Six years after the genocide, the killer children of Rwanda are going home. Maggie O’Kane visits the camp where they are being prepared for freedom
At the foot of Misoko mountain, where mad, sad, gorilla-lover Dian Fossey lived out her life, stands the higher institute of agriculture and animal husbandry. Soon 10 buses will pull away from the institute. Inside will be the class of 1994: the killer children of the Rwanda genocide. The 484 young men and two girls, who have spent the past six years in prisons across the country, have been at this “solidarity” camp for six weeks now, preparing for a return to the real world.
Every war has its journalists’ hotel: Rwanda had the Milles Collines in Kigali, the capital. At night dinner is served on the top-floor balcony. Below is a swimming pool lit from the side so that the rippling water looks like blue marble. The gardens are planted with giant cacti and the air smells of hibiscus. Beyond the pool and the garden is Kigali a grid of the most perfectly swept streets in Africa.
“Imagine,” says my dinner companion, looking down from the balcony, “imagine that you are sitting here and looking out over the wall at a group at a roadblock in the distance. They seem to be chatting among themselves and then you notice a woman and child to the side and the woman seems to be pleading, but nobody is paying any attention to her. The group breaks up and the men are about to move off. Then one of them ?almost as an afterthought goes over and hacks the woman and child to pieces. That is what it was like here in 1994.”
During the genocide 800000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsis, died in just 100 days an average of about five a minute. Some of those responsible for the killings were these children: the class of 1994. Rwandan law says that children under 14 are not criminally responsible under the law, these children should never have been locked up. As it was, in the confusion that followed the horror, they were incarcerated along with the adults.
Faustian was 13 when he became a killer. The cow-tending son of an alcoholic father, he left home six years ago to get a job in the big town. He wanted to make money to buy himself good clothes. He sold beers and looked after cattle in the market. When he heard that there was killing in the villages, he started the long walk home in his three new shirts, wearing one on top of the other. A week later the killing began when the men in suits arrived by car from Kigali.
Now he walks along the corridor of the animal husbandry institute wearing a purple shirt with a cardboard tag around his neck: “Faustian Nikirotiman, commune of Gikongoro.” Here giant lilies mark the concrete walkways between the dormitories. This afternoon there is a football match. On the sloping hill above the pitch, the genocide children pose for the school photo. In the first part of a high-risk experiment in justice, these young genocidaires of 1994 are going home. They are being released without any further punishment: there will be no trials. But they will have a key role to play as witnesses in the next stage of the justice process.
This second stage will involve village-hall trials, called gacaca, for the 115000 killers who were adults at the time of the genocide. The accused will be brought from prison in small groups to face the accusations of their own people. The problem is that most of the people they face will be Hutu, and many of them relatives. The Tutsis are dead or have fled.
Here it is hoped that the class of 1994 will play a crucial role after all, they were present during the killings. It is hoped that the boys will point out the organisers in their own villages. The Rwandan government wants to punish about 1000 “first category genocidaires” the ringleaders, the multiple killers, the rapists. So far they have identified only 40 of them.
Faustian is now 19. When he talks about what he did, it is in the deadpan voice of someone who might be describing a minor traffic accident. He only comes alive when, moving the shy hands on his lap, he talks about God’s forgiveness.
Faustian found God three years ago, and when he mentions the Lord his reserved face sparkles. “Before I met God, I couldn’t live with the sin and crimes I had committed. I prayed for the Lord to open the prison gates and set me free, but I am still inside and God has pardoned me and set me free in my heart.”
Faustian is open about being a killer at the age of 13. “They said that the Tutsis had killed the president. After that some guys started killing the Tutsis and singing songs about cockroaches. I didn’t kill anyone in the beginning, but then we caught Casian and we brought him home and they gave me a club. The boys I was with said I should kill Casian and get his trousers.
“Casian asked to say his prayers before he died, so we let him. Then I hit him two times on the head with a club. He fell down very easily because he had been hiding in the bush for two weeks and he was very weak. Then somebody said that was not the best way to do it and they took my club and began hitting him on the back of the head. He took a while to die. When he was dying he asked for water and I went to one of the neighbours’ houses to get water for him but they wouldn’t give any water for him.”
