It is winter, four years after the Rwandan genocide. Joseph Mpambara arrives at Schiphol airport, carrying a false Ugandan passport. He tells Dutch Immigration officials that he fled his village Mugonero in 1994. He says he feared for his life as Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels massacred Hutus. Later, Mpambara feared persecution because he had testified in defence of his brother at the ICTR.

By Thijs Bouwknegt, The Hague

Mpambara was never granted asylum. Instead, Dutch prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into his role in the genocide. He was eventually arrested in Amsterdam in 2006 and put on trial in 2008. This week, he is back in the courtroom.

This time, a panel of three judges in The Hague will consider his appeal against his 20-year prison sentence for torturing a German doctor and his Rwandan wife and child.

The 42-year-old Mpambara, casually dressed in a dark blue striped shirt and blue jeans, says he has nothing to do with the atrocities. He addressed the three judges in French and Dutch, using two Rwandan translators also. Opposite him in the courtroom are two prosecutors. Mpambara asssures the judges he will not answer their questions in the coming weeks.

Mpambara is the first Rwandan in the dock in the Netherlands for crimes relating to the Rwandan massacres. The Court of First Instance in The Hague in March 2009 found him guilty of ordering the murder of several Tutsi refugees.

“The defendant has robbed two women and at least four children of their most valuable possession - their lives,” the judges commented then, saying Mpambara ordered two Tutsi mothers and their children to be hauled out of an ambulance they were using to flee the mass slaughter. Subsequently, the passengers were forced to stand in line and were bludgeoned and hacked to death with clubs and machetes by militia at a roadblock in Mugonero.

Mpambara was convicted on two charges of torture. However, the earlier judgement cleared Mpambara of war crimes, saying his crimes were not part of the war raging between Rwandan government forces and Tutsi rebels from the RPF that formed the backdrop to the country’s genocide. The judges ruled that his crimes could only be considered as torture.

Mpambara was found guilty of torturing a German doctor, his Tutsi wife and their 2-month-old son by threatening and detaining them at a roadblock on the bridge over the Kiboga river as they tried to flee the country.

Dr. Wolfgang Blam and his wife were each awarded compensation of 680,67 Euros. He, his wife and another victim are scheduled to address to court on April 15th.

Mpambara was also charged with killing dozens of Tutsis who fled to the church complex of the Seventh-Day Adventists in Mugonero, as well as the rape of four women. But the judges said they found inconsistencies in the testimonies of five key witnesses linking Mpambara to the massacre. In the case of the rapes, only one witness alleged that he was involved in the attacks. Under Dutch law, one witness is not enough for a conviction.

The prosecutors appealed against several of these acquittals. In the past two years they gathered testimony from more than twenty witnesses in Rwanda and several other countries to try to prove their case.

Mpambara was not charged with genocide. Prosecutors, at the request of the ICTR, had initially sought to try him for what experts call the “crime of crimes”. But the Dutch courts at the time did not have the jurisdiction to try foreigners for genocide without a ‘Dutch link’. He was therefore charged with war crimes and torture instead.

Mpambara comes from a prosperous Hutu family. Before he joined the family business in Mugonero, he studied building engineering in Italy. The family was highly respected by the village population. But that view changed after the genocide.

Mid-July 1994: Mpambara, his brother and sisters fled Rwanda. Via Zaire (present day Democratic Republic of Congo), they ended up in Nairobi. Mpambara’s brother, Obed Ruzindana, was arrested there and convicted of genocide three years later by the ICTR in Arusha. The former businessman is serving his 25-year sentence in Mali.

The appeals judgement is due on June 30th. A second Rwanda case in The Hague District Court is also underway. Mpambara’s prosecutors are currently investigating Yvonne Basebya, a 63-year-old Rwandan woman who was arrested last year. She holds a Dutch passport and will be the first genocide suspect to appear before a Dutch court.

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