Delegates from 10 countries in the East Africa region gathered in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, last week to mark the first River Nile Day, with most discussions focussing on the need to share water resources equitably in order to avoid conflict. The Nile Basin Initiative is supposed to benefit equally all of the countries in the Nile Basin. “Positive development in one country can have similar effects for the rest of the countries,” said Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame.

Reporters Without Borders have voiced concern about a physical attack on Jean-Bosco Gasasira, the managing editor of the independent fortnightly Umuvugizi, who was beaten unconscious on 9 February in Kigali. It followed months of verbal hostility from the Rwandan government towards the more outspoken, privately-owned media.

Hundreds of people in Rwanda's northwestern region displaced by floods are suffering from food insecurity, a local government official has said. "The term 'disaster' cannot really capture the suffering of the people here," Pénélope Kantarama, the governor of Western Province, said on Wednesday.

An American student and his Rwandan colleagues in the U.S. and Rwanda have joined forces to build a public library in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. The American Friends of the Kigali Public Library (AFKPL), a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC, is committed to working with the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga, Rwanda, to spearhead the construction of the library.

At least 10 people have been killed and hundreds more displaced in flooding after heavy rains in northwestern Rwanda, a government official said. The flood-waters also destroyed 354 homes in Rubavu District, area mayor Ramadhan Barengayabo said on Monday. He said the displaced fled their homes after the heavy weekend rains caused Sebeya River to rise and have yet to receive any aid.

Eight Burundians have accused the UN Mission to Congo (MONUC) of involvement in the fraudulent registration of non-Rwandans as ex-combatants seeking 'repatriation'. According to the Chairman of the Rwanda Demobilisation and Reintegration Commission (RDRC) John Sayinzoga, the eight told RDRC officials that some MONUC officials connive with one 'Mama Claude' to 'repatriate' people allegedly from the DRC for US5 per person and a further reward of Frw.10,000, after receiving their 'resettlement package'.

On 15 January 2007, IGLHRC and ILGA sent a letter to the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, asking him to reconsider plans to include of a provision that would penalize homosexuality as part of an overall revision to the Rwandan penal code currently being debated. The provision appears as Article 160 in the French version and article 158 in the English version of the draft penal code currently on the website of the Ministry of Justice.

Rwandan police and judicial authorities must ensure prompt and effective law enforcement to deal with recent killings of participants in the justice system for genocide known as gacaca, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. The 20-page report, “Killings in Eastern Rwanda,” documents two incidents in late November 2006 in which 13 persons were killed.

On 15 January 2007, IGLHRC and ILGA sent a letter to the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, asking him to reconsider plans to include a provision that would penalize homosexuality as part of an overall revision to the Rwandan penal code currently being debated. The provision appears as Article 160 in the French version and article 158 in the English version of the draft penal code currently on the website of the Ministry of Justice.

Police on Friday (5 January 2007) arrested the former Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Bank of Commerce, Development and Industry (BCDI), Alfred Kalisa on corruption and office abuse-related charges he allegedly committed at the time he was at the bank's helm.

Members of the Forum of Rwanda Women Parliamentarians (FFRP) will February 22-23, host an international conference to share experiences with their counterparts from various countries around the world. The disclosure was made January 5 by the Forum president Judith Kanakuze, during a FFRP meeting held at the Novotel Hotel.

The trial of a Rwandan official accused of being one of the main instigators of the 1994 genocide has begun at the UN war crimes tribunal in Tanzania. Tharcisse Renzaho, the former governor of the capital, Kigali, has been charged with genocide, complicity to commit genocide, assassination, and rape.

Establishing effective prevention programmes in schools requires an understanding of the effects of early alcohol use in students, as well as developing policies and strategies, argues Rwanda's Minister of Education in The New Times newspaper.

A British court has remanded four Rwandan men accused of taking part in the 1994 genocide of minority Tutsis. The men, in their 40s and 50s, appeared in a Westminster magistrates’ court on Friday (29 December 2006) after they were arrested in raids conducted in various parts of Britain.

The National University of Rwanda is to become the core Internet service provider, a reliable source from the Rwanda Information and Technology, (RITA) has revealed.

The first time I heard of Rwanda it was not as a separate country. It was as hyphenation: Ruanda-Urundi. That knowledge came from a Sociology class taught by a German Lecturer, in a pre-degree class at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria’. In those days Sociology was heavily dominated by Anthropology and its preoccupations with ‘the tribe’, ‘the clan’ and ‘the native’. Sociology was a discipline introduced out of protest at the uses and abuses of anthropology.

Anthropology has always had a bad name because of its close association with the colonial enterprise. European colonialists captured Africa through an unholy trinity: Christianity, the Maxim Guns and the Trade. The Anthropologists acted as the civilian contingent of the imperialist enterprise by providing what intelligence officers today provide for the modern state.

This is the same kind of far-reaching specialized local knowledge that ubiquitous Western NGOs can still provide (though a lot of information and knowledge are easily available today) to their sponsors today. The anthropologists were not necessarily ( like many of the missionaries) conscious agents but their knowledge, studies, ‘participatory research’ and activities among ‘the native’ directly and indirectly helped the colonialist project.

For Ruanda-Urundi what we know was that these were countries divided between ‘two tribes’, Hutu and Tutsi. The former looked more like us: Negroid, broad nose, short and stocky while the latter does not look like us: they are lighter skinned, taller, with long noses. With that, our racist focus on Rwanda and Burundi was constructed and the template put in place.

When you then consider the colonial imprint of indirect Tutsi rule in cahoots with the colonial rulers as the traditional aristocratic overlords, the anti-Tutsi prejudice became complete and got given a kind of respectable ideological justification.

