Robinson to visit Rwanda on first trip as UN commissioner

Mrs Mary Robinson is expected to visit Rwanda next week in her first field trip since becoming UN High Commissioner for Human Rights more than two months ago. Mrs Robinson will also travel to South Africa, where she is scheduled to meet President Nelson Mandela.

Yesterday, the UN High Commissioner met the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, in Geneva. After the meeting, Ms O'Donnell said it was essential for world governments to translate their good intentions for the UN into practical and financial support for Mrs Robinson and UNHCHR.

Rwanda is familiar territory for Mrs Robinson, who visited the country three times as President. Her last trip there was in March. The High Commissioner is expected to raise concerns about human rights in Rwanda in a meeting with the government strongman, the vice-president, Mr Paul Kagane. More than 6,000 people have died so far this year in clashes between the Rwandan army and Hutu rebels in the east of the country.

Mrs Robinson's main objective, however, will be to re-organise the UN's ailing human rights monitoring operation in Rwanda. This unit, the largest field operation under the control of UNHCHR, has been in disarray since last February, when five of its staff were killed in an ambush. The head of the operation left in June and has yet to be replaced.

Mrs Robinson hopes to achieve greater co-ordination between the different UN agencies operating on the ground and to ensure there is a human rights involvement in all areas of UN activity.

After Rwanda, she travels to South Africa to speak at an award ceremony marking UN Human Rights day, December 10th. The occasion also ushers in a year-long commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in December 1948.

Up to now, Mrs Robinson has concentrated on the internal reorganisation of UNHCHR in Geneva. She has travelled five times to UN headquarters in New York, where the Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, is based.

Further visits to human rights "hot spots", notably Cambodia and Colombia, are expected to take place next year.

AFP adds from Arusha, Tanzania: Seventy per cent of the victims of one of the worst massacres in Rwanda's 1994 genocide were women and children, a US forensic expert told the UN war crimes tribunal here.

A US forensic anthropologist, Dr William Haglund, of the Boston-based group, Physicians for Human Rights, gave the evidence on Wednesday at the trial of the former Kibuye prefect, Mr Clement Kayishema, and businessman, Mr Obed Ruzindana. Both are accused of being responsible for the murder of thousands of people in various parts of Kibuye, a district in western Rwanda, notably in a bloody massacre inside the community's Catholic church.

Between December 1995 and February 1996, Dr Haglund and his team exhumed 454 cadavers buried between the church and the Saint John Home where nearly 8,000 people are said to have been murdered in April 1994. The remains of 39 other victims were recovered near Lake Kivu.