Introduction

“We are happy you came to meet us. The world calls us devils, but we are only refugees who want to return to our homes. You must tell the world the truth that we are not devils.” So ended my interview with a commander in the Forces démocratiques du libération du Rwanda (hereinafter FDLR), an armed group active under various guises in the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since the mid-1990s. I had interviewed this commander and other members of the FDLR for a research project examining the impact of International Criminal Court (hereinafter ICC) prosecutions on atrocities in the DRC. The ICC opened an investigation in the DRC in 2004, and the FDLR presented a useful case study for this project because the Court later issued arrest warrants for two senior FDLR leaders. Callixte Mbarushimana, a high-ranking political cadre, was apprehended in Paris in 2010, but later released after the case against him was dismissed, and Sylvestre Mudacumura, the FDLR's supreme military leader, remains at large at the time of writing. The warrants against these leaders pertained to war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attacks against civilian populations, murder, mutilation, rape, torture, inhuman treatment and pillaging, inter alia, allegedly perpetrated by the FDLR from 2009–10 in North and South Kivu provinces of the DRC (ICC, 2010, 2012). The FDLR, however, was implicated in systematic, widespread atrocities in the DRC both before and after the period covered by the ICC arrest warrants (Human Rights Watch, 2009), and the organisation originated from the Hutu extremist groups that perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide (International Crisis Group, 2005).

My interviews with FDLR members were organised around a series of questions concerning their knowledge and perceptions of the ICC, and I customarily concluded interviews by asking participants if there was anything they wished to add that was relevant to the ICC. It was in response to this question that the aforementioned commander asked me to tell the FDLR's story to the world.