ARUSHA, Tanzania (AFP) - The landmark genocide trial of a Rwandan Catholic priest was suspended for a day amid a mass boycott by detainees at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and a walk-out by the accused's lawyers.
Lawyers representing the priest, Athanase Seromba, who stands accused of directing the murder of 2,000 of his own parishioners during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, told the court, which sits in Tanzania, that their client had asked them not to represent him during the boycott.
Forty-four of the 56 people detained at the ICTR, including Seromba, began a three-day protest Monday against proposals to move them and some caseloads to Rwanda itself after the tribunal's mandate expires.
Many of them were senior members of the Hutu regime behind the genocide which was toppled in July 1994 by the Tutsi rebels who now dominate government in Kigali.
Seromba's lawyers ignored a judge's order that they remain in court Tuesday and continue to represent the priest.
The presiding judge, Andresia Vaz of Senegal, issued a warning to the lawyers, noted their "rudeness", ordered the registrar to appoint counsel for Seromba and suspended proceedings until Wednesday afternoon.
Seromba's case is the first of a Roman Catholic priest at the ICTR, although two others are awaiting trial there.
Courts in Rwanda have convicted several priests -- although two were later acquitted on appeal -- and, in 2001, a Belgian court found two Catholic nuns guilty of playing a role in the genocide.
Seromba, 41, who turned himself in two years ago, has pleaded not guilty to the charges levelled against him: genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.
He is alleged to have prepared and supervised, together with local authorities, the April 1994 massacre of more than 2,000 Tutsis who had sought refuge in his church in the western parish of Nyange from extremist Hutu killers.
Most of the victims died when the church was bulldozed, allegedly on Seromba's instructions.
Prosecutors also claim Seromba refused to hear the confessions of those in the church before they died or to feed them, saying there was no point giving them food since they were about to be killed.
His lawyers said at the weekend they would argue that although the priest was present at the time of the killings, he was powerless to intervene.
Over the course of 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people, mostly from Rwanda's Tutsi minority, were slaughtered in a campaign carefully orchestrated at the highest levels of the then Hutu regime, with which the Vatican enjoyed close relations.
The Pope visited Rwanda in 1990.
In a letter to ICTR President Eric Mose, the protesting detainees -- suspects on trial, awaiting verdicts or appeal rulings -- threatened to start a hunger strike if the tribunal failed clarify its "real position" about what will happen to outstanding cases when the tribunal's mandate expires.
Under deadlines set by the UN Security Council, ongoing ICTR investigations must be wrapped by the end of this year, trials in progress by 2008 and appeals by 2010.
The detainees and their lawyers argue that fair trials would be impossible in Rwanda and that they would likely die if detained in the country's overcrowded prisons.
Their protest began Monday, the first day of a visit to the tribunal by the first ever Rwandan government delegation to do so.
The transfer of detainees is top of the agenda of their discussions.