In my readings over the years about Rwanda I've come across the word "inkotanyi" which means "invincible" and is the nickname given to the Tutsi rebel army - the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) - originally led by Fred Rwigema, and then afterwards by Paul Kagame. See KAGAME'S HERO FRED RWIGEMA and RWIGEMA'S HERO RUTAREMARA

It has been one of my strongest contentions that General Kagame and the RPF aren't given enough credit for their heroic role as saviours of Rwanda. See RWANDA'S WARRIORS

Too often the world media focuses on the Rwandan "refugees" in Goma etc, without ever explaining to the watching public that these weren't innocent "refugees" but were in reality guilty "fugitives". The majority of them (two million altogether) were Hutus who had actively participated in the brutal killing of their Tutsi fellow-Rwandans.

Another thing that amazes me is how the international humanitarian organizations - including the United Nations - aided and abetted these refugees with a million-dollars-a-DAY in food, clothing, medicine etc, most of which was seized and controlled by the masterminds of the genocide who ALSO lived in the so-called "refugee" camps - hidden amongst the multitude of Hutu peasants they had brainwashed into firstly killing Tutsis for them, and secondly running from the very people - the Tutsi "inkotanyi" who were coming to the aid of their people - and had no intention of killing Hutu civilians - be they killers of Tutsi or not. See GOMA CAMP MAFIA HOTEL

Life in the camps was a hell-hole for the Hutu fugitives but they were afraid to go back home to Rwanda because the genocide masterminds kept telling them the "inkotanyi" were after them. This isn't true. The "inkotanyi" wanted the big fish Hutus, not the small fish further down the food chain.

For years after the "inkotanyi" stopped the genocide, they had to prevent a future genocide by going after the Hutu masterminds in the Congo who were not allowing the "refugees" to return home and riling them up for another attack into Rwanda.

Meanwhile, back in Rwanda, the surviving Tutsis were given NO HUMANITARIAN AID at all after the genocide.

Now, for the benefit of "Orwell Today" readers, I'd like to share some "inkotanyi" anecdotes as told by fourteen people who survived the genocide in Rwanda, and are beneficiaries of the heroism of the RPF.

The stories are based around fourteen hills in the south-eastern part of Rwanda known as the "Bugesera" where two rivers converge and huge swamps and marshes comprise the geographical landscape.

In the movie SOMETIMES IN APRIL the heroine of the story had been a teacher there, and we saw her and her fellow-survivors wallowing in the mud as they hid amongst the papyrus trees. In that movie, we also saw the "inkotanyi" RPF soldiers coming to their rescue, an incredibly moving portrayal of the reality.

When watching that movie (which I've done several times and shown to several people) I've often wished I could hear stories from those swamp survivors and then - as if in answer to my wishes - I came across a book which does just that. The following excerpts give each survivor's background before introducing the "inkotanyi" passages. ~ Jackie Jura

INTO THE QUICK OF LIFE: The Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak,
by Jean Hatzfeld, published in French in 2000, and in English in 2005:

Papa was a junior teacher, Maman was a farmer. From my father's family it is I alone who remained alive. From my mother's family, it is I alone, also, who remained alive. I can no longer remember how many big and little brothers and sisters I had, because my memory is all too preoccupied with this great number of dead, it is not nimble with figures anymore. This also slows me down at school.

But I can relive in all transparence the massacres at the church and the ferocity of the interahamwe. We call Hutu killers interahamwe. We got used to crossing their paths on the road. They hurled noisy threats at us. We could hear what they were saying, we said to ourselves that things were going badly, but reasonably we did not believe it. Later, after the plane accident, the neighbouring Hutus on my hill came every day to kill people where they lived, not even waiting for an everyday squabble or row. People then understood that things were serious, and they slipped away to the forest and the church. As for me, I went down to my big sister in Nyamata, which is why I did not die in Ntarama.

The day the killing began in Nyamata, in the street of the market, we ran to the parish church. A large crowd had already assembled there, because when massacres begin it is Rwandan custom to take refuge in houses of God. Time granted us two peaceful days, then the soldiers and the local police came to patrol around the church, yelling that we would all soon be killed. I remember that you would think twice about breathing and speaking. The interahamwe arrived before midday, singing; they lobbed grenades, they tore down the railings, then they rushed into the church and started chopping people up with machetes and spears. They wore manioc leaves in their hair, they yelled with all their might, laughing scornfully from the throat. They thumped left, right and centre, they chopped randomly....

