WASHINGTON -- Two years after more than a half-million people died in Rwanda's genocide, justice is still just a promise, prolonging the agony of witnesses and survivors in the tiny African country.
In the wake of the worst ethnic slaughter of the post-Cold War period, an international panel of judges set out to identify those responsible. But so far, none of the leaders has been brought to trial. In fact, only 10 of the scores of key suspects have been indicted and only two of them are in custody.
Moreover, as the international spotlight has shifted to other crises, investigators for the United Nations panel have encountered just about every obstacle that a cumbersome U.N. bureaucracy could erect.
"It's the forgotten tribunal," says Jennie Green of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has been monitoring the progress of the investigation.
A major break in the case occurred recently in Cameroon, where authorities arrested a dozen suspects, including a former Rwandan Defense Ministry official, Col. Theoneste Bagosora, believed by a number of experts to be a chief architect of the genocide.
But prosecutors are only now scrambling to put together an indictment against him, and the tribunal is embroiled in a dispute with Belgium, which lost 10 of its military peacekeepers in the early days of the massacres, over who should try him first.
Many additional suspects are believed to be living in freedom in Kenya and Zaire, whose governments have shown little interest in cooperating with investigators.
After long delays getting organized and hiring employees, the tribunal remains understaffed and under- equipped, according to number of diplomats and human rights workers. Many investigators are employed on a short-term basis, hampering continuity in the probe. Detention cells and courtrooms are still being renovated.
Although mass killings occurred throughout the country, the tribunal has so far concentrated on collecting evidence in just two regions: Kibuye in the west and Butare in the south.
In a region where massacres by one ethnic group against another have gone unpunished over decades, reconciliation ,X between Rwanda's minority Tutsis and majority Hutus will be impossible unless those responsible for the latest genocide are brought to justice, a number of experts say.