A Seventh Day Adventist minister is pumping sweat and God at the teenagers to an African/Cajun beat. He cries: “The truth will set you free.” His audience of former child killers looks either rapt or mildly amused. Faustian is overwhelmed and on his feet. “Sinners,” booms the minister into the microphone, tiny drops of sweat gathering on his upper lip, “Sinners dance for the Lord.”
Faustian and his fellow sinners sit on the floor, rapping and singing: “The truth sets you free / Those who see the crimes and the criminals / Tell what you see for the truth / Only the truth can set you free.” Boys dancing and rapping, as evangelical and exhilarated by the call to truth as they were by the call to kill.
Rwanda’s Minister for Justice, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, has just turned 39. He’s a lawyer and the architect of the gacacas. Most of his family was murdered in 1994. “I will not tell you how many. I am the minister for justice. I do not speak of these things.”
His buzzword is “impunity”: the culture of impunity must stop so everyone will face trial. It’s ambitious in a country where most of the lawyers and judges were murdered. It sounds great on paper, but there isn’t much else in the second-floor offices of the Ministry of Justice.
Even this early in the morning, the chipped marble stairways of the ministry have a thick coating of dust from the street. The lift is broken so the minister climbs the five flights. You wonder why they don’t fix the lift and then realise how ridiculous a notion that is when there isn’t even enough money to pay a cleaner to mop the stairs. There are less than 100 computers in the whole country to process the guilty, and in the minister’s office visiting permits for waiting journalists are hammered out on an old typewriter. Yes, it has taken them six years to get this far, but they are ambitious.
Faustian says nobody in his village questioned the order to kill Tutsis. There were massacres in 1959, after all, and no one had been punished. “I didn’t feel anything when I hit him,” he says. “Everyone was doing it and if you killed a Tutsi you were the first person to get the meat at night when they cooked a Tutsi cow.
“Another time the group I was with killed a woman and her daughter. It was three in the afternoon and they were sitting in their demolished house. It was near the end and we had been hunting down survivors. They just sat there before they were killed. They knew there was no point asking for mercy. I didn’t hit them, the others did. I didn’t see anything wrong with what I was doing.”
What the survivors now want most is to be asked by the perpertrators for forgiveness. Vestine Ndikuryayo is a keeper of the dead. Most of her own family died in 1994. Afterwards she found a job as a genocide curator at Murambi Technical School, far from the village where her family were killed.
She shows the genocide tourists around the classrooms stuffed with some of the 50000 bodies that have been dug up. Rwandans rarely go there. The visitors book has aid workers from Ohio and Sussex, who write things such as: “Lest we forget.” These words fail to connect because Murambi is beyond the scope of human experience even imagination. For 24 hours here, thousands of people were hacked to death in the green spaces between the classrooms.
Now all that is left of mothers and fathers and children and lovers has been reduced to a surreal mass of twisted cadavers. Their bodies were stripped by the killers, who wanted their clothes, although now the occasional glimpse of human life comes in the form of a scrap of a child’s lemon-coloured party dress, a blue bra with a lace trimming, or a tuft of hair on a child’s skull the size of a grapefruit.
The skeletons lie jumbled, their mouths frozen in their last dying scream, hands raised above their heads. You notice the skeleton of a young man with no right foot cut off so that he couldn’t run away. How long does it take to die, you wonder, when your foot has been chopped off? Then you close your eyes and you imagine the sounds coming from the wounded and the dying, lying on the blood-soaked grass, bodies wrapped around their already dead children.
Yet Vestine says she can forgive the men and children who killed her parents, her three sisters and her two brothers: “I think I could forgive, but I would like them first to say they are sorry and ask for forgiveness.”
Faustian says: “When we were in prison, people like the intellectuals and ringleaders were telling us that we would be stupid to confess. I feel that the majority of young people here have suffered and will tell the truth when the gacacas begin.”