Genocide study halted as EAC faces funds crunch

Kigali. A study on the genocide ideology, which was to be undertaken by the East African Legislative Assembly since last year, has been shelved due to the financial crisis facing the East African Community (EAC).

Eala Speaker Daniel Kidega told reporters on Monday that the exercise could not be undertaken because there was no money to send teams of legislators and other researchers to the field across the region.

“Members of the select committee cannot proceed to refugee camps and border areas to interview people, who might have been affected by ethnic killings due to lack of funds,” he said in a fresh appeal to the EAC partner states to remit their outstanding budget arrears to the secretariat in Arusha.

He said financial challenges facing the regional organisation were unprecedented, noting that until this week, the five partner states - Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda - had remitted only 44 per cent of a combined total of $ 41.8 million, which they were required to pay for the 2016/17 financial year.

The regional body last year agreed to spend about $450,000 on the long awaited study on the nature and extent of genocide ideology, genocide denial and hate speeches in the region.

Study details were not available, but emanated from the massacres which rocked Rwanda in 1994 in which about a million people, targeting mainly the Tutsi ethnic group after the killing of President Juvenal Habyarimana, when his plane was shot down over Kigali.

Other sources confided to The Citizen that $200,000 was availed to Eala this financial year for the purpose. However, it had been decided that the exercise should not commence until the whole amount was received.

Mr Kidega deplored that only four months before the end of the current 2016/17 financial year. There is still $24.2 million, which has not been remitted by the five member states to the Arusha coffers.

South Sudan, which was admitted as a new member to the bloc, is exempted because the newest member has not been fully integrated in the EAC activities.