MONTREAL - Rwandans around the world are ardently following the proceedings in a Montreal courthouse where the first person to be charged under Canada's new war crimes act is standing trial for his alleged role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Desire Munyaneza, 40, faces seven charges including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes - all of which carry a life sentence that would be served in Canada.
"It's definitely very closely followed by Rwandans - not just those in Rwanda but even in Europe and all over the place," said Jean-Paul Nyilinkwaya of PAGE-Rwanda, a Canadian group representing friends and families of genocide victims.
"The (Rwandan) press is focused on stories related to the genocide."
Canada's first trial under its seven-year-old Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act started last week in Quebec Superior Court.
Munyaneza is accused of having murdered civilians, raped several women and pillaged property during the Rwandan genocide in which Hutu militias systematically slaughtered an estimated 500,000 Tutsis in the span of 100 days.
Nyilinkwaya said an African bureau of the BBC and the Kigali New Times, a daily newspaper in the country's capital, have been reporting on the Montreal trial.
Last week the court heard testimony from two of 13 witnesses brought to Montreal from Rwanda.
One woman, known only as C15 to protect her identity, recalled how she was held captive, raped by 10 men and then hacked in the forehead with a machete.
C15 said she woke up lying on a corpse and smeared blood on her body to blend in with the dead. She stayed put for three days until it was safe to move.
The witness testified that Munyaneza raped another woman and said she saw him beat a young Tutsi man to death.
A second witness, known as C16, told the court that Munyaneza supervised Hutu extremists and ordered them to kill unarmed Tutsis.
She said the accused, with the help of military police, also took food left by the Red Cross.
Nyilinkwaya, a Rwandan native, said he was in the same group of friends as Munyaneza when they were in high school together in Rwanda. Nyilinkwaya moved to the United States to study in 1990.
He said Canada's law leaves genocide suspects with one less place to hide.
"We absolutely think it's a great thing," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Montreal. "The more countries that start putting that law into practice, the smaller the world becomes for the criminals.
"We definitely do believe that it's going to act as a deterrent for future crimes."
He said Belgium is the only other foreign country so far to charge individuals in connection with the Rwandan genocide.
Belgian courts have already convicted seven people, and a new case of a former army commander is set to begin on April 19.
Nyilinkwaya said even 13 years after the genocide, physical and psychological scars of the killings run deep in the African nation.
"It's a very difficult life because the genocide left them with nothing," Nyilinkwaya said. "The few that managed to survive, they don't have a support group. They don't have any family, they don't have any friends left."
Nyilinkwaya said the properties of many survivors were also destroyed, forcing them to start from scratch.
Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies director Frank Chalk said the war crimes law supports Canada's commitment to not deporting suspects to countries where they face the death penalty.
He said Rwanda has considered removing capital punishment, but some of those convicted in early genocide trials were executed.
"In some cases it's not feasible to send them back to their home countries for a variety of reasons, so we needed a law like this," said Chalk, who teaches history at Concordia University.
"We need to demonstrate to future potential perpetrators of crimes against humanity that they can never find a safe haven in Canada."
Meanwhile, Senator Romeo Dallaire, who led a United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the genocide, might be asked to testify at during Munyaneza's trial, his spokeswoman said.
She said Dallaire could not comment about the trial.
