Losing civil parties in Cambodia
Soum Rithy spent two years of his youth being beaten and tortured in a Khmer Rouge jail between 1977 and 1979, after Pol Pot’s cadres mistook him for a soldier in the previous government. He saw his father die of disease exacerbated by the lack of modern medicine under the ultra-Maoist regime, while two brothers starved to death. His third brother, the youngest, had his throat cut by Khmer Rouge soldiers after he was caught stealing a papaya.
France & Rwanda on the reconciliation plane
“While I am happy with the findings and everybody in this country seems to be very excited, I am not excited,” Rwandan President Paul Kagame said to the New Times after the 10 January release of a French ballistics report on the 6 April 1994 coup in Kigali, that seemed to exonerate the RPF. “The reason is simple – have we been waiting to be cleared by a French judge? Were we, all along, waiting to be absolved by a foreign judge?”
Cuska - a “brave and patriotic” trial
It was a sign of changing times in Serbia at the end of December 2011, when Deputy War Crimes Prosecutor Bruno Vekaric told journalists that an insider witness testimony describing atrocities against Kosovo Albanian civilians committed by Serb paramilitaries in 1999 constitutes a “brave and patriotic act.”
ICTR legacy: fragile and confusing
When former Rwandan MRND leaders Edouard Karemera and Mathieu Ngirumpatse received life sentences in December 2011, the conclusion of 17 years of work at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was remarkable: there was no plan at the state or party level to exterminate Tutsis prior to the shooting down of former President Habyarimana’s plane on 6 April 1994.