Prosecutors told four judges in a packed courtroom that the accused, Victoire Ingabire, who tried to run for president last year in the country’s second presidential election since the genocide, had “pretended” to be a politician but was in fact “trying to bring war to Rwanda.”       

Ms. Ingabire, 42, was arrested in April 2010, months before the presidential vote, after she used charged language at the country’s largest genocide memorial and a United Nations report asserted that she had attended meetings with supporters of a terrorist group.       

Her trial, which began this week, includes six charges, one of them that Ms. Ingabire helped create and finance a rebel group in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo with the intention of destabilizing Rwanda. Another charge accuses her of a so-called thought crime known as genocide ideology, which can carry a sentence of up to 25 years. Ms. Ingabire’s four co-defendants have pleaded guilty.       

To many Rwandans, Ms. Ingabire represented the unspoken frustrations of the nation’s largest ethnic group, the Hutu, which committed the genocide against the minority Tutsi and now frequently feels underrepresented in the government. Her arrest came at a time when numerous presidential hopefuls and opposition political parties were not allowed to register to compete, with many of their supporters arrested, stirring concerns that Rwanda was not as democratic as its leaders contend.       

In a small courtroom here in the capital, Ms. Ingabire sat in a pink prison uniform, her head shaved, listening to the charges against her as a crowd gathered outside to observe. In post-genocide Rwanda, tranquility is a way of life, and even the soldiers guarding the courthouse are able to take time to peer through its windows to catch a glimpse of one of the biggest cases in recent memory.       

According to the government, Ms. Ingabire, a Hutu, did not simply try to run for president on an ethnic-based platform, but used e-mail, face-to-face meetings and Western Union money transfers to recruit Rwandan Hutu rebels in eastern Congo to form a rebel group that could infiltrate Rwanda. Prosecutors also said that Ms. Ingabire had sought to recruit thousands of rebels from within Rwanda itself.       

The prosecution has also said there is evidence that Ms. Ingabire had collaborated in her military plot with Paul Rusesabagina, the inspiration for the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” in which a Hutu saved hundreds of Tutsis from persecution by providing them refuge inside the hotel he managed.       

Mr. Rusesabagina has been heralded internationally as a hero, but prosecutors said this week that investigations were under way to determine whether to draw up charges against him as well.
“She knew that conducting an attack to overthrow the government was not possible,” said a prosecutor, “an unachievable dream.”       

Instead, the prosecutor said, Ms. Ingabire aimed at “tarnishing the image of Rwanda abroad,” to leverage the international community into pressuring Rwanda to begin a political dialogue with her party, FDU-Inkingi.       

“The only thing missing was the military force,” the prosecutor argued.

That never did happen. Rwanda enjoys nationwide security and Kigali remains one of the safest, cleanest and most orderly cities in Africa. But according to the government, Ms. Ingabire’s words threatened the nation’s future.       

The genocide ideology crime she is accused of is a vaguely described criminal act that implies that the defendant would or could try to carry out genocidal acts.       

Through speeches, interviews and publications, another prosecutor argued, Ms. Ingabire claimed that “one ethnic group is beyond or above the other ethnic group,” and that power was held by a small group of people who exploit others, thinly veiled allusions to ethnic Tutsis and Hutus. “She says that the Rwandan government is using genocide as a weapon.”       

That prosecutor said that Ms. Ingabire was guilty of spreading a double-genocide theory: that there was the genocide against Tutsis, but also one against Hutus.

The charges stem from a visit that Ms. Ingabire made to Rwanda’s largest genocide memorial upon returning to the country from Europe in early 2010 to run for president. At the memorial, Ms. Ingabire said that only Tutsi victims were being remembered, not Hutus killed as well.       

“She was aiming at inciting the people she calls the Hutus,” the second prosecutor said, “to make them get conscious that there is something going against them.”