In October, prosecutor Edouard Kayihura opened the...

In October, prosecutor Edouard Kayihura opened the proceedings against Bishop Augustin Misago who, when he was head of the Gikongoro diocese about 100 miles southwest of the Rwandan capital Kigali, told terrified arrivals they must move on, sending them to the nearby classrooms of a technical college that today is a memorial filled with the smell of formaldehyde and the mummified corpses of 2,700 children, women and men. That is a fraction of the thousands slaughtered there on the night of April 19, 1994. Misago, a Hutu, is the highest church official accused of helping to organize the genocide. He acknowledges the activity at the heart of the prosecution's case - that he attended meetings with local and district officials who carried out orders from the capital to exterminate the Tutsis. The Bishop insists, however, that he was present only to try to protect those in danger. He is being tried in the First Instance Tribunal of Kigali - a Rwandan court - that routinely sentences "category one" genocide defendants to death, and not by the UN Tribunal for Rwanda where, if found guilty, he would be given life imprisonment at the most.