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	Rwanda to try war crimes locally

Rwanda has set up dozens of community courts to try suspects in the country's 1994 genocide under a system in which ordinary people who witnessed killings judge their peers, often former neighbours and friends.

"We call upon every Rwandan to participate objectively in this process and see to it that gacaca achieves its objectives," said a cabinet statement about the so-called gacaca courts.

Judicial officials said "people's judges" were gathering in 106 areas around the central African country to prepare for the start of the trials in about two weeks' time.

Judges and villagers will draw up lists of people who were slaughtered and of people from those areas who are in prison on suspicion of taking part in the killings. They will also discuss codes of conduct that will govern proceedings, officials said.

"It is not going to be an easy job to do, but we will put in the needed effort," Cecile Mukabagwiza, a gacaca judge in Rukara district of Mutara province, said.

"We shall harvest some enemies (because of the rulings we will make) but we do not mind because gacaca is something we seriously need," she added.

Rwanda's prisons are overflowing with more than 100,000 suspects accused of massacres in which extremists of the Hutu majority murdered 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates between April and June 1994.

To deal with the backlog, Rwanda set up gacaca courts in 12 villages in June on an experimental basis and Monday saw the expansion, on a full-time basis, of the network to villages and towns in a total of 106 districts. Prisoners will be bused out to the courts when the trials get under way.

An international tribunal based in Tanzania deals only with the most high profile cases and has no time for normal Rwandans equally implicated in the massacres.

Officials said the pilot gacaca sessions had helped rectify mistakes and gave a clearer picture of the task that lay ahead.

Under gacaca, suspects are brought before the people's judges, who are elected on the basis of their integrity. The suspects are tried by the evidence of the people who lived with them.

Officials said that under gacaca half of any sentence imposed will be served in the community, and because most have been in jail for over seven years most convicts are expected to serve the remainder of their terms under detention at home.

Human Rights groups have expressed reservations over the partiality of the gacaca courts, criticising the fact that under the system, lawyers are not allowed to represent the accused and the judges will have no formal training.

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