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To travel along the outer rim between these towns entails riding crammed minibuses first to Kigali and then outward again. To avoid constantly heading back to the capital or to get to tiny villages far from the towns often means hitching lifts with madly weaving moped riders or drivers of ancient trucks carrying market produce down choking dirt tracks.

The dirt gets into every fiber of your clothes, every pore of your skin, and the sapping 90 percent humidity, in a landlocked, high-altitude country of endless mountains and hills, leaves you permanently lightheaded and jelly-legged. But I wanted to know what was happening out there, on the periphery. What did everyday villagers, out of the earshot of government officials in Kigali, think about the release of genocide suspects and about gacaca? Lugging a rucksack and a tent, I crisscrossed the country for five months, talking to rural Rwandans about the prospects of Hutus’ and Tutsis’ ever living together again.

The genocide affected every Rwandan— either as a perpetrator, a survivor, or the friend or relative of either of these—but each individual experienced it and its aftermath differently. Yet one feeling seems to unite everyone: uncertainty. And it is no wonder. In the last two years, a flurry of events has left the population dazed. In the first eight months of 2003 alone, Rwandans faced the first of several releases of genocide suspects from prison into the solidarity camps and then into the community; the expansion of gacaca from 750 to nearly 8000 jurisdictions; the government’s banning of the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), the largest Hutu opposition party; a referendum on a new constitution; the first parliamentary and presidential elections since the genocide; Rwanda’s increased involvement in conflict in the DRC; and an escalation of tensions with its neighbor and previous ally Uganda that many feared would lead to all-out war.

I heard the same refrain of anxiety and confusion everywhere I travelled. In a village outside Ruhengeri, in the fertile volcanic hills near the border with Uganda, I met Célestin, a fifty-five year-old Tutsi farmer. He pointed to deep scars on his left cheek and said that during the genocide he had been attacked with a machete. Moments before the attack, he watched as his wife and two young sons were hacked to death only meters from where he stood. Célestin chewed on a stick of millet and drank water from a calabash, sitting on a low stool outside of his mud brick house. “We heard on the radio in January that the génocidaires were coming back. At first, we were very scared. Since then, the government has told us nothing.” He paused to take a long drink from the calabash. “And now they talk of an election. We have to walk to the municipal office to register [to vote] and we lose a day’s work on the farm. We just want to work and live in peace but that’s impossible with all of these things going on.” Célestin said that life had improved a little since the genocide: he had remarried, and his millet and maize crops had done well. “But we live every day with the memories of what happened,” he said. “Sometimes it seems too much to keep going. But God gives us strength, and somehow we keep on living.”

Genocidaires at one of the many Solidarity Camps

Post-genocide trauma affects every facet of people’s lives, meaning that many Rwandans not only find it difficult to talk about the past but also to fulfill basic everyday needs and to earn a living. The government recently trained a handful of national counselors to help genocide survivors deal with their trauma. The task, though, is overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of survivors, especially those in rural places, will never benefit from the counselors’ expertise. And, as I discovered in the weeks after the bus ride from the Kinyinya camp, the release of detainees retraumatized many survivors. On the side of a hill near Nyamata, two weeks after the suspects began returning, I sat in the house of Marie, a thirty-six-year-old Tutsi woman wearing a bright floral shawl around her shoulders. Marie said that during the genocide she hid in bushes for three days as the Interahamwe swept through the village; she found refuge in Burundi. When she returned to Nyamata, she found her house burned to the ground. She now lived in a house that, like most of the neighboring homes, the government had built for genocide survivors.

Marie’s three children chased each other, laughing, through the four sparse rooms as we spoke. One of her boys, Marie explained, was a Hutu whom she adopted after his parents fled to the DRC near the end of the genocide. “His parents killed some of the children in my household,” she said, staring blankly out of the window. Marie’s parents, her son, three nephews and two nieces were killed during the genocide. She didn’t know who had killed her parents, but she suspected that the parents of her adopted son were responsible for the murder of the six children. I asked why she had adopted the boy. “Before the genocide,” she said, “we all lived together. No one cared if you were Hutu or Tutsi—we were like one family. Their children lived with my children. This one has really always been my son.”

