The witnesses of Nyantanga Part II
By Tommi Nieminen in Kigali and Nyakizu
The Rwanda genocide took place in the broad daylight, which means that there were many eyewitnesses. During three months, death squads of Hutu extremists, Gendarmes, and members of the public butchered about 800,000 people, most of whom were Tutsis.
It was no mindless tribal war between Hutus and Tutsis. Instead, it was a politically guided massive operation, with the aim of maintaining power with a small Hutu junta.
On the other hand, in small and remote villages, there was nothing political about the killing. It was mainly random slaughter perpetrated by intoxicated Hutu men.
The Rwandan state bureaucracy is doing all that it can to deal with the backlog of court cases linked with the genocide, but the task is overwhelming. During 13 years requests have been made for an investigation into the deaths of more than 800,000 Rwandans.
More than 100,0000 people are being held in prisons in Rwanda either suspected, accused, or convicted of taking part in the genocide. Some have been in prison for ten years without trial, because the courts are unable to deal with all of the cases.
Butare Prison is also full.
The arched brick gate simply has the words Gereza ya Butare - Butare Prison. Today, April 14, 2007 there were 13,827 prisoners in the jail - according to the figure on a chalkboard in the room of the prison's warden. Of the inmates, 13,046 are men, and all of them, including the nearly 800 women, have been convicted of involvement in genocide. Or else, they are still waiting for a ruling.
The prisoners, dressed in pink garb, carry large packages onto a flatbed truck. Others take canisters and mattocks into the prison from outside the gates. A guard holds an assault rifle and follows the prisoners with his eyes.
"They are all murderers", the deputy warden of the prison notes laconically.
The Finnish guests are not allowed into the cellblocks, and photography is not allowed in the prison area, even though permission has been requested at the ministry level.
The officials do allow interviews with five Hutu men. They were all in Nyakizu during the genocide, and each of them have been convicted of serious genocidal crimes. They all know the Porvoo man.
Celestin Batakawa, Eugène Kayimura, Athanase Rindiro, Apollinaire Kalisa and Evariste Nkuriza in turn tell an almost identical story. The accounts are so in line with each other, and so non-revealing that common sense suggests that it is a cover story agreed by them in advance.
Each of them claim to have been comprehensive school teachers in Nyakizu, but that they lived so far away from the Porvoo man that they did not know what he was doing during the genocide. Each of them say that they met him at a Hutu meeting in May 1994, but none of them recall what he spoke there.
"I did not take part in the planning of the genocide myself, so I do not know anything about his involvement", says Athanase Rindiro, a tall, bespectacled man with a polite poker face.
Fortunately there are people in Rwanda who consider openness a necessity.
"All of the weapons that were used for killing people in Cyahinda were acquired by [the Porvoo man]. He led the killers, and there were also Hutu refugees from Burundi involved in the killing. He got the weapons from Eleazar Ziherambere", says the warden of Kigali Prison.
She is a 40-year-old Tutsi woman who was in Nyakizu during the genocide. She is well acquainted with the case. She does not have the slightest doubt about the guilt of the Porvoo man.
Her words are echoed by Chantal, a worker of the orphans' association, whose parents, two sisters, and two children were killed in Nyakizu.
"Do you have doubts that he is the murderer?" Chantal asks in the yard of the orphanage. Next to her on the bench sits a quiet boy, who cranks a wind-up radio. "[The Porvoo man] was an influential person in Nyakizu. He was one of the founders of a local group of Hutu extremists."
One document left by the Hutu extremists from the time of the genocide points to the suspect's participation in the events of Nyakizu.
A man who used to live in Nyakizu, who now lives on the outskirts of Kigali, hands over a copy of a three-page protocol of a meeting of Hutu extremists. It is dated May 15th, 1994 - slightly after more than 20,000 people had been killed in the Nyakizu area.
According to the document, which was written in the Rwandan language, the Porvoo man said at the meeting that "The only problem in Birambo any more is that some employees of the health clinic had hidden Tutsis in their homes". "But now that problem has gone away, as all of the Tutsis are gone."
The protocol outlines how the Hutus of Nyakizu had planned for the arrangement of security in the area. This is an indirect way of referring to the killing of Tutsis, says the man from Nyakizu.
There are numerous witnesses in Kigali who know the Porvoo man. A 30-year-old Tutsi woman heard when a Hutu prisoner by the name of Martin admitted that the Porvoo man had "ordered them to burn her house down".
Joseph, a Baptist pastor, for his part, says that the Porvoo man had been his friend at first, but when Joseph returned to Nyakizu from abroad in 1992, he realised that the man had changed. "He had become a political hothead."
"He was completely involved in the Nyakizu genocide. He organised it, distributed weapons, and motivated Burundians to kill. There were meetings of hard-line Hutus in his home, and he was seen to have shot people."
Joseph also has some advice. "People in Nyakizu are certainly very frightened about speaking about this matter, so you must hold the interviews very carefully, in secret."
The valley in the south of Rwanda is like one big banana and coffee plantation. An unpaved road winds along the slopes of Mt. Nyakizu. The road ends in the large Cyahinda Catholic Church. In April 1994 Hutus massacred about 5,000 people in the church.
Now the church has been washed, fixed up, and taken into use again, but there are still faded bloodstains and bullet holes in the brick wall.
Four young village boys look in through the door, as Ignacio, a 35-year-old, shy Tutsi man steps inside. He is a survivor of the Cyahinda massacre.
He survived just barely. He fled the church at night and walked across the nearby border with Burundi to safety. Everyone else in his family was killed.
"The killing here lasted four days. He [the Porvoo man] was outside the church together with Mayor Ntaganzwa giving orders to soldiers and Hutu extremists, who killed people in this church", Ignacio says.
"When the killing paused for a moment, he [the Porvoo man] came into the church to see if there were any Tutsis still alive."
It was dark in the chaotic church. There were huge amounts of smoke and bodies. Ignacio shows a confessional in which he had hid before getting a chance to flee.
Behind the church on a steep slope there is a mass grave about ten metres deep, where some of those who were killed ended up. The bodies of 1,000 Tutsis were dug out of there.
When Ignacio hears that we have conducted interviews at Butare Prison, he perks up. When we mention Rindiro, the polite man with the glasses, he says: "I know him. He was here killing people in Cyahinda. He was among those who took orders from [the Porvoo man]."
Near church stands a monument to the victims. The floor of a house is covered by skulls, jawbones, thighbones, shinbones, bone fragments, finger bones of the victims. There are partially mummified bodies raised from the mass grave, as well as tattered clothes and wooden coffins. The smell of the decomposed bodies is biting, and recognisable in a strange way.
"I guard this monument, because nobody else here will do it", Ignacio says.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.5.2007
More on this subject:
 The witnesses of Nyantanga
The witnesses of Nyantanga Part III
TOMMI NIEMINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
tommi.nieminen@hs.fi
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