The Evidence of What Cannot Be Heard: Reading Trauma into and Testimony against the Witness Stand at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Julia Viebach

doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v6i1.352

Abstract

This paper explores the silences and the gaps that cut through witness testimonies at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) by applying a trauma lens to the narratives that emerge on the witness stand and by contrasting those with a survivor testimony. It compares the recollection of a traumatic experience with the production of legal meaning. To do so, it focuses specifically on a survivor testimony shared with the author at the Rwandan Nyange memorial in 2014 where the crimes in question happened, and the ICTR The Prosecutor vs Athanase Seromba trial that relates to the events at that particular site. This paper shows that the experience of trauma not only challenges the language of law but also blurs the legal narratives and functions of tribunals like the ICTR.

Highlights

This paper contrasts the recollection of a traumatic experience with the production of legal meaning
It analyses and compares a survivor testimony that was conducted at the Rwandan Nyange memorial in 2014 and the The Prosecutor vs Athanase Seromba case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)
This paper shows that the experience of trauma challenges the language of law and blurs the legal narrative and functions of tribunals like the ICTR

Summary

Introduction

This paper contrasts the recollection of a traumatic experience with the production of legal meaning. I read the survivor testimony produced in the testimonial process against The Prosecutor vs Seromba trial (hereafter the Seromba case) and read trauma into both narrative accounts This particular methodological approach produces new knowledge on and insights into a legal phenomenon that cannot be explained by mere legal analysis and makes visible the excluded, the marginal and the invisible. Hannah Arendt has famously argued in the context of the historical Eichmann trial that ‘genocide is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon characteristics of the “human status” without which the words “mankind” or “humanity” would be devoid meaning’ (Arendt 1994: 268‐69) This is to say, writing, addressing and acting upon such crimes requires us to look beyond metropolitan readings of delinquency and criminal behaviour and to develop novel epistemological and legal tools of knowledge production and inquiry. This paper wants to promote thinking about mass violence beyond disciplinary boundaries

Functions of the ICTR and of the testimonial process

Findings

Conclusion