RWANDAN authorities have arrested as genocide suspects more than 2,500 Hutus who were among some 460,000 refugees who returned home from Tanzania last month, the United Nations human rights office said yesterday.
Ms Marie van der Elst of the UN said 2,609 refugees had been detained by December 27th for their role in the 1994 genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
She said many refugees voluntarily handed themselves in for fear of reprisals from vengeful villagers who survived the three month mass slaughter which was ended by victorious Tutsi rebels now in power.
"Many of these returnees handed themselves in for fear of their personal safety, and in other instances returnees accused of participation in the genocide were brought to communal detention centres by the local population," she said.
The UN Human Rights Organisation in Rwanda said at least 700 more refugees who returned from eastern Zaire in the first half of December had also been detained.
Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled their homeland in 1994 to Tanzania were ordered out by Tanzanian authorities last month. This followed the return of an estimated 600,000 Hutus from eastern Zaire after they were forced out of their camps in October and November.
The Hutu refugees in Tanzania and Zaire fled Rwanda in 1994 during civil war and genocide and cost aid agencies up to $1 million each day until a revolt by ethnic Tutsi Zaireans drove them out.
But large numbers of refugees in eastern Zaire fled deeper into the country rather than return to Rwanda, where former Hutu militiamen face punishment for taking part in the genocide.
Some 90,000 mainly Hutus are crammed in jails across the tiny tea and coffee growing nation on charges they took part in the genocide sparked off by the assassination of the Rwandan Hutu president, Mr Juvenal Habyarimana, in April 1994.
Genocide trials opened in Rwanda last Friday and continued this week with five people being charged before courts in the towns of Kibungo, Kigali and Byumba. Those found guilty face the death penalty under Rwandan law. But the main players in the slaughter are living comfortably in exile in Africa, Europe and the US.
. Africa's image in 1996 was one of a continent in distress, highlighted by refugee crises, the chairman of the Inter African Human Rights Union (UIDH), based in Ouagadougou, said yesterday.
"The situation in Africa from the point of view of the democratisation of its constituent countries and of the state of human rights, has not improved in comparison with previous years," said Mr Halidou Ouedraogo.
"If almost 26 states have reiterated their desire to work within a framework of the rule of law, drafting a basic legal code, almost all [African] countries endure very difficult institutional, political, socio economic and cultural conditions," he said.
Algeria, Liberia, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan and Sierra Leonet were cited as "symptomatic of a sick Africa, striving to find the path of law". The UIDH said it hoped such scourges would be reduced in 1997.