Rwandan Government Outraged Over Sluggish Pace of Inquiry Into Genocide : Africa: Official says delays in bringing perpetrators to justice will push those who lost loved ones to seek revenge. U.N. denies the probe is being ‘sabotaged.’

The government lashed out Tuesday at the United Nations for not doing more to investigate Rwanda’s genocidal massacres and identify the perpetrators, saying such inaction could turn frustrated Rwandans into vigilantes bent on seeking revenge themselves.

“The United Nations is sending commission after commission to investigate a genocide that took place before the cameras of the world,” complained Maj. Wilson Rutayisire, a government spokesman.

An estimated half a million people, and perhaps many more, were slain in Rwanda in April and May as the former government of hard-line Hutus organized pogroms of its political opponents and the Tutsi ethnic minority.

Rwanda’s current Rwandan Patriotic Front leadership, which took control in July after a rapid and savage civil war with the old government, has called for the trial of at least 30,000 people it says are implicated in the massacres. Rutayisire said failure to put them on trial quickly will undermine support for the new leaders.

“If the people are not tried, the people (Rwandans) will not see the international community,” he said. “They will see (only) the government here.”

Lately, foreign aid organizations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have reported increased arrests by soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army and disappearances by the hundreds. Rutayisire accused the foreign press of being hypersensitive to such accusations and asserted that any abuses by the front’s soldiers are investigated and punishment meted out to those responsible.

In the southern city of Butare, he said, a soldier was shot in front of his unit for murdering a civilian. In Gitarama, he said, a major and four soldiers were placed under arrest for atrocities.

“The international community fails to realize the connection with any incident that occurs today with the failure to try those responsible for genocide,” he added, explaining why delays in trying the killers would push Rwandans who lost loved ones in the spring to seek vengeance themselves.

The comments by the spokesman showed to what degree the government has become exasperated by the snail-like pace of U.N. efforts to formally rule on whether genocide took place, as a preliminary step toward the possible convocation of an international tribunal.

In July, a U.N. special envoy concluded that “planned and systematic” killing occurred in Rwanda.

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Rutayisire said. “If we can try them now, why should we wait?” He voiced the possibility that his government might organize its own prosecutions, but he then backed away, saying, “Maybe we will have to wait as long as it takes” so Western countries, whose aid Rwanda now badly needs, do not conclude that today’s leaders are bent on avenging the bloodshed earlier this year.

At a separate press briefing, Pierre Mehu, a spokesman for the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda, flatly denied a comment by Rutayisire that somebody seemed to be “sabotaging the U.N. probe.”

“Of course we understand the impatience of the government, but there are steps we have to follow,” Mehu said. “You just cannot take people and put them in front of a tribunal. . . . There are rules that have to be followed.”

Three jurists from French-speaking West Africa have been charged by the U.N. Security Council with reporting on whether, in terms of international law, what took place in Rwanda was genocide. They have promised to make a report by the end of this month.

The United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council will then decide what action, if any, to take. Only the council is empowered to create an international court.

Rwandan authorities are frustrated because the U.N. high commissioner for human rights has had an office in Kigali for the past three months, without achieving many apparent results. In fact, U.N. sources say, the four employees responsible for carrying out the legwork and interviews on the genocide issue have been exasperated at what they see as lack of backing elsewhere in the United Nations’ bureaucracy, plus their inability to obtain cars, computers and other resources to gather testimony and other data.

Last week, the office’s director, Irish human rights lawyer Karen Kenny, allowed her contract to lapse. In a press release, the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission strongly denied she had resigned, saying she had been the head of the “first team” investigating the blood bath and that she was leaving because her contract was due to lapse Sept. 16.

William Clarence, a British lawyer and retired U.N. civil servant who last served as the representative of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in the former Soviet Union, arrived last weekend to assume the post of chief of the United Nations’ human rights operation in Rwanda.

He said he expected his staff of three human rights monitors to swell soon to 26 short-term contract employees. In 12 days, Clarence said, his office should forward its findings to the three African jurists who in turn will report to the Security Council.

“It’s tremendously important for the world community to condemn genocide,” Clarence said. “Perhaps the procedures have been slow, but there’s total determination to bring people to justice within the U.N. system.”