Do you work or live in a country in which the World Bank is active? Do you have any dealings with the World Bank? If so, take 10 minutes to speak out and share your views by joining the global survey on World Bank-Civil Society Engagement. The questionnaire was prepared and is being circulated by CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, the Secretariat for the World Bank-Civil Society Joint Facilitation Committee (JFC).

Though quite a number of nations have ratified international human rights instruments, women’s rights are still violated on a day to day basis given the patriarchal set up of society. Through the International Feminist Network, Isis-Women's International Cross Cultural Exchange (WICCE) receives a number of calls for action from women and human rights activists worldwide. So please support the women whose lives are in danger.

The Kenyan government plans to continue to lobby the U.S. government to try to gain additional money for its donor-funded antiretroviral drug distribution program, the Financial Times reports. Kenyan Health Minister Charity Ngilu in February said that the government hopes to provide free antiretroviral drugs to 140,000 HIV-positive individuals by 2005. She also said that the government has adopted the World Health Organisation's 3 by 5 Initiative to combat HIV/AIDS.

Four U.N. human rights experts have begun an emergency 10-day mission in Sudan to investigate claims by a senior U.N. official of "ethnic cleansing" in the western Darfur region, Reuters reports. The team, led by Bacre Waly Ndiaye, director of the U.N. human rights office in New York, will interview refugees from Darfur in Chad before going to Sudan to investigate what the United Nations has called one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters. According to relief agencies, tens of thousands of refugees - mainly black Muslims from Darfur - have fled to eastern Chad over the past few months to escape attacks from Arab militias and Sudanese government troops.

The events of ten years ago found me in Paris, in the office of the African National Congress (ANC), trying to continue to hope after the assassination of Chris Hani, and in Rwanda Felicien Gatabazi. But the news of Habyarimana’s death while the Arusha Peace Accords needed to become a reality was a sign that peace was not for that time.

Today exactly 10 years day after day, the tensions and the questions are still there, and their locations are multiplied. Let me share with you some of the questions that have been my companions since 1995, when I started to look more systematically into the responses to violence in post-genocide Rwanda. Let me say how I learnt about the universality of differences when it comes to expect justice and reconciliation. Why justice and reconciliation?

I have asked similar questions to thousands of people across Rwanda. As I kept on asking questions, I become aware that I can say less about the universality of their expectations, instead I must pay particular attention to their particular experience. I have learned that the answers to the many questions I have raised are far from being straightforward, including within the boundaries of the same “identity group”.

For some, justice was the ability to move on with their lives with amnesia; for others justice was testifying at a trial against the ones who raped, murdered or tortured them or their families. For some, justice is fulfilled with reparation; and for others justice is the possibility to burry their beloved ones in dignity.

Reconciliation too was so fluid a word though for most it equates to living side by side in the same community; for many it is forgiving without conditions in the name of God; some seemed convinced that given a chance they could rebuild tomorrow together while some think it can no longer be the same.

For others it is the prospect to live and raise their children in a country guaranteeing genuine security for all. The ideal of reconciliation is inextricably bound up with yesterday and the promises of tomorrow. Finally, the framing of justice and reconciliation without asking for whom, by whom, with whom and for what purpose leaves little room for other conceptions of what will allow Rwanda to acknowledge all voices and find a common pathway.

I have tried to understand what actually the legal apparatus would achieve in this context. I spent years listening to the stories of women that have experienced sexual violence during the conflict, by meeting them in their gatherings or their homes. My intention was then to look at the ways to voice their particular experiences and needs at the UN international tribunal, based in Arusha, and to monitor the considerations given to them by the tribunal.

The more I listened to their stories, the more I tried to make sense of what, beyond the “violation of their human right” in them was affected, and how far a judicial process could actually address it. I thought that knowledge could be a balm and foundation for a future Rwanda and went to the university to share my questions with the men and women of varied experiences.
Attending the public testimonies of prisoners who plead guilty helped make sense of the process and mechanisms that allowed popular violence to happen, but brought me another infinite set of questions. The sessions I had with prisoners helped me understand their experiences, their hopes and also their worries. What could justice and reconciliation possibly mean in this context?

After 10 years of being a careful student what have I learnt?

I am still at pain to tell in which ways to respond to the consequences of violence that has had such a high level of active participation in Rwanda and how individuals and groups forming Rwanda today look at these strategies aimed at assisting them rebuilding their lives and community.

It is probably not fruitful to view processes of justice and reconciliation as isolated a-historic phenomenon existing outside the realm of politics and every day life. But what have been the contribution of mechanisms such as fictionalized reconstructions of history; reinforcement of an in-group and out-group identity, legitimization and institutionalization of violence? Responding to the consequences of violence include an understanding of the interactions that occur on a daily basis among people whose sense of trust has been destroyed and those fearing reprisal for their deeds.

Another critical component of responses to violence is the recognition that these interactions occur on multiple levels of society but also are affected by time.

Dear sisters, dear brothers, dear friends. I know I have already taken so much of your time and patience, however I will ask for a last favour: have a second tomorrow to think about the women and men of Rwanda. In the name of peace, and love always.

As Malawi's general elections draw closer, deepening national poverty is haunting efforts by the ruling United Democratic Front to remain in power. In March, a United Nations Development Programme study on governance in Malawi revealed that poverty in the country had worsened during the past decade of multi-party politics - compared to the situation under former dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

A British-born judge brought in specially to try corruption cases has imposed stiff bail on two electoral officials accused of embezzling public funds in a high profile case being heard during the run-up to Sierra Leone’s local government elections. At a court hearing on Monday, Justice Robert Schuster set bail of 128 million leones (US$43,000) for Joseph Aruna and Francis Hindowa, two former electoral commissioners in Sierra Leone’s Eastern Region, for misappropriating more than $1,000 of public funds each.

Parents the world over usually find it difficult to talk to their children about sex, even if they are growing up in a country like Botswana, with one of the highest HIV rates on the planet. Embarrassment over discussing matters related to sex and the stigma surrounding those that are HIV-positive is helping to drive the pandemic. It is a challenge the Botswana government hopes to overcome, and this week opened the latest voluntary HIV testing facility in Molepolole, about 50 km outside the capital, Gaborone.

Two of the world's most powerful medical organisations have been accused of medical malpractice for knowingly promoting useless drugs that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. The World Health Organisation and the UN Global Fund, which was set up to buy drugs for poor countries, have allocated millions of dollars to malaria medicines that are no longer effective against the disease, a group of specialists said. They claim negligence by the two organisations contributed to a rising death rate from malaria, which has doubled in a decade in some parts of Africa because of growing resistance to older drugs.

The World Health Organisation will provide financial support to the Kenya Government's proposed national health insurance scheme to ensure its success. Outgoing WHO Africa Regional Director, Dr Ebrahim Malick said the Government had in the last one year put in place health sector policies that had attracted donor support.

A report funded by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has recommended the extension of universal education to O'Level to minimise the rate of school dropout and child labour. The research was conducted by the Makerere University Social Sciences Department and the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development.

Public university dons could call a fresh strike if the Government refuses to renegotiate their salary terms. A national delegates conference at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Juja, told the lecturers' union to push for higher salaries than those published in a recent Memorandum of Agreement. The University Academic Staff Union members want the new package effected immediately and backdated to last July. If this is not done, they threatened to convene a meeting to discuss possible industrial action.

The National Coalition of Social Services (Nacoss) has called on the government to increase funding for organisations offering welfare services. Nacoss, a body representing more than 3 000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), says welfare organisations have been neglected for many years. Solly Mokgata, the Nacoss chairperson, told a media briefing in Johannesburg that while the organisation offers services to more than 11 million people, government contributes only less than 30% towards the cost of these services.

A former Edgemead High School pupil, her mother and her boyfriend, who were involved in a racist attack on a black pupil last year, on Wednesday apologised for their "hurtful" behaviour and agreed to an Equality Court settlement order that they pay R10 000 to a Khayelitsha charity as a gesture of goodwill. The respondents, who may not be named, made an "unconditional apology" as part of the settlement to a black pupil at the school and her parents for the incident at the school on November 6 last year, which prompted political demonstrations and widespread public outrage.

Some 300 fighters of the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), apparently angered by delays to a disarmament programme that carries incentives for them, robbed people in the centre of the country at the weekend, a radio correspondent said Wednesday. The correspondent in central Liberia for Roman Catholic Radio Veritas cited victims as saying the LURD fighters beat up traders and commuters and fired indiscriminately in the air to scare them into handing over their money and personal effects.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, most of Africa was battling with the destabilising and debilitating forces of colonialism, neo-colonialism (imperialism), apartheid, the Cold War and political authoritarianism. With the disappearance of these centrifugal forces, except neo-colonialism and political authoritarianism, several African states have started to recover their souls and move towards normality. But despite the hopes and dreams brought by the end of the Cold War and apartheid in Africa, the new era could as well be described as tumultuous times on the continent. Capturing this development that seems like taking one step forward and two steps back are the enduring dilemma of political, social, and economic crises in many African countries today.

On the eve of 10th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, educational software company 23YYZee launched their website. Their new Interactive Documentary Pax Warrior begins pilot programs in schools in May. The web-based multimedia narrative combines text, images, and sound to tell the story of the United Nation’s intervention in one of the worst atrocities of the late 20th century. The immersive narrative briefs students with the information that would have been available to Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who oversaw the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda. The software also provides access to archival news documents and primary sources, along with original background articles.

