Kagame calls for more action from Africa on Zimbabwe political debacle
BY GEORGE KAGAME

Arusha


President Paul Kagame is the first African leader that has come up openly to discuss the issue of Zimbabwe in mainstream media.


Addressing journalists on wednesday in his monthly press conference, Kagame said the Zimbabweans themselves, primarily Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangarai should be seen to be solving their own problems before appealling for help or publicity outside.

According to reports in the same wee, the Zimbabweans are learning the hard way as far as Tsvangarai's party the Movement for Democratic Change is concerned. Last week, its secretary general Tendai Biti was held by police authorities and faces charges of treason.


Meanwhile the second of the presidential elections on 28th June remains a lesson to be learnt in future crisis management courses. As the two big politicians campaign for the run off the presidential elections, a big number of supporters of Morgan Tsvangarai have reportedly been killed.


Back to Kagame's press conference, the president retariated his disdain for the charges of first a French and later Spanish courts whose judges indicted 40 leaders of the Rwanda Patriotic front as having had a hand in the 1994 Genocide.
The charges have been dismissed by both governments.

However in a related development, Bruguiliere and Fernando Merrelles and indictments were considered in a judgement at the ICTR concerning the transfer of a genocide suspect to stand trial in Rwanda.

Kagame said the European indictments were another way in which developed countries made their poor counterparts as play fields of moral, political, social and economical games. A

nother institution has played itself into the moral authority drama in the past as the Catholic Church whose Archibishop Thadee Ntihinyurwa came forward to give his take on the four Rwanda Defence officers that were arrested by the Millitary Tribunal for thier alleged role in the 1994 Genocide.

The clergyman, perhaps out of professonal fellowship with the victims of the detained soldiers said the Rwandan legal system would not competently try the soldiers, calling foe them to be transferred to the ICTR.

Commenting on the issue Kagame said that church was responsible as an institution in the commission of the genocide and is clergy should be the last people to 'throw stones at the glass house in which they stay' as one anonymous writer put it.


Another Rwandan church that needs a new public relations clean up is the Seventh day Adventist. This time God's men running the coffers have failed to differiantiate between that which belongs to 'God' or 'Ceasar'.

The national treasurer of the Church's activities, Abel Habiyambere is under scrutiny for misplacing millions of Francs, at one point dealing with a criminal in detention at Kigali 1930.

In a complex nature of the world, the Rwanda Defense Force had four of its officers in the recently for crimes committed during the 1994 Genocide.

Last week, on the other hand, General James Kabarebe, the commander of the army was in meetings with his DR Congolese counterpart Gen Dieudonnée Kayembe and the UN monitoring force in Eastern DR Congo, Monuc to continue the process of resolving the issue of active Interahamwe still murdering people in Eastern DR Congo.


Monuc forces have been accused in the past for indulging in a gold-weapons trade with the bandits who are held largely responssible for implementing the Rwandan Genocide.

The Tripartite Joint Plus Commission has been devising means for the past few years to solve the issue of Eastern DR Congo.