Rwanda

KIGALI, Rwanda -- American jets and Ethiopian forces recently conducted strikes in Somalia in support of that nation's fledgling democratic government. The event received passing notice in the United States, but to those of us working in East Africa, and specifically in Rwanda, it was cause for optimism. It demonstrated the willingness of Ethiopia and Somalia to put aside past differences and unite against radical Islamists who threaten both. It suggested that an era of thinking and acting regionally may have arrived in East Africa.

HA NOHANA, Lesotho -- Teboho Mahate was shivering. He had trouble keeping his balance. He couldn't talk, and he had bitten his tongue. A seizure. "Any pain anywhere?" asked Dr. Jennifer Furin. Teboho, 14, held his head. Furin looked into his eyes, checking for dilated pupils. She turned him on his side and, in English along with a few words in this nation's native Sesotho, told him to lie in a fetal position. He barely quivered as she slipped in a needle for a spinal tap. The diagnosis: life-threatening meningitis.

AS WESTERN propaganda machines continue to soften us up for a wider war that would include ground troops in the Balkans, one issue that has been lost but surely will resurface with a vengeance by such an expansion is race.Already, the issue has been raised with the invocation of two words in the media: Rwanda and Vietnam.In recent weeks, the apparent hypocrisy of the western nation's eagerness to intervene in a humanitarian crises involving Europeans -- but not black Africans -- has been addressed in newspaper articles and columns.

Today in history: April 6In 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was organized by Joseph Smith in Fayette, N.Y.In 1862, the Civil War Battle of Shiloh began in Tennessee.In 1896, the first modern Olympic games formally opened in Athens, Greece.In 1909, explorers Robert E. Peary and Matthew A. Henson became the first men to reach the North Pole. The claim, disputed by skeptics, was upheld in 1989 by the Navigation Foundation.In 1971, Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky died in New York City.

NYAMATA, Rwanda -- In a land haunted by the 1994 genocide, where small boys bear machete scars across their skulls, where creeks wash up bones on shore, the civil war in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo is seen as a battle for Rwandan survival.The dreams of Casius Niyonsaba, a 10-year-old Tutsi boy, tell him so. He stands in the Nyamata Catholic Church in southern Rwanda on an overcast morning and walks behind the altar. He points to the spot where his mother, father and three sisters were hacked to death in a raid by radical Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe.

From helpful to unusable, U.S. donations for refugees expelled from Kosovo are flooding relief agencies at a record pace, nine weeks after NATO bombs began to rain on Yugoslavia.Coming so quickly after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in October, the response to the Balkan crisis has heartened agencies worried about donor fatigue.At the same time, relief workers laboring in other parts of the world -- and on social issues here -- are shaking their heads at the selectivity of the media's focus and donors' attention.

AFTER two years of drafting a 173-page statute on crimes against humanity, a United Nations conference is struggling to find consensus on setting up a so-called "war crimes" court.Never was the need so clear.Instead of creating separate courts, such as those in Nuremberg after World War II or in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia today, U.N. countries would form a permanent court to try those accused of such crimes as genocide and ethnic cleansing. The hope is that clear laws and a forum to enforce them would deter the next potential butcher.

As chief veterinarian at the Baltimore Zoo, Dr. Michael Cranfield has operated on giraffes, knocked out tigers with blowguns and looked for a cure for malaria in penguins.Now he will help figure out how to save the 400-pound gorilla.Cranfield has been appointed director of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, a part-time post overseeing international efforts to save Africa's mountain gorilla, the largest and most endangered of the world's great apes.The Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project was set up in 1985 at the suggestion of naturalist Dian Fossey to save the mountain gorillas, whose numbers in Rwanda and bordering countries have dwindled to 640.Cranfield, 46, of Butler was named to the post this month after an international search by an advisory committee of the Morris Animal Foundation, a Colorado-based group that funds the project.

OPENLY DEFYING one of the founding principles of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Tutsis are making the first serious effort to redraw the African borders since the Berlin Conference of 1884 divided Africa.Although a minority in each of the five Central African countries in which they live, ethnic Tutsis currently find themselves in power in three of these countries (Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi) and are expanding their power base, primarily at the expense of ethnic Hutus, their long-time rivals.

WITH KINSHASA preparing to welcome Laurent Kabila and his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seku's 32-year misrule of Zaire is virtually ended, and the trauma of rebellion nearly so.President Mobutu flew mercifully to Gabon yesterday. Although promising to return, he will dismay all Zairians if he fails to fly on to his ill-gotten villa in the south of France, there to see out his remaining days.A Western world that created, coddled and ignored the Mobutu tyranny has suddenly awakened to imperfections of the obscure liberator.