As the 10th commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda approaches, African Rights has written to his Holiness Pope John Paul II to urge him to act in support of his sentiment that this tragedy “never be repeated again”, proposing that the Catholic Church mark the occasion by launching a study of institutional failings in relation to the genocide. Click on the link below for the full letter.

Wednesday, 7 April, was declared by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly as the International Day of Reflection to commemorate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. As such, the University for Peace joined with the Permanent Mission of Rwanda in Geneva to commemorate the genocide by co-hosting two events. The first was a silent remembrance march through Geneva entitled "La Marche du Souvenir". Immediately following the march there was a commemorative evening at the International Conference Centre of Geneva (CICG) In the continuing commemorative events, the University for Peace and the Permanent Mission of Rwanda will also be hosting a Public Dialogue on the 23rd of April.

The ForeignAID.com Donor Directory is now online and features over 500 international grantmakers in the U.S., Europe and abroad. The ForeignAID.com Donor Directory Online is used by high-impact nonprofits in the U.S., Europe and in developing countries to identify corporations, foundations, and other grantmakers that are committed to making social investments in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Central and Eastern Europe.

'Community Informatics' is an e-newsletter packed with information for parties interested in community ICTs. Every month, we take you through ICT news, important ICT announcements and the latest information added to the CINSA portal (www.cinsa.info). This includes research, advocacy articles and resources.

Those of us who are preoccupied, even obsessed, with commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide are often taken aback when we’re asked what all the fuss is about. After all, just today I received from the Holocaust Centre of Toronto an invitation to join in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Not the entire Holocaust, just the terrible Hungarian chapter. Yet memorializing the genocide in Rwanda is never taken for granted in the same way.

Isn’t it already ancient history? Aren’t there all kinds of human catastrophes that no one much bothers with? Didn’t it take place in faraway Africa, in an obscure country few people could find on a map. Wasn’t it just another case of Africans killing Africans? What does it have to do with us, anyway?

These questions deserve answers, not least because some are entirely legitimate. Above all, it is fundamentally true that there would have been no genocide had some Rwandans not decided for their own selfish reasons to exterminate many other Rwandans. But once this truth is acknowledged, a powerful case for remembering Rwanda remains, and needs to be made.

The responsibility to remember:

First, Rwanda was not just another ugly event in human history. Virtually all students of the subject agree that what happened over 100 days from April to July 1994 constituted one of the purest manifestations of genocide in our time, meeting all the criteria set down in the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Genocide experts debate whether Cambodia or Srebrenica or Burundi were “authentic” genocides; like the Holocaust and (except for the Turkish government and its apologists) the Armenian genocide of 1915, no one disagrees about Rwanda. And since genocide is universally seen as the crime of crimes, an attack not just on the actual victims but on all humanity, by definition it needs to be remembered and memorialized.

Second, it wasn’t just another case of Africans killing Africans, or, as some clueless reporters enjoyed writing, of Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu (or Hutsi and Tutu, for all they knew or cared). The Rwandan genocide was a deliberate conspiratorial operation planned, organized and executed by a small, sophisticated, highly organized group of greedy Hutu extremists who believed their self-interest would be enhanced if every one of Rwanda’s 1 million Tutsi were annihilated. They came frighteningly close to total success.

Third, the west has played a central role in Rwanda over the past century. Just as no person is an island and there’s no such thing as a self-made man, so every nation is the synthesis of internal and external influences. This is particularly true of nations that have been colonies, where imperial forces have played a defining role. To its everlasting misfortune, Rwanda is the quintessential example of this reality. The central dynamic of Rwandan history for the past 80 years, the characteristic that allowed the genocide to be carried out, was the bitter division between Hutu and Tutsi. Yet this division was largely an artifact created by the Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonizers.

Instead of trying to unite all the people they found in Rwanda 100 years ago, Catholic missionaries invented an entire phony pedigree that irreconcilably divided Rwandans into superior Tutsi and inferior Hutu. When the Belgians were given control of the country following World War 1, this contrived hierarchy served their interests well, and they proceeded to institutionalize what amounted to a racist ideology. At independence in the early 1960s, this pyramid was turned on its head, and for the next 40 years Rwanda was run as a racist Hutu dictatorship. None of this would have happened without the Church and the Belgians.

The Culprits:

Last, but hardly least, the 1994 genocide could have been prevented in whole or in part by some of the same external forces that shaped the country’s tragic destiny. But without exception, every outside agency with the capacity to intervene failed to do so. My own list of culprits, in order of responsibility, is as follows:

-the government of France
-the Roman Catholic Church
-the government of the United States
-the government of Belgium
-the government of Britain
-the UN Secretariat.

I name the French and the Church first since they both had the influence to deter the genocide plotters from launching the genocide in the first place. Rwanda was the most Christianized country in Africa and the Roman Catholics were far and away the largest Christian denomination. Catholicism was virtually the official state religion. Catholic officials had enormous influence at both the elite and the grassroots level, which they consistently failed to use to protest against the government’s overtly racist policies and practices. Indeed, the Church gave the government moral authority. Once the genocide began, Catholic leaders in the main refused to condemn the government, never used the word genocide, and many individual priests and nuns actually aided the genocidaires.

Rwanda was a French-speaking country, and France replaced Belgium as the key foreign presence. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of English-speaking Tutsi refugees from Uganda, invaded Rwanda in 1990, the French military flew in to save the day for the Hutu government. For the following several years, right to the very moment the genocide began, French officials had enormous influence with both the Rwandan government and army. They failed completely to use that leverage to insist that the government curtail its racist policies and propaganda, stop the increasing massacres, end the widespread human rights abuses, and disband the death squads and death lists.

Two months after the genocide began, a French intervention force created a safe haven in the south-west of the country through which they allowed genocidaires leaders and killers, fleeing from the advancing RPF, to escape across the border into Zaire. From Zaire they began an insurgency back into Rwanda with the purpose of “finishing the job”. Eventually this led to the Rwandans invading Zaire/Congo to suppress the insurgency, which in turn soon led to the vicious wars in the Congo and the subsequent appalling cost in human lives throughout eastern Congo.

Once the genocide was launched after April 6, 1994, the American government, steadfastly backed by the British government, were primarily responsible for the failure of the UN Security Council to reinforce its puny mission to Rwanda. Under no circumstances were these governments prepared to budge. The Commander of the UN force - UNAMIR - repeatedly pleaded for reinforcements, and was repeatedly turned down.

Two weeks into the genocide, the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from 2500 to 270 men - an act almost impossible to believe 10 years later. Six weeks into the genocide, as credible reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths became commonplace and the reality of a full-blown genocide became undeniable, the Security Council voted finally to send some 4500 troops to Rwanda. Several contingents of African troops were put on standby, but deliberate stalling tactics by the USA and Britain meant that by the end of the genocide, when the Tutsi-led rebels were sworn in as the new government on July 19, not a single reinforcement of soldiers or material ever reached Rwanda. This was one of the darkest moments in the history of the United Nations.

As for Belgium, notwithstanding the racist attitudes and colonial behaviour of its soldiers, their contingent was the backbone of UNAMIR. When 10 Belgian soldiers were murdered by Rwandan government troops on the very first morning of the genocide, the Brussels government immediately decided to withdraw the remainder of its forces and to lobby the Security Council to suspend the entire Rwandan mission. Its motive was simple: They did not want to be seen as the sole party undermining UNAMIR. At the Security Council, of course, it found eager allies.

The role of the UN Secretariat is somewhat ambiguous. To a large extent, its failure to support the pleas of its own UNAMIR Force Commander reflected its lack of capacity to cope with yet another crisis combined with its understanding that the US and Britain would not alter their intransigent positions. Still, there were many occasions when the Secretariat failed to convey to the full Security Council the dire situation in Rwanda, and many opportunities when it failed to speak up publicly in the hope of influencing world opinion.

A multitude of betrayals:

It is not far-fetched to say that the world has betrayed Rwanda countless times since its first confrontation with Europeans in the mid-1890s. This previous account has presented several of these betrayals before and during the genocide: by the Catholic Church, by the Belgian colonial power, by the French neo-colonial power, by the international community.

To exacerbate further this shameful record, we need to look at the past decade. First, the concept that the world owed serious reparations to a devastated Rwanda for its failure to prevent the genocide has been a total non-starter.

Second, there has been precious little accountability by the international community for its failure to prevent. The French government and the Roman Catholic Church have to this moment refused to acknowledge the slightest responsibility for their roles or to apologize for any of their gross errors of commission or omission. President Bill Clinton and Secretary-General Koki Annan have both apologized for their failure to offer protection, but have both falsely blamed insufficient information; in fact what was lacking was not knowledge - the situation was universally understood - but political will and sufficient national interest. No one has ever quit their jobs in protest against their government’s or their organisation’s failure to intervene to save close to one million innocent civilian lives.

