Incumbent President Paul Kagame stormed to a landslide victory on Monday in Rwanda's first multiparty presidential poll with 95.05 percent of the votes, the National Electoral Commission announced. "The electoral commission is pleased to announce Paul Kagame as the winner," Chrysologue Karangwa, president of the commission, told reporters on Tuesday.
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INTIMIDATION ALLEGED IN RWANDA POLL
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Rwanda’s National Electoral Commission has approved four candidates to contest the country’s first post-genocide presidential elections, scheduled for 25 August. The commission cleared four of six candidates who had declared their interest in the presidency. The approved candidates are the incumbent, President Paul Kagame, former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, a woman candidate, Alvera Mukabaramba; and former Member of Parliament Nepomuscene Nayinzira.

The Rwandan government has registered eight political parties ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 25 August and 29 September respectively, a government minister told IRIN on Monday. The minister for local government and social welfare, Christopher Bazivamo, said the registered parties were free to operate.

Presidential elections in Rwanda will be held on 25 August and parliamentary elections on 29 September, the government announced on Thursday. The election will mark the end of a nine-year transitional government established after the 1994 genocide that claimed the lives of some 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The case of Rwanda demonstrates significant differences among leading agencies and policy makers working with displaced people in their understanding of displacement and resettlement concepts. At the heart of the problem is the UN agencies' and NGOs' struggle to agree on whether Rwandans relocated into new villages should be considered permanently resettled or still displaced.

The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) has been informed by a Agir Ensemble pour les Droits de l'Homme, a member of the OMCT network, of the disappearance of Mr. Léonard Hitimana, a member of the transitional National Assembly in Rwanda. According to the information received, Mr. Hitama's car was found on April 9th, close to the Ugandan border. Security forces have carried out an investigation at the President of the National Assembly's request, but it has been unsuccessful. The OMCT is asking concerned parties to write to the authorities requesting that Mr. Hitama be located, that an investigation be launched and that human rights be guaranteed.

Former Rwandan Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu arrived in Kigali last Friday from Brussels, ending his eight-year exile to challenge President Paul Kagame in the first post-genocide elections.

The EU has pledged 10 million euros (US $11.7 million) for a new poverty reduction programme, known as "Ubudehe" in the Kinyarwanda language, an EU official said on Monday. The programme seeks to decentralise poverty reduction efforts and is designed to involve local communities directly in the implementation of the National Poverty Reduction Strategy.

Rwandans voted overwhelmingly in favour of their country's draft constitution that will advance democracy and curb ethnic extremism which claimed nearly one million lives in the 1994 genocide. Ninety-three per cent of the people who voted in the May 26 referendum assented to the draft, according to results released last week by Electoral Commission chairman, Dr Karangwa Chrysologe.

The second Pan-African Youth Conference on HIV/AIDS opened in Kigali last Thursday with young people from 40 African countries participating, the Rwanda News Agency (RNA) reported.

Millions of Rwandans turned out Monday to vote on a new constitution intended to usher in a stable, democratic society nearly a decade after genocide devastated the tiny, central African nation. But critics argue that the charter, which is expected to pass, will consolidate the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front's hold on power.

While a transition government is to be installed in the Congo in June, the UN program for voluntary disarmament remains a failure. The recent violence in Ituri, where hundreds have died horrifically, illustrates MONUC's impotence. A new approach is needed to disarm and reintegrate Hutu rebels in eastern Congo. The UN monitoring mission urgently needs deployment of a rapid reaction force to restore order in Ituri and prevent further massacres of the civilians it is already mandated to protect. It also needs military capacity to deter Hutu rebels from destabilising Rwanda and to back renewed diplomatic efforts for voluntary disarmament. The Security Council should seize the opportunity of a new transitional government to give a dynamism to disarmament efforts, and the international community must convince Rwanda that the solution to ending the violent spiral is its own political opening. This is according to a new report from the International Crisis Group.

Imagine a tiny, beautiful, land-locked, densely populated and extremely poor African country that seven years ago was the site of a devastating civil war and genocide that left it in tatters. Now imagine a country that sets up an ICT Commission headed by its President; that adopts a national ICT Policy for the country and that sets up a top level national IT Agency to oversee a 400-page 5-year US$500 million plan and strategy for ICT. And finally imagine a country that commits to transforming itself from an essentially agrarian economy to a knowledge-based society within twenty years and that plans to become a services center in its region, despite being poorer than its neighbours and much less well-endowed with natural resources.

Topics include International Approaches to Post-Conflict Justice in Rwanda, Domestic Approaches: Gacaca and the Domestic Courts and Conflict and Compromise between the different models of justice.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is working to eliminate any opposition to its victory in elections scheduled before the end of 2003, Human Rights Watch says in a new briefing paper. The briefing paper, "Preparing for Elections: Tightening Control in the Name of Unity" examines the Rwandan government's effort to eliminate the Democratic Republican Movement (MDR), the second largest party in the country after the RPF.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) protested the seizure of the weekly "Indorerwamo"'s ("The Mirror") first issue and called on Internal Security Minister Jean de Dieu Ntiruhungwa to return the seized copies of the newspaper immediately. "This prior censorship demonstrates that press freedom is not guaranteed in Rwanda," said Robert Ménard, the organisation's secretary-general, in a letter to the minister.

Nyarugunga is one of four sectors in Kanombe district, Kigali. It is divided into five cellules: Nyarugunga, Kamashashi, Gihanga, Nonko and Rwimbogo. According to testimonies from different groups, the killings in Nyarugunga sector began on the night of President Habyarimana's death, so that a number of the targeted families had no opportunity at all to leave their houses. Several families who took refuge at Kanombe commune office were driven back by the soldiers and communal policemen who were patrolling there, and headed for Masaka parish where they later met their deaths. In two of its sectors, Nyarugunga and Busanza, gacaca trials have got underway. They began in Nyarugunga the day after the official launch of gacaca activities in June and in Busanza in November 2002, with the second series of pilot sectors.

Amnesty International has called on the Rwandese government to ensure the security of individuals named in a March 2003 parliamentary commission report that requests the dissolution of the opposition Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), Democratic Republican Movement political party.

Rwanda is safe for refugees in Tanzania and Uganda to return home, the head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Ruud Lubbers, told IRIN on Tuesday. However, he added that any repatriation must be voluntary.

This week marked the ninth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, in which over the course of 100 days in 1994, beginning April 7, up to a million people were killed in a government-orchestrated ethnic cleansing campaign. (http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,6119,2-11-1447_1343628,00.ht…) As part of its work in monitoring the implementation of the gacaca trials, a traditional system of justice being used to bring those involved in the killings to justice, the human rights organisation African Rights has compiled a written record of the history of the 1994 genocide in 12 original pilot sectors. This first report is devoted to sector Gishamvu, Nyakizu district in Butare, which began hearings in June 2002. Based upon the collective testimony given by groups of residents who were present during the genocide - prisoners, survivors and local people who witnessed how the killings unfolded - the report aims to reflect a broad consensus on what happened. Click on the link provided for an extract from the report, information on the work of African Rights, a listing of publications from African Rights and their contact details.