The nature of divisions between Hutu, who make up nearly 85 percent of the Rwandan population, and Tutsi has always been complex, especially since the Belgian colonial era. Before colonialism, “Hutu” and “Tutsi” signified little more than socioeconomic status, with Hutu the cultivators who worked in the service of the Tutsi pastoral aristocracy. Hutu and Tutsi spoke the same language, held many of the same religious beliefs, and practiced the same rituals. The categories were permeable, so that a Hutu who gained sufficient wealth, usually in the form of cattle, could become a Tutsi. The lines blurred further with widespread intermarriage between the groups over several generations.

In 1933, the Belgians, inspired by Social Darwinist theories and seeing a hierarchical society as easier to govern, introduced identity cards that categorized all Rwandans as either Hutu or Tutsi. Individuals were divided according to an array of personal characteristics including the length and width of their noses (Hutu were assumed to have stubbier noses) or the number of cattle owned (ten cows or more signified a Tutsi, fewer than ten a Hutu). From 1933 until identity cards were scrapped after the genocide, all Rwandans inherited their ethnicity from their father’s line. It is conceivable that some Tutsi, murdered during the genocide, could trace their ancestry to a male Hutu relative who acquired a tenth cow in the week before identity cards were distributed and thus became a Tutsi, with absurd and tragic consequences six decades later.

After 1933, Hutu and Tutsi in many communities continued to intermarry and live together, relatively oblivious to official ethnic distinctions. Successive Hutu governments, which gained control after independence, however, incited ethnic hatred to mobilize the Hutu majority and to subjugate Tutsi, who for decades, Hutu leaders claimed, had ruled Rwanda as Belgium’s lapdogs. Hatred and fear escalated, leading to pogroms of Tutsi in the 1960s and 1970s and sowing the seeds of genocide.

Marie explained that one of her teenage nieces, murdered because she was a Tutsi, had married a Hutu only months before the genocide began. Her niece’s husband was also murdered because the Interahamwe accused him of protecting Tutsi. “I have forgiven [my son’s parents] for what they did, even though I will probably never be able to tell them. But I will never forget what happened. Who can forget such horrible things?”

I asked Marie how she felt about the return of genocide prisoners to her village. She said that, thankfully, she now lived in a different community from the one where her relatives were killed, so she hadn’t yet come face-to-face with their murderers. She had, though, met one released detainee in the market whom she believed had killed a friend of hers. “It is frightening for us survivors to see these people back here. Can we trust them not to repeat what they did to us before? They might not have received enough lessons from the government [in the solidarity camps]. For most of us survivors, the release was a mockery. Haven’t we suffered enough already?”

Rwandans offer mixed responses to the question of whether Hutu and Tutsi can live together after the genocide. Some survivors say reconciliation is possible; others say Hutu and Tutsi will always be divided. Genocide suspects and the wider Hutu population offer similarly mixed views. Different factors influence what people say about the prospects for reconciliation: the degree of intermarriage in their own families, the viciousness of the violence in their communities, or their religious beliefs, which, in a country where 80 percent of the population is nominally Catholic, inspire many people to claim that God commands them to forgive the perpetrators.

Jean Bosco, a survivor in Gisenyi, a town on the shores of Lake Kivu on the DRC border, whose wife and three daughters were murdered by the Interahamwe, echoed a common sentiment when he told me, “We must forgive because God forgives. I’m not saying it’s easy to forgive those who killed, but that is our Christian duty.” Reconciliation in Rwanda requires much more than that Hutu and Tutsi live together without violence. Peaceful coexistence and reconciliation are very different things. To be truly reconciled, perpetrators and survivors will have to confront head-on the root causes of the conflicts between them.

In many communities, aiming for reconciliation will be asking too much. There is too much hatred, distrust, and fear for people to hope for anything more than peaceful coexistence. In other places, however, reconciliation stands a better chance. The difference between reconciliation and coexistence was evident in the story of the detainee Laurent, whom I found nearly three weeks after he was released. We went to a bar near the main Kigali football stadium. Over bottles of local Primus beer, Laurent told me that several friends took him home and cared for him after his release; his illness subsided, and his leg healed. His friends were now paying his way through a computer course, and he hoped to earn a living as a computer repairman. “I want to learn new skills,” he said, “so that I can support myself. But these skills will be wasted after gacaca if I go back to prison again.” It was the first time Laurent had alluded to the severity of his crimes. I asked him whether he had met any of the relatives of his victims. “I haven’t returned to the district where I committed my crimes,” he said. “I have no reason to return to that place. The house where I live with my friends is many miles from there.”