Those we must not forget:

Finally, the very existence of the genocide has largely disappeared from the public and media’s consciousness. This is the latest betrayal. Marginalized during the genocide, Rwanda’s calamity is now largely forgotten except for Rwandans themselves and small clusters of non-Rwandans who have had some connection with the country or specialize in genocide prevention. That’s why I founded the Remembering Rwanda movement in July of 2001. I had four targets for remembering: the innocent victims; the survivors, many of whom live in deplorable conditions with few resources to tend to their physical or psychological needs; the perpetrators, most of whom remain free and unrepentant scattered around Africa, Europe and parts of North America; and the so-called “bystanders”, the unholy sextet named earlier. Rather than being passive witnesses, as the word “bystander” implies, all were active in their failure to intervene to stop the massacres, and all remain unaccountable to this day. It is time the Rwandan genocide is treated with the concern and attention it so grievously earned.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000), the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the founder of "Remembering Rwanda: The Rwanda Genocide 10th Anniversary Memorial Project".

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Rwanda's children have seen the worst of humanity. Ten years after a group of politicians set in motion a genocide in an attempt to retain power, the devastating consequences for those who were left behind are unmistakable.

Traditional protective structures for children including family networks, the judicial system, and the education system were decimated. As a result, children – many of whom survived unspeakable atrocities – are still the victims of systematic human rights violations day in and day out.

Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves in even more precarious conditions. In the face of the daunting challenge of rebuilding a society devastated by war, poverty, and AIDS, protecting their rights has been sidelined. But this does not do Rwanda's children justice.

Those who planned and executed the genocide of 1994 violated children's rights on an unprecedented scale. Children were raped, tortured, and slaughtered along with adults in massacre after massacre around the country. Carrying their genocidal logic to its absurd conclusion, they even targeted children for killing – to exterminate the "big rats," they said, one must also kill the "little rats."

Countless thousands of children were murdered in the genocide and war. Many of those who managed to escape death had feared for their own lives, surviving rape or torture, witnessing the killing of family members, hiding under corpses, or seeing children killing other children. Some of these children – now adolescents – say they do not care whether they live or die.

Perhaps the most devastating legacy of the genocide and war is the sheer number of children left on their own, who live in precarious conditions and are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. On Rwanda's green hills, up to 400,000 children – 10 percent of Rwandan children – struggle to survive without one or both parents.

Children who were orphaned in the genocide or in war, children orphaned by AIDS, and children whose parents are in prison on charges of genocide, alike, are in desperate need of protection. Many Rwandans have exhibited enormous generosity in caring for orphans or other needy children.

Yet, because so many Rwandans are living in extreme poverty themselves, to some, vulnerable children are worth only their labour and their property. Foster families have taken needy children in, but some have also exploited them as domestic servants, denied them education, and unscrupulously taken over their family's land.

These children, often suffering the effects of trauma, have nowhere to turn and they know no other fate. Traditional societal networks – severely eroded by poverty, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and, not least, the consequences of the genocide and war – have failed them.

Thousands of children – many of whom had been exploited for their labour or their property and denied the right to education at home – have migrated to city streets to fend for themselves. There, they live in abysmal conditions, suffer poor health and hygiene, and face a near constant risk of harassment by law enforcement officials and arbitrary arrest.

As recently as February 2004, municipal authorities continued to brutally round children up by force in an effort to "clean the streets" before heads of state came to attend the historic New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) summit. It seems the presence of unkempt street children is inconsistent with the image of the city with the newest Intercontinental hotel. Girls living on the streets are frequently raped, sometimes even by law enforcement officials, yet few of those responsible have been prosecuted.

Although they garner less sympathy, children who took part in the genocide are also victims. Some five thousand people were arrested on charges they committed crimes of genocide before they reached the age of eighteen. Their rights were first violated when adults recruited, manipulated, or incited them to participate in atrocities, and have been violated again by the Rwandan justice system.

One boy who confessed and was convicted of genocide said he had been given a choice of killing his sister's children or being killed himself. He was sixteen years old at the time. Large numbers of these children were in fact arrested unjustly.

Another boy, arrested at age thirteen after the genocide, confessed to having killed in order to escape torture, although he now maintains that his confession was false. He had just witnessed other detainees being tortured at the hands of Rwandan government soldiers. His father, among others, had died as a result of torture the night before. He and a thousand others who were younger than fourteen in 1994, and thus too young to be held criminally responsible under Rwandan law, were freed after being transferred from detention facilities to reeducation camps in 2000 and 2001. The government had been promising to release them since 1995.

As many as four thousand children who were between fourteen and eighteen years old during the genocide continued to languish in overcrowded prisons until last year, and some may still be detained. Their adolescence is gone. Despite repeated, hollow promises to give their cases priority within the over-burdened justice system, they have been subjected to the worst of a bad situation.

Juvenile defendants have been tried at an even slower rate than adults. Few have enjoyed the right to adequate legal counsel and other due process protections guaranteed under Rwandan and international law. A few hundred, for whom prosecutors had not conducted investigations or made case files during their years of imprisonment, were provisionally released in 2001 after their neighbours cleared them of wrongdoing in public meetings.

Ironically, now that the government has finally made some progress in dealing with the massive failures of the justice system – including organizing gacaca courts to deal with the bulk of genocide cases and releasing most of those who had been below the age of criminal responsibility and those who confessed – it has become even harder to draw attention to the plight of young adults who remain in detention for crimes they allegedly committed as children, especially those who proclaim their innocence. "We feel that justice has left us," one of them said.

The international community has provided billions of dollars to assist in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Rwanda and continues to donate tens of millions of dollars each year. Yet inadequate resources have been devoted to address the desperate needs of child protection. And there have been insufficient efforts to ensure that money earmarked for the protection of children is actually used for that purpose.

The majority of Rwandan children have been victims of armed conflict. Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves even worse off.

Rwanda can and must do more to protect their rights. The government has embraced international standards on children’s rights and has passed a strong law on child protection. But words are not enough. Ten years of promises to protect their rights has meant little for vulnerable children in practice. We must not remain complacent while so many children continue to suffer. The future of Rwanda depends on it.

* This article is based on “Lasting Wounds: Consequences of Genocide and War for Rwanda’s Children,” written by Sara Rakita and published by Human Rights Watch in 2003.

April marks the tenth year since the genocide that left a million dead in Rwanda. There will be many acts of remembrance, public and private. Many will be intensely personal. There will be those who wish that we would all forget, that the whole thing would just go away. Many of these will be in prisons in Rwanda, Tanzania or hiding out in capitals around the world. The feelings and reactions about the date will be as varied as the individuals who dared not look away.

Much more complex is the reaction of Africans in the Diaspora. For them as for many others around the world, there was what to make of the scarcely believable horror that forced itself on their lives through television sets. The shock of what was taking place before the world’s eyes froze most people’s analytical faculties. In some sense, the whole world participated in the genocide in Rwanda. Thanks to the miracle of television, we all went along as spectators. Unwilling, reluctant spectators, horrified and yet gripped by the terrifying depths to which human souls could sink. As people watched helplessly, representative governments, chiefly Great Britain, the United States and of course France, worked overtime to ensure that what was happening in Rwanda was not called genocide, because then they would have been obliged to intervene. For them this technicality was all-important.

And so a more convenient, comforting description gained currency in newsrooms. The world was informed that what was taking place in Rwanda was ‘tribal killings’. It was an Old Faithful that never fails to satisfy the questions what and why whenever a conflict in Africa degenerates to such an appalling extent that it forces itself on the attention of a wider world that would rather focus its attentions elsewhere. For most people watching, this line provided some comfort in that it at least provided a context into which they could put the abominable crimes they were being forced to witness.

The line provided a way in which they could distance themselves from what was being done. Such savagery could have nothing to do with them. It could only be done by that ‘other’, the ‘other’ that did not have their sensibilities.

The irony is almost chilling; this is how the organisers of the genocide spoke of their eventual victims. The Batutsi were “snakes” (Rwandans’ horror of snakes should be understood in a biblical sense: an insidious and perfidious killer) that not only could but should be mercilessly destroyed. They were not to be thought of like other people, they were different, they were the other. Upwards of 300,000 children were killed in the genocide, although ‘kill’ is too kind and innocuous a word for how their young lives were ended before they had hardly begun. The leaders of the genocide simply put the rhetorical question to the Bahutu population, “when you hunt for a snake, do you spare its young?” Such reasoning was designed to make even infanticide acceptable.

For Africans in the Diaspora, there could be no such easy comforts. The people committing such unspeakable crimes were no aliens that could be disowned, they were just like them. Diaspora Africans could not distance themselves from the perpetrators of the genocide by seeing them as the other. The other that were not like them, the other that were capable of such inhumanity that they themselves found so abhorrent. They had to endure that terrible unease that must come with witnessing a human being just like you descend into such depths of inhumanity that one would not have even dared to imagine.

The dictionary description of the word empathy, is the power to enter into the feeling and spirit of others. The trouble with empathy is that while it leads one to identify and wish to protect and comfort the victim, it cannot protect itself from the horror of the knowledge that the perpetrator is a human being just like oneself. How could the minds and hearts that could just as easily be theirs, not only perpetrate, or even contemplate such an abomination? How could the eyes that could easily be theirs bear to look upon such evil?

As it should have done, the Rwandan genocide challenged the assumptions for the basis of our own humanity. If a general observation can be made about how Africans in the Diaspora responded to this most profound and personal of challenges, it is that above and beyond the abhorrence that gripped every decent human being, they felt it incumbent upon them to help in some way. And many did. In Britain, a number of organisations both large and small collected money and material for Rwanda, long before the call to respond to the crisis begun to be heard commonly in the mainstream.

