Rwanda and prosecutorialism

So I did largely succeed in getting done, over this past week, what I needed to do on my violence-in-Africa book. Namely, I “uploaded” back into the relevant portions of my brain the three chapters about post-genocide Rwanda that I first-drafted back in July.
(Next, the same for the three chapters on South Africa, and the two chapters on Mozambique. Then, use all that uploaded material as the basis for my concluding reflections on the post-atrocity policies in these three countries. Rather than, which I tried to do six weeks ago, writing the conclusion of the book almost out of thin intellectual-Helena air… I just feel much, much more comfortable as a thinker and writer when I keep close to my empirically-based material. Besides, one of the intentions of the book is to give voice to extraordinarily experienced and wise people in these three countries whose voices almost never get heart in the rich countries that dominate the self-styled “international community”.)
Anyway, Rwanda. What a multiply tragic place. I’ve been following Rwanda’s post-genocide “story” fairly closely since October 2000, and undertook a really productive research visit to the country in 2002, followed by another to the UN’s massive gravy train, oops sorry, the “International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda”, in Tanzania, the following year.
Most of my colleagues in the human-rights movement in the west went almost gaga with delight over the creation of the ICTR and its slightly older sister-court for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, back in the early-mid-1990s. But actually the political-social effects of both courts, within the territories they were supposed to “serve”, have been either quite disastrous (ICTR) or somewhere between quite irrelevant and moderately negative (ICTY), and nobody much in either the UN or the west-dominated “human-rights movement” seems to have given a damn.
But meanwhile many international lawyers and their staffs have been able to make out like bandits, so that must be good news, mustn’t it?
I have never for a moment doubted the good intentions of the human rights activists and others who urged the creation of these courts… I mean, “ending impunity”, “establishing accountability”, and all those other fine things are good in their own rights, aren’t they?
Oh, plus, certainly in Rwanda’s case, there were all these enormous great mushroom clouds of sheer human guilt wafting around– as in, why the heck didn’t the UN do more to actually stop the 1994 genocide?, or, more to the point, why did the Clinton administration actually work hard at the UN in 1994 to dismantle the existing UN force in Rwanda, despite its hard-won and indisputable record in saving the lives of threatened Tutsis?…. Yes, plenty of raw unprocessed guilt to go around.
And so we, instead of deploying peacekeepers we had the unseemly sight of the deployment of UN prosecutors to Rwanda. Here’s what the “righteous Hutu” genocide survivor Andre Sibomana, who saved hundreds of threatened Tutsi and Hutu lives in 1994, had to say about ICTR:

I have met some of the ICTR officials; I am amazed by their incompetence. They are very intelligent people, but completely incapable of carrying out research. They don