Hope Battles Fear

By Bruce W. Nelan

It looked like an episode of roadside vengeance. About 30 miles southwest of the capital city of Kigali, four Tutsi, one of them a soldier of the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front, stood around a Hutu man in his 50s. He was barefoot and dressed in a torn shirt and baggy pants. A dirty strip of blue- and-white fabric roped his elbows tight behind his back. His three young accusers shouted that the Hutu was a member of a militia group that had slaughtered Tutsi and political moderates earlier this year. They had seen him beat an old woman to death with a hoe, they yelled; they had just come back to their town to find the Hutu still in his house, a free man. The suspect stared fixedly at the soldier, repeating over and over in a low voice, "I didn't kill anyone. I didn't kill anyone."

At the R.P.F. checkpoint just up the road, the soldier handed the Hutu prisoner over to one of his uniformed comrades, who shoved him behind a stand of trees. Was the man mistreated? Was he killed? That question writ large is preoccupying the whole of Rwanda. Are the Tutsi who now rule the country killing many, some, or any of the Hutu who have returned to their homes?

There are plenty of rumors, but little hard evidence. Nevertheless, fear of Tutsi revenge for 500,000 murders keeps more than 2 million Rwandan refugees huddled in disease-ridden camps along the country's borders. Some observers believe the horrifying stories are not just propaganda from defeated extremists of the Rwandan army. A U.N. relief official claims large numbers of Hutu are still fleeing from Rwanda: "They are scared of something, and it's not other Hutu." Two weeks ago, he says, U.N. aid workers driving near the border with Burundi saw about 50 bodies lying beside the road. "They weren't able to stop," he says, "because there were so many R.P.F. soldiers around." Last week a new wave of Hutu refugees began crossing into Zaire from the southwest zone that has been secured by French troops. The French are pulling out Aug. 22, and the Hutu are afraid the R.P.F. is preparing to exact vengeance; relief officials fear a second mass exodus.

Only a few hundred refugees each day summon up the courage to leave the festering camps in Zaire to head the other way. Whatever might be happening out in the countryside, the trickle of Rwandans who reach Kigali enter a city of eerie quiet. Fewer than 100,000 of the 350,000 people who lived in the capital four months ago are there now. There is no electricity, no phone service, only partial water supply. Businesses and factories are shuttered.

Julie and Pascal Munyanziza and their two children, who had fled to the south, made the journey back to their tidy three-room house in a mixed Tutsi and Hutu section of Kigali. They found all the windows broken and much of the furniture gone, but the windows have been patched and the house now bears a handwritten sign: IYINZU BANYIRAYO BARAHARI (The owner is here). "If you don't mark your house," says Munyanziza, "someone will take it."

Though he is a Hutu, the former government's militia came to kill him in May because, Munyanziza says, he was not a member of the ruling party. The hit squad dumped him into a pit and threw rocks on him, but a friend rescued him. His next-door neighbor, Albert Rurangirwa, also a Hutu, is back in his house too, after fleeing in May. He learned that his father had been killed by militia, and "I don't even know where to look for my brothers and sisters." But since they all returned last month, says Munyanziza, "there have been no problems with the R.P.F."

Nor have they encountered any hostility from the Tutsi families living in the area. "The Tutsi have the same problems we do," says Rurangirwa. "No work, no money." Munyanziza wonders, though, how they will get along with the Tutsi who are now returning to the capital from years of exile in Uganda and Burundi. "We don't know them," he says, "but they have food, money, and they have taken over empty houses."

With things so quiet in the capital, the returnees allow themselves to hope for a gradual return to normality. Still, Rwandans are well aware of their bloody past, and they have doubts. Munyanziza's wife Julie points to two paintings still hanging on her living-room wall: one shows a man climbing up a tree as a crocodile and a lion attack him; the other shows the same man running away in fear from the lion and the crocodile, while a snake winds down the tree where he had sought refuge. "They are a souvenir of all the problems in Rwanda," she says. Augustin Makama, a Tutsi exile who has just returned from Uganda, does not entirely dismiss the reports of Tutsi reprisals in the countryside. Most of the stories are propaganda, he says -- and pauses. "Some, I don't know. What might someone do if he meets the man who killed his children?"

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Kigali