The interahamwe finished off the killing in the church in two days; and immediately after they set off into the forest with machetes and clubs to track us down. With dogs in the lead, they searcehd to catch runaways hidden beneath cut branches. It was here that I was caught. I heard a shout, I saw a machete, I got a blow on the head and I fell into a hollow.

First, I ought to have been dead, then I insisted on going on living. I do not remember how. A woman passing that way, whose name was Mathilde, found me and carried me off to a hiding place under the umunzenze. Umunzenze are giant trees....This good-hearted woman was from Nyamata; I did not know her surname because I was from Ntarama as I have already made known to you. She was a Tutsi, the wife of a Hutu administrator. When her husband found out that she had cared for a Tutsi child, he took her to the edge of the pond at Rwaki-Birizi, a good kilometre away - so it was reported to me later - and he killed her with a single thrust of his knife. Later, he joined the procession of those fleeing to the Congo, and no one has seen him since.

I can no longer properly remember the end of the genocide, because of the cut to my head....I had no one to go away with anymore, since everyone had been killed in the church or in the marsh. So I returned to live in Nyamata at my aunt Therese's, who just works the land....

But what I love most is to spend bits of time in the church courtyard. In the place where I escaped the massacres. Every day I go there, it is on the way to school. On Saturdays and during holidays I also go there. Sometimes I drive my aunt's goats, other times I take a friend who has a ball, or I sit alone....

"I was born among seven brothers and two sisters. Papa was hacked the first day but we never found out where. My brothers were killed shortly afterwards. With Maman and my little sisters we managed to escape into the marshes. For a month we endured beneath papyrus branches hardly seeing nor hearing anything of the world anymore.

During the day, we lay in the mud in the company of snakes and mosquitoes, to protect ourselves from interahamwe attacks. At night, we roamed among abandoned houses looking for things to eat. Since we fed ourselves only on what we could find, we encountered many a case of diarrhoea; but fortunately it seemed that ordinary diseases, malaria and rain fever, wished to spare us this time round. We knew nothing of life anymore, except that all Tutsis were being massacred where they lived and we would shortly all have to die....

On the last day of the genocide, when the liberators called to us from the edge of the marsh, there were some amongst us who refused to budge from under the payprus, thinking that this was a new interahamwe trick. Later that evening, they gathered us together at the football pitch in Nyamata; the most able-bodied went off to root around the houses for decent clothes. Even though we could eat salted food at last, we had no cheerfulness to show, because we were thinking of the people we had left behind back there. We felt as we did in the marshes, except that no one was running after us anymore. We were not in danger of death anymore but we were still laid low by life....

My parents were driven off their native land in the year of Independence, aboard a Belgian government truck, to come to clear a plot of land on the hill of Kibungo....

The interahamwe began hunting down Tutsis on our hill on the 10th of April. The same day, we upped and left in a group planning to stay in the church in Ntarama because they had never been known to kill families in churches. We waited five days. An endless flow of fellow farmers kept arriving, we came to be a large crowd. When the attack began, there was too much noise to take in every twist and turn of the killings. But I recognized many neighbours' faces as they killed with all their might. Very early on, I felt a blow. I collapsed between some benches, pandemonium all around. When I woke up, I checked to see that I as not dying. I crept out amongst the bodies and escaped into the bush. Amongst the trees, I came across a group of fugitives and we sprinted all the way to the marshes. I was to remain there a month.

Here we lived days darker than despair. Every morning, we hid the littlest ones beneath swamp papyrus, then we sat on the dry grass and tried to exchange calm words. When we heard the interahamwe arriving, we ran, splitting up in silence, deep into the leaves, and into the mud. In the evening, once the killers had finished their work and turned for home, those who were not dead came out of the marsh. Those who were wounded just lay down on the damp riverbank, or in the forest. Those in one piece went to rest where it was dry, in the school at Cyugaro.

And very early in the morning, we went back down again, entered the marshland; we covered the weakest in leaves, to help them conceal themselves....

