Fear of More Killing Haunts Rwanda : Africa: After betrayal by neighbors, survivors wonder if they dare to trust promise of peace.

Some of Maharaliel Nyagahima’s neighbors, people he had sold beer and lent money to for years, came one evening to kill him and his wife. He paid them off with three cases of bottled banana beer and survived.

What now?

The 38-year-old Rwandan sat Sunday afternoon in the sole, creaky armchair in his humble hillside cabin, his wife, Stephanie, by his side, and held his stubble-covered chin in his hands as he thought about the future.

Can he, the son of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, ever again trust the other villagers whose homes dot the banana groves here? What turned some of his neighbors against families they had known for years?

To save his Tutsi wife from the bloodthirsty mob that rampaged with clubs and machetes last spring, Nyagahima had to hide her in the brush-fringed hills.

Could it all happen again? And next time, would they be as lucky?

“What I know is that my father-in-law is dead and my two brothers-in-law,” Nyagahima said. “I am afraid.”

The fear, sorrow and perplexity in this Kitarama prefecture village in a small way are those of all Rwanda.

As the year began, 400 people, mostly small-scale farmers, lived in Karehe.

Now villagers reckon there are only 150 people left. A quarter of the original population was Tutsi, but almost all have been murdered. Fifteen extended families of Hutus, including some who took part in the pogrom, have fled to Zaire.

Rows of thatched huts have been reduced to a no-man’s-land of ashes, scrap and broken water jars. A human skeleton, its teeth shining hideously white, lies on its back near the roadside. It has been there for months, people say. No one can say who the dead person was.

Last April, villagers say, 200 Hutus from the youth wing of the former government’s political party rolled into the village from Kigali, the capital. Along with some local officials and some village Hutus, they compiled a list of people to be killed.

The village mayor, a Hutu from the ruling party named Sixbert Ndayambaje, approved the list, villagers said. And the thugs from Kigali, joined by some villagers, began going from home to home, pulling people outside and killing them with repeated chops from machetes or blows from clubs.

Nyagahima’s 36-year-old wife was marked for death because she is a Tutsi. But also marked was Suleiman Rukera, a Hutu who owns a tiny market stall with a corrugated roof, where he tries to sell door hinges, cigarettes and the odd bicycle tire.

“If they saw you had a bit of a fortune, they tried to kill you to get your money,” the merchant said.

He was then earning $1 a day. To save himself, Rukera, 48, hid in the homes of other Hutus.

The enigma of the genocide that swept Rwanda is why and how it happened so fast. For their part, ethnographers note the traditional differences between the Hutus, who make up 85% of the population, and Tutsis, who, before their blood began flowing in a tidal wave, accounted for almost all of the remainder.

Tall and slim, the Tutsis migrated to Central Africa with their cattle from the Nile region long ago. Although a minority, they came to rule the short, stocky Hutus, a farming people of Bantu origin.

The Tutsis provided protection in return for a share of the crops. Even into this century, one’s ethnic background was still deemed so important that it was noted on Rwandan identity cards.

In Karehe, people don’t blame historical grudges for the massacres. They blame their country’s former, mostly Hutu leaders. It may be a way of washing away guilt for having done nothing to halt the butchery. Or it may be a way of pinning hopes on the mostly Tutsi leaders who are now in charge of Rwanda.

“Before, the Hutus lived together with the Tutsis in peace,” Rukera said. “A Tutsi looked for a Hutu wife; a Hutu looked for a Tutsi wife. All these events happened because of the authorities. They divided people to get power or to keep it.”

Party workers loyal to President Juvenal Habyarimana visited the town to whip up hatred among Hutus even before Habyarimana was killed in an April 6 plane crash, villagers remember. But it was the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane that started the butchery.

“They called the people together. They put up barriers. They said: ‘We have just one enemy. And we know who he is,’ ” Ebaniste Musabeyezu, 37, said of the rallies held by Habyarimana’s party workers here to summon up anti-Tutsi hysteria.

Shortly after the president’s death, the killing began. The trucks from Kigali were accompanied by some of the village Hutus. “Night after night, they came,” Nyagahima said with a shudder.

Hiding out on the terraced slopes, Nyagahima’s wife was in despair. “I knew I was going to die because everyone else who hid was found and killed,” she said softly.

The extortion money her husband paid to the Hutus may have saved them both. One night he gave the killers about $30. A second time, it was about $60. The third and final time, the beer vendor handed over the three cases of banana beer. For some reason, the killers never came back.

“God saved me,” Nyagahima said.

He and his family fled on foot in June when Rwandan government troops, driven out of Kigali by the mostly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, reached Karehe. In an unsuccessful bid to halt the rebel advance, government soldiers raked the village with mortar fire, killing at least 17 people.

Carrying only a mattress, Nyagahima, his wife, their four sons and daughter walked for two weeks over Rwanda’s hilly countryside to Ruhengeri prefecture. There they ran into more men from the rebel forces.

“They told us, ‘Go home, there will be peace,’ ” Nyagahima said. By July, the Rwandan Patriotic Front had driven the government forces out and taken power.

The Front promised peace. Does Nyagahima think the new government of “national unity” can deliver in a country where so much blood has been shed?

The beer seller doesn’t know. His wife is more confident. “People who took part in the massacres are afraid of the RPF,” she said. To her, that’s a reassuring sign.

Also, she said, the people of Karehe have begun to talk to each other, to question what happened--and to wonder why.

The mayor appointed by the new government has warned relatives of the slain against seeking vengeance. But like the grinning skeleton across the road from the market, death and the past still haunt Karehe.

Sunday afternoon, a man wearing a dirty white baseball cap marked “Panama Jack Beach Club” grabbed a machete and started to hack away at a lamb carcass at the market.

Jean Guakavinay chopped and chopped, swinging his arms ever higher as he tried to cut through thick bone.

The villagers eyed each other and then laughed. It was obvious what the chop-chop of the butcher’s machete had made them think of.