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Eigh
t former Rwandan officials, including the alleged mastermind of
the 1994 genocide in which up to one million people died, are set
to appear before the UN war crimes tribunal in northern Tanzania
today.
The so-called "military trial" of former defence ministry cabinet
director Theoneste Bagosora, designated by prosecutors as the
mastermind of the genocide, and three other senior military
officers, Anatole Nsengiyumva, Aloys Ntabakuze and Gratien
Kabiligi, will resume after being halted in September because of a
lack of prosecution witnesses.
The four are accused of meticulously planning the genocide when up
to a million Rwandan Tutsis and Hutus opposed to the slaughter were
killed in 100 days of ethnically motivated massacres.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has formally
tried or accused 15 of the 20 members of the Rwandan government of
the time.
In a trial opening today, four former ministers will be in the
dock: former health minister Casimir Bizimungu, former foreign
minister Jerome Bicamumpaka, former trade minister Justin Mugenzi
and former civil service minister Prosper Mugiraneza.
They each face ten charges of conspiracy to commit genocide and
crimes against humanity.
The charge sheet says they held "authority over the militias", the
main perpetrators of the orchestrated massacres in the small
central African country.
The four former ministers "knew or had to know that massacres of
Tutsis were being carried out" but "did not act to put a stop to
these massacres or punish those responsible for them," the charges
state.
Bizimungu was arrested in Kenya on February 11, 1999, while the
three others were nabbed two months later in Cameroon.
The four men fled Rwanda when their government was hounded from the
country in July 1994 by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the former
Tutsi rebels now in power.
The trial, presided over by Judge Asoka de Zoysa Gunawardana of Sri
Lanka, will open with witness testimony.
The prosecutor intends to call 56 witnesses and five expert
witnesses to the bar.
The UN tribunal's prosecutors in the "military trial" claim that
upon the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in a plane crash,
which sparked the bloodbath in Rwanda, Bagosora assumed de facto
control of the country's political and military apparatus.
Bagosora and co-defendants Kabiligi, the former head of Rwanda's
military operations, Nsegiyumva, former commander of Gisenyi
military region, and Ntabakuze, who once headed the Kanombe
para-military commando in Kigali, have pleaded not guilty to
genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The ICTR, created by the United Nations in 1994 to try key suspects
in the genocide, has been much criticised for its slowness. It has
charged 82 people with responsibility in the genocide, but in
nearly nine years of trials pronounced only 13 sentences - 12
convictions and an acquittal. – Sapa-AFP.
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