From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is the Daily.

Yesterday, inside a courtroom in Rwanda, an unusual trial began, charging a man once seen

around the world as a humanitarian hero with being a terrorist. Today, my colleagues Declan Walsh

and Abdi Latif Tahir, on the improbable story of Paul Ursa-Sabagina and what it reveals about

the past, present, and future of Rwanda itself.

It's Thursday, February 18th.

Declan Walsh,

the Daily.

Declan, when did you start covering Rwanda?

1999. I had just arrived in Africa as a freelance reporter. It was the start of my career as a

foreign correspondent. And one of the first assignments I took was to go from my base in Kenya to Rwanda.

It had only been five years since the genocide. And I went over there to report on the fallout

from that genocide that was still taking place. And remind us about the Rwanda genocide. I recall it

as a singular atrocity. Absolutely. It's roots really went back decades to the colonial period in

Rwanda. It was colonized by Belgium. And there are two main ethnic groups, the Hutu, who make up the

majority of the population and the Tutsi, who make up the minority. The divisions between these

two groups preceding the colonial period were quite fluid, but during colonialism people have

identity cards that identify them as either Hutu or Tutsi. And as the colonial period comes to an

end in the late 1950s, Hutu's claim power and effectively take over the country, pushing hundreds

of thousands of Tutsis into exile abroad. So a few decades pass with the Tutsis living abroad

in refugee camps. And then in 1990, a small group of those Tutsi exiles formed a militia.

They returned to Rwanda to try to seize control, tensions built for two or three years. And suddenly

...