Nuns on trial for aiding and abetting genocide

Jury selection began today in a landmark trial at which four people including two Roman Catholic nuns are accused of aiding and abetting the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

As many as 170 witnesses may testify in the Brussels trial, including 50 from Rwanda who will be flown to Belgium.

The defendants: two Benedictine nuns, a university professor and an aide to a former Rwandan president will not be held in custody during the trial which is expected to last at least six weeks.

The proceedings are highly unusual.

A Belgian court asks four Rwandans to account for what they did, 3,750 miles away in April 1994, to Tutsi refugees hiding at a Roman Catholic convent and health centre near the Rwandan town of Butare.

This legal twist stems form a 1993 law empowering Belgian courts to hear cases of human rights violations, even if these were committed half a world away.

Belgium’s eagerness to stage the genocide trial stems from a sense of unease, above all about its own inability to stop the killing of at least 500,000 people, mainly minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

Last year, Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt apologised for that during a visit to Rwanda.

Courts in Rwanda have already heard several hundred cases. Twenty-two people have been sentenced to death and executed for their role in planning and carrying out the massacres.

The United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha,

Tanzania, is holding 44 suspects and has tried half a dozen cases.

All four are charged with crimes against humanity.

The accusations include that: on April 22 1994, Benedictine Sister Maria Kisito, 36, provided petrol used to set fire to a building near her convent and health centre where 500 Tutsis were hiding.

On April 22 1994, Benedictine Sister Gertrude, 42, forced hundreds of Tutsis hiding in her convent to leave knowing they were going to be killed. Some 600 died on May 5, the prosecution alleges.

National University of Rwanda Professor Vincent Ntezimana, 40, bears responsibility for the deaths of at least seven Tutsis, including a colleague and his wife, who were murdered by Hutu extremists.

Alphonse Higaniro, 52, an aide to President Juvenal Habyarimana who died in the April 6 1994 plane crash that set off the mass killings, incited Hutus to murder Tutsis and of consorting with Hutu militiamen.