4/5/04, 1

4/5/04 TAKING A HARD LOOK AT RWANDAN GENOCIDE AND ITS AFTERMATH

In the wake of two major genocides during the 1990s -- in Bosnia and Rwanda -- an all-day symposium at Northwestern University will focus on the International Criminal Trial for Rwanda (ICTR) by taking a hard look at the responsibilities of the media and others for such extraordinary brutality as well as the role of justice in reweaving the fabric of civil society.

The all-day conference, “Reflection and Reconsideration: 10 Years After the Rwandan Genocide” will take place Monday, April 5, beginning at 9 a.m. at Northwestern University School of Law, Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

"The conference will bring together leading academics, policymakers, attorneys, journalists, women from Rwanda, our law students who will just be returning from field research in that country, as well as major players in the ICTR media trial to ask fundamental questions about a genocide that took 800,000 lives within 100 days," said Bernardine Dohrn, associate clinical professor at the School of Law’s Children and Family Justice Center and faculty for the Seminar on Rwandan Justice.

Steve Rapp, the lead prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and John Floyd, U.S. defense counsel for Hassan Ngeze, the former owner of the Rwandan newspaper Kangura who was convicted of genocide, will be featured at the first panel, at 10:30 a.m., titled "International Justice: the Media Trial and its Rwanda Consequences."

Richard Joseph, the chair of Northwestern’s Program on African Studies and a prominent scholar who has devoted much of his career to understanding governance and conflict resolution in Africa, will moderate the second panel, at 2:20 p.m., titled "Political Reconstruction of Civil Society and State."

In December, in the first case of its kind since the Nuremberg trials in 1946, an international tribunal convicted three media executives for the crime of genocide in Rwanda -- for using a newspaper and a radio station to incite machete-wielding gangs to slaughter 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu who resisted.

The court said the newspaper "poisoned the minds" of readers against the Tutsi minority, who were massacred by state officials who mobilized the majority around "Hutu power" to engage in the slaughter at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks; and the radio station openly called for their extermination, broadcasting names of people and families to be killed.

Quotes by lead prosecutor Rapp and defense counsel Floyd in a Dec. 6, 2003, International Herald Tribune story sum up the opposing views of the media verdicts.

"The court said there is a wide range for free expression, but when you pour gasoline on the flames, that’s when you cross the line into unprotected expression," Rapp said in the article.

"This is a terrible, terrible decision, the worst decision in the history of international justice," Floyd said in the same article. Floyd claimed that American courts, with their great concern for free speech, would have thrown the case out.

David Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern University School of Law, and Loren Ghiglione, dean of Medill School of Journalism, will deliver the symposium’s opening remarks.

The Northwestern University symposium is co-sponsored by the School of Law's Children and Family Justice Center, its Center on International Human Rights, and its Bluhm Legal Clinic, and the University’s Program of African Studies in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Melville Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Medill School of Journalism.