s perspective on an emerging system of international justice. "There are many problems, like healing after genocide, that are not likely to be solved in a single lifespan," says the iSchool professor. "The question is: What are the roles and opportunities for information systems to enable solutions that will unfold over long periods of time? And how does that change the design process — when we expect the information systems to be around for a long, long time?"

This digital record of the people associated with the ICTR is the first time in history — not in Nuremberg or Sierra Leone — that the personal reflections of international court personnel prosecuting crimes against humanity have been gathered. The team’s legal experts included former Washington State Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Utter, former King County Superior Court Judge Donald J Horowitz, and former U.S. Attorney John McKay.

The videos document a legal process that has been as slow and deliberate as the crimes were swift and brutal. From April to July 1994, radicalized Hutus raped and rampaged their way through cities and villages killing an average of 8,000 or more Tutsi and moderate Hutu neighbors a day. The massacre lasted for 100 days.

It has taken almost 15 years for the tribunal — criticized by the Rwandan government for its "plodding manner" — to prosecute a tiny fraction of those crimes. Trials have run into hundreds of days, tangled with false testimonies, recalled witnesses, appeals, and continuations. Investigators often had to feel their way through procedural and ethical dilemmas. Were they putting witnesses at risk when they showed up in a Rwandan village driving a conspicuous UN vehicle? Were they re-traumatizing rape victims by asking the insensitive, probing questions required to build a strong court case?

One prosecutor recalled the difficult choice he had to make when a witness revealed that her husband had no idea she’d been raped during the genocide. The marriage would be over if her husband found out, she said. "In the end," he says, "I dropped her. Because I wasn’t sure that I was able to take on that responsibility personally."

The toll on these judges, lawyers, investigators, interpreters and other tribunal personnel has been heavy. These are people who listened day after day to wrenching testimony from witnesses of the Rwandan slaughter, tallied body counts at mass graves, waded through legal morasses to issue some of the world’s first convictions for the crime of genocide. They speak of psychological stress, psychosomatic illness, the effects of dehumanization.

The tribunal was hastily set up in Arusha, Tanzania by the United Nations in late 1994. It employed hundreds of people from around the globe, representing more than 80 nationalities. "Many of the people in the tribunal led comfortable lives in 1994. They had homes, families, good career trajectories in their own countries. Somewhere along the line, they made the decision to leave those lives to participate in this tribunal. It was a remarkable choice," says Friedman.

When she and Co-PI Lisa Nathan, learned last summer that the tribunal would begin disbanding in December 2008, they went into action. With help from Judge Donald J Horowitz, it took three months to assemble the team, raise funds, receive University of Washington approvals, and arrange travel to East Africa.

Over the course of six weeks, the 10-member team conducted 49 in-depth interviews with tribunal personnel, bringing home more than 70 hours of high-definition footage. Cinematographer Nell Carden Grey, a UW political science major, said she was surprised that the tribunal personnel shared so much. "You don’t always get that from people who talk into a camera."

The team typically worked in pairs, with one legal and one non-legal person at each interview. The videos had to be both meaningful for Rwandans — living in a poor, rural country with a 70.4 percent literacy rate — as well as informative for future legal experts studying the court’s workings and landmark rulings. "The tribunal’s rulings that established genocide as a war crime and rape as genocide have transformed the law and stand as warning to tyrants who appear on the world scene," says team member John McKay, a former U.S. Attorney who now teaches at Seattle University School of Law.

Team members remain concerned about protecting the interviewees from potential misrepresentation. Friedman points to revisionist claims that the Holocaust never happened, that Jews were never put in camps, gas chambers, ovens. Might clips from the collection be distorted to support similar claims related to the Rwandan genocide? "There are more and more tools that allow people to easily edit and alter digital material," says Friedman.

The team decided to house the original set of hard drives as part of the Special Collections in the UW libraries where it sits next to an ancient Sanskrit Buddhist text. New members joined the team to create a process for verifying the videos’ authenticity in the future. Anyone accessing copies of the material will be able to check their authenticity using a cryptographic hash mark to verify whether or not they match the original. Tadayoshi Kohno, assistant professor with the UW Computer Science and Engineering Department, helped develop the technology and sees a wide range of application possibilities. "This could be valuable for any type of information we think people might intentionally or accidentally alter in the future — information such as court records, legal proceedings, congressional testimony and other records the government wants to preserve for the long haul," he says.

The first public screening of the videos was in January, at a UW presentation called "Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal: Genocide and Justice." The event drew more than 400 and garnered national headlines. As funds are raised, the interviews are translated and subtitled into Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda. The subtitled video clips are then posted for the public to access and reuse on the project’s website, tribunalvoices.org. Members of the team plan to return to Rwanda this summer to collaborate with Rwandan organizations to conceptualize innovative ways the video collection can be leveraged to support local peace building and genocide prevention projects.

Eventually anyone, anywhere should be able to access the video clips, whether in a Rwandan village where the material might be projected on a white sheet or wall, in a bustling European metropolis where urbanites call up clips via mobile phone, or in a United Nations conference room where lawyers scour a searchable, multilingual Web site, looking for insights on how to construct the next international tribunal.

There’s a great deal to learn from the tribunal in Arusha, says Horowitz. He describes how newly arrived employees struggled to build a system of international justice, practically from scratch. In the early days of the tribunal, people coming from different cultures, with different legal backgrounds, had no orientation, no procedural guidance for prosecution, no design for dealing with victims — or with each other — he says.

The expense of the trials — estimated at more than $1 billion — bewildered some impoverished Rwandans. In one video clip the Special Assistant to the Registrar recalls the starving Rwandans who, left with almost nothing after the massacres, suggested early on that the tribunal just give the money to their people, "to alleviate some of our suffering."

Time convinced some Rwandans that the international court was establishing an important alternative to vengeance as a means of justice. The former Chief of Witness Protection, Mr. Roland Ammousouga, now spokesman for the tribunal, tells of the day he brought an "old mama" to court. The 85-year-old woman had been raped. She had seen her children and husband killed. In court, asked to identify the accused, she stood up and walked the room, looking at the prosecutor, the court reporter, the judges, the defense council. Finally she looked at the accused person. She bowed before him, then sat down, refusing to point him out to the court.

"(She) say, 'In my culture, you don’t point the finger to powerful people!' (She) say ‘No, he was the mayor and the mayor was most powerful,’ " recalls the spokesman.

When the court convicted the man, the woman declared: "To see the son of God to be there with handcuff. (sic) No, it’s not possible. I can die today and go and see my kids and report back to them that justice has been done."

The spokesman said it was the first day he cried in court.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was set up not only to prosecute violations of international humanitarian law, but to foster Rwandan reconciliation and signal an end to impunity in Africa. In an area again erupting in civil unrest, with armed forces waging attacks on civilians in the Congo, those are immense challenges.

No one who took part in the proceedings in Arusha questions that the global work of preventing genocide, however complicated, must continue.

"What I would like to say to posterity, researchers, young students, professionals," prosecutor William Egbe says into the camera, "is that we have been … part of a tragedy, and our biggest desire is that tragedy is not repeated."

To make a gift to the Information for an International System of Justice: Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Project Fund that supports this work, please visit the iSchool's Giving page.