Addressing journalists on Wednesday in his monthly press conference, President Paul Kagame said the Zimbabweans themselves should be seen to be solving their own problems before appealing for help from outside.

According to reports in the same week, this will be no easy feat for Morgan Tsvangarai’s opposition party who continue to be harassed by state agents.

Last week, its secretary general Tendai Biti was held by police authorities and faces charges of treason.

As the two big politicians’, Morgan Tsvangarai and Robert Mugabe, campaign for the run off the presidential election intensifies a large number of Movement for Democratic Change supporters have reportedly been killed.

Justice matters

Back to Kagame’s press conference. The president reiterated his disdain for the charges of French and 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, Bruguère and Fernando Merrelles indictments were considered in a judgment at the ICTR concerning the transfer of a genocide suspect to stand trial in Rwanda.

Kagame said the European indictments was an example of how developed countries made their poor counterparts as playing fields of moral, political, social and economical games.

Archbishop Thadee Ntihinyurwa came forward to give his take on the four Rwanda Defence officers that were arrested by the Military Tribunal for their alleged role in the 1994 Genocide.

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

Commenting on the matter, Kagame said that church was responsible as an institution in the Genocide.

Clergy should be the last people to ‘throw stones at the glass house in which they stay’ as one anonymous writer puts it.

The Seventh Day Adventist is another Rwandan church that needs a public relations clean up.

This time clergymen running the coffers have failed to differiantiate between what belongs to God and Caesar. 

The national treasurer of the church's activities, Abel Habiyambere, is under scrutiny for misplacing millions of francs.

Army action

While the Rwanda Defense Force had four of its officers accused of committing crimes during the Genocide, General James Kabarebe, the commander of the army, was in meetings with his 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 Congo. 

In the past Monuc forces have been accused of indulging in gold for weapons trade with bandits who are held largely responsible for implementing the Genocide. 

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

Ends