Doing Violence to the Truth

Evariste Ahimana can’t even utter the word “one” to tell how many people he killed in Rwanda’s genocide. He just holds up a finger to represent what he did -- clubbing a neighbor named Augustin Murinda, whom he liked and often drank with -- at the behest of strangers from the next village.

Since returning to this village after his release from prison last year, Ahimana has walked past the house of his victim’s brother every week as he climbed the hill to the church. Walking downhill after prayers and confession, he has never stopped to apologize.

When he passes the brother on the narrow dirt paths of the village, the two men greet each other, but their eyes never meet.

“I’m planning to say sorry one day,” Ahimana said. “It’s not so much reluctance to go as lack of strength.” Leaning on a wooden stick in his house, with pictures of Mary and Jesus tacked to the wall, he says he can’t be held responsible: An armed mob forced him to kill the man.

“Those people are to blame,” he said. “Not me.”

It’s a refrain of many of the ethnic Hutus who confessed to killing Tutsis in the genocide that started 10 years ago this week, leaving up to 1 million Rwandans dead. “They” are responsible. The mob. The former government. Satan.

The genocide was wild and impersonal, the killers say. It swept in “like the wind.” It was “like a car accident.”

Still waiting for justice, many survivors are angered by the provisional release of thousands of genocide prisoners who rarely express remorse to families and don’t seem willing to accept that the decision to kill was their own. The killers’ inability to take responsibility for their horrific acts and the long wait for justice have made Rwanda’s struggle for reconciliation harder. Some believe it will take as long as two generations.

Many perpetrators of genocide speak of reconciliation as some kind of external force -- a government policy that will fix things between them and the neighbors whose families they killed. But without justice or genuine remorse, many survivors say, there cannot be reconciliation.

“How can you say there can be reconciliation with people who killed your family and made you sad all your life?” asked Yves Kamuronsi, 22, who at 13 exhumed his parents and brother from a nearby rubbish heap and buried them in his back garden.

“I don’t think they feel really sorry. They killed someone, and I think on another occasion they can kill again.”

Pilot Ntezirayo agrees. The 45-year-old, provisionally released from prison last year, was part of a genocidal mob but denies laying a finger on anyone. He blames the former government. If authorities order it again, “then that’s it, it’s the start of the killings.”

With 135,000 prisoners initially accused and 100,000 remaining in prison without conviction in 2003, the government provisionally released 23,000 who qualified by confessing. They are supposed to face traditional community tribunals called gacaca, in which killers would face the families of victims, and survivors would hear the circumstances of the rapes and murders of loved ones, perhaps for the first time. The wounds would be torn open again, but the government says this time it is in order to heal.

But the killing has not quite stopped. In one of the freshest graves lies the body of Francois Seramuka, 54, a brave Hutu who hid a Tutsi neighbor in his house in Rukoli village, east of the capital, Kigali, during the genocide. Recently, he told many local people that he would testify in the gacaca against neighbors who, having tanked up on his homemade banana wine, boasted in 1994 about whom they had killed. Late last month, he was hacked to death with a machete.

Several other witnesses have been killed recently, but more common is the community pressure on witnesses not to testify or the letters from perpetrators intimidating survivors. The killings, community pressure and prisoner releases have frightened survivors and deterred potential witnesses, said Aurea Kayiganwa, head of advocacy, justice and information at Avega, the Rwandan organization representing widows of the genocide.

Shameful Memories

The government estimates that 1 million people were killed in the genocide. As the Hutu leadership of President Juvenal Habyarimana faced attacks from the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriot Front, based in Uganda, the authorities and media demonized Tutsis as the enemy. After the president’s plane was shot down April 6, 1994, authorities immediately exhorted the population to kill all Tutsis. Tutsi sympathizers were also slaughtered.

The 10-year anniversary brings shameful memories for the international community, which did almost nothing to stop the killing. Many in Rwanda see the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, as another failure, having convicted 18 people in eight years on a budget of $150 million a year.

The number of ordinary Rwandans who took part in the genocide appears to be much higher than previously thought. In the 9% of gacaca jurisdictions that have finished compiling accusations, the number of accused is more than 50,000. Extrapolated nationally, the figures suggest up to 600,000 Rwandans may have taken part, said analyst Klaas de Jonge of Penal Reform International.

Few perpetrators admit to killing more than one or two people or to serious crimes such as gang rape, and many survivors fear and resent the return of confessed Hutu killers to their villages. Many suspect that the confessions were lies -- or at best half-truths, concealing such crimes as rape or torture -- offered only to get out of prison.

