With Genocide in Past, Reconciliation in Doubt

Two women stand atop a hill looking out over the lush banana groves blanketing the slopes in green, but their thoughts are on their homeland’s hard past, not its beauty.

One, a Tutsi, insists she is not afraid to be living among the families of Hutu men who hacked her husband and children to death. But Speciosa Mukasine’s quaking hands and darting eyes belie her words.

Her Hutu neighbor is afraid too.

“I’m afraid the Tutsi soldiers will come and take away more of our men,” says Maria Dusabe, her baby dozing on a sack of radishes at her feet. Ten local Hutus have been arrested since they returned in July and August from 2 1/2 years in exile in Burundi.

While the two women wait and worry on the hill scented by eucalyptus trees, the government is trying to heal the small central African nation.

Its wounds are deep, inflicted by extremists among the Hutu majority who massacred at least 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in early 1994 and by a Tutsi-led army that went to war to oust the Hutu government and stop the genocide.

“We have a paradise here. We must teach people how to live together in it,” says Moussa Habimana, mayor of Kigembe commune in the forest-clad mountains of southwestern Rwanda.

Gatete, a settlement of 17 houses, is part of Kigembe commune, which is part of Butare prefecture. In this highly organized nation of 7 million people, the government assigns leaders down to groups of 10 households. All returning refugees must go to their communes and face their neighbors.

In Kigembe, a grave the size of a football field is surrounded by trees that sigh in the wind. It holds 3,000 victims of the massacre.

No one is certain how many people were slain in Kigembe. Many Tutsis may have been killed as they fled south. Those who made it to the last Hutu military roadblock were killed there.

In less than a month, at least 150,000 were massacred in the Butare region, according to U.N. figures. That is 19% of its 780,000 people.

The re-integration of Butare prefecture is a model for the national government as it begins to cope with more than half a million Hutu refugees who have flooded home from Zaire since Nov. 15.

In July and August, about 77,000 Hutu refugees returned to Butare district from neighboring Burundi, where they had fled from Tutsi rebels in 1994.

Among the returnees, 1,077 have been arrested, including three former mayors and one army general implicated in the killings, U.N. officials say.

About 18,500 refugees returned to homes in Kigembe. Officials say 65 men are held behind the commune office in a building with gates held together by a motorcycle lock. The prisoners, speaking cautiously, say 160 are crammed into its dark recesses.

The arrest rate of 1.4% is surprisingly low, says Alfonso Barragues, chief of the Butare office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. “We were expecting that 10% to 20% of the returning refugees would be arrested.”

Barragues acknowledges that Rwanda’s prisons are already full of genocide suspects--more than 88,000, according to the International Red Cross--but says Rwandan authorities have carefully compiled witness statements before making new arrests.

One returnee was beaten to death by local people, who were later arrested, Barragues says. Three, possibly four, committed suicide, according to his office’s investigations.

Nationally, 105 people were slain in 54 incidents in September, including eight local officials, eight genocide survivors and one prisoner. That was a marked decrease from July and August, when a total of 649 civilians were killed, according to reports received by the U.N. human rights office.

“The government is doing a great job of promoting human rights and re-integration in the context of Rwanda society and culture, so human rights is not just something brought by foreigners and thrown like pamphlets out the windows of our nice, white cars,” Barragues says.

The same high level of organization that allowed extremists in the former Hutu-dominated government to carry out genocide is now allowing the government installed by the Tutsi rebels to spread the gospel of reconciliation.

Before the refugees returned to Kigembe from Burundi, Habimana, the mayor, says he told local leaders to inform the people they must welcome the returnees, live together in peace and not expect that everyone suspected of genocide would be arrested.

The message has been reinforced by radio, traveling theater groups, debates and security meetings.

While Hutus and Tutsis are together again in villages strung across Kigembe’s hills and valleys, they don’t necessarily mingle.

Hutus live together because they fear popular justice.

Martin Nkundimana, coordinator of the Assn. for the Survivors of Genocide, says most Tutsis prefer to live together, usually in village centers where soldiers patrol more often, even if it means being away from crops.

“We’re always waiting, watching, on edge to see what will happen,” he says.

Since January, 138 Tutsis have been killed by Hutu hit squads throughout Rwanda, the U.N. human rights office says.

Barragues says returning refugees tend to keep to their houses or their banana groves.

“They don’t go to security meetings, and Tutsis wonder if it’s because they have something to hide. It’s a vicious circle,” he says.

Charles Muhire, Kigembe’s social welfare officer, is more optimistic.

“There are those who lost family members--whose children were killed--who do not trust the returnees. But others eat together, and drink together,” he says.

A chronic lack of housing--worsened by the war--is one of Rwanda’s biggest problems.

A thousand teenagers and young men, both Hutus and Tutsis, have come to Kigembe for a month to build 150 homes. Slender tree trunks cut in the forest form the frame, which is covered with lashed bamboo, then mud bricks. A corrugated iron roof finishes the job.

“This is an example of what we can do--everyone working together to make a new start,” says Butare’s governor, Athanse Semuhungu.

Venant Kakira says he volunteered to help because, “I know what that’s like. I didn’t have a place when I came home, either.”

In the evening, the workers participate in discussions and activities on how Hutu and Tutsi can live together in peace.

They are learning, too.

Ask a worker his ethnicity, and with a knowing smile he will say--as if he has learned the answer to a trick question--”I am Rwandan.”

During the war, when a Hutu or a Tutsi reached the safety of his own people, he wore his ethnicity defiantly, like a badge.

In the national capital of Kigali, presidential advisor Ephraim Kabaija says changing hearts and minds in Rwanda is more challenging than ending apartheid in South Africa.

“In South Africa, they lived separately and by different rules. They had to create equal access to jobs, education and housing.

“But in Rwanda, we’ve always lived together. Reconciliation here involves the mind. It is not physical. We have to reconcile the afflicters and the afflicted.”