*

At the prison in Kibuye, we meet Anastase Nkinamubanzi. We walk round there for a couple of days. The complex, built for 800 prisoners, is currently housing 3,197. In the dormitory barracks, there are five people per square metre. But that is physically impossible . . . isn’t it? The bunks are stacked vertically, one on top of another. The crush is inconceivable. They cannot all sit down at the same time. A nail holds all of a person’s belongings. How long could I personally stand it? These convicts have been here for more than seven years. Those I see are but a small fraction of the country’s 115,000 suspected genocidal murderers, who have been in prison awaiting trial all these years.

Anastase is one of the few whose case has been taken to court. He confessed and was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment for having razed the Catholic Church in Nyange to the ground with his bulldozer. The church contained more than 2,000 terrified Tutsis who had been urged by their priests to seek refuge there. Later, we visit the site. Hardly a brick remains. There are huge mass graves covered with a concrete slab. The site is deserted, except for a solitary turkey that struts about, pecking at the remains.

Anastase looks very young. He alternates between aggression, silence and pleading despair. Obviously, he is severely traumatised. Both the prison director and the interpreter furtively point to their heads, to convey that he is a bit crazy.

‘For seven years, I haven’t had a single visit. What upsets me most is that the priest who paid me for the job has found refuge in Europe.’ I find myself feeling sorry for him. When he lets the tears flow, I am relieved. Here at last is a perpetrator who shows feelings I can understand.

And then the translation comes. It turns out that he is weeping because he thinks it is so unfair that he has been punished so severely. For something like that! After all, he confessed! Anyway, it was the priests who gave him the order. Two of them were condemned to death at the same trial. But the principal offender, Athanase Seromba, fled to Italy. Although he is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, he is reported to have enjoyed the Vatican’s protection.

*

‘Here in Rwanda, everyone is a victim,’ the country’s president, Paul Kagame, tells us.

It was Kagame who led the army of Tutsi refugees who, from Uganda, stepped in to stop the genocide. We are now discussing the future with him. He speaks plainly and intensely, but thoughtfully. I say something about how I always try to put myself in the interviewee’s shoes. He laughs and says I should be glad to be spared that fate.

‘We ourselves must cope with the impossible task of creating a society, from the ruins, without the colonists’ artificial tribal antagonisms. We have learnt the lesson that the world is merciless and we are alone. The world stood by and watched, unmoved, while the genocide was planned and implemented. Now they do not care about the consequences. But we, the Rwandans, were the ones who did the murdering and now it is we who must create a reconciled Rwanda with a joint universal truth about what happened.’

The genocide affected the country’s lawyers as well. In seven years, the courts have only succeeded in sentencing 6,000 people. At this rate, it would take another century.

We talk to the chief prosecutor in Kibuye, Rafaël Ngarumbe. A young man, he tells us how hard he is working. He says that he has lost ten kilos in the past few months. I can understand why. His agenda includes investigating 250,000 murders and 7,000 suspected murderers. To help him he has only 12 assistants and one vehicle but unfortunately, at present, no funds for petrol. And the prisons are bulging.

Three thousand genocidal killers in the Kibuye prison have been fed on pea soup three times a day, seven days a week, for seven years now. The prison director tells us about their illnesses. He lets us walk round without surveillance between these men (and around a hundred women). One had, with his own hand, hacked to death 12 of his neighbours. Another had specialised in murdering babies –– a total of 50. Another had given orders to slaughter 11,000 Tutsis who had fled to the largest church in the village. They all watch us with curiosity.

On the Sunday, we hear a thousand murderers –– clad in pink shirts and pink trousers –– rhythmically and deafeningly singing the Lord’s praises at the Pentecostalist service. The Catholics have already had theirs, and the Protestants’ turn is next. Rwandans are among the most regular churchgoers in the world. Even the mass murderers are devoutly religious. One of them talks about his priest who, during a massacre, encouraged a bloodbath by reading from the Bible. We ask what he read. Jeremiah 16 is the answer. Nine out of ten prisoners in Kibuye still, seven years after the genocide, admit no part in it.

There are no escape-proof walls, no barbed wire or high watchtowers surrounding the prison, which is at the main road in the middle of the village. A piece of rope hangs across the entrance. In the morning, a thousand murderers march out into the village to work. We see them returning later, bearing firewood on their heads. They recognise us and wave cheerily. Two minutes behind them, a single guard strolls with a rifle over his shoulder.

Muhizi Ruotema, the prison director, has worked here for two years. We ask how many have escaped in that time. Two, he says; but they came back.

‘However bad things are in the prison, the poverty outside is worse. Anyway, where would they run to? They know what they have done, and are afraid to return home.’

*

It is, of course, untenable to have all these prisoners incarcerated year after year without a trial. The Government’s solution is gacaca. Starting a month or two from now, the genocide suspects will be taken to their home villages to be tried there, in 11,000 newly established gacaca courts. These are an entirely new creation, inspired by the traditional community system of justice, with disputes solved by a tribunal in the presence of a whole local assembly, known as a gacaca after the grassy patch where the people sit. The suspects are to be divided into four categories, and the worst leaders, mass murderers and rapists –– who may be sentenced to death –– will be tried exclusively in regular courts.

