Four stand trial for genocide

FOUR former Rwandan ministers went on trial yesterday charged with playing key roles in the 1994 genocide, including buying weapons and inciting the slaughter of about 800,000 people, a court spokesman said.

The UN tribunal in the northern Tanzanian city of Arusha is keen to show progress in trying former top officials to counter Rwandan government criticism that it has been slow to bring the masterminds of the massacres to justice.

“The prosecutor will show that from April 9, 1994, wherever the ministers went on their campaigns, they were soon followed by blood-letting and displacement of Tutsi population,” said prosecution lawyer Paul Ng’Arua, referring to chief prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow.

“They blazed throughout Rwanda a path which the prosecutor describes as the path of hell.

“They took affirmative actions to encourage the killings, as well as to conceal, mischaracterise or rationalise the killings of Tutsis.”

The four accused were dressed in dark suits and sat listening to the proceedings through translators’ headphones. Video footage was shown of the accused being sworn in as interim ministers in 1994, interspersed with grisly images of mass slaughter, piles of corpses and machete-wielding militias.

The ministers belonged to an interim government that took power in April 1994 after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down just before the massacres began.

Three months later they were ousted by Tutsi-led rebels, but by then government-sponsored Hutu militants had killed an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Among the defendants is former Health Minister Casimir Bizimungu, a 52-year-old former doctor who studied medicine in the United States.

He is accused of travelling overseas to buy weapons for the militias with government funds, and of doing nothing to stop massacres of Tutsi patients and staff at hospitals and a nursing school under his control.

He was arrested in Kenya in February 1999 and denies charges of genocide, incitement to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Due to appear with him are former trade and industries minister Justin Mugenzi, former minister of foreign affairs and cooperation Jerome Bicamumpaka and former minister for civil service Prosper Mugiraneza. They also deny the charges. Prosecutors have said that as early as April 9, two days after the massacres began, Mugenzi, a 54-year-old former businessman, openly expressed his satisfaction that many Tutsis had already been killed.