A number of individuals organised fund raising events. This was particularly true of those in the media. A number of well known professionals exploited their celebrity status and managed to bring together a number of pop stars and other entertainers for fundraising events. The speed with which this was done was surprisingly impressive and for the few Rwandans then living in the United Kingdom (UK) profoundly touching.

The Diaspora community in the UK is relatively small, powerless and lacks any real organised unity. It was for instance notable that while they were organising events for Rwanda, holding meetings, talks and seminars about Rwanda, neither the individuals nor the organisations involved had any awareness that there existed a Rwandan community in their midst.

While they talked of the need to show support and solidarity with their Rwandan brethren, they had no idea that they could share these feelings and deliver these messages, face to face in the same city. Conversely, the tiny Rwandan community in the UK stoically continued to plough a lonely furrow, doing all it could to support people back home. The community never realised that less than three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, people who thought of them as brothers and sisters were almost desperate for an opportunity to help. With this state of affairs it was therefore most impressive that so many were galvanised into action so quickly and so effectively.

There was however another side to this general picture. In Britain, after the initial shock of the first images from Rwanda, one of the determining factors in black people’s response to the harrowing events in Rwanda, was the extent of their identification with Africans in Africa and Africa itself. This identification or lack of it is in turn influenced by their respective backgrounds. The majority of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere are descendants of Africans that were forcibly removed from Africa during the slave trade.

From the moment of capture, these Africans were no longer treated as human beings. Once in the Americas or the Caribbean, those that survived the slave ships were soon deprived of everything that any human being takes for granted. They were stripped of their identity, even their names were take away and replaced with those of the slave owners. “Forget you are African, remember you are black” was drummed into their beings, often with whips. To be African was to be a person with a heritage, a family, a name. It was to belong. To be black was to be a subspecies, a beast of burden. For good measure, the idea of Africa was depicted as a dark primitive place from which the slaves should be grateful to have been delivered.

Over centuries, this notion has been burned into the psyche of many people of African descent. It has lain dormant ready to be triggered by any occurrence or happening that might lead to self-awareness or self-analysis. It is an enduring intellectual and psychological war in which many Diaspora African scholars and activists have been engaged for centuries. For many black people whose view of Africa and Africans have been shaped by this outlook, the Rwandan genocide, like other conflicts in Africa, are no more than the expected atavistic struggles in a modern age. This was a view held by a large minority within the African Diaspora.

It is a view that has been termed “the internalisation of racism” by informed opinion within the African Diaspora. Such thinking, or perhaps more accurately, such feelings were by no means restricted to Diaspora Africans whose ancestors had gone through the slave trade. While they are burdened by what has been called a “slave mentality”, many Africans still on the continent or who have relatively recently become part of the African Diaspora, can be said to be burdened with a similar mentality, which we may term a “colonial mentality.”

And this too came to the fore during the genocide. A veteran journalist of Camerounian origin, whom it might be unfair to name, was interviewed by one of the major television news networks and his responses were revealing. He was offended by events in Rwanda and Burundi, he said, because they were responsible for perpetuating Africa’s image in the West as savage and uncivilised. He irritably opined that these countries should refrain from making the rest of the continent look bad.

A million people had been killed in ways that would defy the most depraved imagination and yet for this senior African journalist, the deepest injury was to the image of Africa, the deepest worry, withdrawal of approval from the West. His was by no means a minority view. The former Secretary General to the United Nations Boutros Ghali was clearly of the same mind, when he visited Rwanda and complained of the smell from the dead. It is a view shared by Africans of a certain generation for whom the West’s view of itself as the arbiter of civilisation has become a deeply ingrained belief. For them Africa is indeed the ‘Dark Continent’.

Small Pan-African groups on the fringe in London had anticipated these feelings and had begun to rail against them long before they had been expressed in response to the genocide. For them the genocide was just another battleground against the colonial and slave mentalities. They automatically spoke of the Rwandan conflict as a colonial legacy, anxious to pre-empt and counter feelings of African insecurity and inferiority. They were more right than they imagined. Ethnic divide in Rwanda is a recent political construction that grew from the seeds sown by German and later Belgian authorities. True as this may be however, one is still faced with the fact that it was Rwandans who first accepted alien views of themselves, abandoned their own civilisations and massacred over a million of their compatriots.

When the first European arrivals from Germany arrived in Rwanda and espoused such fantasist ideas that the Batutsi were a different, finer race from the Bahutu, many from the two main ethnic groups did not challenge this view. Instead a number of earlier Batutsi and Bahutu intellectuals took up these ideas. It was these ideas that were repeated in the first massacres against the Batutsi in the 50s and 60s, during which hundreds of thousands died. It is these same ideas that were heard again in 1994.

There can be no rational explanation for the Rwandan genocide or any other genocide for that matter. None the less, when human beings are visited by such overwhelming disasters, they try to seek comfort in asking why and how. From within the African Diaspora, there was and continues to be a collective chorus of why and how. They need, want and demand an explanation.

However there is no explanation for genocide. Why did the Nazis murder six million Jewish souls? Could even the Nazis say why? The best that can be done for Africans in the Diaspora, who ask why, is to explain the circumstances and conditions surrounding the genocide. As for why they were committed, it is for every human being to answer that. Information may help and much needs to be done to provide it. A black American acquaintance asked me where I came from and when I said Rwanda, he asked me whether it was in South America. Most people know more about Rwanda now of course, but not much more.

Many Diaspora Africans have done and are doing much to increase understanding. Programme makers, journalists and writers like Jack Mapanji from Malawi - who offered a poem in response to what he witnessed - and many others. Rwandan communities in the Diaspora can offer information but none of us can answer the question why.

* Vincent Gasana is a Rwandan who lives and works as a broadcast journalist in London.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Rwandan refugees rose to prominence in 1994 when their mass exodus to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC), Tanzania and Uganda was broadcasted globally. At the same time a less well-known group of Rwandan refugees who had been in Uganda since 1959 returned to their country on the heels of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which itself was made up of 1959 refugees. Moreover, the majority of those Rwandans who did not cross the border in 1994, thereby not being counted as refugees, were in one way or another uprooted and at least temporarily internally displaced. The history of this small country of the thousand hills is also a history of refugees.

Now, ten years after the war and the genocide, the complexities of Rwandan refugees persist and possibly even deepen. The two main trajectories along which the complexity of Rwandan refugees should be conceptualised are firstly, their different backgrounds and secondly, the intricacy of bringing them back home.

About 80,000 Rwandans still remain refugees in mostly African countries and they hardly represent a coherent lot. This is to say that there are qualitatively different Rwandan refugee populations. A way of shedding light onto this complexity is to compare the big remaining groups in DRC, Uganda and Tanzania. The second form of complexity with regard to Rwandan refugees has a more long term orientation and will only matter upon repatriation. It is the complexity of bringing them home in a sustainable and thus responsible way.

When the RPF started making advances inside Rwanda, Hutus started crossing the borders first and foremost into Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda. In Zaire, a large group of extremist Hutus, i.e. perpetrators of the genocide, were able to hide out in the Kivu hinterland - protected by the infamous “Operation Turquoise”. The dilemma of those extremists residing in camps or elsewhere in the Kivus has been a source for international debates about humanitarian assistance. To this day, it is the reason why the current government of Rwanda has a highly critical view of UNHCR. The presence of those extremists has not only provided a pretext for continued intervention by the government of Rwanda in Zaire and later DRC, but also poses a big challenge today when it comes to repatriation.

As such, radical Hutu elements barricaded areas in the Kivus in early 2004 to prevent moderate elements from demobilising under UN auspices and thus from returning to Rwanda. In the long run, it will be this group that will be pivotal in deciding whether Rwanda as a united nation has a future or not. Will they follow one of their former rebel leaders General Paul Rwarakabije and return voluntarily to Rwanda (as the former did in November 2003) or will they only stop fighting once the government in Kigali is overthrown?

The group of Rwandan refugees in Uganda does not compare to the group hiding in the Kivus. For starters, it is highly unlikely that the group contains high level perpetrators of the genocide, as they moved into the territory of the government that was a supporter, an ally as well as a mentor for the RPF in the 1980s. The Rwandans in Uganda fled the atrocities in their homeland and managed to create veritable settlements including their own livestock. They are everything but hiding. If anything they have built respectable homes for themselves, which now requires a rather high incentive to lure them back to Rwanda. Studies and research in the Ourchinga and Nakivale settlements have highlighted this tendency as well as capacity for economic development.

The group of Rwandan refugees that still resides in Tanzania today is different yet again in composition and origin. Those 500,000 who fled in April 1994 (250,000 crossed Rusumo bridge on 28 April alone) did certainly contain extremist elements similar to those in the Kivus. But the display of Rwandan decisiveness in Eastern Congo in 1996 and limited funding for those refugees led to a full-scale repatriation exercise.

The residual group of refugees today is qualitatively different from the ones in DRC (ex-Zaire) and Uganda. The situation in Tanzania prior to 1994 was yet a different one, and new arrivals in after the genocide mixed with Rwandans that had already been there for years if not decades. Under Nyerere and his pan-African ideology all refugees were embraced and welcomed to Tanzania, not only Rwandans. Some came prior to Rwandan independence in 1962, others settled spontaneously, and some fled atrocities in 1959 and 1994. Most of those Rwandans never registered as refugees or even applied for citizenship; they were able to live their lives in the Kagera region.

