View Video | Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal

Justine Ndongo-Keller
speaks on ...

communal wrongdoing [KIN]

Transcript

0:00

What we’ve been doing here will change anybody’s way of thinking, you know. Any – th-, there’s a, there's a, you, you leave this place and you’re different because of the kind of thing you’ve seen, the kind of things you’ve heard. And it makes you reflect, you know, on, on, on the capacity of a human being to do wrong, to, to, to – how would I put it?

0:37

To, to, to be wicked, to, to – I will say in French la capacite de faire du mal, la capacite, a human being versus another human being, the kind of thing that one can do to the other. It’s just unbelievable. So you, you start asking yourself if you were put in that situation, what would you do? Ho-, how do you behave in, in such a situation because you hear horrendous, horrendous, terrible things that you, you just . . .

1:14

I, y-, I was talking to colleagues from the ICTY in, in The Hague and they were just telling the same story. That, “Justine, you hear things here, then you leave. You, you take your car, you’re driving or you’re like okay, maybe the witness was adding, you know, he was making up a story. It can’t be true. But then the next day somebody else comes and tells you exactly the same story.”

1:38

And you’re like, if this group could have done this, how do you know the other one will not do it? Even yourself sitting here, if you had the opportunity, you know, of – and then, you know there’s a, there's a – you, you alone, you may not be able to do something but when there are ten, six, 20, 100, 1,000 people, you know, ready to kill, what do you do if you are amongst them?