A Fake Inquiry on a Major Event. Analysis of the Mutsinzi report on the 6th April 1994 attack on the Rwandan President’s aeroplane

The report of the Mutsinzi commission attempts to show that President Habyarimana's airplane was not downed by the RPF, as the French investigating judge Bruguière concluded but by Hutu radicals who were close to the main victim of the attack. The report raises a number of serious questions. The Mutsinzi committee claims to be impartial, but all the commissioners are members of the RPF, which means that it is both judge and party. This is made abundantly clear from the beginning of the report and is subsequently confirmed throughout the body of the report, which treats as solid evidence testimonies showing the complicity of Hutu extremists, but systematically disregards the evidence pointing towards the RPF. While the committee claims to have interviewed hundreds of witnesses, the validity of their testimonies must be considered with caution. Of those identified, many are members of the former government army FAR; all of them were interviewed while convicted or detained, or fearing arrest, in full awareness of what those in power expected them to say, and of the price to be paid if they did not. Their testimonies are thus of doubtful quality. The committee uses certain documents, for instance from Belgian judicial files, in a selective and sometimes dishonest way. Numerous examples in the report show that the method used by the committee raises serious doubts. The committee generally proceeds by first presenting unsubstantiated hypotheses or even downright untruths as facts; the accumulation of these “facts” is then used to establish the “truth”. The conclusion the committee reaches is not credibly based on the information emanating from the enquiry, and the fraudulent way in which the report was made rather reinforces the suspicion that the RPF committed the attack. There are now two radically opposed versions of the truth as to who is responsible for the downing of the presidential plane: one is in the findings of the Bruguière inquiry, the other in the Mutsinzi report. Both point fingers at suspects, albeit different ones, and both indicate that a crime has been committed. The natural way of dealing with such findings is to conduct a contradictory debate in a court of law. However, it would seem that both Rwanda and France, in their attempt to improve relations, are intent on sacrificing justice on the altar of political expediency. The Rwandan people deserve better.

Institutional Engineering, Management of Ethnicity, and Democratic Failure in Burundi

This article argues that constitutional engineering along consociational lines in Burundi - explicitly accommodating ethnicity rather than attempting to suppress it - was instrumental in reducing the political role of ethnicity, but that other endogenous and exogenous factors also played a role. After surveying developments since 1988, this article focuses on the 2005 polls. The outcome of the parliamentary elections suggests that the "disappearance of the ethnic factor," extolled by many at the time, was achieved by constitutional constraints rather than by social or political dynamics. Nevertheless, with regard to the country's most important and lethal historical problem, the ethnic divide, constitutional engineering has proved hugely effective. Burundi's main cleavage is now between (and within) parties rather than ethnic groups, and when violence occurs it is political rather than ethnic. Burundi's current crisis is therefore not a failure of consociationalism but of democracy.Der Autor dieses Beitrags argumentiert, dass verfassungstechnische Maßnahmen in Verbindung mit konkordanzdemokratischen Regelungen - die explizit Ethnizität berücksichtigen, statt sie zu unterdrücken suchen - in Burundi dazu beigetragen haben, die politische Bedeutung ethnischer Faktoren zurückzudrängen, dass dabei aber auch andere interne und externe Faktoren eine Rolle spielten. Er gibt zunächst einen Überblick über die Entwicklung seit 1988 und konzentriert sich dann auf die Wahlen des Jahres 2005. Die Ergebnisse der Parlamentswahlen lassen darauf schließen, dass das "Verschwinden des ethnischen Faktors", das von vielen Beobachtern positiv hervorgehoben wurde, vor allem durch Restriktionen in der Verfassung und weniger durch eine gesellschaftliche oder politische Dynamik erreicht werden konnte. Nichtsdestotrotz haben sich die verfassungstechnischen Maßnahmen gegenüber dem größten und bedrohlichsten historischen Problem des Landes - der ethnischen Spaltung - als ausgesprochen effektiv erwiesen. Die wichtigsten Konfliktlinien in Burundi liegen jetzt zwischen (und innerhalb von) Parteien und nicht zwischen ethnischen Gruppen; wenn es zu gewaltsamen Auseinandersetzungen kommt, sind diese eher politisch als ethnisch begründet. Die derzeitige Krise in Burundi ist daher kein Beleg für ein Scheitern der Konkordanzregelungen, sondern für ein Scheitern der Demokratie im Land

Semicontinuous intra-abdominal pressure measurement using an intragastric Compliance catheter

OBJECTIVE: To compare intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) measurements obtained from an intragastric Compliance catheter with the pressure measured directly in the abdominal cavity. DESIGN AND SETTING: Prospective cohort study in an operating room of the Ghent University Hospital PATIENTS: Seven patients undergoing elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy. INTERVENTIONS: IAP was obtained from both an intragastric catheter and directly from the peritoneal cavity at 1-minute intervals in patients undergoing elective cholecystectomy and compared using Bland-Altman analysis. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS: In 156 paired measurements obtained from 7 patients the mean difference between IAPgastric and IAPref was 0.12+/-0.70 mmHg (95% CI 0.01-0.23). CONCLUSIONS: IAP measured using an intragastric Compliance catheter reliably reflects the reference IAP in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Anesthesia for combined liver-thoracic transplantation

The combined transplantation of a thoracic organ and the liver is performed in patients with dual-organ failure in whom survival is not expected with single-organ transplantation alone. Although uncommonly performed, the number of combined liver-lung and liver-heart transplants is increasing. Anesthetic management of this complex procedure is challenging. Major blood loss, prolonged operation time, difficult weaning of cardiopulmonary bypass and coagulation disturbances are common. Despite the complexity of surgery, the outcome is comparable to single-organ transplant

War and democracy:the legacy of conflict in East Africa

AbstractThe historical literature on statebuilding in Europe has often portrayed a positive relationship between war, state making and long-term democratisation. Similarly, a number of large-n quantitative studies have concluded that war promotes democracy – even in cases of civil war. Against this, a growing area studies literature has argued that violent conflict in developing countries is unlikely to drive either statebuilding or democratisation. However, this literature has rarely sought to systematically set out the mechanisms through which war undermines democracy. Contrasting three ‘high conflict’ cases (Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) with two ‘low conflict’ cases (Kenya and Tanzania) in East Africa, we trace the way in which domestic conflict has undermined three key elements of the democratisation process: the quality of political institutions, the degree of elite cohesion, and the nature of civil-military relations. Taken together, we suggest that the combined effect of these three mechanisms helps to explain why Kenya and Tanzania have made significantly greater progress towards democratic consolidation than their counterparts and call for more in-depth research on the long-term legacy of conflict on democratisation in the African context.</jats:p

Hepatic artery flow and cardiac output: correlation between systemic and liver hemodynamics

status: publishe