During October, 260,000 judges were elected in public elections. Candidates were chosen ‘among blameless women and men who did not themselves take part in the genocide’. In December, they will be trained by 700 teachers, comprising those Rwandans who have received legal training. First, however, the teachers themselves must be schooled in applying the new gacaca laws.

Interest in this vast experiment is keen. Ninety per cent of the adult population took part in electing the judges. Aid donors and human-rights organisations long remained sceptical, but they have now generally, with certain reservations, begun supporting the experiment. Some have pointed out how gacaca conflicts with basic legal principles: that the accused should be entitled to legal assistance, that the prosecutor should not also be a judge, that application of the law should be the same for everyone and everywhere, etc.

There is also a risk that things will go from bad to worse when, after seven years, all these mass murderers go home and confront the victims’ relatives. When new culprits are identified, perhaps those sent to prison will outnumber those who leave. Can the conciliation process withstand all the truth and justice? Suspects who confess and beg for forgiveness are to be given radically reduced penalties that can often be exchanged for community service. This will, of course, boost the risk of token, non-committal confessions.

But the critics have found no answer to the Government’s question: what is the alternative? A general amnesty? That is politically impossible, and a dangerous route to a new genocide in a country where, for decades, massacres have gone unpunished.

*

We get an unusual opportunity to witness a preliminary gacaca session. It is an attempt to test the plans. There is great uncertainty about the outcome, and so far only a few outsiders have been permitted to attend.

We accompany a truck full of prisoners from the Kibuye prison to their home village Bisesero, an hour’s drive away. The road meanders between the hills, and this is one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. The mood of the passengers is nervously high-spirited. The prisoners are singing at the tops of their voices as the truck pushes its way into the large crowd that has gathered at the Bisesero football pitch. The whole district is here: brothers, mothers and friends rush up to greet the prisoners, while others gaze sombrely, questioningly, at the murderers of their children and spouses.

These are prisoners whose indictments are incomplete, and the prosecutor, Ngarumbe, will try to find knowledgeable witnesses among the villagers. He reviews the legal situation at length, solemnly, stressing repeatedly that the objective is to reach the truth, see that justice is done and pave the way for conciliation.

‘We must stop regarding one another as Hutus or Tutsis. How could this genocide happen? Nowhere else in the world has anything like it taken place. We must now show the world that we, too, can tell the truth and live in peace with one another.’

And then it starts. One by one, the prisoners are led forward. The prosecutor talks about the case, and anyone who knows anything about it is invited to come to the microphone. The audience of thousands, who have already been sitting for a long time in the heat, listen with rapt attention. The atmosphere is so fraught you could cut it with a knife.

A woman steps forward and testifies that the man standing a few metres away murdered her husband and children with a machete.

A prisoner walks forward and confesses to the whole assembly that he hacked his neighbour to death:
‘Someone came and said that my Tutsi neighbours had sought refuge in his house. So we went there and found them. First we beat the man and his wife to death with a club, then my brother beat their small child to death, and after that we killed their daughter. We killed lots of people, with bullets, clubs and machetes. They begged and prayed for their lives, but we were merciless. We’d been ordered to exterminate every single Tutsi here. Many people joined in and helped –– I can see several of them in the audience. Everyone in Bisesero knew what was going on. No one tried to stop the murdering. Now I want to urge everyone to tell the truth during the gacaca and to ask God, the victims and everyone else for forgiveness.’

Another prisoner comes forth and protests his complete innocence (and he is neither the first nor the last to do so). Another of the suspects then says that he is lying: ‘And what’s more, your brother sent me a thousand francs in an envelope to say you’re innocent.’

One after the other, poor farmers in ragged clothes step forward to give their solemn account of the indescribable events. What I am seeing here in Bisesero, I feel, is something unparalleled –– and it is one of the most touching and upsetting experiences I have ever had. I see from Peter’s misty eyes that he is as affected as I am. He whispers to me that what we are witnessing must be the beginning of the biggest trial in history.

A small, tight group of Tutsis in the audience sigh and groan in response to the words issuing from the loudspeakers. Most people listen with absolute attention to every syllable, but their facial expressions give no hint of what they are thinking. No one breaks down; no tempers are lost. This unique experiment is, fundamentally, a matter of initiating a nationwide debate about what is right and wrong. What would have happened if this had been tried in Europe after the second world war? Or in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after the fall of communism?

The loudest murmur goes through the assembled company when one of the village’s Tutsis steps forward to defend one of the prisoners.

‘He is totally innocent.’ Pointing at a man in the audience, he says ‘It was that man who did it.’

There is whispering and muttering. A Tutsi helping a Hutu! The suspect is released at once. Is this the first step towards a new era –– towards the creation of a joint truth about the past and a common moral foundation?

(First published in Dagens Nyheter Dec 7, 2001)