Survivor groups asked to "reconsider" boycott

The registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Adama Dieng, has urged associations of genocide survivors to reconsider a decision to suspend cooperation with the tribunal, ICTR officials confirmed to IRIN on Monday.

Dieng's call to the Avega Agahozo and Ibuka associations, made up of survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, was made on Friday. The officials, who could not give any details, said ICTR's wish would be that the associations "reconsider" their decision.

Avega Agahozo, an association of genocide widows, and Ibuka - Kinyarwanda for "remember" - said in a press release on 24 January that they were suspending cooperation with ICTR, and urged the Rwandan government to follow suit "until it [ICTR] has corrected all its mistakes and accorded sufficient importance to victims", the independent Hirondelle news agency reported on 25 January.

Rwandan radio quoted Dieng as telling journalists in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, that measures "will be taken as soon as evidence was given to support accusations made by the associations".

The associations had said that their members would not go to testify before "people who ridicule us and treat our suffering as a banality".

They accused the ICTR of, among other things, recruiting genocide suspects or their relatives as defence investigators, not paying enough attention to the security of prosecution witnesses, "persecution and harassment of prosecution witnesses from Rwanda, especially women", and allowing defence lawyers to tarnish the name of Ibuka and its members by calling them "witness syndicates".

Hirondelle said the associations' action may have been triggered by ICTR's "controversial" treatment of a protected witness, "TA", a female rape victim, and its handling of the subsequent controversy.

"TA" testified from 24 October to 8 November in the trial of six men, one of whom she accused of raping her. She had to withstand cross-examination by five defence teams, and was kept on the stand for more than two weeks, Hirondelle said. During the cross-examination the three judges were seen laughing as a lawyer questioned "TA" on the way she had been undressed before the rape.

"What outrages us the most is that instead of giving special attention to the protest petition, the President of the ICTR issued a press release on 14 December in which she denies that the judges were responsible for what happened in the 31 October 2001 hearing, and claims that the presiding judge did all he could to protect witness 'TA'," Hirondelle reported the press release as saying.

In her statement - published on the Internet address www.ictr.org - the tribunal's president, Navenethem Pillay, noted that the allegation against the judges first appeared on 10 November in an articled entitled "unprotected witness" published on the Internet. She said the article criticised the judges for various reasons but "does not allege" that they were laughing at the witness or at any part of the testimony.

"It is also important to note that an examination of the audiovisual record of the hearing on 31 October 2001 shows that the article amounted to a mischaracterisation of the scene in the trial chamber," she said. "It is clear that the presiding judge had on a number of occasions attempted to direct he cross-examination of the witness towards great relevancy and precision."

Ibuka and Avega Agahozo said they had been collaborating with the ICTR since its inception in 1995.