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Rwandan pleads guilty to genocide charge
2005-10-03 07:22:36
By Guardian Reporter
A former technical director at a radio station that promoted Rwanda’s 1994 genocide has pleaded innocent to five counts of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha.
Joseph Serugendo, who was arrested in Libreville, Gabon, on September 16, was also a leader of the Interahamwe militia, an extremist Hutu force that led the genocide, prosecutor William Egbe said.
During the genocide, broadcasters at Serugendo’s Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, or RTLM, used their influence to promote the slaughter, urging Hutus to kill Tutsis.
’RTLM broadcast messages that instigated the killings of hundreds of thousands of civilian Tutsis throughout Rwanda,’ Egbe said.
More than 500,000 members of Rwanda’s Tutsi ethnic minority and political moderates from the Hutu majority were killed in the genocide orchestrated by an extremist Hutu government then in power.
The prosecutor said Serugendo ’planned, instigated, ordered, committed or aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of these crimes’. No date has been set for Serugendo’s trial.
An executive and a journalist from Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, along with a newspaper editor, were convicted in December 2003 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for their roles in promoting the slaughter.
Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines was shut down after President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front, a Tutsi-led rebel group, toppled the Hutu extremists and ended the genocide.
The ICTR was up by the UN Securiuty Council in 1994 to try accused masterminds of the 100-day slaughter.
It has so far convicted 22 people and acquitted three. The tribunal has 63 genocide suspects in custody and 25 are standing trial.
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