The New York Times
Tuesday, January 25, 2000
Way Clear for U.S. to Deliver Rwanda War Crimes Suspect
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 24 -- The Supreme Court cleared the way today for the United States to send a Rwandan church leader to a war crimes tribunal, where he is wanted on charges of abetting genocide in 1994 for allowing armed Hutu to enter his church and kill hundreds of Tutsi who had sought refuge there.
If there are no further delays in his case, the Rwandan, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Hutu who was arrested in Texas, will soon become the first person turned over to a current international war crimes tribunal by the United States, an important precedent to American officials.
The United States, which was instrumental in urging the Security Council to create the Rwanda tribunal, has been trying to send Mr. Ntakirutimana to Africa for trial since his first arrest in Texas in 1996. He successfully fought the deportation through the courts until August 1998, when a federal district judge ruled against him. Today the Supreme Court denied him an appeal.
Mr. Ntakirutimana, freed in 1997 by a Texas magistrate but arrested again the following year, is now in a federal prison cell in Laredo. He is the only person wanted by either the Balkans or Rwanda tribunals to be arrested in the United States.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, in New York today for a Security Council session on Congo, said she would review the papers in the case when she returned to Washington, but repeated the view of other government officials that Mr. Ntakirutimana should be deported.
With the Supreme Court's denial of the case, Dr. Albright now has the power to make the final decision on Mr. Ntakirutimana, whose case has been handled for the State Department by David Sheffer, the first Ambassador at Large for War Crimes.
Mr. Ntakirutimana, 75, a Seventh-day Adventist church leader in Kibuye in western Rwanda, has been accused by the Rwanda war crimes tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, of encouraging ethnic Tutsi to seek refuge in his church and hospital compound in the town of Mugonero in April 1996 and then turning a Hutu death squad loose on them.
An indictment from the Rwanda war crimes tribunal says he began welcoming frightened, unarmed Tutsi to his church on April 6, 1994, when ethnic Hutu began the slaughter of Tutsi and their moderate Hutu supporters. On about April 16, Mr. Ntakirutimana was reported to have allowed a well-armed convoy of Hutu officials and militia members to wage a daylong massacre.
Mr. Ntakirutimana later tried to avoid arrest in Rwanda by fleeing to Texas, where one of his sons lives. Another son was taken into custody by the tribunal and is awaiting trial in Arusha.
The elder Mr. Ntakirutimana was first arrested in 1996 by federal marshals in Texas acting under an agreement between the United States and the war crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda. Congress had approved the agreement and enacted it into law that year.
A Texas magistrate, however, decided that the law was unconstitutional, and ordered Mr. Ntakirutimana released in December 1997. The Rwandan, who received strong support from Seventh-day Adventists in Texas, was defended by Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general. Mr. Clark said he did not recognize the legitimacy of the tribunals.
The Texas magistrate's decision was an embarrassment to the United States, since African and European countries were complying with requests to turn indicted people over to the Rwanda tribunal.
The requirements for transfer to an international tribunal are comparable to the requirements for extradition to another nation. This case, however, is not an extradition, which arises from an agreement between nations. Neither is it technically a deportation, which is a justice and immigration decision.
This case represents a very important set of precedents for transfers, officials said today. They added that the United States is in a better position to deal with these kinds of cases in the future because one has been through the federal courts.
