Trials Start On Anniversary Of Rwanda Massacre Ethnic Tensions On Increase As Tutsi Remember Their Dead

“Every day, every month, it has become harder for me to deal with,” said the 26-year-old Tutsi, recounting how he survived two months of massacres by hiding in a deserted house, drinking ditch water and eating grass.

“I had a family,” said Evariste Twahirwa, glancing at bullet holes in the concrete wall of his living room, where his sister was shot a year ago by Hutu militias.

“Now they are all dead. I had friends. They are all dead. I had a fiancee. She is dead. How can we talk about reconciliation with people who killed your family?

“I think the only solution is to kill the killers,” he concluded.

Like thousands of other Rwandans, Twahirwa is juggling frustration and pain as he faces the first anniversary of ethnic massacres in which more than 500,000 people, mostly minority Tutsi, were killed by mobs of majority Hutu.

Many feel justice has not been and will never be delivered, even though the eight-month-old, Tutsi-led government opened the first genocide trials Thursday in Kigali.

The proceedings began with a Hutu defendant, one of 30,000 in detention, admitting that he killed 900 people in the massacres.

The opening was delayed until the very last minute because of objections from several high-ranking government officials, who argued that the courts were putting on a show trial for the one-year anniversary. Other officials defended the trial date, saying it was chosen to send a message to Rwandans that justice had finally arrived.

All seven defendants being tried Thursday have already pleaded guilty, a factor that simplifies the judges’ decisions. Government and United Nations officials believe it will be much more difficult to try the thousands who have not pleaded guilty.

Sometime this year an international tribunal in Tanzania is expected to start the trials of some 400 Rwandan Hutu who planned and organized the massacres, but diplomats in Kigali predict that less than a dozen will actually come to trial there in the first year.

The Rwandan trials are opening at a time when attitudes are hardening in this tiny Central African country, denting its hopes for a political and psychological recovery.

Rwanda is still struggling back, torn between reconciliation and reconstruction and a return to untrammeled ethnic hatred and civil war, senior U.N. officials say.

“There is somewhat of a vicious circle,” said Shaharyar Khan, the U.N. special representative in Rwanda. “First there is a great frustration because of the lack of justice. People are saying it is one year since the massacres and everyone knows who the killers are - they are running free in the camps. Yet the world community gives them free food. They are saying, where is the justice?”

The government, which came to power last summer after the victory of a Tutsi-dominated rebel front, is increasingly dominated by hardliners wary of compromise, U.N. officials say.

Khan said the tension was also evident at the level of the prefectures, where an increasing number of people are being arrested.

Another danger sign is a rise in armed incursions from across the border in Zaire, where thousands of Rwandan Hutu are living in refugee camps, he added. “This leads to the Rwandan army becoming tense.”

In Kigali, the roads are lined with Rwandan flags at half staff and the hotels are full of foreign dignitaries who arrived this week to attend memorial events. The government has declared a weekend of national mourning, with a military parade and a symbolic burial ceremony for Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu president who died in a suspicious plane crash a year ago Thursday.

The crash, which has never been fully explained, helped set off the three-month bloodbath in which scores of Rwandan Hutu shot, hacked and stabbed Tutsi.

Western countries did not intervene with troops and emergency foreign aid until July, when a million mostly Hutu refugees, fleeing a newly organized Tutsi rebel army, crossed into Zaire and began dying by the thousands of cholera. By then the massacres had ended.