ALISON DES FORGES, 66 Scholar chronicled Rwanda's genocide Alison Des Forges, a human rights activist who drew the world's attention to the killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Rwanda in the 1990s and chronicled the massacre, died Feb. 12 in the crash of a Continental Airlines passenger plane in Clarence Center, N.Y., near Buffalo. After April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, members of the politically dominant Hutu group suddenly began to attack the Tutsi minority in an uncontrolled rampage of violence.

Goucher College has suspended a visiting professor from Rwanda after being told he stands accused of participating in the 1994 genocide that killed some 800,000 people in the African nation. Leopold Munyakazi, who taught French last semester, was removed from teaching duties in December after school officials learned of an indictment by a prosecutor in Rwanda. Among the charges is that he revealed hiding spots of ethnic Tutsis who were targeted by machete-wielding Hutu militias. Munyakazi denies the allegations.

NAIROBI, Kenya - The ringleader of the 1994 Rwanda genocide was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for his role in the early days of an ethnic slaughter that eventually killed an estimated 800,000 people. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, was the highest-ranking military officer convicted at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The former colonel's prosecution was viewed as a significant step in efforts to punish war crimes. "This victory sends a message to people like the warlords in Darfur or those committing horrendous rapes and killing in Congo," said Barbara Mulvaney, a Southern California attorney who served as chief prosecutor.

KIGALI, Rwanda - Today I will be celebrating the Fourth of July in a different context than ever before. In Rwanda, July 4 is a holiday that commemorates the liberation of the country from the genocidal regime that murdered 1 million Tutsis and tens of thousands of Hutu political moderates who were committed to freedom and democracy, from April to July of 1994. It is a celebratory day, for it marks the end of the genocide and the establishment of a nonracist state that upholds the principles of liberty, equality and the peaceful coexistence of all Rwandans.

HA NOHANA, Lesotho -- Teboho Mahate was shivering. He had trouble keeping his balance. He couldn't talk, and he had bitten his tongue. A seizure. "Any pain anywhere?" asked Dr. Jennifer Furin. Teboho, 14, held his head. Furin looked into his eyes, checking for dilated pupils. She turned him on his side and, in English along with a few words in this nation's native Sesotho, told him to lie in a fetal position. He barely quivered as she slipped in a needle for a spinal tap. The diagnosis: life-threatening meningitis.

When Leslie Lewis Sword, daughter of business tycoon Reginald F. Lewis, told her father when she was young that she wanted to be an actor, he gave her advice she still thinks about today: "You don't just have to be an actor. You can be a director. A producer. You can own the theater." This week, Sword - now an actress, writer, producer and businesswoman - will perform 10 roles in Miracle in Rwanda, a one-woman play she created with Edward Vilga. Her performance at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture will kick off a celebration weekend to honor what would have been her father's 65th birthday.

They range from Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Court, to Adam Sterling, a grass-roots organizer first seen hawking leaflets to apathetic strollers in Santa Monica, Calif. Success and failure in Darfur's life-or-death context generate excruciating tension. In this movie, the attempt of a World Food Program director, Pablo Recalde, to run delivery trucks through volatile territory sparks more nail-biting anxiety than any starship battle in a space opera.

KIGALI, Rwanda -- American jets and Ethiopian forces recently conducted strikes in Somalia in support of that nation's fledgling democratic government. The event received passing notice in the United States, but to those of us working in East Africa, and specifically in Rwanda, it was cause for optimism. It demonstrated the willingness of Ethiopia and Somalia to put aside past differences and unite against radical Islamists who threaten both. It suggested that an era of thinking and acting regionally may have arrived in East Africa.

There were lots of nationally renowned speakers in town worth listening to this spring. All of them came with a cause. Broadcaster Tavis Smiley stopped at a local church in April to talk about his book, Covenant With Black America, which is a New York Times best-seller. He was promoting the book and its goal -- to uplift and empower African- Americans. Many of us saw Hotel Rwanda, a movie that depicted the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda. Rwanda hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who lived through the events and saved many lives, came to town in April to give insights to the massacre as part of his book tour.

GISHWATI FOREST, Rwanda -- In 1995, a Rwandan named Gad Tegeri cut down a tree in the Gishwati Forest Reserve, 30 square miles of soaring hardwoods in the hills east of Rwanda's largest lake. He and his family, returning to Rwanda from exile in Congo, needed land to grow food. The Gishwati forest seemed more fertile ground for restarting life than United Nations refugee camps outside the city of Gisenyi. So, with his wife, baby daughter and his machete, Tegeri climbed the slopes into the forest and started chopping.