UN Secretary-General Mr Kofi Annan denied today that Rwandan pressure played a role in his decision to replace Ms Carla Del Ponte as chief prosecutor for the UN tribunal pursuing genocide in Rwanda.
"There has been no politicking, and if there has been, it has not been at my level, and there has been no pressure," Mr Annan told a news conference at UN headquarters.
Mr Annan formally asked the UN Security Council yesterday to let him replace Ms Del Ponte as chief prosecutor for the UN court set up in Arusha, Tanzania, to try those suspected of being responsible for the genocide of as many as 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis.
At the same time, he said Ms Del Ponte should remain chief prosecutor for the other UN tribunal, trying those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. She is top prosecutor for both courts under a four-year term that ends in mid-September. Although the main perpetrators of the 1994 massacre were Hutus, Rwanda's predominantly Tutsi government had pushed hard to remove her from the job.
Rwandan officials accused her of meting out "second-class justice" to Rwandans by running the court inefficiently and spending most of her time in The Hague, where the tribunal pursuing war crimes in the Balkans is based.
But Ms Del Ponte argued the Rwandan government was trying to drive her out because she had proposed investigating possible involvement of the Tutsi-led Rwandan army in reprisal killings of as many as 30,000 people.
Mr Annan said it was time to split up the chief prosecutor job so its duties could be divided among two people as the tribunals prepared to wrap up their work.