In mid-July, the NY Times reported that the Obama administration had selected Stephen Rapp to replace Pierre Prosper, the Bush administration’s Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes. A former Iowa U.S. Attorney, and Democrat politico, Rapp began his international career at the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001, while Carla Del Ponte was Chief Prosecutor. In Del Ponte’s 2008 memoir, Madam Prosecutor: Confronting Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity, translated into English in early 2009, Del Ponte explains how she was removed from her ICTR position in 2003 by U.S. Ambassador Prosper, himself, because she refused to cooperate with a U.S.-initiated “cover-up” of war crimes committed by the current Rwandan government during the 1994 “Rwandan Genocide.”

According to Del Ponte, the ICTR Prosecutor had the evidence long before 2003 to prosecute Kagame for “touching-off” the Rwanda Genocide by ordering the assassination of Rwanda’s sitting President Juvenal Habyarimana. Her book also details dozens of massacre sites involving thousands of victims for which the Kagame government and military should be prosecuted. The well-publicized canard, that “the identity of the assassins is unknown” is a bald-faced lie, known to all ICTR senior prosecutors, according to Ms. Del Ponte.   more »