Grim tales of genocide unfold
2004-02-24 11:55
Bisesero - Every day in Bisesero, survivors of one of the worst killing fields in Rwanda's 1994 genocide gather on top of a hill where a memorial to the slaughters is nearing completion.
When it rains, they huddle in the only available shelter, a hut housing the bones of their dead relatives, relics that will be the centrepiece of the memorial.
Aron Gakono, a gaunt man of 51, leaning on a stick, commands respect despite his ragged clothes, which are topped off with a blazer and a felt hat.
During the 1994 genocide, when the extremist Hutu government then in power tried to eliminate Rwanda's minority Tutsis, Gakono was one of the leaders of a Tutsi resistance group that held out for almost three months on the Bisesero hills, which lie in the west of the central African country.
Once the genocide started on April 7, 1994, Tutsis from the whole region converged on Bisesero, numbering an estimated 50 000 at their height.
They held out with spears, stones and the odd gun for just over a month, but their attempt to resist enraged their assailants, led and organized by local dignatories, causing them to redouble their attacks.
By the end of June, just over 1 000 Tutsis were left alive in Bisesero.
Of the one million people that the Rwandan government estimates died in the genocide, one twentieth of them died in Bisesero.
Those who survived, nearly all of them men, are haunted by their memories.
Gakono lost his wife and five of his seven children at Bisesero. His wife was crucified and impaled on a bamboo pole while nailed to the cross.
"You not only have to live with the pain," he said bitterly. "You have to live with the pain and you go hungry."
What he and his fellow survivors find hardest to accept is that the killers pick up the pieces of their lives with relative ease once they come out of prison.
"Okay, they were in prison, but they come out, their wives and children are there and their wives and children have cultivated their land all the time they were in prison," Gakono said.
Little has been done to help survivors, he said.
A few kilometres down the hill, in Mubuga, Karoli Ntagwabira, a peasant farmer of 34, who also sells banana beer in the village bar on market days, locked himself and his visitors into a small room rank with the smell of beer at the back of the bar before telling his story.
His eyes bloodshot, beer on his breath, he told how he was freed from prison after six years after admitting to having clubbed four people to death in 1994 and to having taken part in all the massacres in the Bisesero area.
Karoli himself has suffered. When he was first arrested in 1997 he spent almost a year in an improvised lockup where conditions were so bad that the prisoners died at the rate of twenty a day.
"It's a lot more difficult for a survivor who lost his wife in 1994 than for somebody like me who just has a heavy heart," he said.