RWANDA:Athanase Seromba said he was a humble parish priest, powerless to stop the wave of slaughter that swept through Rwanda in 1994. But yesterday he became the first Roman Catholic priest to be convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which decided he had orchestrated a massacre of some 2,000 Tutsis.
He was found guilty on two of four counts he faced in connection with a genocide that killed 800,000 people, mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
"The chamber finds you guilty of genocide and extermination and sentences you to a single term of 15 years in prison," said chief judge Andresia Vaz as he read the verdict of the three-member panel at the United Nations-backed war crimes court, which sits in Arusha, Tanzania.
Thousands of Rwandans have turned away from Catholicism since the bloody civil war, angered and saddened by the complicity of church officials in the 100-day genocide.
Seromba was acquitted on lesser counts of complicity to commit genocide and incitement to commit genocide, the court said.
Seromba, a 43-year-old Hutu, had pleaded not guilty to the charges that stemmed from the destruction of his parish church in the western town of Nyange, where some 2,000 Tutsi faithful had sought shelter in April 1994.
He was accused of ordering the church to be levelled by bulldozers, killing all of his parishioners inside, and instructing radical Hutu militia to shoot Tutsis who tried to flee the carnage.
Seromba had argued there was nothing he could do to stop the killing. However, the judges found that while he had not personally ordered the church to be destroyed, he had approved a decision by local authorities to do so. "By his proven gestures, he contributed in a substantial way," the judges said.
The charge sheet accused him of directing militias who poured petrol through the roof of the church while gendarmes threw grenades.
The defence had complained that Seromba was prosecuted only because he is a priest and had noted that he voluntarily surrendered in 2002 after fighting a lengthy battle against extradition, so that justice could be done.
The trial, which began in September 2004, has been dogged by delays and controversy, including an unsuccessful defence challenge to remove the judges hearing the case for alleged bias in May.
Seromba was the first Catholic priest to face genocide charges before the ICTR, although the trial of a second, Fr Emmanuel Rukundo, a former army chaplain in northern Rwanda, began in mid-November.
A third has yet to begin.
Last week, another cleric, Adventist pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, who was convicted by the ICTR and sentenced to 10 years in prison, became the court's first convict to be released after serving his time.
So far the tribunal has tried 32 people accused of orchestrating or carrying out the genocide, convicting 27 of them and acquitting five.