The Batwa once inhabited the forests of the Virunga Mountains, but by the 1970s, after legislation outlawed hunting and gathering and introduced national parks, the Batwa communities were driven off their ancestral lands. Today, there are about 130 Batwa families living in this area. Most have become beggars or landless labourers working for their Hutu and Tutsi neighbours for less than $1 a day.

Rwanda has been selected to house the headquarters of the multi-million dollar Eastern Africa Submarine Cable Project (EASSy). The project, which has of recent been dogged by controversy over its ownership, has a membership of 23 countries in the region. The EASSy cable system is a 9900km project expected to run from Durban, South Africa to Djibouti and is supported by the African Development Bank, the World Bank and telecommunications operators.

Thousands of genocide survivors, whose school fees should be paid by a solidarity fund, no longer attend school and live in difficult conditions, said six members of the Rwandan Parliament in a report published last week by the New Times.

The Rwanda Development Gateway (RDG), one of three ICT initiatives under the nationally-funded Rwanda Development Gateway Group (RDGG), will become an official university center at the National University of Rwanda. The new center will establish a business incubation facility to instill the culture of entrepreneurship among IT graduates, an IT research and development unit and a commercial entity to manage the center's profit-making ventures. This will complement the RDG's on-going management of the national development portal and other ICT work.

A former Rwandan media director has been sentenced to six years in prison after admitting inciting violence during the 1994 genocide. Joseph Serugendo this week agreed a plea bargain at a UN court, under which charges of genocide were dropped. Serugendo, 53, is terminally ill. Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the 1994 slaughter. Serugendo is a former technical director of Radio Mille Collines (RTLM), which urged Hutus to murder Tutsis.

Continued attacks from poachers and poor villagers living nearby have led Rwandan officials to announce the closure of the National Volcano Park. "We realized that there was no other way out of this problem. But, we're confident that the awareness campaigns and other projects will enable communities to become conscious of the need to protect their ecological surroundings," Rwanda's tourism and national parks director said.

The apparent sidelining of Rwandans from the workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has led a government representative to question the UN-backed court's effectiveness. Kigali complains that unofficial changes to the court's mandate, for example the significant reduction of the number of genocide suspects, have actually undermined rather than developed Rwanda's legal system. In addition, officials criticize western countries harboring genocide fugitives for slowing down the process.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame has declared Kigali no longer sees the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo as supporters of the Hutu militias responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Kagame's announcement marks a positive development ahead of the first democratic elections in the DRC since independence in 1960. Tensions in the eastern provinces of the DRC threaten to destabilize the election with local leaders loyal to Rwanda unwilling to give up power should they lose the election.

The genocide in 1994, combined with the impacts of HIV/AIDS, has created thousands of orphans in Rwanda. These orphans – many the heads of households – urgently need land use rights. A weakened system of guardianship and increasing pressures on land often prevent this.

Burundian and Rwandan government officials have agreed to resolve by June border land disputes involving communities from the two countries. Rwanda's minister of state for cooperation, Rosemary Museminali, said experts from the two countries would use maps as the main tools to settle the land disputes among the communities living along the border, mostly in Burundi's northern provinces of Ngozi, Kirundo and Muyinga in the northeast.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame said on Monday he was considering a plea for clemency from the nation's first post-genocide president, in jail for crimes including inciting ethnic violence and embezzling state funds. Pasteur Bizimungu, who in February received a 15-year term for the crimes committed after his resignation in 2000, said his release would be "for the good of the nation" in a letter printed by local newspapers last week. “It is true that I received the letter of Mr. Bizimungu but I am yet to think about it and analyze its content," Kagame told reporters. "I will let you know if I make a decision," reports Reuters.

Rwanda has been chosen as the headquarters for the proposed $280mn East Africa submarine cable, said an official at the Rwanda Information Technology Agency. Outgoing Director Dr Shem Ochoudho confirmed that Rwanda had been chosen. The six countries directly involved with spearheading the project are Botswana, Lesotho, Kenya, Rwanda South Africa and Tanzania. There are 23 countries involved in total.

This paper sets the case of Rwanda’s male youth within the larger context of Africa’s urbanisation and burgeoning youth population. It investigates the pervasive images of male urban youth as a menace to Africa’s development and its primary source of instability. It then turns to the Rwandan case, examining the desperate conditions its young men (and women) faced before the civil war (1990-94) and 1994 genocide, as well as their experience of it.

This crucial role aims at improving access to and quality and relevance of primary healthcare services in Rwanda. Requirements include three years operational experience and a track record of success on advocacy and policy development/research in health; a sound understanding and experience of health economics; experience of work at field/community level; a degree in medicine, public health or other health related science.

More than a decade after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the need for compensation to victims of this tragedy continues to present difficulties for government and genocide survivors alike. Since then, a court - the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) - has been set up in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha to bring the alleged masterminds of the genocide to book, while Rwandan courts have struggled to try the huge number of persons accused of carrying out the killings. Those who survived the genocide are still awaiting reparations, however, says François Ngarambe, president of Ibuka ("Remember", in Kinyarwanda) - one of the main non-governmental organisations for genocide survivors.

Kenya and Rwanda have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will streamline professional education in Rwanda, facilitated by Kenyan teachers. The Memorandum was signed by the Kenyan Minister of Education, Science and Technology Dr. Noah M. Wekesa, MP, on behalf of the Kenyan government, while the Rwandan Minister of Education Dr. Jeanne D’arc Mujawamariya signed on behalf of the Rwanda government.

It is true what Gerald Caplan has said (See . But unless we individualy wake up and put an end to these wars we will not win. It is up to us - the African race - to wake up and cultivate a sense of togetherness, a feeling of brotherhood and reconciliation with one another.

