Rwanda - 10 years on

'It's so difficult to live with what we know'

In 1994, around 800,000 people were massacred when Rwanda's Hutu majority turned against the Tutsi community. One of the worst atrocities took place in the town of Kibuye, where 21,000 were killed in two days. A decade on, Chris McGreal, who reported on the genocide at the time, returns to the town to talk to the survivors - and the killers living among them
On April 17 1994, Madalena Mukariemeria stepped forward to die. "The killer was a very big man. He had this huge club full of nails and sharp pieces of metal. He was such an expert he could kill with just one blow to the head. I wanted this man to kill me. People had been dying in such terrible ways and he would do it quickly," she says.



"The graves are half full. Who will fill them?" asked the notorious Radio Mille Collines from Kigali.

In the capital, the bodies were already piling up. The killing began a little slower in Kibuye, isolated to the west among lush, rolling hills on the banks of Lake Kivu. But in time this place would come to be known as the "purest genocide" because of its high concentration of Tutsis, and because - though civil war was its backdrop - that fighting was far away: this was simply a slaughter of civilians.

The first to die in Kibuye was a Tutsi agronomist named Bigirimana. A few days later word reached the church that it was Dr Kayishema who had settled an old score by demanding the man's head. It was skewered on a pole in the middle of the town's only roundabout. Tutsis came flooding in from the hills - driving their cows and dragging their goats, or by canoe over sprawling Lake Kivu - with accounts of armed gangs moving from house to house, killing and raping and looting. They told how the police and army refused to help them.

Father Senyenzi looked to Dr Kayishema for help and reassurance but all he got from the governor were demands for the Tutsis to move to the town's stadium. The Hutu militia, the "interahamwe", made an appearance outside the church armed with spears, clubs and machetes. The first day, they taunted the refugees. The second, they snatched a young girl and carried her off. She was butchered next to the roundabout.


The final note came on the morning of April 17. The father read it and then addressed his final congregation which, sensing doom, had declared that it would rather die in the church than move to the stadium: "These are your last hours. Prepare yourselves to be received by God. Prepare your hearts to be received in heaven."

People gathered by denomination - Catholic, Adventist, Pentecostal and Muslim - and prayed. Madalena and her children held hands. Not far away, Louis Rutaganira clutched his wife and kissed his daughters. "I knew these were our last minutes. I wanted to believe, to have hope that we could all escape, that there would be a miracle. But as much as I tried to believe, I knew it wasn't true and I wanted to cry out to stop this from happening to my children. I thought: why are we praying? We should be shouting at God," he says.


"Let us hunt them in the forests, lakes and hills
Let us find them in the church
Let us wipe them from the face of the earth."

Madalena spotted several of her neighbours' sons among the militia. "Some had masks. Some painted their skins with oils and earth. There were soldiers and police. Some people tried to run towards the lake but they were cut down."


"As he went out he was hacked and immediately killed. So many people running out the door were killed, but somehow the blades never caught me. I kept running all the way to the lake. There was a crowd of us but at the lake there were more militia. So we turned and ran to the nuns' home," she says. "I didn't know where to hide, so I went to the cellars."


The survivors

Dr Kayishema marched into the church when the bulk of the killing was done, gripping a sword. One of the militiamen hauled a half living man to his feet and the doctor finished him off. He came across a small child. It wasn't making a sound, but its tiny body was wriggling. Kayishema brought his sword down on it three times. The child's murder might never have been recorded but for Louis Rutaganira, who lay under it pretending to be dead.

"I saw my wife, who was still alive. They had cut off her legs and arms and left her to bleed to death. I never saw my children again. I don't know how they died," he says. "I lost so many people in the church; brothers, uncles, cousins. I calculated and made it 86."


"At night I would creep down to the lake to drink and eat bananas and sneak back into the church and hide under the bodies before dawn," he says. "On the first night, there were some wounded children in the brush, crying out all night. The crying attracted the interahamwe. They picked up the children and smashed them against the wall."


