Justice on the Grass by Dina Temple-Raston

Author:Dina Temple-Raston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Georges Ruggiu had come to Rwanda seeking his fortune. Instead, eight years after he climbed into President Habyarimana’s car to ask for a job at RTLM, he was cutting a deal for his life. Two years after his arrest, he called prosecutors to the detention facility and said he would testify against his old boss, Ferdinand Nahimana. He told them he could help prove that Nahimana was still in charge of RTLM after the genocide started. There was a hitch for the prosecution, though: Georges Ruggiu was a proven liar.

Chief among his problems was a book he had written while in exile in Kenya, entitled In the Rwandan Torment. The book tried to make the case that the RPF not only was behind the assassination of President Habyarimana but was also responsible for sparking a civil war that ended with the death of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans. Ruggiu maintained that the information he wrote in his book was “one hundred percent correct, except for one paragraph.” The paragraph he disavowed was one in which he claimed that “pregnant women were disemboweled, pillaged, and eaten” by RPF soldiers. Georges Ruggiu said he may have “exaggerated” that.

The book also claimed that the Hutu had no intention of wiping out the Tutsi and that Ruggiu would have been “shocked” had such a thing been suggested.

There was also the small problem of Ruggiu’s mental state. Georges Ruggiu had spent six months as an outpatient at a mental health center in Liège before coming to Rwanda, and while he was incarcerated, he was under medical surveillance. He was taking medication “to help [him] cope with stress.”

He was not the type of witness one builds a case on, but Ruggiu was one of just a handful of people who had worked at RTLM and survived the genocide. Most of the radio’s leaders, save the three men on trial, were presumed dead. Ruggiu could fill in the details about the day-to-day operations at the radio station while at the same time shedding light on Nahimana’s role there.

“We knew he was problematic. You have to work with the hand you are dealt,” Prosecutor Stephen Rapp said later. “We needed to prove that Ferdinand Nahimana was in charge after the genocide began, that the army hadn’t suddenly taken the reins of power at RTLM after April 6. Ruggiu worked there and was one of the few people who could describe RTLM from the inside. We didn’t have much choice but to use him.”

The only outward sign of Ruggiu’s nervousness on the stand came from his incessant fiddling with a blue pen. It never stopped moving during his entire testimony. If one listened carefully, one could hear the soft clicking of the pen against his knuckles, speeding up when he spoke and slowing down when he listened. Much to the chagrin of the prosecution team, Ruggiu also tended to turn systematically to look over at the prosecutors’ bench after each reply, as if looking for approval. If ever there would be witness testimony ripe for rebuttal, Ruggiu’s was it.

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