From Mass Murder to Mass Amnesia

Louis Rutaganira jabbed his finger at the black residue that still coats the concrete walkway outside the Catholic church.

“They burned people alive here,” he explained. “They tied them together and threw them on burning tires.”

He climbed the nine semicircular stone steps leading to the church door, then paused and pointed again.

“And here is where they killed my wife. I was there, watching in the window, when they cut the arms and legs off my wife,” he said, chopping at his elbows and knees with his hand to demonstrate. “I saw everything.”

By hiding under piles of corpses for two weeks, Rutaganira survived one of the worst atrocities of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide: the slaughter of up to 8,000 ethnic Tutsis who had sought refuge inside the Church of St. Jean Pierre.

“Not one minute passes without my remembering,” Rutaganira declared, fighting back tears.

The church massacre, supervised by government leaders and carried out by Hutu militias and soldiers, was a small part of the organized mass murder of Tutsis and government opponents by Hutus across Rwanda. But few areas suffered the hell of Kibuye: Nine out of 10 Tutsis, more than 200,000 people in all, were killed in the province.

The perdition of that past haunts Rwanda. And the return of about 600,000 Hutu refugees from Zaire since Nov. 15, including many suspected killers, has plunged this traumatized country into a painful soul-searching with few historic precedents.

The swift slaughter of an estimated 800,000 Rwandans in three months outpaced the Nazi death camps in Europe. And unlike Cambodia’s peasant-led Khmer Rouge, the killing fields here were commanded by Hutu doctors, teachers, priests and government officials who exhorted extermination of the Tutsi minority they called inyenzi, or cockroaches.

Mass amnesia now has replaced mass murder. Officials of the now Tutsi-dominated government say few, if any, of the returning Hutus have admitted taking part in the blood bath. Many even deny that genocide occurred. And fearful survivors say reconciliation will be impossible without repentance.

“They say they don’t remember, or they saw nothing,” Lt. Col. Charles Kayonga, the military commander in Kibuye province, said bitterly. “No Hutus, not one, have come forward to accuse another of genocide. They say they are all innocent. How do you think that makes us feel?”

Assiel Kabera, the provincial governor, agreed. “What I know is we have to live with them,” he said. “But if they don’t recognize what they did, how can we forgive them? How can we trust them? How?”

Local militia member Jean Mari Vianey Nsaumuhire, for example, was infamous for his murderous zeal with a nail-studded club and bloodstained sword.

Survivors say Nsaumuhire helped lead the Hutu fanatics who hacked and raped Tutsis in the church, machine-gunned thousands more on a nearby soccer field, impaled Tutsi heads on sticks at roadblocks and chanted, “Let us finish them all!” as they burned Tutsis in their homes.

To the shock of survivors, Nsaumuhire unexpectedly climbed off a truck from Zaire one recent morning. Soldiers fired shots in the air to disperse a furious mob of Tutsis before hustling him off to a local jail for his own protection.

In an interview, Nsaumuhire, a stocky 29-year-old with a ragged goatee and deep-set eyes, calmly insisted the enraged survivors who lined up to bear witness to his alleged atrocities were lying.

“I know I am innocent,” he said sullenly, staring at his bare feet. “That is why I came back. To kill is a sin.”

But his version of events kept changing. “I was forced to go on attacks,” he conceded. “They used to group the people in one place and then shoot them with big guns or grenades. . . . Because it was my first time with a gun, I used a stick.”

Nsaumuhire showed neither remorse nor regret, guilt nor grief. “I can’t ask for forgiveness,” he argued. “I didn’t kill anybody. How can I ask for forgiveness?”

Only 2 Confessions

Local officials say only two of the 6,307 Hutus accused of genocide in the provincial prison and local jails have confessed.

So far, only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of Hutus who fled Kibuye province for Zaire’s refugee camps in 1994 have come home. Government officials insist that mass arrests are not planned if they do. But arrests are inevitable.

Government “welcome committees” in the province’s nine counties will hand out food, seeds and photo identification cards to each returnee. They will also check their names against a list of known ringleaders. Soldiers from the former regime are given special ID cards and must report to local army posts twice a week.

Survivors and witnesses have been urged to file charges if they recognize killers among the returnees.

“We’re not going to arrest them until all the files are complete,” said Kabera, the governor.

As elsewhere in Rwanda, Kibuye’s jails already are desperately overcrowded. And tension is growing. On Oct. 23, 16 newly arrived inmates at the provincial prison were beaten to death by fellow Hutus, supposedly for collaborating with police.

Kibuye’s former governor, Clement Kayishema, is being held in a far more comfortable cell in Arusha, Tanzania. Kayishema is one of six former Rwandan officials imprisoned there, with seven more detained in other countries. A U.N. tribunal has charged them with crimes against humanity.

Before those crimes, Kibuye province had Rwanda’s highest concentration of Tutsis: about 40% of the population, compared to about 15% in most other areas. Only 16,805 of Kibuye’s 247,000 Tutsis survived, Kabera said.

But the figures don’t describe the violence that ravaged this region, nestled on scenic hills overlooking the fjord-like shores of Lake Kivu in far western Rwanda.

Death of a President

The butchery began hours after a plane carrying the Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down over the capital, Kigali, on the night of April 6, 1994. The assassins were never caught, but Hutu hard-liners were known to be furious at Habyarimana’s support for a peace accord with local Tutsi rebels.

Survivors say the now-jailed Nsaumuhire was the first to kill a Tutsi in Kibuye town, a sprawl of tin-roofed shacks and shops on dirt roads along the lake. But uniformed soldiers and Hutu militias, called the Interahamwe, quickly followed. The first targets were prominent Tutsis and Hutu moderates who opposed the hard-liners.

