Jean-Paul Akayesu was a small town mayor in Rwanda who became the first person to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court at the Hague for the war crime of rape in 1997. Though listed as a war crime since 1919, a rape had never been prosecuted as such until after Bill Clinton began his second term. How Akayesu found himself before the Hague is told in the powerful documentary The Uncondemned, which screens at SIFF Film Center on Wednesday night.
The first half of The Uncomdemned shows just how stacked the odds were against prosecuting Akayesu. The team of lawyers was young and inexperienced (everyone interviewed said they were in their twenties or early thirties at the time) and this was a charge that tragically hadn’t been prosecuted until that point. As the New York Times said in its review:
The details of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 are well known, particularly the killings of more than 800,000 people. Less discussed were the countless rapes that occurred. Sexual assaults were often seen as secondary to the murders, and there was little urgency from authorities to investigate them.
The second half lets four Rwandan women tell their stories. Hearing the witnesses (identified as Witnesses JJ, NN, and OO) tell about what happened to them and to hear about the indifference they expected from system is tragic. As one Rwandan woman, Godelieve Mukasarasi, pointed out, she had known and liked Akayesu before. As the film notes, no one says Akayesu took part in violence, but as mayor of the small town of Taba, he supervised killings and did nothing to stop sexual violence from Hutus towards Tutsis.
The story itself makes for a good subject for a documentary. There is a lot of courtroom drama here (for example, when lead prosecutor Pierre Prosper tried – successfully – to amend the indictment against Akayesu to include sexual assault, Prosper’s cross-examination of Akayesu). I think director Michele Mitchell’s background in television news likely prepared her for telling this story and crafting a narrative almost exclusively around interviews with participants. There’s a lot of legal information necessary for learning this story, but it never really loses momentum with the legalese. Instead, I found the story of how the team was put together and how the system had to be built from the ground floor to be very compelling. (Co-director Nick Louvel died in a car accident just before the film made its premiere in late 2015.)
Patricia Sellers, a legal advisor for gender for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, says towards the end of the film that the prosecution of Akayesu should be as well-known as Brown v. Board of Education, and that was where I started to see the film as hopeful. For all the frustration that comes with this not being a crime that had been prosecuted sooner and the first prosecution to be done with a green team of lawyers in a system that wasn’t equipped for such a charge, I found it hopeful because it put in a system to help victims of Boko Haram, ISIS, and too many other war criminals in the world.
I hope The Uncondemned finds a larger audience because this is a documentary that I think a lot of people will respond to favorably. It tells the stories of a bunch of extraordinary people that together changed the world.
{The Uncondemned screens at SIFF Film Center on Wednesday, January 11 at 6pm. Director Michele Mitchell scheduled to attend. Tickets and more info are available here.}
