cc In response to a 1 June Human Rights Watch letter calling for the transfer of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the umbrella organisation IBUKA expresses concern over the absence of measures to bring Western parties complicit in Rwanda's 1994 tragedy to task. While broadly applauding Human Rights Watch's commitment to justice, IBUKA and its associates AVEGA and AERG take issue with the letter's suggestions that RPF soldiers should be tried in the same manner as genocidaires. Missing from the discussion, IBUKA contends, is the role of Western governments in the genocide, an omission which needs to be swiftly rectified if rich countries are not simply to be immune from international justice.

In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbours, friends, and family members across Rwanda. Nine years later the killers came home from prison to live side by side again with their victims. The complexities of this homecoming are explored in director Anne Aghion’s emotionally powerful film "My Neighbour, My Killer", where, amongst the green hills and tiled roofs of the village of Gafunda, the memories of those horrors resurface as widows shell beans and peel vegetables.

Rwanda is set to become home to the pilot learning centre for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in Africa due to its outstanding progress in promoting the child user friendly computer on the continent. The centre to be located at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) to be known as the OLPC Learning Centre will be launched on June 9 and it is aimed at supporting Rwanda achieve its objectives of promoting ICT in Education but also act as a reach out centre for the whole of Africa.

Amnesty International has said Rwandan gays and lesbians face serious hostilities, harassment and intimidation in the East African state. According to the Amnesty International 2009 report, the treatment of the lesbian community is not isolated but indicative of general short-fall in the respect of human rights, saying the Rwanda government reacted with hostility to criticism on gay and lesbian community.

Can a joint approach to governance assessment help to improve aid effectiveness? What can be learned from the first Joint Governance Assessment (JGA) undertaken in Rwanda during 2008? A JGA aims to bring government and development partners together to review governance performance based on commonly agreed indicators. This brief from The Policy Practice recommends that such an assessment can prove to be helpful to advancing dialogue, but is likely to be a long-term and difficult process that is only suited to particular circumstances where the process can address joint concerns of government and donors.

Many HIV-positive women in Rwanda are infected with strains of human papilloma virus associated with a high risk of cervical cancer, investigators report in an article published in the online edition of the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Their study also showed that women with cancer-associated strains of human papilloma virus who had a low CD4 cell count were more likely to have cancerous or pre-cancerous cell changes in the cervix.

A Rwandan man living in the United States state of Kansas was arrested on Thursday in connection with the 1994 genocide in his home country, the US Department of Justice said. Lazare Kabaya Kobagaya (82) was arrested on charges of lying on his naturalisation fraud and misusing his alien registration card, officials with the Department of Justice said.

Some of the most controversial issues stemming from the 1994 Rwandan genocide will be addressed at a symposium in Kigali, co-hosted by the University of Oxford, on 3 April 2009. The event entitled, ‘15 Years after Genocide: Where Now for Rwanda?’ will commemorate the 15th anniversary of the genocide and feature provocative presentations by leading policymakers, academics and journalists on a range of key issues affecting post-genocide Rwanda.

cc While most of the world is familiar with Rwandan genocide, fifteen years later the influence of a small band of deniers is growing thanks to the embrace of the deniers' arguments by a small but influential number of left-wing, anti-American journals and websites, cautions Gerald Caplan.

Rwanda requires $200 million by 2012 to connect 220,000 new electricity customers to the national grid, a government official said on Friday. The landlocked east African nation has 130,000 customers and available power capacity outstrips demand. Electricity supply is, however, expected to rise from 55 mw when two generation projects from methane gas in Lake Kivu are completed in three years.

The number of Rwandan Hutu rebels who have left the Democratic Republic of Congo and gone home has risen substantially since the beginning of the year, Bruno Donat head of the United Nations' disarmament, demobilization and repatriation efforts in the DRC has said. The UN official credits his organisation for convincing rebel fighters that repatriation is best for them and for the stability of Africa's Great Lakes Region.

A U.N. court trying the masterminds of Rwanda's 1994 genocide jailed a former military chaplain for 25 years on Friday for sexual assault and killing ethnic Tutsis who sought sanctuary at a seminary. Emmanuel Rukundo is one of two clergymen the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) indicted for their role in the 100-day slaughter in which troops and Hutu militia butchered 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

Thousands of Rwandan troops have started to leave Democratic Republic of Congo five weeks after they crossed the border to attack Hutu rebels. A ceremony has been held in the main eastern Congolese city of Goma, to mark their withdrawal. Rwanda's foreign minister says the joint operation "seriously weakened" the FDLR rebels but a BBC correspondent says civilians paid a heavy price.

The rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) brutally slaughtered at least 100 Congolese civilians in the Kivu provinces of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo between January 20 and February 8, 2009, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed dozens of victims and witnesses who recently arrived from neighboring areas of Ufamandu and Walowaluanda (North Kivu province) and from Ziralo (South Kivu province) at displaced persons camps near Goma, the capital of North Kivu.

On March 20-22, a conference will be held in Toronto at the University of Toronto to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, which claimed the lives of some 1,000,000 in approximately 100 days. The conference, which will focus on lessons learned / not learned from the Rwandan Genocide, will feature some of the world's most renowned genocide scholars and genocide activists. Hundreds of scholars, students, teachers, members of the Rwandan community, and other members of the general public are expected to attend.

Rwandan Hutu rebels have killed over 100 civilians in eastern Congo in reprisal attacks since the start of a joint offensive against them three weeks ago, New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Friday. The attacks by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels took place after Rwanda and Congo launched joint operations aimed at removing the rebel militia, which is seen as a root cause of years of strife in central Africa.

What can be learnt from the work of Rwanda's female parliamentarians? This report by the Initiative for Inclusive Security reviews the literature concerning women’s participation in politics. It considers the issue of gender-based violence in Rwanda and the role of women in Rwanda’s government. Factors behind the successful development of the gender-based violence (GBV) law included soliciting input from constituents and maintaining close relationships with civil society.

A court in Belgium has decided not to proceed with a prosecution against two Rwandan generals. The two were accused of involvement in shooting down the plane carrying the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which triggered the 1994 genocide. A French judge issued an arrest warrant for the pair in 2006.

Rwanda is in the process of adopting male circumcision as a part of its national HIV prevention strategy, but experts worry that a spike in requests before a planned public awareness campaign has been launched could have negative implications. Alphonse Ndakengerwa, a surgeon at King Faisal Hospital in the capital, Kigali, said clinics in the city had recently been overwhelmed by requests for the procedure, largely as a result of media reports on research indicating a lower risk of HIV infection in circumcised men.

The Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) says that it has repatriated 335 former Rwandan Hutu fighters and their dependents to Rwanda in the past month alone. During the same period, the Mission has also transferred 120 Rwandan civilians to the United Nations refugee agency for further consideration as potential refugees in the Congo. As of 5the February, another 219 Rwandan nationals are awaiting repatriation at United Nations-run facilities in north-eastern Congo.