Three months later, in early July, the massacre was over. A Tutsi invasion force had defeated the Hutu army. But Rwanda was a bloody mess. Some 800,000 corpses littered the land. They clogged the country’s waterways and poured into Lake Victoria by the thousands. “Rwanda was dead,” recalls presidential aide Anastase Gasana.
Today, Rwanda is struggling to be reborn. Most of the 2 million Hutus who fled Rwanda, fearful of retribution by the victorious Tutsis, have returned home. A judicial system has been set up to try more than 150,000 genocide suspects sitting in Rwandan jails. The civil service has been rebuilt. There is a system of tax collection and a government fund for education. And last week Rwanda held its first election since the genocide–for the tiny administrative areas known as “sectors” comprising 2,000 to 5,000 people. It was a step toward real democracy. But the shadow of the past wasn’t far from the ballot box. Asked what made a good candidate, Emertha Musabyemaria, a 24-year-old Hutu from Taba, a town 30 kilometers from Kigali notorious for the scale of its massacres, said, “He must not have killed in the genocide.”
For all its progress, the Tutsi-led government faces a multitude of problems–not the least of which is Hutu resentment. Most Hutus are confined to a hard life of subsistence farming. They are excluded from positions of authority by a legacy of mistrust. The courts are slow to adjudicate the cases of the suspected genocidal killers, and Rwanda’s jails are jammed. The economy is a shambles; 80 percent of state revenue is foreign aid.
Victory by the Tutsis has not brought peace. Instead, Rwanda’s ethnic conflict has seeped across its borders. In 1996 Rwanda invaded neighboring Congo to destroy the bases of Hutu soldiers and militiamen who had started the genocide. The soldiers had been carrying out guerrilla attacks in Rwanda. In the end, troops from Rwanda and Uganda enabled Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila overthrow dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, a Hutu backer. But last year Kabila fell out with his allies. Instead he began tilting toward the Hutus. That has sparked a civil war between Kabila and Congolese Tutsis who want to boot him from power. Diplomats call it Africa’s first “world war,” involving at least half a dozen nations.
Rwanda has developed a reconciliation program, basically aimed at dispelling notions of racial differences between the Hutus and Tutsis. The government is trying everything from traditional tribal-conflict resolution to U.S.-style “town meetings” over radio to vent anger and hurt. But given the magnitude of the genocide, the program will probably take decades to produce results. “In a post-genocidal society, five years is a blip,” says a Western diplomat.
There are more than half a million orphans in Rwanda. Pascaline Tumohorane, 17, is one of more than 350,000 children or young people who now head households, according to the United Nations, housing, feeding and clothing their siblings. Tumohorane buys tomatoes and coal upcountry to resell in Kigali at a rickety stand in front of her house. She last saw her parents in April 1994. “We walked in the dark, past the barricades, where we heard people screaming,” says Tumohorane, “and then I saw them: two dead bodies in a wheelbarrow. Nothing has been the same since.” Not for anyone in Rwanda.