After the church, the murder squads moved on to the nuns' home where a child's cries gave away Madalena's hiding place. Dozens of Tutsis were lined up and driven towards the large Hutu man with the club. Madalena watched with gratification how expertly the killer at the front of the line wielded the monstrous instrument, felling each person with a single powerful blow as the club swung without interruption. The victims barely made a sound.

"I stepped up for my turn to die. The man raised the club, then a policeman stuck his gun in the way. I grabbed the policeman and said: 'If you are not going to let him kill us, please kill us with a bullet.' Others were saying the same thing. But he said: 'No, I have plans for you. We will kill you later, but for now you must walk'."



The genocide in Rwanda lasted 100 days and claimed about 800,000 lives. The shock waves spread far beyond the borders of the tiny Central African state, dethroning Mobutu Sese Seko after Rwanda's army marched across Zaire to avenge his support for the Hutu murderers. Gnawing guilt at western indifference to the genocide - one high-ranking Rwandan official told me that British diplomats at the UN reacted to his pleas to stop the slaughter as if he were talking about the killing of ants, not people - laid the foundation for Africa's first international tribunal in the Hague mould and provided the backdrop for Britain's military intervention in Sierra Leone four years ago.


But for many of the survivors, the genocide lives on. Madalena's tiny home is decorated with religious pictures even though she refuses to go near the church any more. She gestures at a painting of Christ on the cross. "I believe Jesus was crucified, crucified like the Tutsis."





There are about 1,000 Tutsi survivors living in Kibuye town. Today they are outnumbered by the number of freed killers on the streets. "They live in the neighbourhood. They drink in the bars. We saw what they did with our own eyes. We live in fear because they are free," says Madalena.

The government began releasing the genocidaire nearly two years ago. The nation's jail population had swelled to 120,000 and the established court system would have taken more than a century to try them. So the authorities revived a system of traditional courts - gacaca - designed to provide village justice with restitution through community service.

All but the worst killers - those who organised the slaughter, or were particularly noteworthy in the scale or brutality of their atrocities - are eligible for release if they confess their crimes, apologise to the families of their victims and agree restitution. The freed prisoner must also go before the gacaca courts as a witness against other genocidaire.


"Some write us letters saying, 'You can help us to get out of prison.' They don't want to talk about the people they killed. They say 'for what happened', never for 'killing your family'. They think that is confessing. One came to my husband and offered him a cow to forgive him. It's like a bribe," says Madalena.

"Truly if somebody comes to us and says 'Forgive me, I killed', saying the truth, there is no way not to forgive that person. But these people see us, the survivors, as the people in the wrong, as the people trying to finish them by putting them in prison ... You can meet them in a bar and a word slips out - why did I let you live?"

The killers

Madalena reels of a list of freed killers. One, she says, is renovating a hotel in the next street. He is called Pascal Parasi. "He is a child killer," says Madalena. "I see him all the time in my street. It is very painful."

Parasi is a small, wiry man of 36 wearing a torn red vest with a Marlboro cigarette logo. He begins by lying. "Myself, I didn't kill but I went with a person who had a grenade. There were four of us in that group. I was there with the killers," he says.


"I accept that I killed a child. He was 13 years old. It happened when one of the others threw a grenade at three children. It killed two of them but it only injured the boy. The one with the grenade ordered me to finish him off and that's when I did it. I chopped him," he says.



"I never had the heart of a human at that time. Now I know I did something wrong. I didn't admit it to reduce my sentence. I wasn't dishonest. My heart was convicting me, making me feel that I'm guilty for what I did."


"Before they came, they brought a letter asking me if really what I'm saying is from the heart, if I'm truly sorry. After, they came and we met face to face. They forgave me because they could see I am really sorry for that thing I did," he says.

But ask him the names of the two girls he murdered and he doesn't know. All he can say is that they were eight and 12 years old.


Ndangamira says he and the aunt meet regularly. When they do, he is effusive. "We have become good friends now," he says. "She has forgiven me completely." The girl's aunt shakes his hand but does not look him in the eye, and as soon as he has stepped out of earshot, she says: "He didn't kill only two. He killed at least six in my family and others too. He killed my two brothers, the wives of my brothers, my nieces. I did not forgive him because I think he is sincere, I forgave him because the church told me to."