In the marshes, we tried to stay with the same group of acquaintances, to make the task of comforting one other easier. But if too many people died, we had to join a new team.

During the evening assemblies, we could catch hold of no news from anywhere because radio sets no longer blared out, except in the killers' homes. Still, we understood by word of mouth that the genocide had spread over the country, that all Tutsis were suffering the same fate, that no one would come to save us anymore. We thought that we would all have to die. As for me, I no longer concerned myself with thinking about when I would die, since we were going to die anyway, only with how the cuts would hack at me; only about how long it would take, because I was very frightened of the suffering machetes bestow....

The day of the liberation, when the RPF inkotanyi came down to the edge of the marshes, shouting to us that we could come out, no one wanted to move from under the papyrus. The inkotanyi yelled their lungs out with words of reassurance, while we stayed beneath the leaves, without uttering a word. I think that at this moment we, the survivors, mistrusted every single human being on earth.

As for the inkotanyi, when they saw us coming out at last, like mud vagabonds, they looked put out. Above all they looked amazed; as though they were wondering whether we were still human beings, after all this time in the marshes. They were more than embarrassed by how scrawny and stinking we were. Despite the disgust in the situation, they wished to show us great respect. Some chose to stand stiffly to attention in their uniforms, lined up in rows, their gazes fixed upon us. Others decided to come close to support the most badly off. You could see that they had trouble believing it all. They wanted to show themselves as very kind, but they hardly uttered a word to us, as if we were no longer able to understand anything. Except, of course, soothing words of encouragement....

...On the 10th of April, after mass, neighbouring Hutus came to our house near the river and ordered us to clear off because they wanted to seize it, without killing us though. We immediately went up to Kibungo, to live with my grandfather.

The next day, the soldiers arrived; my uncle tried to slip away; they shot him dead near the door. So we then fled towards the church in Ntarama, Papa, Maman, my eight brothers and sisters, my grandfather and grandmother. The interahamwe prowled about the small wood around the church for three or four days. One morning, they all came in a group together, behind soldiers and local policemen. They broke into a run and started hacking people, inside and outside....

I crept out among the corpses....I felt myself being lifted and thrown, and other people fell on top of me. When I heard the interahamwe leaders whistle the order to pull out, I was completely covered in dead people.

It was towards evening that some courageous Tutsis from the area, who had scattered into the bush, came back to the church. Papa and my big brother pulled us free from the heap, me and my very bloodied youngest sister, who died a little later in Cyugaro. In the school, people put dressings of medicinal herbs on the wounded. In the morning, the decision was made to take refuge in the marsh. This was to happen again every day, for a month.

We went down very early. The little ones hid first, the grown-ups acted as look-outs and talked about the disaster that had befallen us. When the Hutus came, they were the last to hide. Then there was killing all day long....

The evil-doers preferred to kill as many as possible without taking the trouble to bury them; they must have thought that they would have time later, or that they would not be made to do this stinking chore since they had already done enough. They also thought that the sight of these dirtied corpses in the mud would put us off from hiding. As for us, we did try to bury a few of our relations' corpses, but there was rarely time. Even those animals who would have eaten them had all fled because of the din of the killings....

When the inkotanyi came down to the marsh, to tell us that the massacres were over, that we were to remain alive, we did not want to believe them. Even the weakest refused to come out from the papyrus. The inkotanyi turned back without a word. They returned with a boy from Ntarama. He started shouting: "It's the truth. They're inkotanyi, they're RPF. The interahamwe have run off in disarray. Come out, you won't be killed anymore." We got up. It was the first time in a month any of us had seen each other standing up in the middle of the afternoon. At the assembly, a soldier explained to us in Swahili: "Now you are saved, you must leave your machetes and knives here. You shall not need them anymore." One of us answered: "We have not had any machetes since the beginning. We have only diseases on us but those we cannot drop here. We do not even have clothes any more." I was wearing just a pair of ripped shorts, the same shorts since the first day.

We left the worst off in the shade, to pick them up later aboard some vehicles. We were escorted to Nyamata, we waited a few days, then with my big brother we went back to our plot in Kiganna....

