Some of the 590 skulls inside a former Catholic church where one of the countless massacres that occurred in Rwanda ten years ago took place. Photo: Malcolm Doney
'Before the genocide, Rwanda had seven million inhabitants. By the end about three-quarters had either been killed, displaced, or had fled.'

Malcolm Doney reflects on the first packed day of his visit to Rwanda

On the flight from Heathrow to Kigali I re-read my background notes on Rwanda. They told a dark, nightmarish story.

Almost ten years ago, Rwanda suffered a genocide of breathtaking savagery, where neighbour butchered neighbour simply because they were from the 'wrong' tribe.

A history of tension between the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu, fomented by previous colonial rulers, overflowed in April 1994 when - in the course of just 100 days - Hutu extremists slaughtered almost a million of their compatriots, egged on by hate radio broadcasts which told them where to find the 'cockroaches' they had to stamp out.

By the end of the civil war the country was all but destroyed. Before the genocide, Rwanda had seven million inhabitants. By the end about three-quarters had either been killed, displaced, or had fled. Up to 15% of the population were dead, two million were internally displaced, and another two million had become refugees.

I was visiting Rwanda as co-editor of Developments magazine, the journal of the UK Government's Department For International Development. (See our coverage of Rwanda here).

Sitting next to me on the plane, his long lean frame scrunched up in economy space and trying to sleep, was my Developments colleague and long-term sparring partner Martin Wroe. Together we wanted to find out how this traumatised country was faring ten years on. This was my first ever visit to Africa.

Nairobi morning

It was a night flight from London to the stopover at Nairobi, so my first real sight of Africa was leaving the concrete cluster of Nairobi airport behind and watching dusty green fields open up beneath us. The green turned to pink, sienna and ochre mountain wilderness traversed by dry serpentine riverbeds.

Then sun glimmered off water and suddenly the vast inland sea that is Lake Victoria unfurled beneath us, smoky blue, dotted with the odd island of red dirt.

As we left Victoria behind we crossed into Rwanda, which was noticeably greener, blotched here and there by areas of ox-blood earth.

The terrain grew hillier too, soft edged patches of green cultivation covered the slopes like a blurred mosaic and, as Kigali drew nearer, a bright orangey-ochre river made a meandering ribbon across the landscape. Could this benign-looking place have been the setting for such savagery?

The day kicks off

We only had four days in the country, so despite our bleariness, we stopped only to drop our bags and grab a shower before jumping in a four wheel drive and heading out of town.

Kigali is a difficult city to get a sense of - being subdivided into different districts, none of which seemed more important than the other and with no discernible centre. Everywhere there were people (Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa), on taxi bikes, in cabs, walking along the street with bundles on their heads and a small army of people with machetes trimming the overgrown road verges.

Watching these workers casually cutting down the weeds with this ubiquitous peasant tool, I couldn't help but recall that the machete was the weapon most often used in Rwanda's genocide. It made me shiver.

Yvette from Asoferwa - Association de Solidarite des Femmes Rwandaises. Photo: Malcolm Doney

Suddenly we were off the tarmac and onto red dirt potholed tracks and heading for the hills of rural Rwanda. In the car with us was Yvette, who works with Asoferwa - Association de Solidarite des Femmes Rwandaises - which helps women and children traumatised by the genocide. Martin, ever the newspaperman, was bold enough to dive into asking her about her experience of the genocide.

Yvette told us, matter of factly, in a low voice, about how she lost eight of her family to the militia. She only survived because nuns sheltered her. She was lucky - elsewhere in Rwanda priests and nuns handed over their congregations to the killers, sometimes pretending to offer sanctuary and then leaving them at the mercy of the guns and machetes. An appalling betrayal of trust.

Widows add to their families

Yvette took us to a resettlement village at Ntamara, 35 miles east of Kigali, funded by the UNHCR, where the widows not only brought up there own children but had each agreed to welcome on an extra orphaned child into their family to raise as their own.

This was the just the first instance of many decisive acts of generosity and determination by women we saw who recognised that they had a key role to play in repairing the damage inflicted by their menfolk and in making sure it would never happen again.

We stopped at a nearby school and were instantly mobbed by a host of grinning kids, delighted at the distraction we afforded. Rwanda is getting close to reaching its goal of free, universal access to primary education.

The belief is that lack of education and easy pliability had a significant part to play in the ability of extremists to persuade individuals to turn on their neighbours. The country is investing a lot of its hope in these children.

An unforgettable moment

If I was moved by the solidarity of the women, and warmed by the playful innocence of the kids, I was left completely speechless by our next visit. We told there was a genocide memorial site near the village.

Naively, I had visions of a stone cross, like the war memorials at home. Instead we were taken to a low brick building with a corrugated iron roof, once a Catholic church. Waiting outside to greet us was Pacifique, one of the site's custodians. Wordlessly he took us inside.

Top: Pacifique, one of the custodians of the memorial containing 590 skulls, above. Below: Dancilla, another custodian of the memorial. Photos: Malcolm Doney

On a tarpaulin, neatly arranged in rows, piled three and four deep, were 590 skulls, pinpointed with light from the tiny beams of sunshine which arrowed down from small holes in the roof. Some of them, almost ludicrously, had their original owners' scarves tied around them.

Most were fractured from machete blows. I saw a bullet hole in the temple of another. From yet another the head of a spear protruded. At the front, a heart-wrenching row of children's skulls. Next to these were human bones, stacked like kindling - 570 in all.

Memorial

This was a memorial, not to the fact of the genocide, but to the massacre that took place here on April 14, 1994. Up to 5,000 people, mostly Tutsis, gathered here for safety. In previous episodes of trouble, soldiers and militia had respected the sanctity of the church. But not this time.

