On November 8, thirteen years ago, the United Nations Security Council created the ICTR to try those primarily responsible for the serious crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994. Representatives of the Arusha tribunal promise it will have finished its first instance trials by the end of 2008, except for one, which will be completed in 2009. Two uncertainties still weigh on the ICTR: its ability to transfer some of the accused to national courts and the 14 fugitives. But most of all, the ICTR continues to mourn its most serious failure: the absence of proceedings against the winners of the war. In fifteen years, the ICTR will have indicted 90 individuals and prosecuted between 60 and 70. The acknowledgement of the genocide of Tutsis, perpetrated between April and July 1994, will have been the heart of its work and its accomplishment. On multiple levels, Hassan Jallow, the ICTR's fourth and final prosecutor, embodies a pragmatic and realistic vision of what the tribunal was able to accomplish. "We learned that the legal process is an important, necessary part of conflict resolution, but it's not enough. Justice for the victims, justice for history, we cannot deliver; you need to put a diversity of mechanisms in order to deal with all aspects of the problem," he acknowledged. For four years, the Gambian prosecutor has remained scrupulously committed to keeping the closing date of 2008. To do this, he has still not held the same trump card as the ICTY: the possibility of transferring some of the accused to national courts. This exit solution—made necessary by the international tribunals' lack of effectiveness—has turned out to be nothing but a major headache for the ICTR. No one wants to try Rwandan genocidaires, except Rwanda. However, Rwanda offers so little guarantee of fair trials for such cases that the judges have refused until now to give them the right to do so. In early November, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both shamed such a position, asking the tribunal to publicly oppose it. Nonetheless, the prosecutor hopes to be able to send 12 to 15 defendants to Rwanda.

This first shadow weighs heavy on the completion of the ICTR's work. But there is a second that will no doubt leave a more lasting mark on what it will leave behind for history: its failure to prosecute the leaders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), in power in Rwanda since 1994, for crimes against humanity. It is such a difficult reality to swallow that for the past ten years, everyone at the ICTR has been trying to pass the buck. The judges, who have for a long time written in their decisions that the presidential airplane simply "crashed", have easily been able to say it was the prosecution's responsibility. The first prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, who did nothing about this issue, is trying to forget. His replacement, Louise Arbour, more tactfully but belatedly admitted not having wanted to take the risk. Carla del Ponte, who followed her and was more rash, is now trying to lend validity to a simplistic theory by which she was removed from her position due to her investigations into the RPF. In fact, after having courageously opened these investigations, she herself suspended them and got trapped into an agreement with the Rwandan government. Hassan Jallow did nothing more than inherit a case that was already a lost cause in September 2003, but he has not dared publicly accept this renunciation.

As a result, in this RPF case, the prosecution just spent five years "evaluating" the evidence gathered during the year and a half that, in reality, the so-called "special" investigations of the ICTR will have lasted, from the end of 2000 to mid-2002. Like Sisyphus, at least five high ranking prosecutors of the ICTR were successively presented with the elements of these investigations to draw up legal files, one after the other, starting from zero each time. "I did not inherit trial-ready cases in the RPF cases; investigations are ongoing," Jallow now maintains. The general prosecutor had "hoped to conclude by last June," he admits. Now, he is careful not to mention a date, even one year from the closing.

There are probably, now like five years ago, two or three cases against members of the RPF that could lead to indictments. According to certain sources within the prosecution of the ICTR, another scenario, long-considered, still has some support: chase down a few RPF renegades living in exile and, eventually, obtain an agreement to plea guilty from them. The ICTR would thus hope to save face and claim, right before closing, to have prosecuted both sides.

Analyzing the way the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was able to escape from this trap, David Tolbert, deputy prosecutor at the ICTY, believes that, "if it remains one country, it makes it more difficult" not to apply a winners justice. But "Yugoslavia broke up in several countries". A second aspect, he says, is the existence of international borders following the conflict. "Other states give access to information on the other side. What is difficult to get is national information from the national side." A third factor that was prevalent in the former Yugoslavia but not in Rwanda is "the fact that none of the war actors was highly protected by one of the great powers".

"The ICTY is essentially a war crimes court. The ICTR is essentially a genocide court. There are no two parties to a genocide. There was a parallel military conflict, but genocide was an overwhelming huge crime basis. This is why we have concentrated on that. I don't see any political reasons," Jallow justifies. The fact is that one year from the completion of its work, the Arusha tribunal is still far from clearly addressing both its failure to try the parties equitably and, in a more productive manor, the practical and political reasons why. Three international tribunals—the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), that for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and that for Sierra Leone—are scheduled to complete their work by 2010. After having started an evaluation of the Special Court for Sierra Leone [IJT-69], IJT makes an initial assessment of the ICTR and the ICTY, before turning its attention to the chamber for the war crimes in Sarajevo, the inheritor of the ICTY.