International Court Acquits Suspect in Murder of Dian Fossey

By Georgianne Nienaber

In a very sad day for Rwanda, The International Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) announced it has overturned a 20-year sentence and acquitted Protais Zigiranyirazo, accused genocidaire and suspected murderer of American primatologist Dian Fossey. Citing "serious errors" during the 2008 trial, ICTR Chamber Judge Theodore Meron ordered the immediate release of Zigiranyirazo, known as Mr. Z. This news came at the same time that international prosecutors were meeting in Kigali, Rwanda to discuss the future of international criminal justice.

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, composed of Judges Theodor Meron, presiding, Mehmet Güney, Fausto Pocar, Liu Daqun, and Carmel Agius, today reversed Protais Zigiranyirazo's convictions for genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity and entered a verdict of acquittal. It then ordered his immediate release from the United Nations Detention Facility in Arusha, Tanzania.


On 18 December 2008, Trial Chamber III found Zigiranyirazo guilty of committing genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity by participating in a joint criminal enterprise to kill Tutsis at Kesho Hill in Gisenyi Prefecture on 8 April 1994 and sentenced him to two terms of 20 years of imprisonment. He was also found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide in relation to the killing of Tutsis at a roadblock in the Kiyovu area of Kigali and sentenced to one term of 15 years of imprisonment. The Trial Chamber ordered that these sentences be served concurrently.

Image: Genocide Memorial

It appears that Zigiranyirazo got off on technicalities. Judge Meron cited misstatements of law regarding the burden of proof with respect to Zigiranyirazo's alibi, and errors in the handling of evidence as rationale for his order of acquittal. The murder of Dian Fossey never entered into the equation, since it was considered a lesser crime as compared to the murder of 800,000 in Rwanda in 1994. The evidence remains overwhelming that Zigiranyirazo instituted the roadblocks in and around the city of Gisenyi and ordered the immediate execution of anyone carrying a Tutsi ID card. One can only imagine the angst the people of the province are feeling today. The survivors are mainly young people who witnessed the execution of their parents and grandparents.

Protais Zigiranyirazo was governor of Ruhengeri Province in Rwanda when Fossey worked there. Zigiranyirazo was also the brother-in-law of the Hutu President of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death in an as yet unsolved plane crash ignited the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In a recent controversial ruling, a French tribunal also implicated the current President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, in the plane crash.

Zigiranyirazo remains a likely suspect in Fossey's murder. He was involved in illegal trading in endangered species and gold smuggling out of Congo, and there is much additional evidence in the historical record that Fossey was about to expose him when she was murdered. He was also the brother-in-law of then Rwandan president Habyarimana and member of the "Akazu", a term literally meaning "a small house," the inner circle of President Habyarimana.

Shortly before Fossey's murder on December 26, 1985, the acting chargé d' affaires of the U.S. embassy in Kigali, Helen Weinland, returned to the States for some routine medical exams that took longer than necessary. It was this turn of events that left Emerson Melaven as her temporary replacement after the Christmas holiday. In early interviews with the international media, Melaven stated that he and his colleagues were impressed by the Rwandan government's response to the murder.

Helen Weinland's memoirs of those days paint a different picture. She indicates that she followed initial events surrounding the murder with some frustration that she was not back at her post in Kigali. By the time she returned very little progress had been made in the murder investigation. Weinland states unequivocally that "...it is difficult to believe that the trial to find Dian's killer was a rigorous search for the truth."


Perhaps this turn of events will propel Rwanda to institute a rigorous investigation of Fossey's murder. It may be that the murder of one will end up to be the undoing of the man who got off on a technicality for the murder of thousands.

This news might also serve as a caveat for the United States as we wrestle with the problems of the trail of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. There is no doubt regarding the numbers of people who died on September 11, just as there is no doubt as to the carnage of 1994 in Rwanda, which has since spilled over into Congo. As Coleen Rowley indicates, there are many legal pitfalls, and if we are not careful, what we consider to be "obvious" could very well result in an acquittal.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial will undoubtedly be even more challenging for prosecutors than Moussaoui's was given the fact that Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and that none of his statements elicited as a result of torture will be admissible. The purely voluntary statements that Sheikh Mohammed made, however, before his capture, in April 2002, to Al Jazeera-London reporter Yosri Fouda may be used against him in court. Sheikh Mohammed's admissions which came almost a year before he was captured and tortured, are documented in Fouda's and Nick Fielding's book: Masterminds of Terror and they counterdict Dick Cheney's statements that waterboarding was essential to getting information from Sheikh Mohammed. (I happen to have met Al Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda once in the course of an interview in November 2004 but I didn't get much of a chance to question him about his experience.)

On the day I visited the grave of Dian Fossey, raindrops covered the surface of a marker that was written in Kinyarwandan. The raindrops looked like tears.




"You Nyiramacyibili, that loved Rwanda-you gave your life to the gorillas in Virunga. This Karisoke you created has reserved for you peace and love that cannot be threatened by a spear."

As for the ongoing conflicts in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, perhaps it is the ghost of Dian Fossey that will generate interest in a rigorous search for the truth. Perhaps outrage at the death of one will put the deaths of 3000 at the Twin Towers, 800,000 in Rwanda and six million in Congo into perspective.

Time to Kill?

