One month after his arrest, Jean Mpambara has been indicted by the ICTR. For only one count: genocide. When Tanzanian police raided a refugee camp in western Tanzania on June 20, 2001, the Arusha Tribunal got a two-for-one special: they not only captured indicted genocidaire Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, they also arrested his comrade-in-arms and fellow bourgmestre, Jean Mpambara. On July 23, Judge Erik Mose (Norway) confirmed the indictment of 47 year-old Mpambara, former bourgmestre of Rukara commune in Kibungo prefecture.
In the indictment, the Prosecutor alleges that, between April 9 and April 13, 1994, Mpambara ordered and led attacks on Tutsi refugees whom he had encouraged to seek shelter at Rukara Parish and Gahini Hospital. It has been estimated that 500 people were killed at Rukara Parish. The Prosecutor further contends that Mpambara joined Gacumbitsi and other bourgmestres in distributing weapons that they received from Colonel Pierre Celestin Rwagafirita. Somewhat surprisingly, the indictment only charges Mpambara with one count: genocide.

The charges against Gacumbitsi
Almost a month earlier, on June 26, Gacumbitsi, the former bourgmestre of Rusumo made his debut appearance before the Arusha Tribunal to enter his plea to charges of genocide (or, alternatively, complicity in genocide) and crimes against humanity, specifically, extermination, murder and rape. Hands clasped in front of him, Gacumbitsi answered « non coupable » as Judge Lloyd Williams (St. Kitts and Nevis) read out each of the counts.
The Prosecutor's June 20 indictment portrays Gacumbitsi as the driving force behind the genocide in Rusumo commune and describes in clinical, but harrowing, detail the escalation of violence. On April 10, 1994, Gacumbitsi received over 100 boxes of weapons from the Rwandan military, which he subsequently distributed to communal officials with instructions that they should order their constituents to kill Tutsis. On April 12, he ordered soldiers and boatmen along the lakes to stop refugees trying to flee to Tanzania. On April 14, he personally distributed machetes to Hutu households, telling them and communal police that all Tutsi should be killed by nightfall and they could steal the belongings of those they killed. On April 15, Gacumbitsi drove around announcing that Tutsi women and children could safely return home in order as a gambit to lure them out of hiding. Between April 15 and April 17, he led the infamous massacre at Nyarubuye church. Before the attack began, Gacumbitsi ordered the crowd of refugees at the church to separate themselves into Hutus and Tutsis. He later returned to finish off survivors. On Gacumbitsi's orders, surviving Tutsi children were lured to a place with offers of food and then, when they had assembled, the exits were blocked and grenades thrown in.
The indictment also portrays Gacumbitsi as an avid participant in murder: he killed a Tutsi woman and her three children (including his godchild) in his own home; he took money from two Tutsis as payment for killing them with a gun rather than a machete; and he slit open the stomach of a pregnant woman and then repeatedly stabbed her and the twin babies.

Sexual Violence
Notably, the indictments of both Mpambara and Gacumbitsi contain detailed allegations of sexual violence against women. The Prosecutor clearly wants to avoid any repetition of what happened during the Cyangugu trial when Judge Williams refused to admit oral testimony about sexual violence as evidence of genocide -- because it had not been specifically pled in the indictment. The Prosecutor alleges that, on April 17, 1994, Gacumbitsi allegedly drove along a road using a megaphone to call on Hutus to kill and rape Tutsi: « Search in the bushes, do not save a single snake.... Tutsi girls that have always refused to sleep with Hutu should be raped ... and sticks placed in their genitals. » Afterwards, the indictment states that several Tutsi women were raped, and one woman had a stick thrust in her genitals.
By contrast, the evidence against Mpambara is more attenuated. The prosecutor merely alleges that « *t+he sexual violence was so widespread, and conducted so openly, and was so integrally incorporated in generalized attacks against civilian Tutsi, that Jean Mpambara must have known, or should have known, that it was occurring and that the perpetrators were his subordinates. » Still that should be sufficient to allow the Prosecutor to present rape testimony when his trial happens.