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  • Doomed to repeat the horror?

    Malaysia Star, Malaysia
    July 30 2006

    Doomed to repeat the horror?

    One Malaysian got a lot closer to these tragic events than was
    comfortable. He came away from the experience despairing, he tells
    SUHAINI AZNAM.

    FOR most Malaysians, Rwanda is just a name `somewhere on the map of
    Africa'. And genocide is a big word to grapple with.

    But one Malaysian had the dubious privilege of coming to grips with
    the tragedy at close range. After Justice Tan Sri Lal Chanda Vohrah
    retired from the High Court of Malaya in 1993, he was appointed first
    as a permanent trial judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for
    the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for two terms (1993-2001), sitting in
    the Hague, and subsequently as an ad litem judge (where he could be
    called upon as need arose) in the Appeals Chamber for the ICT for
    Rwanda (ICTR), sitting in Arusha, Tanzania (2001-2005).


    Retired Justice Tan Sri Lal C. Vohrah desribing the horrific tales of
    genocide he listened to in his capacity as a judge.
    The Yugoslav stories in particular affected him tremendously because
    as a trial judge, he heard first-hand accounts of the atrocities
    committed by man against his fellow men.

    `It was horrifying actually, the suffering the victims underwent,' he
    recalls soberly. `Bosnians were being chased out of their villages.
    There were heart-rending experiences. We used to shed tears listening
    to their stories.'

    He was not alone. One judge was so appalled he had to down a bottle
    of wine in the evenings. Another resorted to haunting art museums to
    find peace of mind.

    Ironically, genocide, as it is committed today, came with the
    civilisation of mankind. `Before 1900, we never saw genocide as we
    know it today,' Vohrah points out.

    Genocide is defined as `the deliberate extermination of a race of
    people'. The past century has seen at least nine instances of
    attempted genocide: the Armenians in Turkey; the Nazi holocaust; the
    Cambodian `killing fields'; Yugoslavia; Rwanda; the attempt to wipe
    out the tribal Karen by the military junta of Myanmar; the ongoing
    displacement in Darfur, Sudan; and the ethnic killings in Sierra
    Leone and Sri Lanka.

    `Nothing was done until the newspapers showed (pictures of) emaciated
    people in Bosnia. That was the sort of apathy we saw then. The United
    Nations was propelled to do something at the instigation of the
    United States.'

    When Rwanda finally grabbed attention, `there was that thought, `Are
    you not bothering with us because we are Africans?' So the UN was
    pushed to set up a sister commission to the one on Yugoslavia.'

    Vohrah used to travel to Arusha because the Rwandan tribunal had to
    hear cases in an African court.

    When the ICTR was formed in October 1994, its jurisdiction was
    backdated to Jan 1 of that year because its members also wanted `to
    go after the minds who had instigated the mission and planned the
    genocide,' recalls Vohrah.

    This tragedy happened because `politics came into play,' he said
    simply. Its propagators were `harping on ethnic fears.

    'By 1994, a lot of inter-marriage had taken place between the Tutsi
    and the Hutu. But because the society is patrilineal, as long as the
    father was Tutsi, his children would also be persecuted.

    `Whole families were thrown into wells,' says Vohrah. `I didn't see
    the skulls because it was thought to be unsafe for the judges to go
    (to the scenes of massacres). But there was a museum of skulls in
    (the capital) Kilgali.'

    Globally, the trend is encouraging in that the international
    community is forced to take into account that genocide does occur and
    can always recur, notes Vohrah.

    To prevent it from recurring, `one has to prevent the people who
    commit these crimes from getting off with impunity.'

    But Vohrah himself holds little hope that we have learnt any lessons
    from these dark chapters of `ethnic chauvinism'.

    `Well, we keep repeating them, don't we?' he says in despair. `It's
    human nature, that's what it is. Human nature has to be controlled.
    We must never allow the bad side of human nature to rear its ugly
    head.'
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