The sentencing of the mastermind of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Theoneste Bagosora, was hailed on Thursday as the most significant by an international court since Nuremberg. The prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said that the five-year trial put to rest claims by those who continue to deny that a genocide took place or that it was planned.

The case that Bagosora personally ordered the murder of Rwanda’s prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers, and then unleashed the genocide against the Tutsi minority was, the prosecutors claim, as important for the fact that it established an incontrovertible body of evidence for the planning and organisation of a genocide as it was for establishing its agent. This is an undoubted achievement, as is the fact that the international tribunal has now netted most of the top people involved in the genocide.

There are, however, many qualifications. It has taken a long time to reach this point – 14 years after 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days. Both the time it has taken and the physical distance of the proceedings in Arusha, Tanzania, have diminished their impact on Rwanda. The idea that the tribunal would broadcast a strong message to all those who want to repeat such acts has also weakened with time. It is plainly not the case that the threat of international justice deters the premeditated use of massacre, rape and child soldiers as standard weapons of warfare. The Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda has used all these tactics in eastern Congo, and the fact that he is fighting an enemy as vicious as the Hutu militias of the FDLR does not excuse him. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, denies backing the rebel leader.

But whether or not the UN panel of experts has the evidence to back up its claims that both Kigali and Kinshasa are waging a proxy war with Hutu and Tutsi militias in eastern Congo, it is clear that Rwanda has lost much of the moral authority it gained after the genocide.

The cumulative weight of evidence of Rwanda’s actions in eastern Congo speaks loudly against it – from its invasion in 1996 to clear out the refugee camps that had become a base for the defeated Hutu forces to attack Rwanda, to the lengthy war two years later, to Nkunda’s murderous campaign around Goma. Rwanda’s involvement has never wavered. No single atrocity by either the Hutu exiles in the FDLR or Nkunda’s rebel force, the CNDP, has been on the scale of the genocide. But up to five times as many may have died.

International justice has not only become a two-edged sword for Rwanda, but it has also become highly politicised. A top aide to Mr Kagame has agreed to stand trial under French anti-terrorist laws on charges based on the testimony of Bagosora. The French prosecutor is still trying to prove the Hutu case that the Tutsis brought the genocide on themselves.

If it is right to say that most of Africa’s brutal wars have ended with deals that have incorporated warring factions through amnesties and the conciliatory processes of traditional justice, it could be that the prosecution of international indictments hinders rather than helps conflict resolution.

This is the claim that President Yoweri Museveni has made over his attempts to talk the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony out of the bush, even though the Ugandan president first called in the international criminal court to investigate. Supporters of the ICC argue that the threat of arrest brought Kony to negotiations, and accuse Mr Museveni of using international justice as a bargaining tool. The compromise solution for Uganda could be the establishment of local courts which meet the requirements of the ICC. But in 14 years, the search for international justice in Africa has strayed far from the “never again” principle, and into the murkier waters of deals and fixes.—Dawn/Guardian News Service