Like the war in Darfur which has displaced many, I strongly believe that Africans themselves will end it and not people from outside Darfur. We do not need so much the help of the international community but the African leaders and the people of that region. The resources of reconciliation lies within our reach.

If we cultivate an environment where we recognize that we are Africans fighting one another, we will see the common enemy and fight it with all our energies. We will therefore be in a position to fight such ills inflicted on our society such has poverty, disease and under-development. I would like therefore to say that the African leaders and we in general, will turn the tables only if we are part of the reconciliation and not sitting on the edge of the fence leaving everything to the international community.

A Rwandan ex-mayor has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for aiding and abetting killing in the 1994 genocide. Paul Bisengimina, who was mayor of Gikoro in 1994, was sentenced at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Tanzanian town of Arusha. He was convicted on two charges to which he pleaded guilty in terms of a plea bargaining agreement. An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered during the 100-day genocide. Mr Bisengimina was involved in the slaughter of about 1,000 Tutsis who had sought refuge in a church.

Last week the world remembered the 12th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Gerald Caplan argues that understanding about the real causes of the genocide remains limited, while the world’s superpowers continue to act in their own self-interest when it comes to other genocides.

Twelve years after perhaps a million defenseless Rwandans were slaughtered for the sin of being Tutsi, Rwanda's genocide has at last become widely known. As people around the world commemorate this week the 12th anniversary of the genocide, the phrase "Another Rwanda" joins the wildly ignored "Never Again!" to reflect the world's apparent abhorrence of genocide—the ultimate crime of crimes. Anyone who thinks this augurs well for the future of humankind is dead wrong.

There are three critical realities that both these neat little phrases obscure: Few really understand what actually happened in Rwanda in 1994. A pernicious campaign to deny that genocide continues to unfold. And it IS happening again before our eyes.

Thanks to a modest production of movies, documentaries and books since the 10th anniversary, the genocide is far better known now than it was even while it was at its bloodiest. Far and away the most important vehicle has been the mainstream film "Hotel Rwanda", seen by millions and widely available on CD. The problem is what these large audiences learned from "Hotel Rwanda." Yes, it made clear that the minority Tutsi people were attacked viciously by the majority Hutu and that the world at large failed to intervene.

Yet the lasting impression surely is that some Hutu Africans were sadistically massacring some Tutsi Africans for no good reason. No one viewing the film alone would have grasped that this was no mere barbaric tribal eruption based on primitive ancient hatreds. This was a carefully planned and executed conspiracy by a group of sophisticated, westernized, greedy men and women for the purpose of ensuring their continued power and privileges. That's not a savage African phenomenon - that's a universal human phenomenon.

Nor is the critical, destructive role of outside forces evident in "Hotel Rwanda". No viewer would learn that the hatred between the two groups had largely been invented and inculcated over a century ago by the powerful Roman Catholic Church in Rwanda. They'd know nothing of the responsibility of the Belgian government for the deep, ultimately deadly, division between Hutu and Tutsi. They'd be blissfully unaware that the government of France was complicit in the genocide and has never to this day accepted any responsibility. Indeed, without a century of western interference, there'd have been no genocide as we know it. And had western governments cared one iota, they could easily have prevented the entire genocidal conspiracy from being executed. The world knows everything about Rwanda except what really matters.

What's even worse are the insidious forces at work that brazenly deny that there ever was a genocide launched by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi. Another unwelcome lesson in human nature: There are always deniers. There are always David Irvings and Ernst Zundels, who for their own sordid or pathological motives deny what can't be doubted. In Rwanda's case, it's an unholy coalition of Hutu genocidaires who want to complete the extermination of the Tutsi, whites in Belgian and France who had privileged access to the pre-genocide Hutu government, conservative Christian politicians in Europe, and a motley cast of characters around the world (including Canadians) with diverse, perverse, sometimes inexplicable motives.

For the survivors of 1994, and for the families of the victims, denial creates a second unbearable hurt, making an already difficult healing process far more painful and prolonged. And it's all based on lies and distortions. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable: To deny the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda is the equivalent of denying the Holocaust, and all who do so should be treated accordingly.

Finally, despite Rwanda, there remains Darfur. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on the world to assure that Darfur, the besieged western area of Sudan, doesn't become "another Rwanda". Unlike Rwanda, all the world knows what's happening in Darfur, so the excuse of ignorance, as in Rwanda, doesn't hold. Unlike Rwanda, Darfur has been formally labeled a genocide by the Bush administration and both Houses of the American Congress.

Yet three years since the Darfur crisis erupted, the world's reaction has been pitiful. The all-powerful permanent members of the Security Council - China, Russia, the US, France - have perfectly good reasons of crass self-interest to allow hundreds of thousands of Darfurians to die, countless women raped, millions forced to flee to squalid camps. Three years after it exploded, the situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate drastically. "Another Rwanda", indeed.

What are the real lessons of Rwanda and Darfur? They are surely inescapable. Those of us who demand interventions on humanitarian grounds - in Rwanda, Darfur, northern Uganda - will continue to be ignored. When western powers do intervene, we can be sure that dubious geopolitical and hegemonic interests are the driving force. We'll have many more Rwandas; we can count on it.

* Gerald Caplan has written frequently about the Rwandan genocide and genocide prevention.

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Africa Action marked the International Day of Reflection on the Rwandan genocide by emphasizing the urgent need for action on the continuing genocide in Darfur. "On this day, when the international community pledges its commitment to avoiding another tragedy like that of Rwanda 12 years ago, the crisis in Darfur continues to grow. Africa Action notes the mounting security concerns and increasing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, and urges the United Nations (UN) Security Council to overcome obstacles to the rapid authorization of a multinational peacekeeping mission in Darfur."