Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes and a Nation's Quest for Redemption - Hardcover

Temple-Raston, Dina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743251105 ISBN 13: 9780743251105

Publisher: Free Press, 2005

Synopsis

An examination of the 1994 Rwanda genocide traces the nation's subsequent search for accountability and the war crimes trial of three prominent media executives who were found guilty of inciting the killings of more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Dina Temple-Raston is the author of A Death in Texas, which won a Barnes & Noble Discover award. Currently the City Hall Bureau Chief for the New York Sun, she lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap

"Dina Temple-Raston has writtten a beautifully crafted and deeply moving study of the Rwandan genocide and the unprecedented war crime trial of journalists that followed. Her enormously sophisticated description of that controversial trial, which raised profound and painful issues about freedom of the press, makes the book a memorable contribution to public discourse." --Floyd Abrams, Partner, Cahill Gordon & Reindel, LLP

"Justice on the Grass is an important addition to the growing literature on the worst genocide since the Holocaust. By following in beautifully etched detail the war crimes trial of three Rwandan journalists, Dina Temple-Raston has found new dimensions to the Rwandan tragedy, and raised important questions about the role of the media in such events." --Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke

"Justice on the Grass is a compelling, precisely reported account that follows three key conspirators in the Rwandan genocide as lawyers seek to hold them responsible for their actions during the 1994 genocide in East Africa. It succeeds where few other books on the Rwandan massacres have: it puts a human face actually several human faces on a series of crimes and by so doing provides new haunting depth to what had previously been a shapeless, and often nameless, horror." Marie-Pierre Poulain, counsel, Advocats Sans Frontieres

"While the story of the Rwandan genocide as it happened has been told in black and white, the story of its aftermath requires a more subtle intelligence, and Temple-Raston identifies and exposes all the moral ambiguity of the current situation. Her characters are by turns vivid, engaging, and frightening, her narrative moving, strange, and sometimes wonderfully humorous. In telling the story of the notorious media trial, she shows us what it means for a small country and the world to grapple with the unspeakable, delineating the unlikely heroism of those who achieve dignity in the face of tragedy, the palpable evil of those who would undermine humanity, and the pathos of those who belatedly aspire to grace. This is both a gripping book about fundamental values and an important historical document." -Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

Reviews

Quickly tracing the history of Rwanda and the course of the 1994 genocide there, Temple-Raston (A Death in Texas) focuses on the Hutu Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM), and the resulting trial of the men who ran it. The station was hate radio personified, urging the majority Hutus to kill the minority Tutsis, even naming people individually, as Temple-Raston vividly describes. She tracks the strong (but not slam-dunk) cases that were eventually brought against RTLM founders Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Ferdinand Nahimana, and against Hassan Ngeze, publisher of the Kangura newspaper, a hate-sheet. She captures some hauntinng scenes beyond the U.N.-run trials (which took place in Arusha, Tanzania), including chilling accounts of women who had been raped. Also, she tells the story of Damien Nzabakira, who was unjustly accused of killing orphans he tried to save and ultimately cleared of the charges without apologies or reparations for his lengthy prison stay. The book concludes gloomily despite the men's convictions; the new Rwandan constitution entrenched Tutsi power, the media contributed to a Kagame landslide and the Hutu majority, the author says, feels systematically disenfranchised. The title refers to gacaca, informal tribal courts aimed at low-cost postgenocide reconciliation. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar. 9)
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The old and colonialist-inspired animosities between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda were fanned into genocide in 1994 with the help of a radio station and a newspaper that prompted the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi. When brought to justice before a war-crimes trial reminiscent of the Nuremberg trials, three journalists were charged with crimes against humanity. Temple-Raston examines the social and political forces behind the horrific slaughter and the motivations of the journalists who urged ordinary citizens to pick up machetes and kill their neighbors. Recalling the long and troubled history of Rwanda, the author builds toward the tension of mass murders in killing fields and the war crimes in primitive courtrooms that attracted worldwide attention. Temple-Raston focuses on the journalists and their indirect victims--family members killed and maimed, and those torn apart by the conflict. She also examines the current state of Rwanda, a decade after the trial, and the forces that still foment violence and unrest in a nation that continues to grapple with notions of ethnicity and humanity. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743251105
• ISBN 13: 9780743251105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320