Arusha is quite the dirty, dusty town. There are lots of Land Rovers heading out on safari, lots of touts pushing both said safaris and local tours and there are also lots and lots of lawyers working at the ICTR. Our contact here, a prosecutor at the tribunal, took us to a restaurant the night we arrived where we ran into a bevy of Quebecois litigators, all of whom are either here working (many for the defence) or are law students doing a stage.
Walking around Arusha, one is contantly being hassled by people asking you to buy things or to go on a safari, etc. We discovered the magic bullet, though: if you tell them that you're in town for the court, they look at you funny and you can see them searching for something to say... and by that time, you've walked on and left them behind. It's like the Jedi mind trick!
Of course, we REALLY WERE here to see the court so we headed up to the convention centre where it is located, cleared security and then made our way to one of the courtrooms. The trial we found in session was interesting: a former Rwandan army captain was in the dock defending himself from charges of failing to seop the massacre of Belgian sodiers. We were able to sit in the public/media gallery, which was located behind the witness stand and separated from the court proper by bullet-proof glass. We had to surrender mobiles, cameras, etc. at the door and pick up some headphones with which to hear the proceedings. Since things were happening in both English and French, most people in the court were wearing them and sometimes there would be a lag between questions and answers as the different parties waited for the interpreter to finish.
The captain kind of looked like Donovan McNabb and had a deep voice that rumbled as he went over the minutiae of what he had done on the day/night in question. He was rather hostile to the prosecutor (who wasn't the best) and tried to point out what his duties as a simple captain were... At the end of his testimony, though, he offered his thanks to the court and pointed out that those who were really responsible for the genocide were not the ones who were on trial...
It will be very interesting to follow what happens...
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