Down among the dead

In 1997, Dervla Murphy packed into her rucksack two hundred mini-cigars, flew to Uganda and, in the pre-dawn dark, set out from Kabale to walk the 14 miles to the Rwandan border. Rwanda was a nervy place at that time. Though the war had ended, there was still much sporadic killing, including fatal attacks on aid workers and expats. The residue of fear and suspicion among Hutu and Tutsi was understandable. The genocide of 1994 left three-quarters of a million Tutsi dead due to organised killing carried out by bands of murderous Hutu, and we can be grateful for the writer's attempts to explain how the same Hutus' own experience of historical subjugation left them prone to manipulation by their own warlords. Her compassion, never misplaced, shines through.

Dervla Murphy's original intention had been to start trekking in the mountains around Lake Kivu where she had stayed the previous year with her daughter Rachel, whose partner worked for an aid agency. She never did get to Lake Kivu , however, but instead travelled around Rwanda witnessing the results of the most violent and well-orchestrated genocide since the Nazi Holocaust.

The stories of what and whom she encountered do not make easy reading. There is the man told to eat the foetus ripped from his wife's womb. There are the three young orphans fending for themselves as best they can, the goat - given to them by an aid agency - taken away to be "minded" by a neighbour. There is the priest shot at close range by a man to whom he was giving communion. And there are the ghosts of the 800,000 dead, killed during those terrible three months while the rest of the world looked away. (I read Visit- ing Rwanda while in Bosnia, and found some of the parallels chilling.)

Righteous anger is evident throughout this book. Railing against the "culture of impunity" that allows the vast majority of the perpetrators of the genocide to walk free, Dervla Murphy lays bare the weaknesses and lack of resolve of the Christian churches (sitting on the fence), of the NGOs (waste of resources, inexperienced personnel), of the international community (those of us who did nothing), of Mandela's government (resumption of arms exports despite Rwanda's continuing instability), and of the French government (arms trading during the height of the genocide). Each accusation is backed up by concrete examples. The criticisms of two agencies in particular stand out: the UN and Amnesty International. When informed in January 1994 by its man on the ground of the genocide plot, the UN - characterised here as "the toothless purveyors of platitudes" - expressed doubt as to the veracity of the information and passed the buck. Six months later, 800,000 Tutsi were dead.

With the case of Donatilla Mujawimana who, in the course of being raped, had her genitalia publicly mutilated, Amnesty International's human rights campaign is seriously called to account. When Donatilla, supported by her husband and stepson, courageously reported the crime to the police, the powerful Amnesty International machinery went into action not on behalf of the victim but of her attacker, churning out "unrealistic rubbish". Thus, Dervla Murphy believes, did a respected organisation allow itself to be manipulated and to become the gullible ally of criminals. While accepting that the rights of suspected rapists must be upheld, in post-genocidal Rwanda the priority, she maintains, must be to bring to justice the perpetrators of the genocide. When the facts relating to Donatilla's case finally emerged - that the rapist was part of the genocidal matrix - Amnesty International should have retracted. This it failed to do.

Devotees of the travelogue should not be dismayed, however, by the political vehemence in Visiting Rwanda, for the traveller within constantly escapes. Thus we read about the writer's preference for banana beer, her method for dealing with awkward custom officials, her strategy for coping with sleeping-bag fleas, floating corpses in Lake Kivu and all-night birthday parties thrown by Rachel's partner. Not to mention the latest family arrival, her granddaughter, Rose.