Rwandans add thousands of returning refugees to genocide trial backlog

RWANDAN authorities have arrested at least 5,600 of the million refugees who have returned from Zaire and Tanzania, UN sources claim. They are being held on suspicion that they were involved in the 1994 genocide.

The latest arrests bring to over 90,000 the number of genocide prisoners, many of them detained without trial in overcrowded conditions for over two years.

Rwanda has only 16 lawyers capable of defending them in forthcoming trials, UN human rights officials have told the Minister of State for Overseas Co operation, Ms Joan Burton. Most are unwilling to act as defence lawyers as their lives have been threatened.

The influx of refugees continues, with up to 2,000 a day emerging from the forests of eastern Zaire to cross the frontier at Bukavu, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees. Their condition has been described as "bad but not horrendous". UNHCR says field observations carried out 120 km from Kisangani have led it to believe there may be up to 330,000 people on the move.

Mr Peter Vandor, representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said the food security situation was "alarming". Hundreds of kilometres of forest around the camps had been felled. Almost the entire agricultural infrastructure had been destroyed. In 1995, 400,000 cows had been counted in eastern Zaire last year, there were only 30,000.

Rwanda faces a food deficit of 120,000 tons unless two million refugees and vulnerable peasants were given seeds and hoes to till their land, Mr Vandor says. If this is not done, the cost of emergency feeding would be £300,000 a day.

To accommodate the new arrivals, 250,000 new houses are needed, and a further 150,000 need to be repaired. The average cost for a four roomed mudbricked house is estimated at £650.

AIDS is also rising as the refugees return. In Kigali, 25 to 35 per cent of mothers in pre natal care were found to be HIV positive. In the country, the rate of infection has increased from about 4 per cent to 8 per cent.

At the same time, the upheavals of the past few years have seen the use of contraception drop from 13 per cent of the population to just to 3 per cent.

Agencies add: In Arusha, Tanzania, the UN tribunal on Rwanda yesterday heard a Hutu mayor accused of genocide directly cross examine a prosecution witness who said she watched him order the slaughter of Tutsis in his commune. Mr Jean Paul Akayesu (43), the former mayor of Rwanda's Taba commune, directly confronted his former employee, an accountant known to the court only as witness "K" to protect her identity.

Witness K had told the court that she watched Mr Akayesu order a group of eight Tutsis hacked to death in front of his office on April 19th, 1994. She also said Mr Akayesu imprisoned her for hours and threatened to kill her unless she provided information on the whereabouts of other Tutsis.

Mr Akayesu has pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

In a separate development, aid sources said yesterday that some 60 armed men attacked a hospital in north western Rwanda over the weekend, killing three and leaving three others seriously wounded.