Those who tried to escape ran into a deadly maze of militia checkpoints that cut the only road from town.

Many Hutus insist that Rwanda’s blood bath was unpredictable, or part of the civil war that erupted after the president’s plane went down and exiled Tutsi guerrillas invaded from Uganda. The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army ultimately routed the Hutu regime.

But the fighting was far from Kibuye. “There was no war here,” said Callixte Kayitare, a Rwandan who heads the local U.N. World Food Program office. “People were killing without any war.”

That was deliberate, survivors say: Jean Kambanda, then prime minister, came to Kibuye in early April to enlist the governor, local mayors and other officials to lead the local slaughter.

The officials, in turn, distributed guns and offered rewards of $1 for each Tutsi killed. They gave virulent speeches and radio broadcasts to whip up an anti-Tutsi blood lust.

Hutus were told to “get to work,” understood as an order to kill Tutsis. Farmers were urged to “clear the bush”--to hunt Tutsis in the fields. Homeowners were encouraged to “clean around their houses”--to slaughter their neighbors. Milita leaders were praised by name for their “good work” at roadblocks where bodies piled up.

After several days, local officials and police went door to door in the town and nearby villages to urge terrified Tutsis to gather for safety at the soccer stadium or at the church. Both had been sanctuaries in previous anti-Tutsi pogroms.

This time was different. At noon on April 18, survivors said, soldiers set up machine guns under the goal posts and opened fire on the Tutsis packed inside. Others threw grenades from the walls and stands. Militiamen ran among the survivors, hacking with machetes.

Up to 20,000 people died in the stadium. A few of the wounded reached a small hospital next door. But the fanatics followed them. “They killed them in the beds,” said Suprien Ngiruwonsanga, a patient who hid in a crawl space and is the only survivor in his 13-member family.

The church massacre was even more horrific.

Rutaganira, a 44-year-old businessman, is one of only three known survivors. His voice is low and strong, and his tale gushed out like blood from a cut vein. The outpouring stopped only when he buried his head in his hands to weep.

He recounted how he, his wife, their four children and several dozen relatives had fled to their house of worship on April 12 after soldiers and roving militias began burning Tutsi homes in their village above Kibuye town.

Hundreds, then thousands, of Tutsis soon arrived from nearby counties, describing similar scenes of horror. Fearing the worst, the parish priest defied the governor’s order that the Tutsis huddling in the church should go to the stadium. “He told the people if we shall die, let us die here,” Rutaganira recalled.

Machetes vs. Stones

On April 16, several hundred Hutus suddenly approached the church, waving machetes and clubs. “We picked up stones and threw them at these people,” Rutaganira said. “We knew they had come to kill us.”

The Hutus retreated. But early the next morning, a larger group returned with armed troops and provincial officials. “When we threw stones, they threw grenades,” Rutaganira said. “Then they began to shoot.”

The modern stone tabernacle stands on a finger-like ridge that juts into Lake Kivu, its cross-topped tower visible for miles. With only one approach, it appeared easy to defend. But with steep cliffs on three sides, it was impossible to escape.

To smoke their victims out, the killers burned tires inside the church door. Tutsis who staggered out to escape the fumes were chopped down, Rutaganira said. Women were stripped, then lined up and led forward one by one. Some were raped. All were executed.

Later, tear gas was fired into the nave. Those heard coughing were shot or hacked to death. Rutaganira stumbled into a confessional behind the main altar and found a breathing space on the floor.

“Others came in and were shot,” he said. “They fell on top of me. I was covered by the corpses.”

Rutaganira hid under the bodies, emerging only at night to cover his wife’s dismembered corpse with banana leaves, to forage for food and water in the forest and to search for his children. He found his 6-year-old daughter shot to death. He never located his two boys’ bodies.

Afraid he would be discovered when prison work crews arrived to bury the decomposing bodies, Rutaganira decided to escape. That’s when he found his 10-year-old daughter, Marie Marceline. A machete had sliced her head, and grenade shrapnel peppered her chest. But she was alive.

“I put her on my back and ran,” he said. He found a boat and paddled to a nearby island. But it wasn’t safe. “There were some people who used to come at night whispering, ‘Is anybody here?’ ” he recalled. “If you came out, they killed you.”

After a week, Rutaganira and his daughter crossed the vast lake to Zaire. They fled back to Kibuye in late July, however, when Hutu militiamen joined the exodus of Hutu refugees to Zaire and began killing Tutsis in aid compounds.

A Silent Memorial

The church is locked and empty now, a silent memorial to those in unmarked graves on all sides. The gore has been mopped from the floors, and bloody handprints have been whitewashed. But bullet holes pockmark the altar, and most of the windows are smashed. A foul stench persists in places.

The town stadium is still used for soccer and local events. These days, returning Hutu refugees sleep in the stands at night before resuming their march home each morning.

Is reconciliation possible in a land where churches and hospitals became charnel houses? Where figures of authority and morality committed unspeakable crimes, and traumatized survivors are asked to live beside killers?

Rutaganira says his daughter, who now lives with an aunt in Kigali, is still terrified and refuses to leave the house when she visits him.

He is not hopeful about reconciliation between Tutsis and Hutus, or indeed, about his own future. “They have a plan to kill all the survivors” to prevent them from testifying, he insisted. “And I’m sure I will be killed.”

But Rutaganira says he is a Christian, so he must forgive. However, “I am always remembering,” he added softly. “I cannot forget. The killers were my neighbors.”