I heard the same story from most of the released detainees I tracked down: they returned to live with family and friends far from the communities where they committed their crimes, hoping to avoid meeting genocide survivors until they came face-to-face at gacaca. Because most survivors and suspects avoided confrontation, it was hardly surprising that the release of detainees on the whole went off peacefully. There were of course exceptions. Rumours of reprisals against released prisoners circulated throughout the countryside. In late 2003, a group of returned detainees in southwest Rwanda murdered three genocide survivors because, it was widely reported, they intended to testify against the prisoners at gacaca. But there was no widespread violence when the detainees returned, as many people had feared.

If suspects and survivors refuse to speak to each other, however, how is reconciliation possible? This is the problem that gacaca is designed to overcome. On a humid Monday afternoon, I sat on a wooden stool beneath a plastic shelter on the edge of a grey lake near the Burundi border. Around me a crowd of 150 people chattered nervously, waiting for the gacaca hearing to begin. More than a quarter of them were amputees, their limbs presumably hacked off during the genocide. Eventually a young man, the president of the judges’ panel, explained that a prisoner had been brought from the nearby solidarity camp. A murmur went through the gathering as the suspect walked to the front, standing between the crowd and the line of judges seated on a long bench.

The man, head bowed, explained that he wanted to confess to killing his neighbour’s wife in May 1994. “I pulled the woman out of some bushes where she was hiding,” he said. “I was in a group of men with machetes and we were looking for Tutsi in the grass. We knew there were many Tutsi hiding from us. When I found the woman, I slashed her once across the neck with my machete and then once again and left her to die.” The president asked the prisoner to give the name of the woman he had killed, which the secretary of the judges’ panel recorded in a dog-eared notebook. The prisoner said that he was sorry for what he had done, and he now wished to ask forgiveness from the dead woman’s family, particularly from her husband, whom he had considered a good friend. The husband was absent from that day’s hearing, but others in the audience wanted to ask questions of the detainee.

Rural Rwanda - Parking Bisoke, near Ruhengeri in the northwest.

An elderly man, his right arm a stump at the shoulder, asked exactly where the killing had taken place. Another man and a woman accused the prisoner of committing other crimes, which he denied. The president explained that, as the purpose of this hearing was only to record the detainee’s confession (his trial would take place later), the assembly would have to wait to verify the details of his case. A security guard led the detainee away, as light rain began to fall. For the next two hours, the assembly painstakingly debated details about other genocide suspects in their community. The president had to coax information out of many people, the men in particular. But one by one, people stood to tell what they knew. Sometimes there was disagreement: No, that man couldn’t have killed on that day; my brother saw him in another village. No, that woman died much earlier than that; I saw her decomposed body on the date you’re describing. That boy wasn’t poisoned; he was beaten to death with a panga. The hearing proceeded calmly, methodically. Only when the rain began to fall so heavily that people could no longer hear each other did the president announce that gacaca was over for the day. Next week they would continue these discussions, and several more detainees would come to confess their crimes.

One aim of gacaca is to find out the “truth” of what happened during the genocide. Back in Kigali, Augustin Nkusi, chief adviser to the Gacaca Commission of the Rwandan Supreme Court, told me, “At gacaca, the truth ultimately comes from the population. We know that people will tell who is responsible because they saw what [the perpetrators] did. They stood there as it happened and they saw everything with their own eyes. There will be no confusion about who is responsible for these things.” But uncovering the truth of the genocide is much more difficult than Nkusi claims. Although gacaca offers Rwandans a rare opportunity to debate and record key details of the genocide, which might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten, the truth-finding process is often acrimonious, as people’s interpretations of the past inevitably clash. For this reason, gacaca is rarely as orderly as the meeting by the lake. Hearings are often heated and dredge up traumatic details that, for many survivors, are too much to bear.

