Killers’ Return Raises Tension in Rwanda

In the gloom of the battered stucco house that soldiers gave her last year, Janviere Mungorewero grimly recounted Wednesday how Hutu militias butchered her sister and her sister’s five children two years ago.

“Now the people who did the killing are coming back,” she said softly, fear etched on her face.

Charlie Juma, owner of the house, paced nervously outside. A witness alleged that Juma was an ardent member of the Hutu militias that in 1994 went house to house here, night after night, hacking people to death with machetes in a savage campaign to annihilate the country’s Tutsi minority.

“I don’t know why they are afraid,” Juma, 30, said of the Tutsis in his house. “When the genocide was taking place in Gisenyi, I was in my garage. I did not go outside.”

Rwandan authorities and international aid agencies are struggling to house, feed and transport up to 600,000 Hutu refugees, such as Juma, who have hiked back from Zaire since Friday, further crowding one of Africa’s most densely populated nations.

But a far more difficult--and dangerous--task will be the re-integration into Rwanda’s volatile society of those returnees, especially the former militia fighters who took part in the systematic slaughter of about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus two years ago.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s vice president and defense minister, told a news conference Wednesday in the capital, Kigali, that “to my knowledge” none of the returnees have been arrested.

“We have let them all go to their villages,” he said.

But the provincial government here has quietly rounded up hundreds of young men and their families and ordered them to make camp in a schoolyard here rather than return to their homes.

They are free to move about during the day but must sleep there at night under guard by armed Rwandan soldiers.

All those in the schoolyard came from the now-emptied Mugunga refugee camp in Zaire.

A United Nations report earlier this year estimated that 80% of the young men in Mugunga belonged to the fanatic militia called the Interahamwe, or “those who attack together,” the zealots most responsible for the 1994 genocide.

Many of the men at the school appeared far stronger, more organized and better dressed than other refugees.

Unlike the barefoot, bedraggled throngs on the road, nearly all the men wore shoes. Many sported watches and jewelry. One youth, built like a weightlifter, listened to a Walkman.

The Hutus at the school have been told that they must wait 15 days until Tutsis occupying their homes can find new places to live. That legal waiting period also applies to other returnees who have found their homes occupied by Tutsis.

But none of the other returnees in the Gisenyi area are known to have been segregated. The government has battled all attempts by aid workers to create even temporary rest camps or feeding stations for the vast hordes of haggard refugees still crowding the roads.

“There are some people among the aid agencies who are intent on creating [refugee] camps again,” Kagame said.

And many in the schoolyard, unlike the other refugees, complained that local officials have prevented them from lodging with relatives, friends or even the Tutsis occupying their houses. Juma, his wife and his child were told that they could not live with his mother.

Gangs of men gathered by their tents at the schoolyard Wednesday, scowling and surrounding visitors in a menacing manner. All those interviewed denied being members of the militia. They also all denied genocide had occurred.

“I can’t say there was genocide,” said Martin Habimana, 23, leader of one group. “There were Tutsis who died and Hutus who died.”

Asked about the young men’s detainment, Emmanuel Rutaboba, deputy mayor of Gisenyi, did not deny that many were Interahamwe.

“Of course they are here,” he said as the men lined up to register and be issued high-protein biscuits. But Rutaboba insisted that suspected militia members were not being interned for eventual arrest.

“After being settled, their fellow villagers will say who did the killing,” Rutaboba explained. “The ones who killed people will be accused and face court.”

However, more than 85,000 Hutus are already crammed in 15 dungeon-like prisons and more than 200 makeshift local jails on charges of genocide. None have been brought to trial. Many have not been charged. At the same time, numerous Tutsi survivors have been murdered to prevent them from testifying.

Human rights officials fear mass arrests of the returnees now could exacerbate the nation’s seething ethnic tensions.

One of the Hutu men at the schoolyard, Donnat Shawiga, warned that “there will be no peace” unless he is allowed to return to his home.

“I feel it has been confiscated,” he said.

But Maria Nyabajambere, an elderly Tutsi woman who occupies Shawiga’s mud-walled compound with 20 family members and friends, was equally adamant.

“The Interahamwe, they killed my friends, they killed my brothers, they killed my children,” she said bitterly, leaning on a worn wooden cane. “Unless they kill me, I shall not leave this house.”