Later in Political Science classes one was presented with another set of truisms that did not square with the tribal angle. Rwanda and Burundi, this time joined together with Somalia, we were taught, were the only countries in Africa where ‘tribalism’ was not an issue as in many post colonial African states, because the people of those countries were the same ‘tribe’, same faith. In the case of Rwanda and Burundi they did not even have significant dialect differences.

So if the people of those countries are not of different tribes how come they are killing each other? The answer lies in politics and power, not in ‘tribe’.

It took me moving to Uganda in the early 1990s to complete my education about Rwanda. Most Africans’ understanding or misunderstanding of Rwanda and Burundi was shaped by racist anthropological understandings. The ambiguities of some of the most radial scholars on this continent about the 1994 Genocide, and in understanding Rwanda since then, are rooted in this.

Many Africans believe themselves to be Hutus and by definition are apologetic about Hutu extremism. People who are usually critical of colonial constructs of ‘tribalism’ and ‘ethnicity’ in Africa, lose their critical faculties when it comes to Rwanda and Burundi. Because Genocide was carried out in the name of the majority, against a minority, does not make it ‘democratic’ or excusable. One’s opposition to minority rule should not condone genocide or atrocities against ethnic or racial minorities or minorities’ of any kinds.

The role of past colonial and neocolonial powers, especially Belgium and later France, in manufacturing these tribes and playing them against each other in order to perpetrate foreign domination in that part of Africa, cannot be separated from the successive Genocide that has engulfed the two countries (though with different victims and villains) since the late 1950s.

Without France and Belgium, the Genocidiare regime of Habyarimana and MRND could not have held on to power for so long. Without France and its ‘operation turquoise’ after the defeat of genocide in 1994 the Genocidiare regime, its army and clergy could not have forced genuine refugees behind fugitives in camps in Goma and other parts of Eastern Congo that eventually led to forceful closure of those camps, prolonged wars in the Congo and instability that continues until today.

It is therefore very rich, insulting and most mischievous and mendacious that a French judge sitting in some obscure province, and an even more obscure kangaroo court, can start issuing indictments against the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame and nine of his officers.

Was the Genocide really caused by the shooting down of the plane of Habyarimana? If it had not been planned well in advance, with weapons being put into place how could it have been carried out and executed so swiftly and with such clinical precision?

Africans too readily accept Westerners sitting in judgment over us, without us doing the same for their many atrocities against us. Very often we allow our disagreements or opposition to particular regimes or leaders to cloud our better judgment and this gets non-Africans off the hook and even inflates their pomposity towards us. For many of us, as long as we are opposed to the person, people or governments being attacked, we think it is alright regardless of the principles that may be at stake.

How many African judges have issued indictments against Western leaders for their complicities in the many tragedies that continue to take place on this continent? Why can’t our judges, governments or institutions and even our human rights organizations who are quick to accept donor funds to campaign (rightly in many cases) against abuses by our governments also put some energy into prosecuting and campaigning against non-African excesses against Africa?

France and Belgium in particular and their successive leaders, ministers, corporations, diplomats, bureaucrats are guilty of aiding and abetting Genocide and should hang their heads in shame instead of looking for Africans -leaders or the led - to prosecute. They are only trying to ease the burden on their own consciences about their moral, political and legal complicity in murdering the innocent in Rwanda. 1994 may be the worst expression of these excesses but there are too many similar cases across this continent. Where do we even start when counting these cases? Is it Genocide by the Germans against the Hereros in Namibia? Or King Leopold’s Genocide in the Congo? Is it the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, coordinated by the Belgians and the CIA? Is it the overthrow of patriotic regimes including that of Nkrumah, Ben Bella, and so many more by agents of the West? Or do we cite the testing of nuclear weapons on innocent people of the Cameroon by the British in the 1960s?

We do not have to look far back in history to find evidence of Western conspiracies and wrongs against Africa. Most western countries will stand indicted without too much research. France will be in a special class of its own as both a brutal colonial power and neocolonialist on this continent.

There is more than enough for many western countries, and their leaders - political, religious and corporate -to be hauled before the ICC. That they are not is because they are the ones making the rules and then breaking them. That they get away with it is because we let them. International law should not only be for the poorer countries to obey, used to threaten current leaders, or enforce on leaders who have fallen out of favour (like Taylor, Milosevic, and others). It should apply equally. In a just world, how many western leaders, current and past, would be sitting comfortably in their mansions?

The responsibility for Genocide is not about who shot Habyarimana, it is about those who aided and abetted Genocide in that country ending with the delivery of their final script in April 1994. That responsibility, Monsieur Judge, is on France and their Belgian cousins.

• Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Rwanda has cut diplomatic ties with France and given France's ambassador to Rwanda 24 hours to leave the country. On Thursday (23 November 2006), thousands of Rwandans had held protests after a French judge said that Paul Kagame, the country's president, should stand trial for a 1994 plane crash which killed the country's then leader.

Rwanda has rejected calls by a French magistrate to indict Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, over his alleged involvement in the death of the country's former leader. Juvenal Habyarimana, Rawanda's former president, was killed when his plane was shot down in 1994.

General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1994, will testify for the third time next Monday (27 November 2006) before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Contrarily to the previous two hearings, this time the Canadian general is to testify via video-conference from the headquarters of the Canadian Army in Ottawa, according to the prosecutor's office.

Rwanda and Burundi may be sworn in as new members of the East African Economic Community (EAC) when the grouping holds its next summit, Nov. 30, in the Tanzanian financial centre of Dar-es-Salam. The regional organisation presently comprises Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and is headquartered in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.