But they are listening to testimony about a place and time in a village half a world away. On the stand, a diminutive Rwandan man with gold-rimmed glasses talks in his native language about how he participated in the murder of his neighbors during the ethnic massacres in Rwanda 17 years ago.
The witness, Valens Murindangabo, is asked about a moment on April 17, 1994, when two Tutsi teenagers were captured by Hutu men in some woods. He glances at the defendant, Lazare Kobagaya, an octogenarian with a cane, whose gray head can barely be seen above the back of his chair.
“Kobagaya said, ‘Wipe them out, kill them,’?” Mr. Murindangabo testifies. Then he says one of the men hacked the boys to death with a machete near a watering hole while Mr. Kobagaya watched from a few yards away. The defendant puts his palm to his forehead and shakes his head sadly. He dabs tears from his eyes with a handkerchief.
With this testimony, and more to come over the next two months, a federal court jury will hear a detailed account of how the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was carried out in a single village near the mountainous African country’s southern border with Burundi.
The jurors have been asked to decide whether Mr. Kobagaya, a former teacher and mill owner born in Burundi, incited local Hutu farmers to turn on their Tutsi neighbors in the turbulent days of April 1994. The Hutu president had died in a plane wreck, and Hutu hard-liners in the government began a genocide against Tutsi civilians, killing as many as 800,000, while a Tutsi rebel army renewed its offensive.
The defense has argued that Mr. Kobagaya never participated in the mass killings but has been falsely accused by various villagers who did take part and received reduced sentences in Rwandan prisons for pointing the finger at him and others.
“What they found in the course of their investigation was a group of killers willing to make accusations,” Melanie Morgan, a defense lawyer, said in opening statements.
Mr. Kobagaya, who is 84, is not being charged with genocide but with lying to immigration officials about his involvement to obtain American citizenship in 2006. Prosecutors say that he claimed on immigration forms that he lived in Burundi in 1994 and that he denied ever committing a crime.
“This case is about how the defendant lied and lied and lied again,” Christina Giffin, a prosecutor, said in the government’s opening statement.
Last week, prosecutors began calling several Rwandan witnesses, some of them convicted killers, who testified that Mr. Kobagaya was one of two leaders who organized the burning of Tutsi homes in the hamlet of Birambo and later led an attack on Tutsi who had retreated to a nearby mountaintop. The witnesses said Mr. Kobagaya also participated in hunting down Tutsi fugitives and, in at least two cases, used threats of violence to coerce Hutu men to kill captives.
But the defense has painted a different picture of Mr. Kobagaya. It says he was a peaceful, churchgoing man who fled his native Burundi in 1971, when there were massacres of Hutu by the Tutsi-led government, and was in the process of moving back in 1994. Contrary to assertions that he was a leader in the Rwandan genocide, the defense says, he saved his wife, who is Tutsi, and another Tutsi woman who had sought his help.
In all, more than 50 witnesses from five countries have been called to testify, and Judge Monti L. Belot of Federal District Court has said that the trial here could last 10 weeks. As the first prosecution witnesses took the stand last week, the jurors absorbed the gory events that took place in Birambo and on a nearby mountain called Nyakizu, where hundreds of Tutsi were massacred on April 19.
On Thursday, a survivor of the massacre, Valerie Niyitegeka, wept as she testified that Mr. Kobagaya led the attack, The Associated Press reported. On Wednesday, another witness, Emmanuel Nzabandora, said that Mr. Kobagaya had stabbed him in the leg when he balked at killing captives. He said that fearing for his life, he bludgeoned a Tutsi man to death while Mr. Kobagaya watched.
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