Open your eyes and read the Voices from Gaza

Close your eyes...imagine these atrocities happening in your neighborhood.

Do you want to support the mass slaughter of people just like you around the world? Your tax dollars are being misused to kill innocent civilians.

Silence is the cover needed for these atrocious war crimes. Don't be an accomplice to this crime. Take a few minutes on Monday to speak out and contact your elected officials--all of them--and request that the USA STOP SUPPORTING THE MASS MURDERS OF INNOCENT CIVILIANS. This is genocide, it is madness, and these are terrorist acts against the people living in Gaza.

Family Securiy Matters - for the Bush Family That Is

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I am glad Mosquito brought up the so-called conservative (Barry Goldwater would scream) political group, Family Security Matters, in her last post. They are actually a front for the NeoCon think tank "Center for Security Policy", and it just so happens that I wrote a public diary at OpEdNews back in August regarding their "conservative" philosophy of government, based on a Paul Watson article. So I am reprinting it here for your enlightenment. If this doesn't raise alarm bells in your heads as to what these seemingly innocuous-sounding NeoCon cadres have in mind for America and the planet, then you are likely a cadaver on a slab. So read on if you are still alive and kicking:

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From my OpEdNews Public Diary of August 17, 2007:

Want to know what goes on in the minds of NeoCons behind closed doors? Want to see how their philosophy, one more akin to Nazi Totalitarianism, Statism and the Mafia all rolled into one, is totally alien to the principles upon which the American Republic was founded? Then check out this expose by Paul Joseph Watson of their not so secret desire to make Georgus Bushus Junior the Emperor of the World.

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The NeoCons had a gaffe recently. They let their collective inner brain get exposed to the public, if ever so briefly. Within this brain we see the workings of disfunctional, delusional psychotics whose rantings would normally end them up in a secure mental ward in an asylum. Instead, the lunatics have taken over the asylum, the Paranoid States of America, formerly known as the United States. Read this excerpt from Paul Watson's latest article, which can be found here:

(I don't usually insert this much from an article, but it is truly important to immediately absorb just how f**ked up in the head these cats are.)

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Neo-Cons: Make Bush Dictator Of The World


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, August 17, 2007


If you thought Stu Bykovsky's call for a new 9/11 was the lowest the Neo-Cons could sink, think again. A right-wing foundation with links to Dick Cheney has called for Bush to be made lifetime president, ruler of the world, and for Iraq to be ethnically cleansed of Arabs by means of a nuclear holocaust.

The Family Security Matters organization masquerades as an independent "think tank" yet was highly influential in President Bush's re-election in 2004 and has links to top Neo-Con ideologues.

The outfit poses as an advocacy group for a new breed of goose-stepping brownshirts - so-called "security moms," who are noted for their blind obedience to neo-conservatism as a result of believing every ounce of fearmongering that emanates from the Bush administration on the inevitability of mass casualty terror attacks.

"In late 2004, Media Matters for America discovered that the phone number listed on FSM's website actually belonged to the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a rabidly hardline foreign policy outfit run by former Reagan administration figure Frank Gaffney," reports Right Web.

The Center for Security Policy is an umbrella organization that includes the National Security Advisory Council, whose members hold senior positions within the Bush administration itself. Former and current members include Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams and the organization has also given awards to Donald Rumsfeld.

The FSM foundation itself also has ties to the Anti-Defamation League, the International Women's Forum, numerous nationwide television and print media outlets, and includes on its board of advisors Neo-Con radio host Laura Ingraham and former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey.

Representatives of FSM also routinely appear as guests on Fox News and their website is a cesspool of anti-American fervor - acting as a cheerleader for the invasion of Iran, the warrantless wiretapping program (opponents of which are labeled "traitors") and lauds the Patriot Act as "An irreplaceable tool utilized by our Secret Service to keep us safe."

In an August 3rd article, contributing editor and philosopher Philip Atkinson penned a feverish diatribe that calls for the end of democracy, for Bush to be made ruler of the world as Julius Caesar was made emperor of Rome, for Bush to be made lifetime President in the U.S., and for Iraq to be ethnically cleansed by means of nuclear genocide and re-populated with Americans.

The comments are so fundamentally sick and twisted that the reader must absorb the following passages in full to recognize the true depravity of what the Neo-Con fringe truly embrace.

After calling democracy 'the enemy of truth and justice', Atkinson openly calls for genocide and mass slaughter."The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide. Israel provides the perfect example. If the Israelis do not raze Iran, the Iranians will fulfill their boast and wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

"The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead."

He then cites Julius Caesar, the reviled dictator of the Roman Empire, as an example of how Bush should engage in rampant ethnic cleansing.

"When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies."

Atkinson then concludes by stating such actions would allow Bush to declare martial law, become permanent President of the U.S. and eventually ruler of the entire world."He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

"President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming "ex-president" Bush or he can become "President-for-Life" Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons."

The sheer abhorrence of the diatribe could lead many to think that this was some kind of attempt at black humor, a faux article written by a liberal intended as a parody to ridicule right-wingers, but it's not, it's real - this is what many of the Neo-Cons actually embrace.

To the kind of people who think like this, carrying out a 9/11 style attack is like a walk in the park.

-end of excerpt

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Again, please check out the rest of this expose at this weblink