Iain Morley QC worked for four years at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania prosecuting four cases of genocide in Rwanda. He reports on the work performed by the tribunal.
Between April and July 1994, in 100 days, at an average rate of 10,000 souls per day, almost one million minority defenceless civilian Tutsi men women and children were systematically butchered by the Hutu majority throughout Rwanda, mostly with machetes, knives, spears, and cudgels, sometimes with grenades and firearms, sometimes by the army and police, but mostly by fearsome civilian militias often called the Interahamwe. There is evidence very many of the several hundred thousand women were raped before being murdered. The pretext for the carnage was the assassination of the Hutu President Juvenal Habyrimana on 6 April 1994, against a background of ethnic troubles over generations, smoldering particularly after the advent of independence from Belgium in 1959.