Aid sought to bring perpetrators of Rwandan genocide to justice

THE international community has a vital role in assisting the Kigali government to bring the perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda to justice, the coordinator of a Trocaire project in Rwanda said during a visit to Ireland.

Ms Alphonsine Mutabonwa Abia said the failure to punish those involved in previous genocidal outbursts in Rwanda was a factor in the recurrence of such outrages.

An "amazing" amount of work had already been done by the new regime in building a judicial system, and genocide trials would begin in the next month or so.

"We believe people will become reconciled when this work begins," she said. "But the process costs a lot of money and we want the international community to assist the Rwandan government in bringing these people to justice."

Ms Mutabonwa Abia said some 60,000 people are being held in Rwanda in relation to genocide. Many other suspected perpetrators were outside the country.

The divisions between Hutus and Tutsis created during colonial times had been used by successive regimes to assist them to remain in power. The government established in 1994 after the Rwandan Patriotic Front, took power was genuinely trying to reconcile those divisions, she said.

"It is hard but it is possible. It is going to be a slow process but we are going to achieve it.

A judicial system was being built up, the national army had recruited members of the old government force, many of them to high positions, and the government wanted all refugees to return.

Following earlier massacres and the flight of large numbers of refugees, mostly Tutsis and Hutu moderates, the Kigali regime had worked against the people returning, arguing that Rwanda did not have the land to accommodate them, she said.

Ms Mutabonwa Abia's father was killed in 1963, near the end of a four year outbreak of violence and massacres. Her mother, three brothers and three sisters fled to Uganda, where they grew up in a refugee camp, and later lived in a refugee settlement.

Her sister, Ms Aloisea Injumba who was one week old when her family fled Rwanda, is now Minister of Family and Women in Development in the Kigali government. Two of her brothers are dead.

Ms Mutabonwa Abia, a psychiatric nurse, social worker and counsellor, has lived in Uganda Kenya, Swaziland and South Africa. She is now coordinator of a Trocaire funded project in Rwanda in which local people are being trained as trauma counsellors.

"Most of the people we see are widows," she said. "With genocide, because everyone suffers people suppress their feelings. By setting up this service we are saying that it is OK to express your feelings. The reaction we are getting from the community shows us the need is there."

Ms Mutabonwa Abia has been speaking during her visit to church congregations and to schoolchildren, in Dublin and Belfast, about Rwanda and the, Trocaire's work there.

She would not discuss her ethnic background, saying Tutsis and Hutus did not fulfil the criteria for being called tribes. They share the same land and language, and have no characteristics that are unique to one group.

"Maybe it's like clans, like the O'Briens and the Martins. They are not tribes."

Ms Mutabonwa Abia referred to a report in Liberation of Paris that more than 100,000 Hutus died in 1994 in systematic killing "tolerated, if not organised" by the RPF. "That is totally untrue," she said.

Its Mr Niall Tobin of Trocaire said people on the ground believed there had been "arbitrary killings for revenge" by RPF forces in 1994, but it was not systematic and not at the level claimed in the Liberation report.