The enormous number of refugees and the swelling camps, however, presented a burden to Tanzania that the country was not willing to shoulder any longer. Through UNHCR facilitated repatriation almost all Rwandan refugees from 1994 returned home, leaving behind a group of compatriots that did not necessarily want to return, but was also denied local integration in Tanzania.

The generation of leaders following Nyerere were less sympathetic to what they see as aliens on their soil. It is a general trend in Africa, whereby local integration as a durable solution has become less and less of an option.

Hence, now those old Rwandan refugees and at times migrants are effectively stateless. There might be solution in bringing them back to Rwanda, but this is a marginalized group of ethnic Banyarwandans that have no links with their country of origin any longer. It should also be noted that while repatriation from Tanzania was ongoing some Rwandan refugees moved across the border into Uganda to avoid repatriation. This is unlikely to be connected to the fear of prosecution for crimes against humanity, but rather it is a harbinger of the second level of complexity regarding Rwandan refugees - the complexity of repatriation.

The different backgrounds highlight that there is not one repatriation policy that will fit all. Whereas genocide perpetrators actively resist the idea of returning to a state run by the RPF and want to overthrow the current government of Rwanda still, many refugees in Uganda and Tanzania have concrete economic and security concerns that are diametrically opposed to those still in DRC.

There are three main reasons why Rwandan refugees are reluctant to return home. The first is the problematic process of unity and reconciliation; secondly, refugees might have little to strive for economically in a land that ranks 158 on the 2003 UNDP Human Development Index and which has a long way to go in terms of development and poverty reduction; lastly Rwanda is densely populated and fertile land is scarce, which some Malthusian scholars have attributed the origin of the genocide in the first place.

Unity and reconciliation is the explicit policy of the current Rwandan government and it is often juxtaposed with the South African model of truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, amnesty is taboo and the government is adamant in fighting what it calls a “culture of impunity”. However, this process of justice is skewed in that it excludes RPA war crimes committed between 1990 and 1994. Thus only genocide is considered crime, which leads to a collective accusation of Hutus as a group and the victimisation of Tutsis as a whole. This precludes a genuine reconciliation effort. The same issue, namely that of RPA war crimes was what chased Carla Del Ponte from her position as chief prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICTR) in Arusha. This renders the process of bringing Rwandans back home more complex, as it is difficult to see how this represents a sustainable situation.

The problem of development is a serious one, in a country that has next to no natural resources, depleted land and no access to ports or main waterways. The donor presence in Kigali is impressive and many strategies are being devised, most recently the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan with distinct country ownership. However, the focus remains on a limited amount of clusters like coffee, tea and tourism. Evidently, those clusters are volatile and dependent on many factors that are largely beyond the reach of any Rwandan government.

In an economic situation like this, it is highly difficult to bring ever more Rwandans back not knowing how and where to fit them in. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Rwandans are subsistence farmers. For some it could simply be more attractive to keep their livestock and stay put in places like Uganda and Tanzania.

Lastly, there is the issue of land, and anybody who has ever driven across the thousand hills of Rwanda cannot be but startled that wherever you look you will find houses or settlements. The population density with 323 persons/km2 ranks among the highest in the world. The lack of land need not be the cause for another conflict, but it makes life upon return to Rwanda significantly more difficult. The double pressure of land degradation and growing population density has been pointed to repeatedly as a main impediment for development. Additionally, one has to take into account the population growth. According to UNFPA estimates, given the current birth rate, Rwanda will count roughly twice of today's population by 2050. This does not yet include the Rwandans that are due to return soon. The question any observer who knows Rwanda will have to wonder, “Where will they all live”? This prospect or absence thereof in terms of development contributes to the complexity of Rwandan refugees who are ultimately to become returnees.

In conclusion, Rwanda history is a history of fleeing and returning populations. Many different refugee groups have emerged over the course of the last five decades and continue to coexist and overlap. Rwandan refugees do not represent a coherent whole, but rather a sum of contradictory and at times antagonistic parts.

This complexity of the multi-facetted Rwandan refugee “community” is exacerbated by the future they will face. Should the UNHCR Executive Committee at some point vote in favour of the cessation clause, thereby withdrawing prima facie refugee status, the only real foreseeable option for the vast majority is indeed to return home. This is when the heterogeneous group of Rwandan refugees will face yet more complexities in trying to reconstruct and rebuild a nation. To overcome enormous developmental challenges such as reconciliation, development and access to land will be a highly complex process. But given Rwanda's history of in- and outflows of entire groups it is legitimate to ask where the “re” in “reconstruction” actually comes from. Ultimately, the construction of a Rwandan society without precedent in the land of the thousand hills is the consequence and combination of this two-fold complexity of Rwandan refugees.

* Volker Schimmel is UNHCR Reports Officer in Rwanda. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of UNHCR.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

In the ten years since the Rwandan genocide leaders of national governments and international institutions have acknowledged the shame of having failed to stop the slaughter of the Tutsi population. At the 2004 Stockholm International Forum, “Preventing Genocide: Threats and Responsibilities,” many renewed their commitment to halting any future genocide. Honouring that pledge will require not just greater political will than seen in the past but also developing a strategy built on the lessons of 1994.

Lesson One: Stop the genocide before it becomes a genocide

The genocide in Rwanda began suddenly after the killing of the president, but the attitudes and practices that made it possible developed over a period of years.

For decades the government had practiced discrimination against Tutsi, the people who would be targeted during the genocide. The post-independence government categorized citizens by ethnicity and, continuing a practice of the Belgian colonial regime, required all adults to carry documents identifying their ethnic group. These identity documents were used to select Tutsi for slaughter during the genocide.

During the three years before the 1994 genocide, government officials, soldiers, national police, and leaders of political parties incited and directed sixteen massacres of Tutsi, each of which killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. The army also killed hundreds of Hima, a people related to Tutsi, during a military operation in 1990. In addition, authorities permitted and in some cases encouraged violence against supporters of rival political parties.

Killers and other assailants went unpunished if their victims were Tutsi or members of parties opposed to the authorities.

The international community, including national and multinational donors, occasionally expressed concern about the human rights situation but failed to press effectively for an end to abuses or for punishment of the guilty. Even the slaughter of hundreds drew little or at most short-lived criticism.

Lesson Two: React promptly and firmly to preparations for massive slaughter of civilians

Many Rwandans, diplomats in Rwanda, and United Nations (UN) officials knew that militia were being recruited and trained to kill, but even when an informant told UN peacekeepers that the militia were meant to attack Tutsi civilians, there was no effective intervention to halt militia activities. During the genocide, the militia mobilized and led the general population in killing Tutsi, often carrying out orders given them by soldiers and national policemen.

The distribution of arms to the civilian population was widely known and elicited no effective international reaction.

Lesson Three: Pay close attention to media in situations of potential ethnic, religious, or racial conflict. In cases of impending genocide, be prepared to silence broadcasts that incite or provide directions for violence

For three years before the genocide, newspapers like Kangura had identified Tutsi as “enemies of the nation,” to be scorned and feared. A private radio, supported by many influential government, military, and political figures, broadcast the same message with increasing virulence and effect in the nine months before the genocide was launched. The media went so far as to name individuals to be eliminated, including the prime minister.

Beginning the year before the genocide, leading Rwandans and international observers all deplored the media campaign against Tutsi and members of opposition parties but no one intervened to actually stop the calls to hatred or to promote the broadcast of countervailing messages of tolerance.

Having had months to build a listening audience, the private radio station was well-placed to contribute to the killing campaign once it began. The radio incited listeners to violence against Tutsi and others opposed to the genocide, and gave specific orders on how to carry out the killing, including identifying individuals to be attacked and specifying where they could be found.

Silencing the radio broadcasts would not only have ended this particularly effective form of incitement and the delivery of specific orders; it would have showed that the international community rejected the legitimacy of the genocidal message and those who were delivering it. The United States considered jamming the broadcasts from an airplane, but found the cost of about $8,000 an hour too high.

Lesson Four: Be alert to impact of negative models in nearby regions

In late 1993 and early 1994 tens of thousands of Hutu and Tutsi were slain in neighbouring Burundi, a country demographically similar to Rwanda. These killings, skilfully exploited by Rwandan propagandists, significantly increased tensions in Rwanda. Both the slaughter and the absence of international reaction to it encouraged the planners of genocide to proceed with the attempt to eliminate Tutsi in Rwanda. Propagandists frequently talked of the Burundian example on the radio, enhancing the impact of this negative model on Rwandans.

Lesson Five: Ensure accurate information of what is happening on the ground

In 1994 the governments most involved in Rwanda -France, Belgium, and the United States - had substantial information about the situation on the ground but they shared this information with only a few others. Non-permanent members of the Security Council - with the exception of Rwanda, itself a non-permanent member in 1994 - depended for information on the UN secretariat.

From the field, the head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, and the representative of the Secretary-General, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, sent very different descriptions of events to the secretariat in New York. In preparing briefings for the Security Council, the secretariat favoured Booh-Booh's interpretation, which gave no sense of the systematic and ethnically based nature of the killing. Relying initially on this information, the non-permanent members agreed to withdrawal of most of the peacekeepers. But when they later learned of the extent and genocidal nature of the slaughter from Human Rights Watch and others, they pushed the Security Council to send a second and stronger UN force to Rwanda. Their efforts produced results, although not in time to influence the course of the genocide.

