Jury begins deliberations in Rwanda genocide trial

A Belgian jury was today beginning its deliberations on four Rwandans - two men and two nuns - accused of war crimes in the central African homeland.

In the Brussels dock are two Benedictine nuns, a university professor and a factory manager all charged with murder during the 1994 slaughter of up to a million of Rwanda’s minority Tutsi ethnic group and moderates among the Hutu majority.

The trial which entered its eighth week yesterday, is the first under a 1993 Belgian law that gives the country’s courts universal jurisdiction over violations of the Geneva Convention on war crimes.

Whatever the verdict, human rights activists hope the trial will set a precedent for more cases in Belgium and other countries where those accused of atrocities seek refuge.

‘‘This trial is very important for Rwanda,’’ said Gasana Ndobe, a Rwandan human rights campaigner who helped compile evidence on the four accused.

‘‘Other countries must follow the lead, this must not become just a Belgian speciality,’’ he said, naming France, Switzerland, Germany, Britain and the United States as nations where Rwandan war crimes suspects have fled.

Presiding judge Luc Maes is due to issue instructions to the jury when the trial resumes today and issue jurors with 39 questions on the guilt of the four defendants in a series of killings.

Lawyers said they expected the jury to deliver its verdict today or tomorrow. If convicted, the four face life sentences, which in Belgium usually means 20 years.

The charges against the two nuns - Sister Gertrude and Sister Maria Kisito - stem from attacks by militia mobs in April and May 1994 on their convent at Sovu in which up to 7,000 Tutsis are believed to have perished.

The prosecution claims the two Hutu nuns encouraged and collaborated with the killers, even supplying them with the petrol used to burn a garage where some 500 people were hiding.

Defence lawyers claim witnesses invented their stories and insist the nuns were innocent bystanders powerless to halt the slaughter.

‘‘I wanted to save my community. Perhaps that was not what I should have done, but I never wanted the massacres,’’ said Sister Gertrude, the former mother superior at Sovu, in a final appeal to the jury yesterday.

The two men, Vincent Ntezimana, a professor from Rwanda’s Butare university, and Alphonse Higaniro, a one-time government minister who ran a local match factory, also deny the charges.

They are accused of being Hutu extremists who virulently opposed proposals to share power with Tutsi rebels and responded by helping plan and carry out the genocide in their southern region.

The four fled to Belgium - Rwanda’s former colonial ruler - after the rebels took control of the country and put an end to the killings of Tutsis.