I was a young man when we were exiled to the Bugesera. This was in 1959, the mwami Mutara III had surrendered his last breath, all positions of importance were in Hutu hands after Rwanda's first popular elections. I had finished my studies in the famous Teacher's School of Zaza. I was given a post in the volcanic region of Birunga, but the moment I tried to set foot in the classroom, I was pushed back out, and I could hear more and more worrisome words pronounced behind my back.

In December of that awful year, Bahutu extremists painted the doors of Batusi houses with a single brush stroke during the day, then came back during the night to torch them....One morning a Belgian administrator came; he asked us to write down on a list the country to which we wanted to be exiled. I knew nothing good of foreign countries, I had family neither in Burundi nor in Tanzania, so I wrote down the name of Rwanda, my own country. A large group had written down the same answer. The administrator concluded by saying: "Alright, you will go to the Bugesera, since it is uninhabited."

We only knew the Bugesera region by name. They brought army trucks into the mission yard. I got aboard a rubaho, a truck with a wooden skip, with my wife, my little brother and my grandmother....We crossed the bridge over the Nyabarongo river early in the morning. At the time, it was only two tree trunks placed in the water to get you over. On the other side, other lorries were waiting for us.

We opened our eyes to a land of savannah and marsh, we were arriving in the Bugesera. I thought to myself: "they are packing us in here, abandoning us alive into the arms of death." I am not exaggerating when I say the tsetse flies darkened the clarity of the sky. To this day, I still believe the authorities presumed that these terrible tsetse would be the end of us. We could not see a single living being anywhere on the trail, then the first straw huts appeared. As for wood lodgings in Nyamata, there was but the mission office, the district court, the administrator's home, and an army camp in the forest of Gako....

The discord grew venomous once the multiparty system was authorised in 1991. At meetings, discussions in public became all too dangerous. Debates got scalding hot, and you ran the risk of wounds each time. The interahamwe paraded along the roads and the paths and strutted about the cabarets. The radio called Batutsi cockroaches; at public meetings Bahutu politicians predicted the death of Batutsi cockroaches. They were terribly afraid of the inkotanyi or of foreign military invasion. I think that it was at this time that they started to contemplate genocide.

In 1992, they counted four hundred Batutsi corpses in the forests, without a single reprimand from the chief of police. When the war started two years later, we were well accustomed to killings. I foresaw a routine tragedy, nothing more. I thought "The situation is too explosive to go walking on the high road, but if we do not leave the hill, it will perhaps settle down." After the massacre in the church, I understood that things were deadly serious. That day, I joined a line of runaways for the marsh at Nyamwiza and I squatted down in the mud.

In the beginning, we hoped for help in the depth of the papyrus. But God himself showed that he had forgotten us, the Whites even more so. Later, all we could hope for was to reach the next day's dawn. Through the marsh, I saw women crawling through the mud without lamentations. I saw a sleeping infant lying forgotten on its mother who had been hacked....

During that time, we talked a little as to the why of this accursed situation, and we kept coming up against the same replies. The Bugesera, formerly empty land, was now crammed with people. The authorities feared being chased out by the "Ugandan" RPF; the Bahutus gazed longingly on our land. But all this could not explain the extermination, no more than it can now....

The primary school at Cyugaro, rebuilt in brick, today has some twenty-five classes in which Hutu and Tutsi pupils sit together on the same benches. In the village, most earth houses have fissures or are collapsing, the waste land is invading gardens. Five kilometres separate the school from the marsh. The only trail crosses manioc fields, passes the walls of two burned out villas. Iwuwa, trees with yellow flowers, and umuko, trees with red flowers, adorn the savannah through which gangs of children roam looking for wild cabbage. Then the track plunges into a forest of eucalyptus, luminous because of the height of the trees.

On the other side of the wood reappears the green immensity. You tear down a steep slope and, behind a fringe of wild banana trees, you come to the swamps. Your first impression is one of an inextricable tangle of papyrus and reeds gone rotten in the water. It's possible nevertheless to enter it by pushing the tangled stems out of the way. The ground, spongy during the dry season, muddy in the wet, smells of putrid mud. With each step, you are up to your shins in mud. A droning of flies, mosquitoes and dragonflies serves as background noise to the melodious laughter of the ibis and the piercing screams of macaques and black talapoins, whose aerobatics you can just make out. If you're pateint, you can also stop and listen to the grunts of invisible wild hogs, or to the swishing of slender sitatungas, marsh antelope, in the tall grass....

