Finland opens Rwanda genocide trial

A Rwandan former pastor has gone on trial in Finland charged with genocide over the masscre of 5,000 Tutsis in his home country in 1994.

Francois Bazaramba, a Hutu, is accused of planning and carrying out the killings. Many of the dead were women and children.

The 58-year-old, who will face a life sentence if found guilty, has denied all the charges.

Kimmo Nuotio, a professor of criminal law at the University of Helsinki, said on Tuesday: "This is something for which there was no alternative.

The Nordic countries have been promoting the development of an international criminal order, that there should be an end to impunity.

This is significant. It's important that Finland has taken this responsibility."

Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,

By Keith B. Richburg, (Basic Books, 1997)

Reviewed by Wolf Roder.

" ...Richburg is a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He has won several awards for international reporting and is presently assigned to Hong Kong. He was assigned to Africa and based in Nairobi from 1991-4. In the process of describing what Africa taught him, he tells us much about himself, his growing up black in a working-class neighborhood of Detroit, and what it means to be black in America. Like many African-Americans, he found his first arrival in Africa, the land of his forefathers, filled him with expectations and apprehensions. He was surely predisposed to see much good in Africa, and to ascribe shortcomings to the colonial period and its white masters.

As Richburg covers the coups, the wars, the massacres, from Liberia to Somalia, he comes to cherish his American heritage more and more. Even a visit to the slave dungeons of Goree Island, the historical museum outside Dakar, leaves him without pain or personal connection. As he contemplates the long-ago atrocities of the slave trade, he has to think of what his life might be like if the slave trade had never been. Perhaps he would be one of the many anonymous bodies he has seen dumped into mass graves at Goma, or cascading down the Kagera River, after another mass murder. Eventually, he can only bless those unsung ancestors of his who survived capture, the middle passage, and the auction block to become Americans.

Richburg decries those African-American leaders who, in the name of racial solidarity, cater to some of the worst dictators in Africa and excuse their outrages. The meeting of civil rights and other black leaders with the boy dictator of Sierra Leone at a conference in Libreville is startlingly embarrassing. "These black Americans were obviously more impressed with the macho military image Strasser cut than with the fact that he represents all that is wrong with Africa--military thugs who take power and thwart the continent's fledgling efforts to move toward democracy." In the end, Richburg concludes that "while I know that 'Afrocentrism' has become fashionable for many black Americans searching for identity, I know it cannot work for me. I have been here, I have lived here and seen Africa in all its horror."

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