Hutu militants opposed to the voluntary repatriation of their countrymen are holding at least 3,000 Rwandan civilians and former combatants hostage in a forest in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the spokesman for the UN Mission in the DRC, Hamadoun Toure, said on Tuesday. "Some hardliners do not want to return to Rwanda and have obstructed former fighters intent on returning home from leaving the forest," he said.

The former Rwandan army provided weapons and training to militiamen in the months leading up to the 1994 genocide, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the former commander of UN troops in the country, told the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Tuesday. In his second day of testimony in the "Military Trial I" - for four former Rwandan military officers - Dallaire said an informant told him that weapons in the hands of Interahamwe militiamen were from the army's reserve stocks.

The purpose of Remembering Rwanda is to commemorate and learn from an event that most of the world has all but forgotten. Beginning on the morning of April 7, 1994, and for the next 100 days, a small clique of power-hungry extremists organized the systematic slaughter of three-quarters of all Rwanda's Tutsi and many thousands of its moderate Hutu. It was one of the classic genocides of the past century. Yet outside of Rwanda itself, only a small number of diaspora Rwandans and their friends seem to care if the memory of the genocide is allowed to fade away, its lessons ignored. To supporters of Remembering Rwanda, this is the world's second betrayal of Rwanda. First the world deliberately chose to abandon Rwanda to its terrible fate. Then the world chose to suppress the memory of what it had done - or failed to do - and of the hundreds of thousands of innocents who paid the price of that failure. Among all the terrible crimes that humankind seems determined to inflict on itself, the crime of genocide is the most terrible. But this crime is compounded when it is then ignored, when the memories of the victims, the survivors, the perpetrators and the betrayers, are all allowed to disappear into thin air. Remembering Rwanda is a widespread international network whose goal is to promote the commemoration in April 2004 of the 10th anniversary of the genocide so that it will not be buried again and that its lessons will not be ignored. Please click on the link below for more information, and for a Remembering Rwanda International Progress Report for December 2003.

The governments of Rwanda and Mozambique and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed a tripartite agreement on the voluntary repatriation of an estimated 900 Rwandan refugees in Mozambique. Most of the Rwandan refugees in Mozambique are women and children. Under the agreement, Rwanda will ensure the security of the refugees, while UNHCR would provide support for travel as well as help with initial resettlement for the returnees.

Some 300 Rwandan refugees, among them nine former combatants, have returned from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), state-owned Radio Rwanda reported on Sunday. After nearly eight years in exile, the returnees cited poor living conditions in the DRC jungles as one of the major reasons for their return home.

For the first time since World War II, an international tribunal has found journalists guilty of crimes against humanity through the use of broadcast and print media. The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sentenced two men to life in prison and a third to 35 years for their roles in the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which extremist Hutus massacred between 500,000 and 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

Peace efforts in the Great Lakes region were taken a step further this week when leaders from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo met in South Africa for talks. The regional summit, hosted by President Thabo Mbeki, focused on the implementation of a peace accord between the two central African countries that was signed on July 30 last year. Mozambican President Joachim Chissano also attended the meeting in his capacity as president of the African Union (AU).

Four former senior Rwandan officials went on trial in Tanzania last week accused of playing important roles in the 1994 genocide of 800,000 people, including training militias and drawing up lists of people to be killed. It is the second trial in a month to feature former cabinet ministers and senior officials from Rwanda on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and mass killings.

This is a full-time appointment for an initial period of one year as of January 2004, with the possibility of extension. The researcher will be based in a field office in Kigali, Rwanda.

It is the first day of catch-up classes for vulnerable children in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. This is a big day. For the 300 children who succeeded in getting a space in the classroom, the suspense and excitement are overwhelming. Most of these children, aged nine to 14, have never been to school. Others dropped out years ago. A national study supported by UNICEF found that around 400,000 primary school-aged and 600,000 secondary school-aged children across Rwanda are not in school. In response to this educational crisis, UNICEF and the Rwandan Ministry for Education set up these classes to give the children another chance.

Women in parliament, civil society, and government have created crosssectoral initiatives and are beginning to play a significant role in post-conflict governance. Their participation is increasingly recognized as critical to the long-term security and stability of the country. Amid the complexity that characterizes Rwanda today, these are important developments, says the executive summary of a report by the Women Waging Peace Policy Commission.

Rwandan police are holding the editor of a privately owned newspaper arrested on Wednesday near the Ugandan border, according to Reporters sans frontiers (RSF), a media watchdog in Paris. On Thursday, RSF reported that Robert Sebufilira, editor of Umuseso, was arrested as he went to collect 4,000 copies of the weekly printed in Uganda, where it is cheaper.

This is a full-time appointment for an initial period of one year as of January 2004, with the possibility of extension. The researcher will be based in a field office in Kigali, Rwanda.

The journalist Linda Melvern, through unprecedented access to both the UN files and the files of the Rwandan Government from prior and during the genocide, has produced an excellent expose of the Security Council's role and how it knew that genocide was happening at the time.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan welcomed the voluntary repatriation of more than 100 high-level members of the rebel Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) and called on other armed Rwandans in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to seize the opportunity to return home. He congratulated Rwanda and the FDLR leaders "for the strength of the political will demonstrated by them to negotiate this repatriation, and to end the long-standing conflict through peaceful means," a UN spokesperson, Marie Okabe, told the daily news briefing. "This development represents a major breakthrough in the peace process," she said.

There are nearly as many women as men in Rwanda's two legislative chambers, making the central African country a world leader in gender balance in political representation and decision making. Women won 45 per cent of seats in the September elections, including 39 out of 80 seats in Parliament and six out of 20 seats in the Senate.

The Rwandan and Malawian governments as well as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed a tripartite agreement on Tuesday to repatriate close to 5,500 refugees who fled the central African nation at the height of the 1994 genocide.

The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has vowed to root out Rwandan Hutu rebels in eastern Congo in a bid to normalise relations between the two countries. "We need to open a new chapter in terms of relations between our two countries," Mbusa Nyamwisi, the Congolese minister for regional cooperation, announced on Friday in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

Two French Lawyers on Tuesday began presenting evidence in defence of a former Rwandan finance minister accused of genocide for allegedly encouraging, planning and instigating mass rapes and murders. Emmanuel Ndindabahizi, a greying 53-year-old, denies all charges of involvement in the 1994 massacres when extremist Hutus slaughtered around 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days.

The recent report by human rights advocacy group Amnesty International that Rwanda still has troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was "based on unfounded allegations, speculation and innuendo", the Rwandan Foreign Affairs Ministry said on Monday. "We categorically reject insinuations by Amnesty International, some NGOs and journalists that we still have forces in the South and North Kivu and even in Ituri region," the ministry said.