The Uncondemned

Led by a 31-year-old former deputy district attorney from the hardcore gang unit in Los Angeles and a 27-year-old recent graduate of Columbia Law School, the prosecution of the first genocide case in history got underway at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1997. With few supplies and ever fewer guidelines, the first international criminal trial since Nuremberg was dogged by young international activists who were pushing for first-ever charges of rape as war crime. False starts, setbacks, buried secret memos led to the third-to-last witness. And the night before she testified, the break they needed happened. But what was happening, meanwhile, with four courageous women in rural Rwanda is what would make history.