My name is Louise Mushikiwabo. I was born and raised in Rwanda, where I graduated from the National University of Rwanda’s Foreign Languages department. In the summer of 1985, I got a job teaching English at Lycée de Kigali High School in the capital. In 1986, at the age of 24, I received a scholarship from the University of Delaware to pursue graduate studies in French and Conference Interpretation. After graduation, I got a job working in public relations in Washington, D.C. That’s what I was doing in 1994 when, on April 6, an airplane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda, was shot down.

In the wake of the shooting, the nationalist Hutu militia in Rwanda, the Interahamwe, went on deadly rampage across the country, slaughtering members of the Tutsi ethnic group and any moderate Hutus who might have sympathized with them. Over the next three months, they murdered somewhere between 500,000 and a million people, including most of my family.

My life, as you might imagine, was turned upside down. I came from a middle-class Tutsi family with no political ties until 1991, when one of my brothers, a University professor named Lando Ndasingwa, decided to join the pro-democracy movement. Eventually he became the government’s Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, and was the only Tutsi in the cabinet when the genocide started. He had been active in trying to facilitate the return of Tutsi refugees living in neighboring Uganda and was always vocal on behalf of equal treatment for the country’s minority groups. Thus, I feared that he might be one of the Interahamwe’s primary targets. My fear was borne out.

As news reports trickled in that the Interahamwe were hacking people to death with machetes, I feared the worst. I was on the phone day and night with my family. But early in the morning Washington time on April 7, the phone lines to all of my relatives in Rwanda went dead. The following day I read in a wire story that my brother was missing and presumed dead. I was devastated. But what I did not know was that my brother was not the only one I lost. The Interahamwe also killed my mother, two other brothers, one of my nieces, five nephews and two of my sisters-in-law.

As best as I have been able to piece together, this is what happened. In the first days of April, my mother went for an extended visit with my brother at the home he shared with his Canadian wife and their two children. The home was located in the Kimihurura neighborhood, not far from a base of the Presidential Guard, the Rwandan military elite unit. Knowing the sensitive position my brother and other moderate politicians were in, the UN Mission in Rwanda had placed armed guards in front of their homes. But, on the morning of April 7, as elements of the Presidential Guard approached, the Ghanaian blue helmets stationed at the house fled. Within the hour, the soldiers entered the house and murdered everyone inside.

Across town, Rwandan soldiers entered my sister’s house and ordered her and her husband to go to the police station for questioning. Belgian troops took her children to a near-by school called ETO for safekeeping, where about 3,000 Tutsi had sought UN protection. My sister and her husband were subsequently released, and went into hiding with some Hutu neighbors for about a month. Their children, however, would not be so lucky.

The Belgian peacekeepers were ordered to evacuate Rwanda and, on April 11, they left the ETO school, leaving the 3,000 people inside to fend for themselves against the Interahamwe. As soon as they left, the killers entered the school and immediately targeted my nephew as "a relative of the Inyenzi-in-Chief, Lando." With the killers in hot pursuit, my nephew ran toward a nearby house for shelter, but the owner slammed the gate closed and refused to let him in. The Interahamwe hacked him to death on the spot. The 3,000 others who had been hiding in the school fled about two kilometers up Nyanza Hill, but the Interahamwe soldiers soon found and killed them, too, using machetes, sticks, hand grenades, and guns.

Interahamwe soldiers also burst into the home of my other brother. He begged them not to kill him with machetes, so they agreed to shoot him, but only if he could pay for the bullets. He did not have much cash on him, so he offered them his refrigerator, an iron, and several other appliances. Satisfied, they led him outside and shot him. His children, who recounted this story to me, managed to escape and hid in near-by farms for several days before they were rescued by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. His wife, however, got separated from the children during the escape. Her remains were found two years later in a near-by house that was burnt by the Interahamwe.

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A few months after the genocide, the UN Security Council set up a war crimes tribunal to prosecute those responsible for committing the atrocities in Rwanda. It goes without saying that many Rwandans, myself included, had felt betrayed by the United Nations inaction before and during the genocide. Nonetheless, I had high expectations for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). However, I was to be sorely disappointed.

