Ten years ago nearly one million Rwandans were killed in a 100-day orgy of horror. Now the survivors are trying to build a future, reports Joe Humphreys from Murambi
Emmanuel walks to the first of six locked steel doors, clutching the "key" - a metal door-handle - in one hand. No words are exchanged as he unlocks and opens the door, revealing row after row of bodies.
Men, women and, in the centre, a child with a wilting red flower on its chest.
Emmanuel closes the door and moves to the next room, where more bodies, preserved in lime, are strewn across benches, their contorted limbs a reminder of the horror which occurred here, in the hilltop village of Murambi, 10 years ago.
Eventually, as he reaches the end of what used to be a block of classrooms in a school campus, Emmanuel asks: "Have you seen enough? There are more rooms. But they are all the same."
Up to 50,000 people were killed at this site in just three days of the 1994 genocide, among them Emmanuel's wife and five children, murdered, he believes, by a grenade attack while he tried to fend off the killers "with stones and whatever else we could find". A bullet-sized indentation in his left temple bears testimony to his own fate.
"I was shot in the head and fell among the dead. At night, I awoke and escaped into the forest," he says. "It was not me, but God, who saved me. It's God's plan that I survived so I can tell people what happened."
A few miles away, at Gikongoro's state prison, another Emmanuel remembers the massacre.
"At a roadblock from Murambi I killed three people," he says. "Then we encircled the compound and the soldiers entered with guns. I personally killed three people who were trying to escape. In total, I was responsible for the death of nine people."
The prisoner conveys no emotion as he speaks. But he claims to be sorry. "For all this, I am asking for forgiveness from the government and the people of Rwanda," he says.
As a snapshot of Rwanda 10 years after the genocide, the tale of the two Emmanuels may seem like an optimistic one, suggesting that the country is facing up to the horrors of its past and the people to their responsibility for them.
If only things were that simple.
The history of the genocide, which claimed between 800,000 and one million lives in 100 days, remains a contentious one. Denial is rife, fuelled by resentment among sections of the population that the suffering they endured before and after the genocide has not been properly recognised. A reluctance to accept individual responsibility for atrocities also lingers.
Emmanuel the prisoner, who lost two of his children to malnutrition and disease at the Goma refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to which he fled with legions of other murderers, says: "It's not our fault we killed. It was the leaders who made us carry out these crimes. If you refused you were also going to be killed."
Denial of another kind prevails within the government, albeit arguably of a more healthy kind. Reference to ethnic divisions, which had been exploited since the colonial era and which lay at the root of the genocide, have been outlawed under a new constitution. More worryingly, the Tutsi-led government, headed by Paul Kagame (whose Rwandan Patriotic Front is credited with ending the genocide), has also resisted moves towards democratisation, claiming the country is not ready for a free press or multi-party politics.
One nation, one Rwandan identity, is now the policy, with the emphasis on reversing racial distinctions that may have existed for many centuries but only became a source of conflict with the arrival of Belgian forces in 1916.
Tutsi kings were installed to rule for the Belgians, generating resentment among the Hutu majority, who rose up in 1959, the first occasion of recorded violence between the two ethnic groups. The balance of power swung back and forth until 1993, when the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana signed a power-sharing agreement with the Tutsis. On April 6th 1994, however, he was assassinated when his plane was shot down over Kigali. The attack was the signal for an extremist element in the Hutu elite to begin the systematic massacre of Tutsis, orchestrated through bloodthirsty decrees on state-run radio.
The day after the plane crash, roadblocks were set up in Kigali by the vigilante militia Interahamwe, meaning "those who attack together".
People fled to schools and churches but there was no refuge. At the Catholic Cathedral of Sainte Famille, the killers, helped by a local priest, led Tutsis outside in twos and threes to be cut to pieces by machetes.
Today Kigali is a lively, bustling city and Sainte Famille boasts record crowds at its Sunday Mass. In the yard outside, where so much blood was spilt, a driving school now operates, raising funds for the parish. Across the valley, around which the city stands amid banana and coffee plantations, the finishing touches are being put to the Gisozi Genocide Memorial, due to be opened officially on April 7th. Busloads of Rwandan visitors are already arriving at the site, filing past exhibits of skulls and weapons in the midst of construction and reburial works. Bodies are still being brought here from family plots and roadside graves that had been dug in the aftermath of the killings.
At the battle-scarred parliament buildings, a production crew from the US TV company, HBO, is filming re-enactments of the genocide and its aftermath for a movie to be broadcast next year. The remnants of mortar fire from the fall of Kigali are visible on the upper storeys, and with no funds for repairs the buildings mostly lie idle.
Kigali's newest and most expensive structure, the €120-a-night Intercontinental Hotel is also, ironically, largely vacant. Building was completed in time for a summit of African leaders in February but filling the rooms in a country where the average income is 80 cent per day is proving to be a problem. The presence of the hotel has nonetheless generated an air of progress, enhanced by the recent success of the Rwandan soccer team and, in politics, the first resignation of a senior government official for corruption.
