A new dawn beckons in Rwanda as a nation forgives

"My mother, father, sister and brothers were killed inside this church. They made the mistake of thinking because it was God's place these people would be afraid to do such things here."

Immaculata, a survivor of the 1994 massacre

The killers are loose again in the most traumatized country in the world. Of the 120,000 jailed for their part in the Rwandan genocide, a third were granted amnesty in May and are now living as neighbors with the people whose families they butchered barely nine years ago.

It is an experiment in reconciliation unlike anything ever tried before, just as the crime that preceded it was on a scale that was hard to comprehend. Bertrand Russell spoke of "the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis."

He was referring to the Hutus' slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1959, when 20,000 were killed. One wonders what he might have made of the horror of 1994, when the Hutu government masterminded the killing of 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

After the Second World War, most Nazis remained in Germany while the surviving Jews went to Israel and the Americas. In Rwanda no such separation is possible. Neighbors killed neighbors, teachers killed students, uncles killed nephews, husbands killed wives. Once released, in a country where 90 per cent of the population live in dire poverty, there is no option for them but to return to live side by side with their victims.

Can work? The government says the signs are encouraging. Otherwise the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front would not have decided to hold the country's first elections since the genocide.

Astoundingly, the RPF, formerly the Tutsi rebel movement which ended the genocide after seizing power in July 1994, seems certain to win tomorrow's election; astounding because Tutsis make up 14 per cent of the population, Hutus 85 per cent.

The RPF's severely ascetic leader, Paul Kagame, was portrayed by the people who instigated the genocide as the Devil, but today he is the nation's benevolent patriarch. He won the confidence of the Hutus by sharing power with them in government, offering Hutus senior Cabinet positions; promising to continue to share power; delivering stability and peace -- and, above all, by not seeking revenge. Nelson Mandela is regarded as a saint for his forgiveness towards his white tormentors. Such was the scale of the crime committed against the Tutsis that for Kagame to forgive the Hutu people -- to pardon 40,000 Hutu killers -- is generosity on an unimaginable scale.

The Tutsis' first impulse when the slaughter began in 1994 was to rush to the nearest place of worship, but this time the order was to eradicate Tutsis from the face of the earth. Which explains why in town after town the place where the bodies piled up was the church.

Infamous these is the Catholic church of Nyamata, at whose doors were gathered a dozen women whose husbands and children had been massacred inside. All members of the Association des Veuves du Genocide, they recently had a new burden to add to the grief and destitution that have been their companions during the last nine years.

The killers -- people who, in many cases, they had seen chop their husbands and children limb from limb -- are back in town, having fulfilled the Government's criteria for granting amnesties: confession and public repentance.

These days the released genocidaires stroll around the remote, dusty town of Nyamata, in the geographical heart of Africa, as freely and easily as if 1994 had never happened. But sitting around a table talking to the women at the church -- all wearing long cotton dresses in bright oranges, greens and reds at odds with the prevailing mood -- the memory of the terror is laceratingly alive. Their stories show how extraordinary the effort is going to be, to what unprecedented limits the boundaries of tolerance will have to be pushed, if Hutus and Tutsis are to live together in peace.

Immaculata, a woman with an air of authority, is the first to speak: "My mother, father, sister and brothers were killed inside this church. They made the mistake of thinking because it was God's place these people would be afraid to do such things here."

Immaculata a classic Tutsi: tall, fine-nosed, elegant. Many Tutsis, through generations of interbreeding with Hutus, have lost that defining look, which is the only thing separating peoples who otherwise share the same language and customs. Though she saw her husband cut to pieces at home, she survived, as many did, in a latrine.

No oversights at the church. Everybody there was killed. "First, as the doors were locked, they fired bullets in from above," said Immaculata, pointing to the holes that make a sieve of the church's corrugated-iron roof. "Then they smashed open the doors with grenades, went in and slaughtered the men, women and children with machetes until no one was left alive. Three thousand of them."

One the survivors, Dorothy, was eight months pregnant at the time of the genocide. She was raped minutes after they killed her husband -- gang-raped, as most of the women were. Her twins were born in July, after the liberating forces had arrived. She had to spend four months in hospital, recovering not from the excruciating birth -- they had kicked her repeatedly in the stomach -- but from a battering with a pestle and club which left bruises all over her head and body.

"I was so terribly swollen," said Dorothy. "They left me blind in the left eye."

These are the most terrible stories in the world. Two years ago one of Dorothy's twin boys died. He was HIV-positive. His mother had not realized until then that she had been infected when she was raped. Now she understands why she has been feeling sick on and off.

Many became pregnant during the genocide. Many had children who have since died of Aids. Others suffered even worse fates. Dorothea, the oldest lady in the group outside the church, said: "My girl is mentally deranged. She is 23 but cannot do anything for herself. The experience destroyed her." They killed the girl's father, then her four brothers and two sisters, then raped her every day until it was all over three months later. Except that she was now pregnant.

"She was a 14-year-old kid," Dorothea said. Her grandson is now nearly nine, but her daughter has "no feelings for him. How can she? She has no feelings for herself," explains Dorothea, who has been raising the boy. Does she feel love for the child? "Yes, I do," Dorothea replies. "I love him."

The other widows, who have seen friends and neighbors die of Aids picked up from rapists who killed their husbands, nod, murmur and moan. Each is impatient to have her say. Consensa lost four of her six children. Emerentia lost all three. Valerie six out of eight -- the youngest aged one. And Immaculata lost five out of seven. All watched their offspring cut to pieces -- arms, legs, necks -- and were then raped by the murderers, drenched in their children's blood.

If Dorothea could love that little boy, did it mean she could live in peace with the men who destroyed their lives, with the prisoners who had just been released? She did not hesitate: "Unless they kill again, yes," she said, determined somehow to move on, to get on with what little remains of life.