With my sister Laetitia, I today look after eight little non-accompanied children. It came about naturally. In the marshes, when the parents went away to their deaths without taking their children along with them, those like us who did not have any offered to replace them on the spot. Later, time entrusted them to us forever.

Before the war, I studied diligently because I wanted to take the national exam in Kigali and land a beautiful career for myself....

Three days after the plane crash, a small company of us moved into the church at Ntarama: my family and neighbouring folk, with bundles of what we needed to survive. During the day, the courageous ventured out into the surroundng fields to bring back some food. At night, we slept inside or outside, according to who was weak or fit. When the interahamwe encircled the fencing, men began letting stones fly so as to slow down their advance. The women gathered the stones, because they did not want to die any old way. But our resistence did not have much vigour behind it. Grenades exploded at the front door. I was positioned at the back, I raced down the slope, I ran so fast I forgot about breathing for an hour, then dived into the marsh urunfunzo, which I knew by reputation. Urunfunzo are papyrus trees. At this moment, I did not of course have any idea that for the next month I was going to spend my days in the mud, covered from head to toe, under the tyranny of the mosquitoes.

The killers worked the swamps from nine to four, half past four, as the sun would have it. Sometimes, if it rained too much, they came later in the morning. They came in columns, announcing their arrival with songs and whistles. They beat drums, they sounded very cheerful to be going killing for an entire day. One morning, they would take one path, the next day another path. When we heard the first whistles, we disappeared in the opposite direction. One morning, they cheated, they came from all sides springing traps and ambushes; and that day was a very dispiriting one because we knew that that evening there would be more than the usual number of dead.

In the afternoon they would not sing anymore because they were tired, but chatting away, they returned to their homes. They fortified themselves with drink and by eating the cows that they slaughtered at the same time as the Tutsis. These were truly very calm and accomplished killings. If the RPF liberators had delayed one week more on the road, there would not be a single Bugesera Tutsi left living to deny the lies, such as the criminals' so-called drunkenness....

My father was a veterinarian's assistant in Ruhengeri. He was sent with many others to fertilise a plot on the hill of Kanombe. Which is what he did with his own two hands. In Rwanda, farming is not something that can be taught; it comes to you. If no better business awaits you for the while, then you pick up the hoe and you go dig in the fields.

At the time when my parents crossed the Nyabarongo river, a few Hutu natives were already scattered here and there in the bush, and were not at all wicked. They knew nothing of the chaos fermenting throughout the rest of the country and they looked on the refugees with very peaceable eyes....

At the time, Nyamata already deserved to be called more than a village, with a respectable market and a solid brick church....

It was afterwards, around 1992, that politics came and spolied everything. Militia and politicians came from Kigali sending out signals of dark portent. A Hutu burgomaster was even killed because he refused to give chase to Tutsis. Amongst ourselves, we no longer mixed with Hutus at the same cabarets for fear of coming back wounded, but we still spoke with civility to one another at work and on the road. In 1994 I could smell, like everyone else, a catastrophe cooking. You no longer dared enter such and such a cabaret if you were not a member of such and such a party. We Tutsis limited ourselves to going to Tutsi shops to drink our Primus without any problems....

The day after Habyarimana's plane crashed, we continued teaching in the daytime but for fear of underhand tricks, slept far from our homes in the bush at night. On the morning of the 11th of April, there was a great commotion in town. Soldiers had started doing some very serious shooting in the streets. But quickly these soldiers noticed that there was no threat coming from the people, and they no longer used up their cartridges, they then only gave a helping hand to the interahamwe - who had already rushed in to start thumping. They started with prosperous shopkeepers first, because even then they were above all preoccupied with getting rich....

Women, children, and the weakest began walking to the church. As for me, I said to myself: "Things are completely out of hand. They are going to kill there too for sure, and in any case I do not want to die in a church." Which is the reason why I ran all day without destination. I spent the night in the undergrowth and the next day reached Kayumba. Up there, two or three kilometres from the town, there were about six thousand of us in good health, waiting in the eucalyptus forest to see how events would unfold.

