Desiré Munyaneza, a 40 year old Rwandan, is the first man to be charged and tried in Canada for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was in court this week, as an unnamed woman [to protect her identity] testified:
The woman, one of 13 witnesses brought from Rwanda to testify, took the stand March 26, the first day of the trial.
But she fainted from the trauma of recounting the horrific details of the genocide and had to be hospitalized.
Her voice was forceful on Tuesday and the interpreter told the judge the woman “was strong.”
The witness said she saw Munyaneza at a motel owned by someone named Maheng.
It was a place where women were taken and raped repeatedly by the Interahamwe, the extremist Hutu militia.
In her earlier testimony, she said she was raped by 10 men on one day. “There were about five young men there in one room,” she said. “Desire had a gun.”
As I wrote last month, the United States has recently passed the Genocide Accountability Act, which would allow US courts to try accused genocidaires for their crimes.