Simon Bikindi is Rwanda's most famous musician. He is also one of the country's most famous accused war criminals. He was arrested last July at a center for asylum seekers in the Netherlands, and he sits now in a Dutch jail awaiting extradition to Tanzania, where the tribunal investigating Rwandan war crimes is convened. The ''statement of facts'' in his six-count indictment runs to 46 paragraphs, but the charges against him focus on his music: in essence, Bikindi is accused of inciting genocide with his songs.

Bikindi, 47, grew up in a broken little village called Akanyirabagoyi in Rwanda's mountainous Gisenyi Province, five miles from the nearest paved road. He was a child prodigy on the inanga, a sort of guitar, and the iningiri, a one-string violin with a calabash tone box. From the village priest, he learned to do the ntore, Rwanda's signature war dance, in which two fighters with short spears, small shields and white manes hanging to their knees feint and thrust at each other. At 22 he was hired by the Ministry of Youth and Sports to act as the ministry's head cheerleader, organizing massive North Korea-style song-and-dance displays for honored visitors, including the pope.

He became a popular songwriter; a United Nations official who has followed his career calls him ''Rwanda's Michael Jackson.'' His style was to infuse old folk songs with new rhythms and ideas. He wrote powerful rap lyrics that mixed English, French and Kinyarwandan and set them to traditional tunes. He supplemented his government income by working at weddings, where he would sing and lead folk dances like the caller at a hoedown. His first cassette, released in 1990, was of traditional wedding songs.

At the time, Rwanda was in the midst of a tense but officially tolerant standoff between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. Inciting racial hatred was illegal and a social faux pas. But in 1990, the army of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda from Uganda, quickly capturing some territory in the north. For the next four years the R.P.F. fought a guerrilla war, punctuated by sporadic massacres of Hutus, and slowly advanced toward the capital, Kigali.