On a patch of grass beside a football field in Kigali, a detainee wearing a bright red t-shirt, who had been released from a solidarity camp less than a week before, arrived halfway through a gacaca hearing. A woman sitting in the assembly spotted him and accused him of having burned the roof of a house belonging to an old woman in the village, whose murder the community was discussing. After the woman described the alleged act of arson, the accused man stood up at the back of the gathering and began shouting first at the woman who was giving evidence, then at the president of the judges’ panel for allowing this testimony to continue. The president told him to stop talking and to let the woman speak. The accused man refused and kept shouting. Some friends of the man also began shouting at the president to stop the woman from talking. A group of other women in the gathering told the man to sit and wait for his turn to speak, which he did momentarily, but he soon leaped to his feet again. The president could do nothing as the man screamed at the assembly, “I know many things that I will never tell. Everyone here today should be on that list of killers.” Eventually he sat down and allowed the hearing to continue.

Scenes like this worry many international observers. Gacaca, its critics argue, is likely only to inflame tensions in already fraught communities. Human rights groups criticize gacaca as a cheap, fast method of justice that gives short shrift to due process by allowing a traumatized, divided population to judge its own genocide cases and by banning lawyers from all hearings. But these arguments miss the point: gacaca was never designed to function like a conventional courtroom. In a country with such an immense backlog of cases, where the genocide destroyed any semblance of a functioning judiciary, gacaca offers what is perhaps the only legal solution. And it represents more than a convenient option; there are distinct virtues to involving the population so intimately in the trial process. For the first time, Rwandans are drawn together to discuss their problems, to confront them head-on, to publicly engage and debate with one another, and to build for the future.

Most human rights critics also ignore the fact that gacaca is concerned with much more than legalities. It gives people a chance to talk about their emotional experiences and for the community to acknowledge their pain and suffering. At a hearing under a giant eucalyptus tree, an hour south of Kigali, several women brought wood-framed photographs of loved ones who died during the genocide. They clutched these photographs tightly throughout the hearing and pointed to them when they stood and gave evidence. When these women sat down again, many of them cried and hugged each other. Older women moved from the fringes of the gathering to comfort them. The women holding the photographs appeared to gain solace and strength from those who showed their concern, sitting up more confidently and soon participating again in deliberations. Though they were reluctant afterward to discuss why they had brought the pictures, it seemed that they wanted to give faces to the otherwise disembodied names that the judges recorded in their notebooks. For these women, gacaca provided a memorial to their loved ones and perhaps some sense of healing.

The government should be praised for taking an immense risk in establishing gacaca. Handing the key processes of justice and reconciliation to a wounded population is a huge gamble. Paradoxically, however, the government is at the same time the biggest stumbling block to gacaca. Its policies in other areas undermine the people’s confidence in an institution that depends on the community’s trust and active participation. The government’s failure to adequately prepare the population for the release of detainees allowed misinformation and fear to spread across the country. More crucially, the government has attempted to quash all forms of dissent by banning MDR—the lone, and generally moderate, official voice of the Hutu majority—only weeks after the release of detainees. Dissident human rights activists and journalists face constant persecution. These policies undermine the message emanating from gacaca that the population must be free to discuss openly all aspects of the post-genocide society.

Some survivors and members of the broader Hutu population told me that their fear of reprisals for speaking out at gacaca, both from the government and from their neighbors, kept them from attending hearings. Low turnout rates are a major problem for gacaca in many communities. Further exacerbating the situation, the government recently passed legislation banning the public use of the labels “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” Although it is a laudable attempt to protect against hate speech, this law also has the effect of stifling discussion of ethnicity and its role in inspiring hatred and violence. If Rwandans cannot freely discuss the ways in which leaders throughout the twentieth century manipulated ethnic labels to violent ends, they will fail to address the root causes of their conflicts, rendering reconciliation little more than a pipe dream. Eleven years after the genocide, Rwanda is at a crossroads. Against immense odds, the government has avoided mass violence, sometimes using heavy-handed tactics. Beneath the peaceful veneer, though, the old antagonisms fester, and the release of detainees has only magnified these tensions.

A group of boys in Kigali. This picture was taken in November 1993, just a few months before the genocide started. It’s anyone’s guess how many, if any, of them are still allive today.

Gacaca represents a risky but necessary circuit breaker to the fear, distrust, and violence of the past, a rare chance for the population to confront the legacies of the genocide. If gacaca fails, justice and reconciliation in Rwanda will take a severe battering. In many communities, where Hutu and Tutsi are already engaging with one another in new ways, it will probably succeed, and these successes should be celebrated. The celebrations must be muted, however, until communities across the whole country reap the same benefits. Upon leaving Rwanda, I reflected on what the detainee Karisa had told me as the bus of released prisoners headed out to the countryside. His expressions of quiet optimism but overriding uncertainty seemed to speak for an entire nation: “We have a new life now. Everything is new. But what will happen to us now? None of us can know.”

