The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

here to take shelter and obviously they didn’t find it. In the gardens outside the church are spectacular flowers, amaryllis, marigold, daisies — a huge explosion of color. And ... more bodies. A moth- er and her child. The child appears to have been decapitated. The entire [church] complex appears to have been ransacked, loot- ed. Papers with the church’s symbol on it are scattered about, drawers emptied, cloth material just ripped apart. And again, more corpses. And flies. And here what seem to be shot- gun shells ... which raises, of course, the question of whether some of these victims were blasted. In this small room, there are some wooden crucifixes on the floor and what is left of the body of a small baby. Our guides have told us that in the direction we’re heading now, outside the church complex, there is a place where there are many bodies. And they’re right. In front of me I can see a dozen corpses. They appear to be mainly women, some children. The stench is really overwhelming and I’ve put a mask on so that may muffle my voice. But in this courtyard there are easily a hundred bodies, all of them very badly decomposed, many with obvious hack marks (from machetes). Feeling Yourself Hacked And here is a room of horror, dozens upon dozens of bodies, piled one on another. I think it’s fair to say there are hundreds of dead here ... and everywhere, flies. This village, we are told by a woman who lived here, was a predom- inantly Tutsi village and [she says] that this massacre was carried out by predominantly Hutu Interahamwe, the dreaded militia whose name is so associated with the unspeakable atroc- ities of this war. ... It was at Nyarubuye that I met an elderly Hutu man who, with his wife, watched the killings. He told me he personally saw friends and neighbors slaughtered with machetes. Speaking through an interpreter, the man, Krisustum Gatunzi said it was unbe- lievable. It’s unbelievable to see your neigh- bors, friends being hacked to death. ... These people [the killers] say they want to create a new Rwanda ... and I was asking them, “Do you create a new Rwanda by killing everyone inside that Rwanda or by killing neighbors and friends?” The interpreter went on to say Mr. Gatunzi had a special expression for what he felt — feeling yourself hacked. The old man and his wife were credited with saving a young Tutsi woman, a 27-year-old neighbor named Consolata Mukatwagirimana, whom they helped hide. She believed her entire family had been slaughtered. She heard their screams. I had taken cover in the nearby bush. All I know is I was hearing my family being massacred. Shooting and cries, screams. I managed to come out in the evening and checked and found everyone who was at home was killed. ... They Don’t Look Like Killers … Several days after visiting Nyarubuye, I was allowed by the pre- dominantly-Tutsi rebels of the Rwandese Patriotic Front to inter- view a group of captured Hutu Interahamwe militia blamed for mass killings. I filed this report: At first glance, nothing seems par- ticularly sinister about this group of 21 Rwandans. ... They don’t look like killers. Yet in a series of interviews, mem- bers of this group of prisoners admit openly that they did join the Inter- ahamwe, and that they did kill Tutsis and other political opponents at the group’s behest. They now insist they only did so under duress and they say they didn’t kill very many people, usually just one. At 74 years of age, Joseph Ruk- wavu is the oldest member of the group. He claims government sol- diers killed members of his family and then made him kill one of his broth- ers. He says he committed the mur- der with a club. Like the elderly Mr. Rukwavu, 27- year-old Turatsinze [no first name] says he only joined the Interahamwe after the mass slaughter began in April. He also says he was forced to kill. His particular band of killers used machetes to hack apart more than 10 people, three of whom he admits he knew. He maintains that because he was forced to kill, he should be forgiven. Julienne Mukanyarwa, 37 years old, is one of two women among the prisoners held at the jail. Her story is much the same. She says she joined the Interahamwe after other mem- bers of the group threatened to kill her baby. She says the Interahamwe forced her and several others to finish off with machetes the survivors of a mass shooting organized by the militia and army soldiers. She insists she only killed one person, but says the mas- sacre spanned three days. And what about her baby? She says it is dead, fatally injured as it A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 Even as the grim death toll brought on by machete-wielding ethnic Hutu fanatics mounted, no action was taken.