Victims, killers struggle to bury genocide's ghosts

BISESERO, Rwanda -- Emmanuel Ntawizerundi's eyes dart nervously as he tries to explain how he survived the 1994 genocide.

"I was hiding and running," he says, motioning to the gray-misted hills.

"Of course he was running. He was running after somebody," retorts a man from a group eavesdropping nearby.

Ntawizerundi is a Hutu, the heckler a Tutsi, and the incident a microcosm of the distrust and scores still unsettled eight years after the 100-day slaughter that left more than 500,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus dead.

The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is supposed to bring justice, but is too slow and geographically remote for many rural Rwandans. To speed up trials of those among the 120,000 genocide detainees charged with minor roles, the government has begun training judges chosen by local communities for a traditional justice system known as "gacaca."

Officials hope gacaca will begin in May. Those who confess to their crimes will face sentences ranging from community service to 25 years in prison, while those who don't confess but are found guilty could face life imprisonment

Until then, like the unfinished red-brick memorial to the 50,000 killed in and around Bisesero in western Rwanda, reconciliation will be incomplete.

It is only superficial, and there is no trust, said Jack Ntirushwa, a Tutsi whose entire family was killed in Bisesero. "Gacaca will help ... everybody will know exactly what happened ... it will hurt, but we have no alternative."

He struggles for words, speaking in phrases that often peter out, leaving pain etched on his 24-year-old face.

Reminders of horror

This is a big part of the pain -- that after the genocide, villagers had no choice but to return to their homes and live alongside those who may have been involved in the slaughter, said Antoine Mugesera, president of an organization of genocide survivors called Ibuka.

Rwanda is about the size of New Hampshire but five times more densely populated. The killings were triggered by the shooting down of the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, to Kigali on April 6, 1994.

Hutu villagers, spurred on by extremist Hutu government officials and hate propaganda, were incited -- and abetted by special militia and the army -- to butcher their Tutsi neighbors with ordinary farm tools like machetes and hoes.

The genocide ended when Tutsi rebels captured Kigali, the capital, in July 1994 and formed a government of national unity.

Skulls and bones piled at the massacre sites are reminders of the horror, and rivers flowing through tranquil fields of maize and beans once carried bloated corpses.

Sitting on the wall leading to the memorial, men begin by saying that reconciliation is working well in their area.

But they are the ones who heckled Ntawizerundi.