Searching for Justice in a Sea of Blood

In a land where the stench of death still fills churches and schools and the horrors of genocide haunt the psyche and soul, what is to be done with Cyprien Nzavugankize?

Thin and intense, the 37-year-old farmer stands barefoot in the mud outside a crypt-like brick jail here and calmly confesses that he butchered more than 200 people during Rwanda’s reign of terror two years ago.

Nzavugankize was in the Hutu militia. Fed on ethnic hatred, members cheered in April 1994 when the Hutu mayor gave them rifles, machetes and obscene orders: Kill ethnic Tutsis, including family and friends. “We were told to kill them all,” he recalled. “May no one survive.”

Few did. Up to 50,000 Tutsis were slain in this handful of hamlets in the dark, misty mountains of southern Rwanda. More than 10,000 corpses and skeletons were exhumed recently from a single deep pit at the primary school. Most of the victims had been shot, clubbed or hacked to death with machetes before being pushed in. But not everyone.

“Some, we threw them in alive,” explained Nzavugankize.

Men? he was asked. Of course. What about women? “And women.”

Children? “Children too.”

Why did he kill them? “Do I know?” he replied angrily, his only flash of emotion. “It was the people giving the orders. They are the bad ones. Ask them.”

By his own account, Nzavugankize is a mass murderer. But the term defies definition in this Maryland-sized nation in Central Africa where doctors killed patients, priests massacred parishioners, teachers slaughtered pupils and husbands hacked wives in a 100-day frenzy of murder and madness that by some estimates left 800,000 dead.

“People are grieving,” said human rights activist Richard Nsanzabaganwa, who lost most of his family. “They desperately want people to be brought before a court and for justice to be done. But how do you punish for genocide? How do you deal with crimes of this magnitude?”

The search for justice torments Rwanda today. More than 68,000 men, women and children cram dungeon-like prisons and disease-ridden jails built for a quarter that number. All are suspected of joining the genocide.

None have been tried. Most have not been charged. Many don’t even have case files. And hundreds more are arrested each week.

Gerard Gahima, deputy minister of justice, said the first trials could begin this summer. But he doesn’t expect courts to heal the wounds.

“What we are doing is really symbolic,” he said. “There is nothing you can ever do to redress the injustice and inhumanity of genocide. We can’t put all these people to death. We can’t try them all. And we can’t just let them go. . . . That is our dilemma.”

It’s not the only one. Rwanda never had an independent or impartial judiciary. Before the war, most judges and prosecutors were untrained. Trials were infrequent. Corruption was common. But even that dismal system is gone.

“There was no justice system left after the war,” said Todd Howland, head of the U.N. Human Rights Operation in Rwanda. “Most judges and prosecutors had been killed or fled. No courts were functioning. Everything was looted or destroyed.”

The nightmare began on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana crashed at Kigali airport. As if on signal, cutthroat militias and heavily armed soldiers began rounding up and executing Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Savage massacres, accompanied by mass rape and looting, exploded across the country.

A civil war erupted at the same time. By mid-July, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a much smaller Tutsi-led force, had smashed the Hutu army. Most of the killers, and almost 2 million fellow Hutus, fled in panic to neighboring Zaire. About 1.7 million refugees still live in squalid tent cities just outside Rwanda.

About 90,000 refugees have returned since the exodus, but the camps’ soaring birthrate has more than filled the gap. Hutu leaders, including many wanted for genocide, contend that anyone who goes home is murdered. They claim hundreds of Hutus are killed in Rwanda each day in revenge attacks.

But human rights groups see no evidence of such widespread abuses. “The average murder level we can confirm is one a day,” said a Western diplomat in Kigali, the capital.

And while the refugees remain in limbo, Rwanda is rising from its ashes. The capital, in ruins two years ago, bustles with activity. Shops are busy and markets full of fresh produce. Water, electricity and other basic services are back. Banks and other offices are working. Roads are open, with few military checkpoints.

“This government is a lot more together than a lot of other governments on this continent,” said Steven Rifkin, field director of Save the Children (U.K.), a humanitarian group. “We’ve never paid a bribe here. We’ve never been asked to pay a bribe.”

The progress is all the more dramatic since the outside world has mostly focused on the refugees, pumping $1 million a day into relief operations. No foreign aid was authorized to rebuild legal infrastructure until August.

Two efforts are now underway to bring mass murderers to justice.

The first is an international criminal tribunal created by the United Nations last year to find and prosecute the 400 or so chief architects and ideologues of genocide who have fled abroad. Many live and travel openly in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Zaire, Kenya and elsewhere.

But the tribunal is foundering. Only 10 suspects have been indicted and only two have been arrested, both in Zambia. Critics cite poor organization and leadership.

Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who is chief prosecutor, blames lack of U.N. support. “The office is seriously understaffed and under-resourced,” he complained last week. He said only 24 lawyers and investigators have been assigned and that most leave after short-term contracts, limiting their impact.

The tribunal also is picking an unseemly fight with Rwanda’s government, which is equally determined to try the ringleaders. Unlike the tribunal, it has moved quickly, expanding prisons, rebuilding courts and training hundreds of investigators, prosecutors and judges since last fall.

Both the government and the tribunal are competing to extradite 11 alleged masterminds of the genocide who were arrested in Cameroon last month at Rwanda’s request. The U.N. court insists it has primary jurisdiction.

Among those arrested were Ferdinand Nahimana, who allegedly urged mass slaughter in vicious anti-Tutsi broadcasts on Radio Mille Collines, and Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva, the former military intelligence chief and alleged head of Hutu death squads.

But the key suspect is former Col. Theoneste Bagosora, who ran Rwanda’s main military base and is accused of directing the slaughter. Belgium also wants to extradite Bagosora for the torture and murder of 10 Belgian U.N. peacekeepers in Kigali at the start of the genocide.

More than venue is at stake. Rwanda will use a firing squad for those who planned and supervised the slaughter, including leaders of the old government, army, clergy and militias. The U.N. court and Belgium can impose only life imprisonment.

Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu insists that his government must punish such “master planners” to convince survivors that accountability, not revenge, is the answer. That, he said, will enable the government to “show some degree of amnesty” to lower-level murderers--those who killed 50 people or fewer--now jamming prisons. “We won’t have to put so many people before the courts,” Bizimungu said.

And that could be critical. Hundreds have died from disease and suffocation in grotesquely overcrowded, crumbling prisons. Conditions improved this year, largely thanks to the International Red Cross and other humanitarian groups, but are still macabre.

At Gitarama prison, eyes peer out of the gloom in the women’s cell. Several hundred women squeeze together on three long metal tiers along each wall. Some are withered and frail, others young mothers nursing infants. It was Easter Sunday and several women sang hymns in a corner.

“They say that I killed 10 people,” said Alphonsina Mukamurigu, who stood sullenly as a baby wailed on her left hip. “I never did these things.”

What she did, if anything, will be determined by people such as Moises Mukiza, a former teacher now studying to be a magistrate. He and 106 other aspiring judges are in a four-month intensive law course at a leafy campus outside Gitarama. About 200 others already have graduated.

During a break in an examination on civil procedure, Mukiza said he heard about the course in a radio advertisement. “I am ready to confront genocide, both legally and psychologically,” he said confidently.

Marc Cousineau, a University of Ottawa law professor who is helping run the training, isn’t so sure. But he says the crash course is a start. “They’re getting more training as magistrates than magistrates got before in Rwanda,” he said.

A separate three-month course has trained about 250 special investigators. Former teacher Martin Kagiraneza graduated last fall and was posted to Ntongwe, an hour’s drive from Gitarama on winding mountain tracks past lush banana groves and brilliant wildflowers.

At first Kagiraneza had six deputies. Then they were reassigned. Now he works alone, the sole official responsible for solving 50,000 murders. “All I can do is try my best,” he said with a shrug.

But at 27, he is dedicated and energetic. Early each morning, witnesses and survivors line up on a bench outside his tiny office to denounce the killers. He patiently pecks their statements on a battered typewriter. Then he investigates.

His biggest obstacle is the genocide itself. “Sometmes a man shows up and says, ‘I killed him and him and him,’ but we can find no witnesses,” he said. “They are all dead.”

So far, Kagiraneza has jailed 559 suspects in a dark brick storehouse turned lockup. Inside, the prisoners sit pressed against one another on the dirt floor. Most blame Charles Kagabo, the former commune chief, for the blood bath here. Officials said Kagabo now works as a hospital nurse in a refugee camp in Bukavu, Zaire.

But more and more prisoners have begun to confess. “This morning, this very morning, someone came in and admitted killing 39 women,” Kagiraneza said, shaking his head.

That was the case with Cyprien Nzavugankize. He walked in Feb. 7 and soon signed a statement confessing that he had killed more than 200 people. Most, he said, he threw in the pit. Others he drowned in the river. And some he simply macheted as they pleaded for mercy--slicing leg tendons first to stop them from running, then cutting their throats to finish the job.

Nzavugankize’s voice is low, his black eyes dull, his face blank and expressionless. He said he is not proud of his role. Nor is he sorry.

“I sleep fine,” he insisted.

He surrendered only because he was tired of hiding in the bush. The rainy season was starting. And his wife stopped bringing him food. “I had no other place to go,” he said with a shrug.