Author - Phil Clarke
Photography - Phil Clark and Lee Ridley
Copywrite - Dissent Magazine

Phil Clark is a Research Fellow at the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster. He has conducted extensive field research on conflict and post-conflict societies in Africa.

This article, edited from the original version, is reproduced with the kind permission of www.DissentMagazine.org
The first part of this article can be seen here.

The international community ignored the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were macheted to death, many by their own friends and neighbors, and it was almost entirely absent on the most momentous day in Rwanda since the genocide. Two Western media agencies, BBC Radio and the Canadian television network CTV, together provided a total of three and a half minutes’ coverage when, on May 5, 2003, more than twenty thousand confessed genocide perpetrators were provisionally released into their hometowns, after spending nearly a decade in prison.

I had expected to fight my way through hordes of journalists to talk to the detainees before they boarded buses, returning to the same communities where they committed their crimes. Instead, I walked unimpeded into the Kinyinya “solidarity camp” on the outskirts of Kigali, one of eighteen civic education centers around Rwanda, where, for three months between leaving prison and being released into the community, around a thousand confessed génocidaires received instruction from government officials on how to be good citizens in the post-genocide society.

On board the bus with the detainees

The Rwandan government struggled for a decade to solve the problem of prisons massively overcrowded with genocide suspects. In 1994, the Tutsi-led rebel force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which halted the genocide and currently constitutes the ruling party in Rwanda, rounded up nearly 120,000 Hutu suspects and piled them into prisons built to hold only 40,000 detainees. Most suspects, never normally charged with any crime, were forced to live in hellish conditions: underfed, drinking dirty water, crammed into tiny rooms, where they slept on top of one another in latticework formations.

To help process the enormous backlog of cases, which would take a conventional court system around two hundred years, the government announced that it would provisionally release selected suspects who had already confessed to their crimes. Back in their home communities, these suspects would now face justice at communal courts known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha and derived from the Kinyarwanda word meaning “on the grass,” referring to the outdoor setting in which the hearings take place). With courts established in around nine thousand towns and villages, each overseen by nine locally elected judges, gacaca is a traditional Rwandan institution of participatory conflict resolution that has been controversially revived and reformed to deal with genocide cases.

Arrival of detainees at drop-off point

Gacaca is founded on the principle that the community should reintegrate the individuals whom it punishes. Under gacaca’s plea-bargaining scheme, some convicted perpetrators who confess early enough will receive reduced sentences or be able to commute part of their sentences to community service. In April 2005, after three years of gathering evidence, gacaca courts convicted and sentenced the first wave of génocidaires, many to new prison terms. The government continues to release new groups of selected detainees who now await trial, while gacaca hears the cases of those released earlier.

After some hasty negotiations, the camp wardens at Kinyinya agreed to let me ride on a run-down, white Mercedes-Benz bus carrying seventy detainees to an undisclosed drop-off point somewhere south, near the Burundi border. First, though, I went looking for Laurent, a short, gray- mustached, forty-two-year-old Hutu detainee whom I had met on my initial visit to the Kinyinya camp three weeks earlier. When I first interviewed Laurent, he asked me to turn off my dictaphone and, unlike most detainees, refused to describe the crimes to which he had confessed. A camp official later told me that Laurent had confessed to murdering three men and a woman in 1994. I wanted to know how he was feeling now as he prepared to return to his community.

Solidarity camp at Gashora

I found Laurent sheltering from the blazing afternoon sun beneath a blue tarpaulin, a tattered bag of clothes by his side and his left knee heavily bandaged. “I’m sick and I have to walk home today,” he said. “I’m sad because I have no family left. What am I going back to? I’m going back to nothing.” All of Laurent’s family, themselves Hutu, were killed during the genocide. Although Tutsi were the main target, thousands of Hutu were also murdered either because they were mistaken for, or displayed sympathy toward, Tutsi, or because they were the victims of RPF revenge attacks.

All around, detainees were hugging one another and exchanging addresses, as though they had been at summer camp. “When I see these people outside of the camp,” Laurent said, “they will be like my brothers and sisters.” Laurent picked up his bags and began limping toward the camp gates. I asked him why he wasn’t riding the bus with the rest of us. “My name isn’t on the list of people to ride in the bus,” he said. “I’m sick and my leg is bad, but [the camp officials] tell me I have to walk home.” Laurent said goodbye and inched up the dusty slope toward the gates.

