Genocide suspect, Hassan Ngeze, said on Monday he was boycotting his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) over the court’s refusal to replace his lawyers, the independent Hirondelle news agency reported. “If the Tribunal does not assign a duty counsel to my defence, and my investigators and assistants are not reinstalled to work with me, there will be no interest for me to attend the trial any more as from this Monday 9 July, 2001,” Ngeze said in a letter to the ICTR president, Navanethem Pillay.
Ngeze is a former editor of the extremist ‘Kangura’ newspaper. He is on trial with two other suspects linked to the “hate media” that incited Hutus to kill Tutsis during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. His co-accused are Ferdinand Nahimana, a former director of the Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, a former politician and RTLM board member. Barayagwiza has been boycotting his trial since it started on 23 October, saying it would not be fair because the ICTR was “manipulated” by the current Rwandan government.
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