As the torrent of refugees flowed past the little Rwandan village of Nkuli last week, Jonasi Ruziga stood in silence and stared. The numbers were overwhelming--more than half a million Hutu, alternately trudging through the pouring rain and panting under the tropical sun. Ruziga, a Tutsi trader, had an equally overwhelming reason for monitoring their passage. He was looking for the murderers of his children. "Yesterday evening I saw two of them," he said. "They passed here along this road. Then this morning I saw one more walking by. Just like that."
The epic influx of refugees was made up mostly of Hutu civilians who fled Rwanda in 1994, fearing reprisal for the genocide deaths of 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of the Hutu-led government. For two years the Hutu had huddled in Zairean camps, prevented from returning by Hutu militia who controlled them through savage intimidation. When Tutsi-led Zairean rebels routed the Hutu tormentors two weeks ago, the refugees fled home. In their midst, however, were thousands--perhaps even tens of thousands--of the extremists who had organized and taken part in the butchery of 1994. Some of those killers were now returning to the scene of their crimes and parading under the gaze of their victims' parents, like Ruziga.
In the view of many Tutsi, had Ruziga seized a machete and hacked his children's killers to pieces, he would have been acting within his rights. Yet he did not, and his reasons for refraining may say something about why the genocide occurred in the first place, and much about whether Rwanda can overcome it. "I will wait until everybody has returned; then I will go to the authorities and make my report," he said. "Whatever happens will be up to the government. If they find out that, say, they killed because they were told to by the authorities, then I will agree to live with them the way we lived before."
That response may seem extraordinary for a man whose two daughters were slaughtered, and it is far from certain that his attitude is shared by all Tutsi. Many made no effort to conceal their contempt for the returning Hutu. Many more, however, seemed to greet the returnees with Ruziga's air of orderly acceptance and restraint--an outlook that may stem from Rwanda's unique social structure. Unlike most African nations, which were cobbled together by colonial mapmakers, Rwanda was a tightly organized kingdom long before the Europeans arrived. A Tutsi god-king headed an elaborate system of civil administration, taxation and military conscription that the Germans and Belgians left largely intact, even as they tightened the screws. When independence came, with a 1959 Hutu revolution, the new rulers inherited a near totalitarian state.