In the fields around Kigali, prisoners accused of atrocities in 1994 can be seen labouring on construction and farming projects. Identifiable by their pink uniforms and shaven heads, they slave away like chain-gangs from 19th-century America.
Down laneways and dusty side-streets, dogs are returning in greater numbers. They were executed en masse just after the genocide because of the risk of them feeding on carcasses.
To the visitor, however, the most notable feature of Rwanda 10 years on is the people, or rather the sheer number of them. Despite the genocide, the country is one of the most densely populated in Africa, with 8.5 million occupants in an area the size of Munster. They bring a lively, match-day feel to the streets, snaking between the traffic with children, goods and frequently umbrellas in hand, the latter to guard against both sun and rain in the high-altitude climate.
But the people also bring poverty and residual tension. Attacks on survivors of the genocide may have diminished but many Hutus, who account for 84 per cent of the population, refuse to commemorate the dead. In certain areas they have reportedly boycotted Tutsi reburials, reflecting widespread anger over the government's refusal to be held accountable for the killing of tens of thousands of Hutus, many of them combatants but many also civilians, immediately after coming to power. As for poverty, that's there for all to see, not least in Rwanda's 85,000 child-headed households.
One such home can be found hidden behind a cluster of houses in a suburb of the southern town of Gikongoro. The breadwinner is Furaha (15), whose father and two brothers were killed in the genocide, and whose mother died later, leaving behind a small plot of land and a shelter, cut off from electricity and running water. The only decorations in the house are drawings Furaha did at school. They are adorned with handwritten text in the state's three official languages: English, French and Kinyarwanda. "God Protect You", "Happy Christmas" and "Let Love Prevail", they proclaim.
Furaha hasn't been to school in two years. Instead, she runs a stall with her 13-year-old sister Susan, selling spinach. What they make is spent on the youngest in the family, 10-year-old Louise, the only one of the three who is wearing shoes.
"I don't know what the future will be," says Furaha. "I owe money to a neighbour, and the little profit I get from the stall is used up at home."
Foreign aid agencies, laden with cash from a guilt-ridden international community, flooded into Rwanda after the genocide. But within a year some of them had started leaving for the Balkans and other more topical causes.
Foreign governments, with the notable exception of the UK's, have also scaled back support amid donor fatigue and concerns that Kagame's authoritarian policies are turning the country into another Zimbabwe.
Much good work is being done, however, and, as in many developing countries, women are to the fore in doing it. This stems as much from necessity as choice in Rwanda, where one-third of households were left fatherless by the genocide. An emergency law granting women land rights was introduced to avoid mass evictions, and women-led credit unions and agricultural co-operatives have sprung up around the country. Women are also leading the fight against HIV/AIDS, which was spread partly through mass rapes in 1994. In addition, they feature prominently on local and national councils, boasting 39 of 80 seats in parliament, the highest proportion of women parliamentarians in the world.
Typical of the new breed of socially active women is Fatuma Ndangiza, executive secretary of the government-funded National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. A graduate of development studies at Kimmage Manor, Dublin, she cites "bad government" and "a culture of impunity" as the two main causes of division in Rwandan society. But she believes there are signs of improvement.
"I bet when you told people when you were going to Rwanda they said: 'Oh! They're killing each other on the streets.' But, as you can see, you can travel around the country without fear. There is security," she says.
How, though, to turn security into peace? Sort out regional conflicts which threaten to destabilise the country? Eradicate poverty? Prosecute those responsible for genocide and other atrocities? Even if all that is done, there is still the trauma to overcome.
In the northern town of Ruhengeri, a stopping-off point for tourists visiting Rwanda's famous mountain gorillas, survivors can be found reliving the horrors of 1994 at trauma clinics under a national counselling network set up and supported by the Irish aid agency Trócaire.
"Our home was surrounded by presidential guards," recalls Francoise, whose husband was killed one year and 47 days after they were married. "They called him inyenzi . I started running and then I heard a gunshot."
Therese, who was also widowed by the genocide, is still tortured by memories of returning home to a mass grave "and dogs tearing at the clothes to get to the bodies."
"There is nobody in Rwanda who has not lost relatives," says Ariele, a survivor who has since trained to be a counsellor herself.
Challenging the legacy of mistrust, she has both Tutsis and Hutus as clients, as well as prisoners implicated in the genocide - despite the fact that her own pain is raw.
"When I come across a client who I imagine was the one who killed my relatives I transfer the person and go for counselling myself," she says. "But I won't tell anyone they can't be helped."
Rwanda's problems are staggering. But with people like Ariele it has hope. All she asks is for the outside world not to give up on her country.
"It will take a long time," she says. "But there will be peace."
Joe Humphreys travelled to Rwanda as a guest of Trócaire