Up to one million Rwandans were slaughtered in the 1994 genocide

GIKONKO, Rwanda, Aug 2 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - A Rwandan court convicted Friday, August 1, 105 people of involvement in the central African country's 1994 genocide, with 11 of them getting the death penalty, in what is seen as the biggest such trial to date. 

Victims' relatives and survivors attended the court in the southern town of Gikonko to hear the first verdict of its kind being handed down, as 73 genocide perpetrators dressed in pink prison uniforms were sentenced to life imprisonment, others to prison sentences of up to 25 years, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

A further 37 of the total of 142 were acquitted, some of them after having spent nine years in detention awaiting trial.

After two days listening to the charges, the accused stood silently as the verdicts were handed down. Murmurs came from the public gallery as the acquittals were announced.

Up to one million Rwandans were slaughtered in April and May 1994 in a campaign orchestrated by the then Hutu-led government to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority. Many Hutus were also killed, either in reprisals or because they refused to go along with the killings.

Divided 

The survivors and the relatives of the victims, however, remained divided over whether justice had been done.

"I'm moved by the verdict. Finally the man who killed our two children has been punished," said Vedaste Nayinzira, a genocide survivor.

"The person who killed my children has been sentenced but they won't be brought back to life by the verdict," said a woman who asked not to be named.

But others said that a number of perpetrators were acquitted.

"Many of the guilty have been acquitted, so we will appeal a number of cases," the investigating magistrate's representative Apollinaire Gakombe said.

About 100,000 genocide suspects are currently in jails in Rwanda awaiting trial.

The Rwandan authorities first used mass trials, such as the current one in Gikonko, to deal with the backlog and then in June last year began setting up the so-called "gacaca", or village courts, across Rwanda to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Those convicted on Friday had been charged with involvement in the massacre of around 50,000 people in the Gikonko district.

The state prosecution service says that 6,500 people have so far been convicted of crimes linked to the genocide, with between 600 and 700 getting death sentences.

Twenty-three death sentences have so far been carried out, according to public prosecutor Gerald Gahima.

A United Nations war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha in neighboring Tanzania and set up in November 1994, has so far managed to try a handful of the genocide's organizers, and has frequently come under fire, not least from the Tutsi-led Rwandan government and genocide survivors.

Meanwhile, Rwanda has formally opened its campaign for the first presidential elections since the genocide, the BBC News Online reported Friday. 

The election will take place on 25 August and parliamentary polls will follow on 3 September.