Fear, Refugees Return Future Unclear For Hutus, Tutsis Going Home To Rwanda

A soldier who doesn’t believe there ever was a genocide. A mother who lost her entire family in the slaughter. A refugee who just wants his house back. And a wife grateful to be reunited with her husband.

These are the people of Kanama village, Hutus and Tutsis with very different perspectives on Rwanda’s ethnic war and on what will happen now that a half-million Hutu refugees have come home.

When the Hutu-led army fled after helping massacre a half-million Tutsis, Cpl. Gerard Biyemeje went, too. They went to eastern Zaire because they feared the Tutsis would take revenge for the Hutu government-led genocide.

Now, he says there wasn’t any genocide. And if there was, he wasn’t to blame. “Me? I don’t share responsibility for anything. I was just a soldier, I did what the military told me to do,” he said calmly, standing in front of the big concrete house and large family he came home to this week in Kanama, a village 10 miles from the Zairian border.

For his neighbor, Dansira Mukarubibi, time stopped in April 1994 when Hutu militiamen hacked her two teenage daughters to death with machetes and killed her father. She survived only because she had been away, working in the fields.

The daughters - her only children - had a Hutu father, but that was not enough to save them.

The suspected killers are in jail now, awaiting trial.

They had been among the Hutu militiamen who fled to Zaire, where they lived in U.N. camps among the civilian refugees. The militias used violence and intimidation to keep the refugees from leaving the camps; they needed them as a human shield so they could launch cross-border attacks on Rwanda.

One night in October 1995, a group of militiamen attacked this village and Tutsi police captured them. Among those arrested, Mukarubibi saw the men who slaughtered her family.

Now, Mukarubibi is worried again.

Since a Zairian rebellion drove the militias from the U.N. camps two weeks ago, 500,000 Hutu refugees have come back to Rwanda. Mukarubibi says some of them are killers.

Joseph Ntibiringkwa, 33, a Hutu refugee, says he has faith that the guilty will be punished.

“Tutsis don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “There are authorities to judge those who did the killings. This country has laws, and everybody will be punished according to laws.”

Ntibiringkwa was a medical technician in Kigali during the worst of the genocide, when nearly half of the capital’s Tutsi population was wiped out between April and July 1994.

When he came back to Kigali on Monday, he found a Tutsi living in his house. When the Hutus fled to Zaire, Zairian Tutsis moved into Rwanda - and the many empty houses.

The Rwandan government has given 15 days for those occupying other people’s homes to leave.

So Ntibiringkwa is living in Kanama with his sister’s family.

For Speciose Mvrekatete, a 31-year-old Tutsi teacher, the return of the refugees is a mixed blessing.

This week, she saw her husband, a Hutu, for the first time in 2-1/2 years.

The couple fled to Zaire in 1994 to escape the slaughter. Her uncle already had been killed. A month later, when Tutsi rebels took control of Rwanda, she returned with her three young children. Her husband, Elikan Kagabo, remained in the refugee camp.

He came home on Monday, but her happiness is mixed with fear.

“We’re afraid that certain people who killed our families can still do us harm,” she said. “They have to be punished so that we can start all over again.”