To begin with, the United Nations established the Tribunal not in Rwanda where victims of the genocide could follow proceedings, but across the border in Arusha, Tanzania. Although this was done for security reasons, the remoteness meant that ordinary Rwandans would remain totally unaware of the legal process taking place. To make matters worse, the Tribunal announced that it planned to conduct its trials in English and French, not Kinyarwanda, so that even if Rwandans wanted to follow the trials, they could not. Thus it seemed the ICTR was operating with total disregard for the very people it was meant to serve by ignoring our language and culture, not to mention our feelings toward the United Nations.

Nonetheless, I was thrilled when, a year after its creation, the ICTR issued its first indictments. Even more heartening was that unlike the UN Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTR was actually able to gain custody of much of the Hutu leadership responsible for the genocide. However, my fellow Rwandans and I were appalled when we heard about how the accused would be treated in UN custody. At a time when most Rwandans were living in poverty and struggling just to get enough to eat every day, those responsible for the genocide were living in spotlessly clean facilities, were served three meals a day, and had access to telephones, the Internet, and a gym. Moreover, we were told that the accused enjoyed a principle called "presumption of innocence," and therefore should not be called "prisoners." We also learned that their families were given UN protection.

Sometime in 1999, Radio Rwanda announced that the ICTR was going to release Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, one of the masterminds of the genocide. Apparently the United Nations had violated his rights by holding him in detention for too long before he was able to appear before the court. I could not even dare explain what that meant to many friends and relatives in Rwanda who called and wrote to ask me what was going on. The United Nations had done nothing to protect us from the Interahamwe’s deadly rampage, and now it was releasing one of the men responsible for it. For me, Barayagwiza’s release held a particular irony because I had successfully sued him in Federal District Court in New York back in May 1994, under the Alien Tort Claims Act, with the help of Human Rights Watch. I was able to pursue some form of justice through the American courts, yet a court set up by the United Nations specifically to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda seemed unable to mete out justice.

My disappointment with ICTR culminated in the fall of 1998, when I was invited by a member of Congress to attend a briefing on the Rwandan genocide by a former investigator for the ICTR. The investigator explained how on February 17, 1994, a military intelligence officer sent a memorandum to the commander of the troops in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, informing him of a plot to assassinate two prominent Rwandans who had been involved in the peaceful transition of power in 1994. One was Joseph Kavaruganda, then president of the Constitutional Court of Rwanda. The other was Lando Ndasingwa, leader of the Liberal Party, my brother. That meant that the UN mission knew that my brother had been targeted for assassination as early as February 1994, but did not inform him. And not only that, but when UN investigators interviewed my sister and me after his death, they didn’t tell us what they knew.

Shortly after learning of the memorandum, I filed suit against the United Nations with the help of Geoffrey Robertson, a prominent British Human Rights lawyer. It was not an easy legal process to undertake because the United Nations has sovereign immunity and can only be sued by states, not private citizens. However, we wrote to the UN Legal department in New York in the hope of seeking compensation for gross negligence because my brother and his family were murdered while they were under UN protection. Over the last year, we have been exchanging correspondence in which the UN disputes its responsibility in the incident. At this juncture, we are looking at other ways to move our case forward.

Despite all of this, however, I still feel the work of ICTR is extremely important for my country. Since its establishment, it has secured the arrest of over 40 people accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and tried several of the top leaders, including Jean Kambanda, the former Prime Minister, and Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of Taba. They were the first people ever to be sentenced by an international criminal court for genocide. In so doing, the court has established several precedents in international law, which may have implications for courts all over the world. Thus, I feel it is extremely important for Rwandans to be aware of ICTR’s legal proceedings. To assist in that effort, I have been working as a consultant to the Internews Network, a non-profit organization, which is working on a multi-media project aimed at informing Rwandans about ICTR’s proceedings. I helped translate their documentary, "Genocide on Trial," into Kinyarwanda. In the coming months, it will be shown across Rwanda by a traveling video van, from which ordinary Rwandans will be able to watch and give feedback. It is my hope that the justice the United Nations is slowly meting out may someday have an impact on my country and other troubled spots around the world.