Accurate, impartial, and analytical reporting of the Rwandan genocide could have helped build a public demand for more forceful government action in halting the slaughter. But press coverage was limited, superficial, and often sensationalistic. Journalists usually portrayed the killing as the result of ancient, tribal hatreds rather than as a state-directed attempt to exterminate the Tutsi. Major media outlets gave more attention to the problems of sports stars O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding than to the deliberate slaughter of more than half a million people.

Lesson Six: Identify and support opponents of the genocide

At the start a vast number of Rwandans opposed the genocide. When potential leaders of resistance, including military officers, appealed for foreign support in the first days of the killings, they were refused. The people of central and southern Rwanda nonetheless continued opposing the genocide for ten days to two weeks. Instead of supporting these resisters, the Security Council undermined them by reducing the already inadequate number of peacekeepers. The organizers of the genocide then gained in confidence and decided to push the killing campaign into the regions that had thus far remained relatively peaceful. They stepped up pressure on the resisters by sending in militia from other areas where the killing was well advanced, by mocking them on the radio, and by removing key local officials who opposed the killing. Faced with this overwhelming pressure and feeling abandoned by the international community, the resisters either went into hiding or became active participants in the genocide.

Lesson Seven: Call the genocide by its rightful name and vigorously condemn it. Commit to permanently opposing any government involved in genocide, including by refusing it assistance in the future

Rwandan government officials, military officers, and political leaders who directed the genocide claimed to be legitimate authorities giving appropriate orders for the self-defense of the population. This pretext of legitimacy made it easier for them to persuade people to violate usual moral and legal prohibitions. By remaining silent during the first part of the genocide and by taking no effective action to stop the killing throughout the period, the international community appeared to acquiesce in these claims to legitimacy. The government exploited every apparent demonstration of international acceptance - every time Rwandan government representatives were received abroad, the event was fully publicized on the radio.

Rwandan officials and political leaders understood how dependent their government was on international assistance: they knew that no government could operate for long without such support. Even ordinary Rwandans who lived out on the hills knew the importance of international aid since they or their families benefited from schools or clinics supported by partnerships with foreign communities.

States and other international actors must send clear condemnations of the genocidal government combined with the announcement that direct foreign assistance would forever be denied to the government. This would have called into question not just the legitimacy of the government but also its long-term viability. Rwandans might have well have been less inclined to follow the directives of a government that had little chance of continuing to hold power.

Lesson Eight: Impose an arms embargo on the genocidal government

Many killers used machetes or homemade weapons, but soldiers, national police, and thousands of militia used firearms in launching attacks on churches, schools, hospitals and other sites where thousands of Tutsi had gathered. A first wave of assailants, relatively few in number, killed thousands of civilians by using small arms, grenades, and mortars. They left the survivors of such attacks terrorized, vulnerable to assault by a second wave of killers wielding machetes and homemade weapons.

The U.N. Security Council established an arms embargo, but only late in the genocide. Had the embargo been imposed earlier, the killers would have had fewer arms at their disposal and would have been less effective in their attacks.

Lesson Nine: Press any government seeming to support the genocidal government to change its policy

Some governments, particularly France and several African governments, continued to support the Rwandan government throughout the genocide. This limited the impact of condemnation by those other governments that did finally take a stand against the slaughter. As official documents show, at least some French officials were concerned that continuing support for Rwanda was damaging their own international standing, but other governments with potential influence on France, like the United States and the United Kingdom, failed to press the French effectively enough to produce a change in policy.

Lesson Ten: Be prepared to intervene with armed force

The organizers of the Rwandan genocide were relatively few in number but they controlled three elite military units. Backed by these forces, they were able to assert control first over other units of the army and national police and then over the administrative system.

When the crisis began, the UN peacekeepers had neither the mandate nor the numbers needed for effective action, but had their mandate been broadened to allow offensive action and had they received support from the elite French, Belgian, and Italian troops sent in to evacuate their own citizens, the combined force could have blocked the effort of the genocidal organizers to extend their control to other parts of the armed forces and administration. Intervention later would have required a larger force and would have saved fewer lives, but intervention at any point would have limited the number of civilians killed.

French troops sent some ten weeks after the start of the genocide saved at least ten thousand lives. Although meant to serve political as well as humanitarian objectives - they intended to support the faltering Rwandan army as well as to save lives - they did end up protecting Tutsi at risk of imminent slaughter.

Genocides are complex phenomena, each with its own peculiar configuration and dynamics. These ten lessons will not provide the full answer to stopping the next genocide, but they provide a starting point for those who are determined to act in defence of our common humanity.

* This article has been reproduced with the kind permission of Human Rights Watch. (c) 2004 Human Rights Watch

SOURCE: Edited from a chronology of events on the website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rwanda/etc/cron.html, which was compiled from Fergal Keane's Season of Blood and Alain Destexhe's Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.

1918: Treaty of Versailles makes the former German colony of Rwanda-Urundi a U.N. protectorate to be governed by Belgium.

1926: Ethnic identity cards differentiating Hutus from Tutsis introduced by Belgium.

1957: Party for the Emancipation of the Hutus is formed.

1959: Hutus rebel against the Belgian colonial power and the Tutsi elite. 150,000 Tutsis flee to Burundi.

1961-62: Belgians withdraw. Gregoire Kayibanda installed as president. Fighting continues.

1963: Attack by exiled Tutsis results in massacre and further Tutsis flee. This is followed by further massacres in 1967.

1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana takes power and sets up a one-party state. Tutsis are restricted to nine percent of available jobs. Pattern of exclusion continues through the 1970’s and 1980’s.

1975: Habyarimana's political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement, or MRND) is formed.

1986: Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army takes power in Uganda, with the help of Rwandan exiles, who then form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated organisation.

1990: RPF guerrillas invade Rwanda from Uganda. Fierce fighting ends in a cease-fire on March 29, 1991.

1990/91: The Rwandan army begins to train and arm civilian militias known as interahamwe ("Those who stand together")

February 1993: RPF launches a fresh offensive and reach the outskirts of Kigali.

August 1993: Habyarimana and the RPF sign a peace accord that allows for the return of refugees and a coalition Hutu-RPF government. 2,500 U.N. troops are deployed in Kigali.

Sept.1993-Mar.1994: President Habyarimana stalls on setting up of power-sharing government. Training of militias intensifies. Extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, begins broadcasting exhortations to attack the Tutsis.

April 6, 1994: President Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, are killed when Habyarimana’s plane is shot down near Kigali Airport, sparking the beginning of the genocide.

April 7, 1994: The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and the interahamwe set up roadblocks and go from house to house killing Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians. U.N. forces cannot intervene as they have only a monitoring mandate. The U.N. soon cuts its forces to 250 after ten Belgian soldiers are murdered.

April 30, 1994: The U.N. Security Council spends eight hours discussing the Rwandan crisis. The resolution condemning the killing omits the word “genocide”. Had the term been used, the U.N. would have been legally obliged to act to “prevent and punish” the perpetrators. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees flee into Tanzania, Burundi and Zaire. In one day 250,000 Rwandans, mainly Hutus fleeing the advance of the RPF, cross the border into Tanzania.

May 17, 1994: As the slaughter of the Tutsis continues the U.N. agrees to send 6,800 troops and policemen to Rwanda with powers to defend civilians. A Security Council resolution says “acts of genocide may have been committed.” Deployment of the mainly African U.N. forces is delayed because of arguments over who will pay the bill.

July 1994: The RPF captures Kigali and sets up an interim government of national unity in Kigali.

November 1994: U.N. Security Council establishes an international tribunal that will oversee prosecution of suspects involved in genocide.

1994 was the most tragic year in the history of Rwanda as the country experienced a genocide that swept away more than a million Tutsi. This was a carefully conceived, planned and carried out genocide, as proven by its record death toll. The world was shocked.

To this day, people still wonder what the causes of this slaughter were. Some even point at the church of Rwanda, in this instance the Catholic Church, which was then the most representative and the most influential in the country. Indeed, it represents more than 60% of the population and had for a long time boasted the moral high ground, which could have been used to curb this disaster.

The question is then to know whether the church really tried to make use of its influence or if it rather failed to fulfill its duties, as several analyses seem to confirm. At the moment when we commemorate the tenth anniversary of those tragic events, it is necessary to sort the events out and draw out the responsibilities of the parties. This contribution is based on personal experience as well as various investigations in this field.

As soon as they arrived in Rwanda in the 1900s, the first settlers and white missionaries found a well-structured country ruled by the Mwami. Even though the power was concentrated in the hands of the Tutsi minority, the missionaries did not deign to protest against this situation.

They even found it natural and went as far as asserting that the Tutsi were intellectually superior to the Hutus and were the only ones able to rule the country. They invented the Hamite myth that said the Tutsi were actually white men with a black skin. They developed typologies that were probably influenced by the evolutionist theories that were fashionable in those days.

The schools they opened were almost exclusively reserved for Tutsi children. They also made an obvious effort to convert to their religion numerous children from the aristocracy.

For decades, both the Belgian colonial power therefore relied on the Tutsi, stockbreeders more akin to a cast than to an ethnic group, to rule the country and dominate the Hutu farmers, by far the largest group in the country.

But in the late 1950's, when the Tutsi elite started to wave claims of independence and the Mwami contemplated appealing to the United Nations, both Belgium and the Church decided to defend the democratic rights of the Hutu majority, embodied by Grégoire Kayibanda, former secretary of the bishop of Kabgayi and founder of the Party for the Promotion of the Hutu People (ParmeHutu).

