ARUSHA (Tanzania): Attorney Barbara Mulvaney has spent three years prosecuting the accused mastermind of the Rwanda genocide. But her most personal contact with him came only recently, when he casually testified about how he would go about assassinating someone in the courtroom, his cold stare swivelling in her direction.

Col. Theoneste Bagosora, a former military commander accused of overseeing the mass killings of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, was asked to explain how he had issued orders. To answer, he gave a detailed hypothetical illustration about dispatching a killer to infiltrate the tightly guarded war crimes tribunal here.

“If you give an order to someone, for example, to come and kill someone here in this courtroom,” Bagosora began, turning his head toward the prosecution table at the far side of the room and locking eyes with Mulvaney.

“That was chilling,” the former Playa del Rey resident remembered scribbling on a note to her co-counsel as Bagosora went on to explain how his assassination order would include specifics about the courtroom layout and position of guards.

“It freaked me out,” Mulvaney recalled with a nervous laugh.

It wasn’t the first time the former soccer mom found herself questioning how she had ended up in Arusha as lead prosecutor in the Bagosora case — a job she describes as a complete ‘fluke’ — facing down a man accused of orchestrating a massacre that killed an estimated 800,000 people in three frenzied months in 1994.

To prepare for the case, she had to endure graphic evidence about Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana’s murder. Mulvaney spent hours viewing old news footage of the piles of bodies in the roads, most hacked with machetes in a genocidal rampage that turned neighbour against neighbour.

While deposing one teenage boy about the slaying of his parents, Mulvaney broke down and had to pass the interview to a colleague.

“He was the same age as my child,” she said. “It gets to you after a while. Finally I decided I was driving myself crazy. I had to get cable TV so I could go home at night and just watch the Hallmark Channel.”

By the end of Bagosora’s testimony in November, Mulvaney could no longer stand to look directly at the former military commander, instead watching his testimony via a video monitor at her table. She discovered that touching the screen caused the video image to distort.

“When it got really bad, I kept poking it until his face would disappear,” she said.

Her experience at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has not only consumed her professional life and tested her ability to survive as an American woman in a male-dominated, multinational workplace, it also has shaken her long-standing notions about justice and humanity.

“This is a process that makes you question the underpinning of everything you thought was correct,” she said. “It’s going to take awhile to digest this.”

Her road to Arusha was an unlikely one. Mulvaney grew up on the beaches of Playa del Rey until LAX swallowed her neighbourhood, and the family — much to her disappointment — moved inland to San Bernar-dino.

“It was a crushing blow,” she joked.

By 2001, Mulvaney had settled into private practice in New Mexico, raising three children between stints with the Los Angeles district attorney, Miami-Dade state attorney’s office and New Mexico attorney-general. She says the family’s life centred on her husband’s job, while she carted the kids to after-school events and pursued her own legal career.

After the September 11 attacks, Mulvaney toyed with the idea of joining the FBI and CIA. Then while surfing the internet one night, she stumbled across a job posting by the Rwanda tribunal. Though she’d always had an interest in international law, she had no experience in war crimes, having spent most of her career on zoning disputes, cocaine trafficking, prostitution and homicide.

To her shock, she got the job.

“The whole thing was such a fluke,” she said.

Her days are spent in a drab conference centre in Arusha, a sleepy tourist town best known as a way station for travellers going to climb nearby Mt. Kilimanjaro or making a safari to the Serengeti.

Launched in 1995, it’s the most ambitious war crimes tribunal ever convened, including several dozen cases, nearly 1,000 employees from 80 nations and a budget of more than $1.5 billion. Among the 73 detainees are government ministers, military leaders, priests, students, businessmen and journalists.

The 1994 genocide was triggered by the April 6 death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane was shot down as it approached Kigali, the Rwandan capital. In the chaos over who was responsible for the assassination, long-simmering animosities between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis exploded.

Hutus were oppressed during Rwanda’s long colonization by the Belgians, who believed Tutsis were racially superior. After independence, Hutus took power — and revenge — and a Tutsi rebel army began to form.

Each side blamed the other for the president’s death. In a spasm of violence that prosecutors allege was long planned, Hutus launched a massive attack on Tutsi civilians.

Many of the killings were carried out by ordinary Hutus armed only with machetes. Teachers killed students. Priests betrayed parishioners. Neighbours turned against one another.

To date, the tribunal — expected to continue until 2010 — has convicted 23 people, although critics have questioned its costs and delays.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service