Reconciliation remains elusive //Yearender//

Rwanda achieved economic progress in 2004, with strong performance in the agricultural sector fuelling a six-percent GDP growth. However, 10 years after the genocide in which up to 937,000 people died, the country is still grappling with the twin imperatives of justice and reconciliation.

Thousands of people accused of participating in the genocide await trail. In recent years, scores of genocide survivors - who were scheduled to testify in genocide trials - have been killed, mostly in the southwestern province of Gikongoro. Early in 2004, a court sentenced nine people to death and one to life imprisonment over such killings.

To help deal with the backlog of cases, Rwanda created a traditional justice system known as "Gacaca". But the start-up of the Gacaca courts was delayed from 2004 to early 2005 following a number of amendments to the Gacaca law.

The amendments included reducing the number of local judges from 258,209 to 169,400, reducing the number of judges per court from 19 to nine, and scrapping the two highest levels of the Gacaca courts.

The courts are seen as crucial to Rwanda's efforts to achieve justice and reconciliation. However, political polarisation and mistrust have not altogether disappeared.

In June, a court tried and sentenced ex-president Pasteur Bizimungu, the first head of state of post-genocide Rwanda, to 15 years in prison for embezzling state funds, disseminating literature to incite public violence and forming a militia group. The trial was widely seen as being politically motivated.

Later in the year, the Rwandan parliament recommended the banning of five civil society organisations for allegedly harbouring "genocide ideology".

The European Union said the recommendation proved that although 10 years had elapsed since the genocide, Rwanda still faced hurdles in reconciling divisions in society.

Earlier, President Paul Kagame had sparked a diplomatic row in April when he criticised France for allegedly aiding perpetrators of the genocide. His remarks came barely two weeks after a French judge issued a report accusing the current Rwandan government of shooting down the plane carrying the former Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994, the incident that allegedly triggered the genocide.

On the other hand, relations between Rwanda and the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) improved in 2004. To speed up the work of the ICTR, its newly appointed prosecutor promised to transfer 45 investigated cases of key genocide planners to Rwanda for trial.

Having managed to re-establish some stability in their country, Rwandan troops began participating for the first time in peacekeeping operations. In August, Kigali sent 300 troops to protect observers in the war-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur, under the mandate of the African Union.

[On the Net: IRIN's 2004 chronology of events in Rwanda]