NAIROBI The much-maligned United Nations tribunal on Rwanda's 1994 genocide says it has turned a psychological corner by obtaining a historic guilty plea. Former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda's confession on May 1 was handily timed just days before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visits the seat of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) at Arusha, Tanzania. The tribunal's top officials portray Kambanda's admission as the first time in history an accused at an international trial has pleaded guilty to genocide. More ambitiously they say it is a first step to reconciliation between Africa's Hutu and Tutsi tribes, whose inability to co-exist has resulted in a series of bloodbaths in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi for the last 40 years at least. When he goes to Arusha on Tuesday, Annan will welcome thelcome the good news from the ICTR after a damning report on it by UN investigators in 1997 and a critical follow-up a year later.

The ICTR was created by the Security Council in November 1994, four months after the end of the massacres of an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Hutu hardliners. Time will tell if the first admission by a prominent figure in the ousted Hutu regime, recognizing that a genocide did occur between April and July 1994 and his own leading role in its planning and execution, is going to heal wounds in Rwanda. One test will be whether the mainly Tutsi government now in power in Rwanda continues to execute those of its 130,000 overwhelmingly Hutu prisoners found guilty by its national courts.

The first 22 were publicly executed by firing squad on April 24, despite a plea for clemency