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Chapter 2: Building Vocabulary: Using...
Chapter Quiz
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Prosecuting the Perpetrators of the Rwanda Genocide
1In November 1994, this time with the objective of stopping an epidemic of interethnic violence in the center of Africa, the UN Security Council created another ad hoc tribunal—one mandated to bring to justice those responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi civilians by Rwandan Hutu militia earlier that year. (Some estimates ran as high as 1 million slaughtered.) 2Formally named the International Criminal Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Genocide and Other Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of Rwanda and Rwandan Citizens Responsible for Genocide and Other Such Violations Committed in the Territory of Neighboring States, Between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994, the Tribunal has in some respects a more simple task for Rwanda, and in other respects a more formidable one, than its counterpart Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
3In this case, the leaders of one of the country's ethnic groups (the Hutus, which comprise 85 percent of the population) were clearly to be held responsible. 4Moreover, the group they had victimized, the Tutsis, were now in control of the government of Rwanda and were presumably able and willing to arrest individuals indicted by the Tribunal. 5But the slowness of the international Tribunal on the one hand (no indictments were issued by the end of 1995)—resulting from its meagre staff and funds and the fact that its chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, was preoccupied with his other assignment as chief prosecutor for the Yugoslav Tribunal—and the desire of the Tutsis, back in power in Kigale, for swift justice, on the other hand, do not bode well for the prospectus of due process. 6In the view of many Tutsi leaders, thousands of Hutus were complicit perpetrators of the genocidal massacres of 1994, and the government in Kigale, which is not waiting for indictments from the Hague, therefore feels justified in making arrests on its own. 7Many of the presumed-guilty Hutus, however, have fled into the neighboring countries of Burundi and Zaire and are hiding out among millions of Hutus reluctant to return to Rwanda out of fear of reprisal from the Tutsi community. 8The potential for renewed outbreaks of intertribal warfare are high, and the violence could easily escalate into the neighboring countries. 9The ability of the Rwandan Tribunal to function in the midst of region-wide relapse into genocide would be problematical, to say the least.
Source: Brown, S. (2000). Human Rights in World Politics, New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, pp.145-146.
Fill in the Blank
Read each question below and fill in the blank from the choices below. Use the context of the sentence and the paragraph to guess the correct meaning.
difficult
accused
people who carried out
unwilling
retaliation
expand
backsliding
killings
made up of
small number of
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