The Catholic Church actively involved itself with the first Hutu revolutionaries, often former pupils of its schools, and denounced the social injustice it had once promoted. A letter of Mgr André Perraudin, then bishop of Kabgayi, that was published at the occasion of the Lent of 1959, agrees in many aspects with the broad outlines of the Hutu manifesto launched on the 24th of March 1959.

In this pastoral letter entitled ‘Super Omnia Caritas’, the prelate declared that the resources as well as the political and even judicial powers were in truly considerable proportion within the hands of people of one race only. He predicted imminent bloodshed if the situation was to remain unchanged.

After a referendum, carefully guided by the Belgian colonial power and the church, had installed a republic, thus exiling the last king, the Tutsi were stripped from their power, evicted from their lands and physically threatened. Hundred of thousands of them sought refuge in neighbouring countries, notably Uganda.

Throughout the three following decades, the Church was perfectly aware of human rights violations but did not lift a finger. It gave its blessing to the abuses of power of the young republic and got further involved in social activities. This conniving silence was indubitably interpreted by the rulers as a sign of support.

Grégoire Kayibanda, the first president, was close to catholic circles and had clergymen among his counsellors, specifically his grace André Perraudin, who was seen as his spiritual father. The first republic displayed notorious intransigence towards the exiles and exercised undisputed power under cover of majority democracy. Instead of grasping this opportunity to reassure the royalists and the Tutsi in general, the government was driven by feelings of revenge.

Every time an attack was launched by the exiles, the Tutsi paid for it with their blood. This was the case in the years 1961/1962. The president himself declared in his speeches that such actions by the exiles endangered the lives of their brothers who stayed in the country. The Catholic Church, present out in the field all across the country, did nothing to stop the mass killings and went on working hand in hand with the government until it collapsed.

Major-General Juvénal Habyarimana, then staff officer of the army, seized power in 1973. The Church ignored the circumstances in which this power was taken and gave full support to the new regime. When the MRND, the party of the president and future grassroots of the infamous interahamwe, was founded in 1975, some religious leaders became active members. A system of ethnically based quotas introduced by the government was also applied in some religious schools. The same racial discrimination was carried out in the choice of bishops.

At no point did the Church raise its voice to denounce the dictatorship of the MRND and its policy of exclusion. Those who dared to criticize it, such as Mrs Félicula Nyiramutarambirwa and father Silvio Sindambiwe, have paid dearly for their views.

The Church also took an active part in party propaganda. Certain homilies often sounded like popular meetings. After the attack of the FPR rebels in 1990, the government did a mock attack on Kigali and arbitrarily arrested thousands of Tutsi. The Church again missed the opportunity to distance itself from the government.

Mass killings like those in Bugesera and Bigogwe, which were aimed at Tutsi, did not change anything. When it was time to contribute to the war effort, the Church was more than eager. This connivance from the Church and the state would carry on until the genocide and even its eruption in April 1994 did not change the position of the Church. The first massacres of the morning of the 7th of April took place in Kigali at Remera Christus Centre where priests, seminarians on holiday and other visitors were killed.

The behaviour of these men of God in those crucial moments is revolting to say the least; some of them even handed over their own colleagues to the executioners; others refused to shelter in their parishes the refugees flocking there; and others offered to hide them only to fetch the interahamwe afterwards.

This was the case of the two Benedictine nuns, Consolate Mukangango and Julienne Mukabutera, who used to run the convent in Sovu and collaborated with the killers to the point where they provided them with the petrol that was to set ablaze the building where 500 Tutsi were hiding. They have recently been sentenced by a Brussels court to 15 and 12 years respectively.

The case of minister Elizaphan Ntakirutimana should not be ignored either. At more than 70 years of age, he was the minister of the Adventist Church of the Seventh Day in Mugonero, Kibuye. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda recently sentenced him to 10 years in jail. Instead of answering to the cries for help of his Tutsi colleagues who relied on his influence in the area and begged him to intervene, he sent them militia men while he was himself driving killers to different massacre sites in his own vehicle.

These are only a few examples among thousands. Indeed, other religious people are still held prisoners or are wanted by justice. Churches, once seen as sanctuaries, were turned into slaughterhouses. The churches of Nyarubuye, Cyahinda, Karama, and Kibeho have become remnants of this sad episode. Men of God, who once were seen as role models and enjoyed an indisputable moral authority, did not know how to use it in order to save lives of innocents. Their silence and their participation in those fatal moments brought a sort of “acknowledgement and legitimacy” to the ignoble acts in the eyes of the killers.

The priest and the minister have always been considered upright, wise and even saintly. It is therefore quite obvious that their attitude mattered enormously for their congregation. The highest hierarchy, doubtlessly closer to the government, did not use its influence to bring political officials to their senses. Five weeks after the genocide had started, four Catholic bishops and a few ministers of the Protestant Church published a document, which was, to say the least, half-hearted, in which they called on both parties, the then government and the RPF troops, to stop the massacres. The word genocide was not even suggested.

When the government fled the fights and settled in the centre of the country, the bishops abandoned their dioceses to follow it. They later did the same thing when, after the defeat, they scattered into Zaire, Tanzania, Cameroon etc.

The attitude of the Church at the end of the genocide was not one of great courage. Some of its members went into revisionism, others tried to cover the crimes of their colleagues. To this day, the Church as an institution has never apologized for this very serious failure.

From the Vatican to the Episcopal council of Rwanda, there is contentment with saying that the crimes of some of theirs have nothing to do with the Church as a whole, thus seeming to ignore that they have been educated, ordained and appointed by the Church.

Furthermore, those who ran towards them did so because they saw in them a representative of the Church. Without playing down its part in the economic and social field of the country, the Church failed seriously. Whether one admits it or not, it has played an active part in the misery that has befallen on Rwanda and has lost some of its credibility. Not to acknowledge it would be foolish.

* Camille Karangwa survived the genocide in Rwanda and now lives in Pretoria, South Africa, where he works for the African Association of Political Science. He has just published at the ‘Editions du jour’ a book entitled ‘Le chapelet et la machette : Sur les traces du génocide rwandais’. He can be contacted at the following address: [email][email protected]

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

A new and extensive collection of declassified official documents concerning the genocide in Rwanda has been published by the United States National Security Archive. Click on the link below to access the material.

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time. Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene. Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has accepted institutional and personal blame for the slaughter of 800,000 civilians in the 1994 Rwanda genocide that was initially ignored by world leaders. "The international community is guilty of sins of omission," said Annan, who was head of the United Nations peacekeeping agency at the time and had asked countries to provide troops. "I believed at the time that I was doing my best. But I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support," Annan said in a speech on Friday to open the "Memorial Conference on the Rwanda Genocide" to mark 10 years since the massacre.

The genocide in Rwanda in April 1994 must not distract from the fact that genocide is a global phenomenon that knows no racial or geographical boundaries. In its modern form, genocide was perfected by the fascist Nazi regime led by Adolph Hitler in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Khmer Rouge also demonstrated in the killing fields of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 that genocide could be carried out as efficiently in a different social and political context.

In more recent times the world watched live on satellite television in the 1990’s while genocide was perpetuated in the heart of Europe as Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo became household names for the grimmest reasons known to history. Going back even further, the transatlantic slave trade has been described as genocidal, though the mass murder of millions of Africans over 400 years was more a by product of plunder, exploitation and repression rather than the specific goal of slave dealers and the states that backed the slave trade.

But why does genocide happen? Why do human beings, the so-called most civilised and intelligent of the species that inhabit the planet, turn to mass murder?

In answering this question, the most important point to make is that genocide does not just happen. It is prepared for, consciously executed and is based on reasonably identifiable social, political and economic conditions. What differs is the extent to which these conditions apply or exist, and the degree of preparation by the perpetrators.

The second most important point to make is that genocide is not ‘triggered’ by a single event that pushes the perpetrators over the brink. On the contrary, the so-called ‘trigger events’ are excuses for setting in motion the logical end to a process prepared for well in advance.

Only when the world appreciates the fact of these processes can we collectively identify the signs or beginnings of what is likely to end in genocide and douse the fire before it becomes an all-consuming flame.

In the case of Rwanda, it is a popularly held myth that the shooting down of the plane carrying the then Head of State Juvenal Habyarimana and the Burundian President Cyprien Ntayamira on 6th April 1994 triggered the genocide that followed over the next 12 weeks and left well over 700,000 dead (nearly 10% of the country’s population of over 8 million). Nothing can be further from the truth.

Before the shooting down of the airplane by yet unidentified persons, the social and political conditions had been prepared by various factors. One key factor was the dictatorship established following the seizure of power by General Juvenal Habyarimana in 1973.

Habyarimana ruled in the name of the “majority” and imposed a dictatorship on the entire country. In addition, the official discrimination against the Tutsi minority was so much that within two decades, half a million had fled the country.

The government estimated Tutsis at 9% of the population and restricted them to 9% of jobs and educational opportunities. (Many of the exiles later joined the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, RPF). In order to consolidate the hold on power, Tutsi’s were painted as the enemy within (and without), and anyone that did not treat them as such was a sympathiser of the enemy, deemed to be “no better than them” and likely to face the same fate.

This is a classic manoeuvre used by a variety of regimes throughout history to divide society, promote a climate of fear and insecurity, encourage racism, xenophobia or ethnic hatred and mobilise their supporters to systematically suppress and eradicate the so called enemy. The Nazis in Germany used this strategy to near perfection over the period of their rule.