On the day of the massacre in the church, from up in Kayumba you could hear the grenades and see the smoke. My wife and child had taken refuge inside....

I could not have brought my wife and my son up to the hill of Kayumba, because they could not run fast enough. I did not follow them to the church which by custom was reserved for the weakest persons. I said to myself: "Since you are going to die, you must nevertheless try and last two or three days longer." This is why we parted ways....

On the hill of Kayumba, the situation immediately became sombre. It is a eucalyptus forest as I have already pointed out. Eucalyptus are tall trees which grow too widely apart for there to be any hope of hiding amongst them, unlike the dense papyrus in the marshes. So the bottom of the hill was encircled by interahamwe. In the morning they came up in rows, singing, and then, shouting, they began their pursuit. To have any hope of escaping them, you needed to be able to do a hundred metre dash in nine seconds. You had to slip through the trees, you had to duck and dive all day without ever slowing down....

At around four o'clock, the evil-doers went back to town, because they feared the dark. In the evening, from up on the hill, we could hear them rejoicing with songs and drinking. We could see that they were now living in the most comfortable houses. With the breeze, we could sometimes even smell grilling meat. While we went to scour the fields and sleep in the rain, sheltering beneath branches.

The next morning, they would come back up the hill singing, and the hunt resumed for the rest of the day....

They chopped us out of a taste for barbarity, nothing more. Amongst them there were normal Hutus who killed normally, wicked Hutus who killed wickedly - most often interahamwe; and finally there were extremists in wickedness who killed with extreme wickedness.

Every morning, even on Sundays, the hunters came up various paths, they wore hats on their heads, carried machetes on their shoulders; they sang. In the evening, around four o'clock, they left, chatting as they went, leaving behind them one hundred, two hundred corpses beneath the eucalyptus. First the old and children; then the sick and the ailing, then women and the unlucky. Several teams tried to escape at night to Burundi. There are only two survivors left....

In the end, there were only us sprinters left. We had begun as five or six thousand; one month later, when the inkotanyi arrived, there were twenty of us alive. That's the arithmetic. If the inkotanyi had lingered on the road one week more, our exact number would be zero. And all the Bugesera would be a desert, because the Hutus had gorwn so accustomed to killing they would have gone on and started killing each other too....

My parents were small farmers and cattle breeders. They gave me permission to finish my first year in secondary school before I had to leave in search of a husband. With us, girls would marry earlier when their parents were not rich....I married [Leonard] at the age of nineteen....

At that time, Nyamata was a small town of mud brick houses with sheet metal roofs. It was only in 1974 that the first solid houses were built. Leonard built his first house on our plot, then a warehouse in the high street, then new shops....

On the day the plane crashed, the Tutsis who lived in the town centre could no longer go out. Many people came seeking protection behind the solid brick wall around our house. Leonard had known several massacres in his youth and understood that the situation this time was catastrophic and advised young people to make tracks to Kayumba. But he himself did not want to flee, he said that his legs had already done enough running.

On the morning of the 11th of April, the first day of the massacres, the interahamwe turned up in a great uproar right in front of our gate. Leonard took the keys and went to open up without delay, thinking that in this way he could save the women and children. A soldier shot him dead without uttering one word. A mass of interahamwe came into the courtyard, they caught all the children they could, they laid them in rows on the ground, they began to cut them. They even killed a Hutu boy, the son of a colonel who was there with his friends. As for me, I managed to skirt around the house with my mother-in-law and we lay down behind piles of tyres. The killers stopped before the end, because they were in a great hurry to start looting....

In the courtyard there was a child who had not been killed. So I put a ladder up against the dividing wall, I climbed up with the child and jumped into our neighbour Florient's place....

Monsier Florient was a Hutu. He was head of military intelligence in the Bugesera, but had built his house on our plot and, before the war, we would speak to one another kindly, share good moments, our children ran around together in the courtyards. So he locked myself and the child up in his home, he gave us some food to eat and he went away....

That night he took us to a Hutu acquaintance of his who was hiding a small number of Tutsi acquaintances. One day, the interahamwe came knocking on the door to search the house....

