Kigali, September 2nd, 2004 (FH) – The number of people suspected of participating in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is expected to spiral from the present 100,000 to over 500,000 within the coming year, a senior official with the courts set up to try genocide suspects told Hirondelle News Agency on Wednesday. “Statistics drawn on the basis of information collected from the first phase of Gacaca court hearings indicates that we will end up with between 500,000 and 600,000 genocide suspects”, the director of the legal department in National Service for Gacaca Jurisdictions(NSGJ), Augustin Nkusi said.

Gacaca courts are semi-traditional courts set up three years ago to speed up the trials of genocide suspects. For over one year, only 700 out of some 10,000 courts have been operating in a pilot phase. The rest are expected to begin work later this month. All Gacaca hearings held until now were in a pre-trial phase identifying victims and suspects. Nkusi said that the estimates of genocide suspects made by the NSGJ were an extrapolation from the suspects’ lists drawn by the 700 courts. The figure of over 500,000 is about three times the estimate made by the government before the trials began. “This is a big challenge for Gacaca courts”, admitted Nkusi. “We must not forget that there was mass participation in the 1994 genocide”, he added. However, Nkusi maintained that despite the latest indications of a much bigger number of suspects, Gacaca courts would still complete all genocide trials in a period of between five and eight years. Gacaca courts were set up after authorities realized that classic courts would take over 100 years to handle all genocide suspects. Since the first genocide trials in 1996, regular courts have delivered judgments for 8,000 accused. Regular courts will continue to handle cases involving the highest of four categories of genocide suspects. From the estimated 500,000 suspects, 50,000 would be of the category to be handled by standard courts. Observers say that the government is likely to tighten the categorization process to reduce to a manageable figure the number of suspects to be handled by regular courts. The categorization is done by Gacaca courts. GG/JA/GF/FH (RW’’0902e)