Official discrimination on its own is not enough to involve a significant percentage of the population in mass murder. Hate speech (using crude or sophisticated propaganda) must be deployed on a mass scale, and organised armed bodies of men infused into society to provide the ‘back bone’ and direction for mass murder. Where the prerequisite social conditions do not exist, or hate speech does not achieve the desired effect of involving significant numbers of everyday citizens in mass murder, it still facilitates their acquiescence to genocide carried out by smaller organised units of killers.

But even hate speech must have a clearly identifiable target to lead to genocide. This means that the ‘targets’ must be isolated and identified as systematically as possible. This is achieved by obvious means such as clearly marked or distinct clothing, less obvious means such as identity cards, or crude social stereotyping using race, ethnicity, language or physical appearance etc.

In the case of Rwanda, this had already been pre-facilitated by the Belgian colonialists through the issuance of identity cards based on ethnicity and the classic colonial strategy of creating an artificial elite through which colonial powers rule in countries where colonialists are vastly outnumbered.

During colonial rule, the artificial classification and imposition of a minority elite created the basis for long lasting resentment seized upon after independence by Hutu extremists to build a power base. Similar creation of artificial borders, cynical divisions of ethnic nationalities, imposition of artificial elites and so forth by colonial powers have provided the basis for many conflicts in Africa.

Simply put, genocide has become the method though which organised groups within society, whether based on ideology, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or language, consciously pursue a strategy of achieving or consolidating power, through manipulating economic, social or political conditions and insecurities to unite significant sections of society behind them and against a real or artificially created enemy whose extermination or repression is promoted as vital to the “survival of the species.”

The main tools are hate speech, use of mass propaganda to spread lies, insecurity and create myths promoting a climate of simultaneous fear and dehumanisation of the intended targets; and the organisation of armed bodies of men in preparation for, or to actually direct, instigate or carry out violence and mass murder. All of these factors and those mentioned earlier are clearly identifiable and if left unchallenged build up to make genocide almost inevitable.

But how can genocide be tackled?

General education and enlightenment, an understanding of social, political and economic issues and of individual and mass psychology will all help to make people less susceptible to manipulation of their fears and insecurities.

However, while sharp economic, social and political inequalities remain a characteristic of human society there will always be a possibility that people will be open to manipulation by those that see such cynical manipulation as their path to power and the trappings that go with it. Interventions by United Nations forces or others may stop specific cases of genocide from playing out, but this cannot be a permanent solution.

In Africa, the legacy of colonialism, serious economic problems, deepening inequalities and ongoing conflicts mean that there is a possibility that an increasing number of incumbent governments or powerful groups could promote religious, racial, ethnic or social differences and conflict as a way of acquiring or consolidating their hold on power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation. History shows that once set in motion conflicts are difficult to stop. How civil society and pro democratic forces tackle the issues is crucial to the future of Africa.

Overall, there is no doubt that the central challenge facing humanity today on all continents is to resolve the inequalities and injustices on which genocide can be built.

* Sankore is on the editorial board of Pambazuka and is Coordinator of CREDO for Freedom of Expression and Associated Rights which focuses on rights issues in Africa.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

A senior U.N. official criticized Swaziland's monarchy Saturday for failing to rein in HIV/AIDS, which now infects 38.6 percent of Swaziland's population, making the southern African nation's prevalence rate the highest in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, closed his three-day visit to Swaziland by slamming the kingdom's leadership for being "too slow to recognize the threat of HIV/AIDS on people's lives" and saying it would have to act with "lightning speed" if it wanted to reduce the prevalence rate.

The legal system in Sierra Leone is still very weak and that further impacts human rights and protection issues, says Refugees International. "It is extremely difficult for the poor to access the system. There are prolonged cases of pre-trial detention for suspects. Many have no legal representation in court, and most cases brought to the court are not properly documented or investigated. Hearings are repeatedly adjourned and postponed, leaving suspects to languish in prison," said the organisation.

The Human Rights Day spotlight should be turned on farmworkers, the SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) said. Spokesman Patrick Craven said the brutal murder of Nelson Chisale, who was fed to lions, reminded the country of the blatant disregard of human rights by many employers in rural areas. South Africa celebrated Human Rights Day on Sunday. Craven said some farmworkers were denied a minimum wage, forced to work many hours of unpaid overtime, housed in squalid conditions and were frequently beaten.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has used this year's observance of World Water Day to announce the establishment of an Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, which aims to galvanize global action on these issues as part of international efforts to eradicate poverty and achieve sustainable development.

Mali is promoting solar power and modern, clean energy such as butane to reduce poverty and improve the lives of rural women and safeguard the environment. The Ministry of Mines, Energy and Water is encouraging such new and renewable energy alternatives to wood through a project that aims to reach 250 villages in the southern regions of Koulikoro, Ségou, Sikasso and Mopti. Other partners are the Ministry of Environment; the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and the Family; and UNDP.

An organisation seeking to promote and stimulate the ideals of good governance in the country has been established. The Liberia Organisation for Good Governance (LOGG) which is headed by Dr. Nathaniel R. Richardson as Interim President, was formed recently by a group of concerned Liberians. At a press conference to announce the formation of LOGG, Dr. Richardson said the organisation was not for profit, non political, non-governmental and represented no political group.

The story of Burundi’s heroes is one of humanity against all odds. It is a story of courage in the midst of crisis, of defiance in the face of danger, of compassion in a sea of callousness. When everyone around them told them to accept the status quo of blood and brutality, these Burundian heroes chose to listen to their internal voices. It meant risking their own lives, and those of their family in some cases, to save that of another. For many, it meant ongoing danger and difficulty long after the moment of their act of courage. It was a moment for which they had not prepared or planned. Susan Koscis writes about these heroes in the latest edition of the Peace and Conflict Monitor.

Amnesty International has welcomed the historic decision by the Special Court for Sierra Leone dated 13 March 2004 to refuse to recognize the applicability of a national amnesty for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Special Court for Sierra Leone held that, in accordance with international law, the general amnesty granted in the 1999 Lomé peace agreement was "ineffective" in preventing international courts, such as the Special Court, or foreign courts from prosecuting crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The World Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS) has begun its biennial World Assembly with strong words from Botswana President Festus Mogae about the relocation of members of his country's San community. The assembly is being held in Botswana's capital, Gaborone. A non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Britain, Survival International, claims that Mogae's government has evicted the San - or Basarwa - from lands they had traditionally occupied in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to make way for mineral exploitation.

Violence erupted on Saturday afternoon in Liberia’s second city, Buchanan, about 120 kilometres southeast of the capital, Monrovia. According to reports from Buchanan, fighters from the rebel Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) ran amok, looting properties and harassing civilians. One civilian was later confirmed dead. Witnesses who fled the area and later contacted IRIN talked of MODEL fighters letting off weapons at random intervals, causing civilian casualties.

Zimbabwe's economic crisis has seen deepening vulnerability in urban areas and an increase in the number of malnourished children attending clinics in the two largest urban centres. In its latest situation report the World Food Programme (WFP) noted that "there is an increased need for assistance for malnourished children under the age of five in the cities of Harare [the capital] and Bulawayo [the second city], as evidenced by an increased turnout at clinics".

Everjoice – I have always admired your courage and heart, and deeply salute you for this editorial (Pambazuka News 147: Open letter to Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and other women in the South African cabinet). And I pray for your sustenance.

A coalition of thirteen associations of non-Tswana speaking ethnic groups in Botswana, including the Wayeyi tribal community, have raised their concerns over 'assimilationist policies' which deny their linguistic and cultural rights and leave them marginalized. Calling for dialogue with the government, the coalition representative stated that non-Tswana speaking groups are not recognized or consulted on decisions affecting their lives through their chiefs, lack rights to land, and do not have their languages used in education, the national radio and other social domains.

Ethiopia’s Karayu pastoralists have called upon the government to step up its efforts to assist them and protect their rights in consultation with community representatives. The Karayu have lost much of their ancestral pastoral lands to commercial farming interests, agro-industry and for use as nature parks and game reserves, leaving their traditional nomadic livelihoods threatened and offering them little alternative means of survival. Representatives have called for a share in new opportunities and for efforts to ensure the possibility to continue traditional practices and pastoralist lifestyles.

A Mozambican trade unionist has raised concerns that his country is lagging behind in coming up with a roll out plan on access to Antiretroviral Treatment (ART) and the lack of involvement of his country’s civil society in the Pan African Treatment Access Movement (PATAM). Pedro Jose Mondlane, who represented the Mozambican Labour Organisation at the recently ended PATAM conference, said that while Mozambican government and civil society are focusing on the issues of stigma and discrimination, it is also important that they engage with the central issues of treatment access and literacy.

Located about 20 km north of Gulu town, Pabbo internally displaced persons (IDPs) camp is one of the oldest such settlements in northern Uganda. It is also the largest, currently hosting 60,000 IDPs. "It is 18 years since this camp was created," Uganda's Minister of State for Disaster Preparedness Christine Aporu said, as she gazed over the densely packed expanse of mud and grass huts of which the camp consists. "Many of the children who grew up here have never known anything but camp life," Aporu, who had accompanied top World Food Programme (WFP) officials, including its deputy executive director, Sheila Sisulu, on a visit to the camp last week, added.