Monsieur Florient came back and suggested: "We will put you in a sack and take you into the forest, then you will have to fend for yourself."....So I said to him: "Florient, I have two villas in Kigali, take them. The shop in the high street, I leave it to you. I will sign a paper granting you power of attorney over everything. But I want you to accompany me to Burundi."

We left - me lying down in an army van between the driver and Florient. I first stayed in his house at the military base at Gako. I was locked up in a bedroom. When everyone was asleep, someone brought me food. I only had a cloth on me. This lasted weeks, I do not know how long anymore. One night, a friend of Florient's came in. He explained: "The inkotanyi are coming at speed, we are going to evacuate the barracks. It's too awkward to keep you here. I have to take you away." He put me aboard a truck which delivered sacks to the front. We drove - all road blocks opened up for us - we entered a dark forest, the driver stopped beneath the trees....He said: "Marie-Louise, go straight as a die, and never stop. When the forest comes to an end, you will lay your hand on the Burundi frontier-post and on deliverance." I walked, I fell, I crawled on my hands and knees. When I came to the frontier-post, I heard voices calling out in the dark, I fell asleep.

Later, a Burundian associate of my husband came in a van to collect me from the refugee camp. When he looked at me, he did not recognize me. He did not even want to believe I was Leonard's wife. I had lost twenty kilos, I was wearing a cloth made of sacking, I had swollen feet, a head full of lice....

I returned to Nyamata at the end of the genocide in July. Not a single member of my family in Mugesera had survived, not a single member of my family in Nyamata either, the neighbouring folk were dead, the warehouse looted, the trucks stolen. I had lost everything. I was indifferent to life. Nyamata was very desolate, since all the roofs, all the doors and windows, had been taken off....

I came to the region in 1980, in the midst of migrations of Hutu compatriots, because my parents were getting thin on an all too crusty plot of land in Kibuye. Many Tutsis were already claiming the Bugesera for themselves but brand new plots were still being distributed to Hutus.

At the beginning of the war, I was in the fifth year of primary. At this time, we saw on the hill more and more young men with malicious faces, not all from the region. They entered Hutu houses without saying their names and stuffed themselves from our pots. When these interahamwe attacked the church at Nyamata, a small crowd formed and watched the killing....

On the second evening, some interahamwe returning from the church turned up at our house, and they chopped Papa with a machete, in front of Maman and neighbours. Papa was called Francois Sayinzoga, he was Tutsi....

As for us, we felt guilty for living in the midst of this blood lust: and we were truly very frightened by Papa's death. So we continued to scratch the fields in silence....

This is another truth of importance: the interahamwe wanted to kill all Tutsis married to Hutus, and even peaceful Hutus linked with Tutsis. After Papa's death, neighbouring folk hurled threats at me because I had Tutsi blood. So as not to be killed I considered myself Hutu, but I was frightened. So I fled with a Hutu to Kigali, leaving Maman and my brothers behind in the house. At the end of the great rains, as RPF rifles began to crackle in the outskirts of Kigali, we felt the war laying a hand upon us. Interahamwe killers came to loot the house, they took away all the utensils and furniture in their stampede. These evil-doers, who had drunk beer, forced me onto the bed and left me with a baby in the belly. It was in May, as I remember. A great disorder was spreading everywhere. Runaways were robbing from all sides; they screamed death and panic. All this frantic racing around heated the spirits. So I put on two sets of clothes, one over the other, and a sweater, and without thinking I rushed out and joined the fleeing scrum. We walked for at least six weeks, without stopping, because of all the alarming rumours.

All along the road as we went, it was said that a deadly danger was hot on our heels and must not catch up with us. Those who had money hidden got on trucks, the penniless walked. We were at the end of our tether, our legs and feet swelled up, the weakest let themselves drop by the wayside and died, the others walked on because of the evil pronouncements being made. It was often repeated that Ugandan soldiers would revenge their Rwandan brothers and that bad luck had switched camp. We ate bananas and manioc we had stolen from the fields....

Everywhere the chaos was the same. In June, we put in for a long stopover in Gisenyi, then we beat a retreat towards the Congo. Many Whites came to the roadside to watch us as we went. We were fugitives, we had come in for a very rough ride, and this was good enough for them. I was sent to the camp in Mugunga, some ten kilometres from Goma, where I lasted two years....

