GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Turkish government has reacted angrily to a vote by the French Senate Monday in favour of a proposal to punish those who don’t recognize genocide, including the killing of Armenians in Turkey in 1915. Turkey has long opposed international and internal efforts to label the deaths genocide, although it admits half a million Armenians were killed, while Armenians, who use the term genocide for the events, claim there were 1.5 million deaths. France in 2001 recognized the Armenian claims but the new measure would put offenders at risk for a one-year prison sentence or fine of euros 45,000.
Both the government and its opposition in Ankara condemned the French move as an attack on Turkish honour. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggested last week that if the Senate vote passed he might never visit France again.
Links to other sites: Hurriyet, Le Monde (Fr), TSR Swiss pubic television
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The badly decomposed remains of 15 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi population in Rwanda have been found at the Hotel Tech in the district of Remere in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Authorities were told of the bodies in May and the process of exhuming them began in mid-July. They were buried under what is now the sauna and the women’s bathrooms of the new hotel, built on the premises of an older hotel called Total.
The Tutsis were taken from the Catholic church, where they had taken refuge, to the hotel where they were killed by grenades, then buried, according to the survivors who led authorities to the graves. The information has been confirmed by the survivors’ umbrella organization, Ibuka.
More than one million people are estimated to have been killed during the 100-day genocide campaign. An educational centre about the killings and genocide worldwide was built in 2004 to mark the 10th anniversary; its sits on the place where 250,000 bodies were buried.
Links to other sites: Aegis Trust, UK, allAfrica 14 July, allAfrica 19 July, Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre and Facebook page for the new “Raindrops over Kigali” documentary film
Breaking news: Two Bosnian Serbs have been sentenced to life in prison for their role on the Srebrenica genocide in 1995 and five others have been given sentences ranging between five and 35 years.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced seven defendants at The Hague.
Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara were among seven former high-ranking military and police officials to be sentenced.
Five other Bosnian Serb army and police officers were also convicted of war crimes.
Additional details: Radio Netherlands, Associated Press/Yahoo News
Paris, France (GenevaLunch) – The arrest in France of Sosthene Munyemana at the request of Rwanda, which seeks his extradition to be tried for war crimes, may indicate a shift in France’s attitude, reports the CS Monitor. He is a Hutu and doctor who has been living in France since 1994, one of scores of prominent Hutus who were given refuge by France after the Rwandan genocide that killed some 800,000 Hutus and Tutsis. The Rwandan government and international investigators have sought their return to stand trial.
Sosthene Munyemana, age 45, has been working as an emergency room doctor in Bordeaux, where he was arrested. He denies the charges.
Links to other sites: CS Monitor, Interpol, Times, UK
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, on trial for genocide at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands will appear today, 3 November for a procedural hearing. Karadzic has boycotted the proceedings since 26 October, saying he needs more time to review a million documents and the testimony of hundreds of witnesses. Karadzic stands accused of 11 counts of genocide and crimes against humanity during the war in Bosnia 1992-1995, when he led the Bosnian Serbs during that country’s civil war. Al-Jazeera, Epoch Times
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, although, reports the BBC, it “stopped short of accusing [him] of genocide” and AllAfrica, which carries several articles on the arrest, says two of the three judges who ruled on the warrant refused to consider genocide charges. The Sudanese leader reportedly called the decision worthless. He is the first sitting head of state to be charged by the ICC.
The International Criminal Tribunal Thursday sentenced three men to life in prison for planning the mass killing of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1996. Theoneste Bagosora, former defense official and two senior military officers, Anatole Nsegiyumva and Alloys Ntabakuze, were found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. BBC