Why does she not tell him herself? "You just have to be quiet. What can we say? They know who we are and we know who they are," she says.






The churchmen

A year after the genocide, the Pope set the line that is maintained to this day: the church cannot be blamed for the crimes of individual priests and nuns. "The church lost its children, and some of the church's children were doing the killings," says Kibuye's parish priest today, Gaudens Murasandonyi, a 33-year-old Tutsi. "But the church does not have responsibility for what happened. It did not cause the killings. If priests were involved they were responsible as individuals, not as the church."

Many of the survivors think differently. "I blame the church with all my heart," says Madalena. "During the massacres in 1973 we went in the church to hide and nobody came to kill us. In 1994, everybody thought the church would be safe again but that is where we died. That archbishop, Vincent Nsengiyumva, was in charge. He never did anything to stop the killing. He could have said nobody must kill anybody in the church, but he did not."



When, five weeks into the killing, leading Catholics and Protestants finally issued a statement condemning murders on all sides - a dubious document because it effectively equated deaths in war with the extermination of Tutsis - the Anglican archbishop refused to sign even that ambivalent statement. Rwandans took this as an endorsement of the killing.

After the genocide, a priest showed me a yellowing document written in 1972. It was a plea by a group of young Hutu priests to the white archbishop of the time to purge the Catholic church in Rwanda of Tutsi "domination". The letter derides Tutsis as cockroaches and accuses Tutsi priests of failing to recognise the Hutu "victory". Eleven priests and religious leaders signed the letter, among them Andre Havugimana, who was a young curate in 1972 but rose to become secretary of the Episcopal Conference, the third highest position in the church in Rwanda. At his office in Kigali, Havugimana was long on reasoning, saying the document was written in a spirit of "justice and charity", but he had difficulty explaining why it described Tutsis as cockroaches, a word so frequently applied to the doomed by their murderers in 1994.

"I admit that some people can get hurt by that, but that was the language of the day. At that time it could be understood in the context of the country's history, but, I admit, today you can't use words like that," he says.



Before the end of 1994, the doors to Kibuye's church were bolted. The holes ripped by bullets and grenades through the wooden pews, stained-glass windows and corrugated iron roof remained as a testament to the slaughter. Bloodied handprints on the walls of the priest's rooms behind and above the church, and the macheted metal doors of the toilets peeled away like banana skin, were untouched. Children played with human bones as if they were sticks from the forest.


The bishops returned to reconsecrate the church in 1997 and services resumed. But many of those who survived the massacre refused to pray there. Louis Rutaganira joined the American evangelist Pat Robertson's church, Assemblies of God. "I cannot go back to that church. It betrayed all of us. The Catholic church has never apologised for supporting the killers," he says.

Madalena returned briefly. "At first I went again and I was OK with it. Later on, I was taking mass and I looked at the man holding the cup. I imagined he was one of the killers. He wasn't. I looked at the church and I kept seeing the bodies. It all came back. I couldn't stand it. I went home and I didn't go back," she says.


Among the myths eroded by the passing years is that all Hutus welcomed the murder of their neighbours. Few of the survivors in Kibuye would have lived without the help of Hutus - many of them strangers - who risked their lives to subvert the killing.

The gendarme who stopped Madalena from being clubbed to death outside the church had no intention of killing her, despite what he told the interahamwe. Four policemen led the line of survivors to safety through the corpse-ridden brush. "We heard a child cry out for help. We were furious because it was shouting and we thought it would bring the interahamwe. I thought to myself: 'Shut up child. Shut up or die,'" says Madalena.

A policeman found the boy covered in blood but not wounded and put him in the line. "They took us to a safe house and I looked at the boy we had found in the bush," says Madalena. "I hadn't been able to see him before because it was dark. It was my son. That is the worst moment of the genocide, when I realised I had wished my son to die."

Hours later, her two daughters arrived having been hidden by a woman in the roof of the nuns' home behind the church.

Read part two here

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