“I think it’s a good hypothesis to say the confessions are half-confessions, semi-true. It makes it absolutely necessary to verify the confessions, and that is not being done properly,” De Jonge said.

But Fatuma Ndangiza, executive secretary of Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, said that if the tribunal found out 70% of the truth, it’s a start.

“Genocide is a crime that never dies. It’s a crime that haunts you,” she said. “We think that slowly, slowly, the truth will come out. It’s better than keeping quiet because discovering the truth is a process.”

Anastazi Habimana, 51, hopes to win release from Nsinda prison outside Kigali after admitting that he joined a mob and, wielding a club, set fire to a house and chased Tutsis. He said that other people killed the victims before he could. He is confident that the relatives of those he hunted and helped kill won’t be angry when he returns to his village, Jarama.

“I think it will be very easy for me because the government has a policy of reconciliation and is trying to get all the people to live together,” he said. “Whatever happened, happened. It was not a personal thing. It was just something that was done in a general way.

“It came like the wind. I wouldn’t think of saying no or yes. I just found myself joining the group and killing people,” he said, slipping out of his claims that he didn’t hurt anyone.

Another Nsinda prisoner, Faustin Mizeyama, 33, is accused of killing two people but said that all he did was fire one arrow into the shoulder of one victim as part of a mob murder.

“It happened so suddenly, I didn’t think about it. It just happened, like a car accident,” he said.

Amandin Mukurarinda, 43, in a Butare prison, south of Kigali, admitted he was an enthusiastic killer who arrested five Tutsis and helped kill 20 others.

“After the order, we suddenly jumped on all of them from behind, because it was much easier for us to kill them by hitting the backs of their necks so they wouldn’t beg us,” he said. Later, however, he denied using his machete. But he said the killings were “normal and casual because it was happening everywhere.”

Waiting for Apology

Issa Munyambabazi is waiting. He is waiting for Ahimana, the killer of his brother, to come to him with the word “sorry.”

“It’s hard,” Munyambabazi said. “It’s very hard to reconcile with someone who has not said sorry. They never feel sorry for killing. It’s in their blood from when they were babies. If they’re not saying sorry, why shouldn’t we go and take revenge?

“The only times when I feel that anger coming back and that I might take revenge is when those people who are released go out and kill survivors. It’s like scratching a wound.”

In many ways, Francois Seramuka, the man who was killed last month, is an unlikely hero. He called himself an honest man who liked his drink. Family and friends agree.

He spent several hours each night in the local bar, and the more he drank, the more he threatened other drinkers that he would tell the gacaca tribunal all he knew about their parts in the genocide. The family is sure he was killed to stop him from testifying.

He did not see any genocide murders, but killers used to visit his house at nights, boasting about how many people they had slaughtered.

Among those who gathered around his humble dirt grave Thursday was Frida Ndangiza, 30, remembering the man who had saved her life.

Eight Tutsi families lived in the area in 1994 -- about 70 to 80 people.

Six people survived, including Frida, whom Seramuka hid in his house.

Seramuka’s eldest son, Jean Claude Twahirwa, 29, said the family was lucky to escape being killed as Tutsi sympathizers during the genocide.

Despite the hideous pictures he has seen of his father’s bloodied corpse, he could not repress a smile, remembering his father.

“My father is honest. He’ll say what he wants, whether you like it or not. You cannot convince him to do anything else,” he said, not yet able to relegate his father to the past tense.

The deputy prosecutor in Gikongoro, Alphonse Abby Mazimpaka, said three key witnesses had been killed in the area, scaring off other potential witnesses. Charles Rutinduka was tortured with hooks and machetes and killed in front of his wife by those he had accused of genocide.

Another witness was tied up and thrown into a river, and one woman who had just testified at a preliminary gacaca hearing was hacked to death.

Reconciliation in Rwanda, De Jonge said, was as difficult as if Holocaust survivors and Nazis had been made to share one country after World War II.

Ndangiza of the reconciliation commission said survivors and perpetrators were living together in villages, taking the first, halting steps toward reconciliation.

“I think Rwandans feel they have to go through this process or else perish,” he said. “There’s no alternative. No one wants their children to go through what they went through.”

But it is painful. For Yves Kamuronsi, it means seeing the things once looted from his family home standing in neighbors’ houses.

“Even people who did not kill during the genocide, laughed. They saw Tutsis running, and they laughed,” he said. “They are still there, and they are real.”