This is the second of three excerpts from the new book “Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption” (Free Press) by The New York Sun’s associate editor and City Hall bureau chief, Dina Temple-Raston. It will be in book stores March 9.

When The Prosecutor v. Jean–Bosco Barayagwiza, Ferdinand Nahimana, and Hassan Ngeze finally opened, in early 2001, the world was looking the other way. In USA Today, political columnist Walter Shapiro was focused on the lack of idealism in America. Students at Harvard University were attending a forum on hate crimes, but the issue of the Rwandan genocide never came up. President Bush’s proposal for required testing in schools was filling editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill, Democrats in Congress offered up a $900 billion tax-cut plan they said would be easier on the economy than President Bush’s $1.6 trillion proposal.

The prosecutors rolled out an eighty-page list of charges against the trio. Indictments are usually just three or four pages long. In retrospect, the lawyers said the document could have used some editing. It was more of a narrative than a recitation of crimes.

The indictment began – rather oddly, given that the jurisdiction of the court was limited to 1994 – with the history of Rwanda. It opened with the 1959 uprising, chewed through the nation’s bloody cycle of massacres, and ended up accusing the three men of a litany of crimes: incitement, conspiracy, crimes against humanity, murder, and genocide. The media trio, the prosecutors said, had infected people’s minds with ethnic hatred and persecution.

The indictment said Barayagwiza had presided over several meetings called to plan the murder of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Mutura commune, in Gisenyi prefecture, in northwest Rwanda. Prosecutors also alleged that he had distributed weapons and money to Interahamwe militia. It was on his orders, the indictment said, that Interahamwe youth began to kill Tutsi. Barayagwiza, as a leader of the Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique, or CDR party, knew that its members were preparing a genocide, but he did nothing to stop it. He was also accused of conspiring with Nahimana and his friend Rwandan businessman Felicien Kabuga to set up RTLM expressly to promote Hutu extremism. What the indictment didn’t say was that there was scant evidence to link Barayagwiza to radio station RTLM. Barayagwiza pleaded not guilty.

Ferdinand Nahimana, small and compact to begin with, shrank even further into his suit when the charges were read against him. He was accused of having broadcast messages on national radio that were meant to incite ethnic hatred and the murder of Tutsi. Prosecutors said he joined forces with Hassan Ngeze and Barayagwiza to wipe out Tutsi and their moderate Hutu supporters. There was also proof, they said, that Nahimana had encouraged unemployed Rwandan youth to form self-defense groups to oppose the RPF. Those who took up his call became the core of the Interahamwe. Prosecutors went further. Nahimana had chaired meetings in which top officials of the Mouvement Republicain National pour la Democratie et le Developpement, or MRNDD party, plotted to eliminate the Tutsi. He, too, ordered the murder of Tutsi and helped get arms to the Interahamwe, the prosecution said. His Ph.D. thesis had provided the ideological basis for the 1994 genocide, the lawyers continued. They didn’t mention that his voice had come over the airwaves only a handful of times or that he was out of the country soon after the genocide began or that his thesis was twenty years old.

Hassan Ngeze’s work at Kangura was the focus of the charges against him. Prosecutors said he had consented to the publication of material in the newspaper that promoted ethnic hatred and incited mass killings of the Tutsi. Editorials, guest journalist articles, political and social cartoons, and the names of individuals targeted for assassination were found in the pages of Kangura. The tribunal’s mandate to try crimes committed from January 1, 1994, to the end of that year meant, technically, that few Kangura issues would be admissible since the newspaper stopped publishing before the genocide began. Prosecutors used the RTLM contest as a way to get more issues of the newspapers entered into evidence.

Provisos aside, prosecutors said they intended to prove that Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze were men who used words to kill.

The counts and charges rang through the tribunal court room like chimes, and the accused sat emotionless as history was made: the three became the first journalists since the self-proclaimed “number-one Nazi,” Julius Streicher, to stand trial in an inter-national court for such grave crimes.

“Every count in the indictment will be proved by credible evidence and is supported by hundreds of hours of taped radio broadcasts and newspapers generated by the prisoners themselves,” the media trial’s first prosecutor, Bernard Muna, said in his opening statement. He called Nahimana the “intellectual high priest of Hutu Supremacy.” Barayagwiza was the “master manipulator of the truth both at home and abroad.” Ngeze was not spared from his own superlatives. Muna called him “the venomous vulgarian and purveyor of racial libel and slander.”

“Your Honors, this case has been popularly known as the media trial,” Muna said. “In fact, the media is not on trial here. It is the trial of three prisoners who used, or rather misused, the media. When people who speak on radio are people in political leadership and when such broadcasts are seemingly approved or sanctioned by a government, I can only leave it to the imagination of any reasonable person to estimate the influence that such broadcasts can have on the ordinary citizens on the hills.”

The trial, Muna went on, was to prove that the trio were principally responsible for what was broadcast or appeared in print and that the genocide was part of an overall strategy and plan. “The conspiracy to commit genocide in Rwanda can be likened to a moving train,” said Muna. “The train would stop at the prefecture and the prefect and his assistants would be invited to join the conspiracy.”

The strategy, working through a grassroots campaign, explains why the genocide that took place in Rwanda is considered to have been the most efficient killing in human history, Muna said, adding that in Germany the targeting of the Jews went through four stages. There was classification as a Jew, the expropriation of property, banishment to the ghettos, and then transportation to the camps and eventual extermination. “The whole process took nine years,” Muna said. “By comparison, the Hutu leaders went from stage one to stage four within a few weeks.”