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THE HAGUE, Jan 16 (AFP) - The International War Crimes Tribunal will send a mission to Rwanda next week to launch investigations in the ethnic massacres which left up to a million people dead, a spokesman said Monday.
Christian Chartier, speaking as the UN-sponsored tribunal opened its fifth plenary session here, said a team would set up offices in Kigali as a first step towards beginning prosecutions of the perpetrators and organisers of the ethnic killings last year.
Honore Rakotomanana of Madagascar was named Friday to head the Rwanda probe, acting as a deputy to the tribunal's top prosecutor, South African Judge Richard Goldstone.
Chartier said that most of the three-week tribunal session would focus on proceedural questions raised by an independent working group of lawyers matters and that the court's first case -- involving Serbian soldier Dusan Tadic -- would not come to trial until late March or early April.
Tadic, currently held in Germany, will be formally accused in the next four to five weeks of war crimes allegedly committed in Bosnia, he added.
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