On Rwanda
What would you have done? ask the prisoners accused of participation in the Rwandan genocide. Rory Carroll reports
Monday April 5, 2004
Believe some of those who answered genocide's call and there is no such thing as guilt or innocence, just a grey area in between.
Many prisoners in Kigali's central prison say they are not killers. They might have run errands for death squads and occasionally joined the hunt for victims but pull a trigger, swing a machete? No, they never did that.
Even their minimal involvement was coerced, they say. The country was at war. It was either help the killers, or at least pretend to help, or be killed yourself. What would you have done?
Interviews with four genocide suspects in the jail yielded much the same story: claims of at least partial innocence followed by a look of defiance and a challenge - what would you have done?
Not an easy question to answer given the often grim choices ordinary Hutus faced when an extremist Hutu regime decided to eliminate Tutsis and their sympathisers.
The way Esperance Nyirandegeya, 43, tells it she was a very minor player who aided the interahamwe militia solely to avert retribution for having a Tutsi husband.
"I wanted to show cooperation so I carried uniforms for them to help my family to hide," the former accountant for Air Rwanda says in a low voice.
Dressed in vivid pink prison garb with a headscarf and spectacles she does not look like a mass murderer but prosecutors say she directed the militia in Kigali's sector 43.
"I didn't kill anybody," says Nyirandegeya. "But ..." The voice trails off. She did lead a mob to the hiding place of four Tutsi men who were promptly butchered. "It was a mistake, I didn't know they were there."
The milita had been looking for different Tutsis, a family, and Nyirandegeya said she led the mob away from the house where they were hiding to another hiding place which she thought was unoccupied. That it was not will remain on her conscience, she says.