We were joined by Dancilla, another of the site's custodians. 'They broke a hole in through the wall and threw grenades in,' she told us. That was where the pin holes in the roof came from - shrapnel.

Those that were not killed by the grenades, were finished off by guns or machetes, as the militia broke down the doors and waded in through the bodies. I couldn't look any more at the skulls and bones, they were already imprinted on my mind, as they still are today. I don't think they will ever leave.

I turned to walk through the church. We had entered through the back door, and at the far end I could see a brick-built altar upon which sat a solitary skull staring back across the empty rows of low benches (pictured).

The benches were no more than a foot off the floor and I used them as stepping stone across the church, because there were rags and rubbish on the floor between them. Absentmindedly, I missed my step and put a foot down between benches. Something crunched under my boot. I looked down, and there, among the rags that I could now see were clothes and ten year's worth of dust, was a human jaw bone.

The church altar with a single solitary skull on it. Photo: Malcolm Doney

Now I could see that the floor was littered by the detritus of carnage, pieces of people lay exactly where they had fallen. 'Sorry', I said to whoever it was I had trodden on. It was this act of unconscious desecration which I think brought home to me more than anything else more the pain and desolation of this wasteland.

Martin and I interviewed Pacifique and Dancilla because that's what we were here to do, but neither of us knew what to say. Each of us at some point had to find a moment to be quiet and alone. Asked to sign the visitor's book, I was rendered wordless for a long while. I can't remember what I wrote eventually, something trite about how words were not enough. Which they still aren't.

An emblem of hope

As a counterpoint to the nightmare, I hold on to Dancilla's story. Eight months pregnant when the massacre took place, she was there in the church. She recalls: 'People fell to the floor, someone fell on me, then another.' Buried under the pile of bodies, the killers did not notice she was still alive. After they had left, she crawled out. She found her two children and father dead and ran into the bush where she lived in terror for a month.

Today Dancilla has a ten year old son, Eric - a living memorial to the genocide and a sign of hope and a future who is to be cherished. But for her, if hope is to come to Rwanda the past has to be faced. 'Many people do not accept that what happened really did,' she says.

'But when you see this, you cannot deny it. It makes me happy that people can come here and learn what happened, or that people far away can know about this place. For the sake of the future we must keep this memory alive.'

Back in the car again, we headed for the hills. Rwanda is a spectacular, swooping, verdant country, whose only claim to fame, apart from the genocide is its colony of wild mountain gorillas, mythologised in the film, Gorillas in the Mist.

We never got near the gorillas but we did swing up and down and around hill after green hill. Every inch, however steep, was cultivated, mostly by small, garden sized plots - this was the blurry patchwork I'd seen from the air.

Incongruous in pink

We were on our way to Rilima prison which housed some 5,000 men accused of genocide. There are around 120,000 alleged genocidaires imprisoned in Rwanda - far more than any legal system could handle. It would take an estimated 150 years to process this many cases.

Now the country is relying on the traditional Gacaca court system where the accused are brought before their accusers in small local outdoor gatherings where elected people of good repute will make a judgement. So far a number of pilot cases have been brought, but no sentences passed.

As we approached the prison, I noticed the fields of the surrounding hills were dotted by bright, baby pink. Closer inspection revealed this to be men dressed in a prison uniform of pink shirt and long shorts, for all the world like a pair of child's pyjamas.

At the prison itself we asked if we could talk to some of the inmates. In the beaten earth yard a crowd was gathered to see a government information film on prisoners rights. At the edge of the crowd we talked to a small group of men about their futures.

As we did so, the film ended and the rest of the prisoners, drifted over to see what these white men were about. Before long we were surrounded by a huge press of silent men in pink, who were listening intently to our conversation. The sun scorched down and the heat of bodies was palpable, as was the distinctive smell of male African sweat, sweeter and spicier than the sour European variety.

I stood there thinking, 'Ten years ago some of these men were on the rampage, raping, torturing, killing'. But here they were clustered around us quietly, looking at us curiously, and I was reminded of the gathering of kids who had surrounded us earlier in the day. There was an eerie similarity, and peculiarly I felt myself in no more danger than I had then.

Léon, a giant of a man talked of what he hoped would happen. 'I will go and see the relatives of the families I have killed. I will say that I was caused to do it by the political leadership, that I was told to do it.' He then adds, 'And I will say sorry to them'.

It may not seem much, but is a start and at least Léon admits to his horrific crimes - other prisoners we spoke to do not. Léon, also hopes that the Gacaca court will enable him to return to a normal life. 'I hope that once I have confessed I will be able to live peacefully with my enemies.'

Can hope survive?

Even with the country's bloody history, there is still a sense of hope in Rwanda. Photo: Malcolm Doney

Could that be possible? Later that evening, over a drink, Yvette told us: 'I met the man who had killed members of my family, he accepted that he had killed them and said how he had done it. In our country you may be in a conversation with someone who has killed your loved ones, you may not be their friend but you can be in the same society and live peacefully.'

It seemed to me at the time to be to be an astonishing statement of faith. And in my remaining time in Rwanda I was struck time an again by the resilience and the hope of this people. They were determined that genocide would never happen again.

Pacifique the custodian of the memorial site, had rubbed the dent in his head where he was struck down and left for dead. He said quietly, 'We are becoming one people - Rwandans - not Hutu or Tutsi. It is when you divide people that you have a war.'

As I lay my buzzing head on the pillow after this, my first day in Africa, I found it hard to believe the intensity of what I had seen. More than enough to build dreams upon.

© Malcolm Doney