Detainees disembarking at drop off point

I boarded the bus with the last of the detainees. The men onboard waved ecstatically to their friends as the bus pulled out of the camp. Once outside the gates, they began dancing and singing in celebration, stomping in unison and rocking the bus back and forth. The lone, fresh-faced security guard in a maroon uniform smiled and kept the beat by banging the butt of his rifle on the floor. I prayed he had the safety catch on. Waving, cheering Hutu lined the streets to welcome the returning prisoners as if they were a liberation army. Shopkeepers and schoolchildren waved as the bus bounced along the rutted, dusty tracks out of Kigali.

One detainee, Karisa, sat silently near the front as the rest of the bus celebrated behind him. He told me that he had confessed to being an infiltré, one of the hundreds of Hutu militiamen known as Interahamwe (literally “those who work together”) who fled into the jungles of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]) after the RPF victory in 1994, and then returned repeatedly to attack RPF troops and Tutsi civilians. Karisa was captured in 1996 and jailed as a genocide suspect. “Today is an amazing day,” he said. “All I want to do is walk the streets of Kigali for one or two hours. I want to remember what it’s like to walk those streets.” Karisa was from Bicumbi, in central Rwanda, but said that he wanted to find his older brother, who he had heard was living somewhere near Butare in the southwest. “We have a new life now,” he said. “Everything is new. But what will happen to us now? None of us can know.”

Detainees boarding trucks at Kinyinya solidarity camp

The detainees fell silent as the bus rolled further away from Kigali. For weeks, I had heard rumors that Tutsi lynch mobs would be waiting when three hundred trucks and buses of released prisoners like this one arrived in marketplaces all over Rwanda. Undoubtedly the detainees had heard the same rumors. Some of these men would also be found guilty at gacaca and sentenced to further years in prison. The coming months would therefore be only a short, and in their eyes, cruel, taste of liberty.

One of the detainees was nineteen-year-old Damascène, who had been ten during the genocide. He had confessed to being in a group of three boys who killed another boy with a machete and hacked the Achilles tendons of an old man whom they left for the Interahamwe to finish off. The bus was a good snapshot of the overall population of genocide suspects: most are men aged between twenty-five and forty-five; some are younger; and a few are much older, including some in their seventies and eighties. Not all of them killed during the genocide; some injured others or looted property. Only the women suspects, of whom there are thousands in Rwanda, were missing from this group.

The road wound south following the Nyabarongo River, which snakes through a fertile valley of thick, green vegetation, surrounded by hills of cocoa plants, sunflowers, and banana palms. It took more than two hours to travel the nearly seventy kilometers of corrugated road. No one spoke. We pulled into a small village, and the bus stopped. Outside, schoolchildren watched as the detainees picked up their bags and stepped slowly into the village courtyard. Except for several officials who greeted the detainees as they walked off the bus, no adults were visible. The officials took the men to an open-sided room, where one official began lecturing them. The detainees would remain in this village for the night; then they would be sent home on foot tomorrow.

Solidarity camp in Butare

One by one, adult villagers emerged from the surrounding houses, to catch a glimpse of the prisoners. They stood at a distance and whispered to one another. The return of these detainees attracted no fanfare; that would come when they arrived in their home villages. The official’s lecture ended and the gathering dispersed. I found Karisa, who told me, “There are only a few survivors in this village, so we can sleep here tonight in peace.” An official approached me and said that no outsiders were permitted to follow the detainees home the next day.

The driver and I climbed into the empty bus, which bounced and jolted its way through the fading evening light back to Kigali. When I got off, the dark streets of the capital were beginning to crackle with people leaving offices and flooding out of the market. Music blared as the bars overflowed with workers. I scanned the dark circle of hills surrounding the city: out there in the hills, all over the country, the killers were going home.

Author - Phil Clark
Photography - Phil Clark
Copywrite - Dissent Magazine

Phil Clark is a Research Fellow at the Transitional Justice Institute, Belfast. He has conducted extensive field research on conflict and post-conflict societies in Africa.

This article, edited from the original version, is reproduced with the kind permission of www.DissentMagazine.org