Rwanda: UN tribunal opens two new information centres

The United Nations tribunal set up to deal with the mass killings that engulfed Rwanda in 1994 inaugurated two new information centres in the south of the small African Great Lakes nation.

They join ten other similar sites set up by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania.

The centres, located throughout the country, seek to provide genocide-related information to promote peace and security in the region.

Beginning in April 1994 in Rwanda, more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutu moderates were massacred, mostly by machete, during a period of less than 100 days.

At the launch of the very first site last November, the ICTR Registrar, Adarna Dieng, said that “we have a strong hope that the knowledge base of lawyers in provincial courts will be expanded and strengthened through their easy access to and use of the tools and technologies they are presented with, and for which they have been effectively trained to ensure their efficient use.”