'Bloody sisters' embraced genocide, says lawyer

Two nuns sat impassively in the dock today as a lawyer told how they had enthusiastically ‘‘embraced’’ genocide when it swept across Rwanda to the gates of the convent where up to 7,000 terrified people were seeking refuge.

Sister Gertrude and Sister Maria Kisito are charged in Brussels with voluntary homicide.

They are accused of aiding and abetting a militia mob that butchered and burned to death the Tutsis hiding in the convent grounds at Sovu among the green hills of southern Rwanda.

Sitting alongside them and facing similar charges in this groundbreaking trial are university professor Vincent Ntezimana and politician-turned-businessman Alphonse Higaniro, alleged Hutu extremists who helped plan and carry out massacres of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority.

The trial entered its eighth week today and neared its end as lawyers wrapped up their arguments in a case that is making legal history.

The jury, expected to retire after the judge’s closing comments tomorrow, is the first made up of ordinary citizens called upon to judge war crimes committed in a foreign land. .

Human rights campaigners hope the trial will become a model for future prosecutions under national laws that recognise the universal nature of such crimes.

Today, lawyers representing the families of genocide victims attacked claims of the defence team who had dismissed the testimony of massacre survivors and alleged a conspiracy against their clients.

‘‘I’ve never heard such a defence system. Everybody is lying except the sainted defendants,’’ said Frederic Clement de Clety, a lawyer representing a Rwandan widows’ association.

‘‘These nuns did not slide into the genocide, they embraced it.’’

In an impassioned address Clement de Clety told how the ‘‘bloody sisters’’ had worked with Emmanual Rakeraho, a confessed leader of the militia that carried out the massacre at Sovu who is now in a Rwandan jail facing the death penalty.

Rwandan women in the packed public gallery quietly sobbed as the lawyer in his black robes told of the convent compound scattered with bodies hacked to death and of haunted dreams of women who lost their children in the country’s slaughter.

The prosecution claims Sister Gertrude, 42, the mother superior at Sovu, pleaded with authorities to clear out Tutsi refugees, knowing they were being sent to their deaths. Sister Maria Kisito, 36, is accused of supplying petrol to a mob that burned the convent’s garage, where some 600 Tutsis were sheltering.

The four defendants fled to Belgium after Tutsi rebels took control in Rwanda and ended 13 weeks of mass murder estimated to have killed between 500,000 to a million Tutsis and moderates from the country’s Hutu majority.

They were brought to trial under a 1993 law that authorises Belgian courts to try alleged violations of the Geneva Convention on war crimes.