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KIGALI (AFP) - Rwanda has abolished the death penalty, a key step demanded by the international community to transfer genocide suspects to Rwandan courts, the justice minister said on Thursday. "The abolition of death penalty is effective from July 25, 2007," Tharcisse Karugarama told AFP. Abolishing the death penalty was one of the conditions set by the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to allow the transfer of genocide suspects to the Rwandan judiciary. The bill was initially put forward by President Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front, approved by the cabinet at the beginning of the year and approved...

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (Reuters) -- A U.N. court trying the masterminds of the 1994 Rwandan genocide on Monday began to hear a case against a former sports ministry official whose popular songs were said to have encouraged the killings. Simon Bikindi, a musician and former official in Rwanda's Ministry of Youth and Sports, was arrested in the Netherlands in 2001. He faces six counts of genocide to which he has pleaded not guilty. "He was the singer whose popular songs were supposed to have encouraged people to commit genocide," Timothy Gallimore, spokesman for Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda...

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - The suspected architect of Rwanda's 1994 genocide begins a fourth week of testimony on Monday defying accusers in the biggest trial to date over the central African nation's 100 days of slaughter. Prosecutors at the UN's Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) say former army colonel Theoneste Bagosora, now 64, was in charge as troops and machete-wielding militiamen butchered some 800,000 people. But in lengthy comments from the stand, Bagosora has accused rebel-turned-president Paul Kagame of triggering the bloodshed, blamed the chief of UN peacekeepers for the murder of Rwanda's prime minister and even...

France accused of genocide role Kagame denies ordering the shooting down of the Rwandan president's plane in 1994 Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused French people of "direct involvement" in the 1994 genocide. He told the French state-owned RFI radio that they provided weapons and training, and gave orders to those who killed some 800,000 people. He said the "French elements" were acting on government orders. The president was speaking a week after a French daily reported a police report that blamed him for a rocket attack that precipitated the massacre. "Sooner or later they will have to account for...

In just 12 weeks the world will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. That somber thought was on my mind as my friend, the distinguished African-American journalist Peter Noel, took me the other night for a tour of Harlem. We passed by Bill Clinton's office, and Peter told me how significant crowds, nearly all African-Americans, await the arrival most mornings of the man dubbed "America's first black president." That description – coined in 1998 by African-American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison – as well as the African-American rapture for Bill Clinton, is nothing short of astonishing. Calling Clinton...

<p>NEW YORK - With a trio of guilty verdicts yesterday, the U.N. tribunal for Rwanda has established that men armed only with words can commit genocide.</p> <p>Three Rwandan media executives were convicted by the international tribunal of committing and inciting genocide, war crimes and persecution in a case that will set a precedent for the new International Criminal Court.</p>

<p>NEW YORK — With a trio of guilty verdicts yesterday, the U.N. tribunal for Rwanda has established that men armed only with words can commit genocide.</p> <p>Three Rwandan media executives were convicted by the international tribunal of committing and inciting genocide, war crimes and persecution in a case that will set a precedent for the new International Criminal Court.</p>

Few of the words that President Bill Clinton offered the world have been stenciled onto the sides of buildings. An exception is his declaration that "Arusha is the Geneva of Africa," painted on several walls of the Arusha International Conference Center in Tanzania, home to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). It is here in this safari town, in a grouping of buildings where the electricity is temperamental and the translators are few, that a new first draft of international law is being written. A court press release boasts that the ICTR is "providing a sound foundation" for the...