In the evening, by the fire, I suffered a great longing for the family plot in Maranyundo. I longed to return, but the interahamwe spread threats around the camp. All the time we believed we would be assailed from every direction because of the evil the interahamwe and the soldiers had done.

In November 1997, the banyamulinge guns drove us out of the camp. Tutsis from the Congo are called banyamulinge. It was early morning in the fog; a great stampede followed. I walked for days following a group through the mountans of Masisi. We fled, bogged down in fear, without knowing one another and without knowing our way. Guns raised, the banyamulinge encircled our group. A soldier persuaded me peace lay waiting for me in Rwanda, since I had not killed, and that I would find again the harmony of the old days in my home and in the fields.

So I went walking in the opposite direction, in the company of a traveller I met by chance. On the road home, no one spoke to anyone. I crossed the country without a word. I was questioned at the village. When I saw Maman and my brother alive, I finally felt my first hope. They had been back for a very long time, since they had not got as far into the Congo. With great joy, they took me back to the house....

My father owned eight cows, but he withdrew me from primary school because I was his fourth daughter. Pre-war I was thus an employee, indoors and outdoors, for cleaning or for chores in the fields....

When the plane dropped, I was a boyeste in Nyakabanda, a good neighbourhood in Kigali. The mistsress of the household, whose Christian name was Gloria, was Tutsi. Her husband, Joseph, was a very kind Hutu merchant. One day of the genocide the interahamwe opened the living-room door. The husband was away on a business trip in Kenya; his brother was unable to save the lady's life. The Interahamwe killed the family on the carpet. I was hiding on my belly in a box room. They did not search the house, because they had simply wished to get rid of the lady and her children in the husband's absence, and so they were satisfied.

An hour later, looters entered and surprised me in the house. They were preparing to cut me up on the spot when one of them, who answered to the first name of Callixte, protected me from his fellows. He was carrying a gun, he was the chief. He took me for his wife because he no longer had one. At his home, I heard through the doors that the killing programme was on schedule everywhere and that by the dry season there would not be a single Tutsi child left standing. So I said to myself that since God has so far authorized me to keep my life in hiding, then I should not waste it. Which is the reason why I never attempted to escape and run the risk of dying amongst other Tutsi.

I lived in Callixte's dwelling until the arrival of the inkotanyi in July. After this, he took me away on the distressing flight to the Congo, of which you have heard much news. We lived first in Gisenyi, under the protection of French soldiers, with some of Callixte's family. Then we travelled on to the Congo. We spent a year and a half in the camp at Mugunga. I was very confused by all the macabre rumours, and no longer expected anything from life. We lived in a tent. I was a wife for Callixte, who was never bad to me. The camp co-inhabitants knew I was Tutsi. They never dared say anything in front of Callixte, because he was an interahamwe of great importance, but when he went away on rounds of meetings, I heard malicious and upsetting gossip ring out. On a November day in 1996, I approached a gathering of white trucks belonging to a humanitarian organization. Whites were saying that whoever wanted to return to Rwanda had only to get aboard, it was free. Callixte had gone away on an expedition, I climbed up onto the skip along with a great many others. The truck drove as far as the border. New white trucks were waiting for us the other side of the barriers. In this way I took the road back to Nyamata....

First, Papa was deputy clerk in the administrative district of Kibwa, near Ruhengeri. He earned a good living, he was esteemed. Then in the night he was offloaded along with his family into the bush of Nyamata. Tutsis did not stop coming in from Byumba, Gikongoro, from everywhere - they helped frighten off the lions and elephants, they gathered under cardboard huts. This is how I came to be born on the hill of Ntarama.

As a little girl, I never knew what it was to be safe. When the inkotanyi from Burundi attacked Rwanda, the soldiers had to kill Tutsis, as punishment. Because the Bugesera shares a border with Burundi, they killed a more significant number here. Those killed were replaced by Hutu farmers soon afterwards. However, we lived cheek by jowl with them without trouble. I always had kind-hearted Hutu friends in our area.

The civil war embedded itself in the hills in the year 1991. In that year my first baby did not manage to come through, and he died in my belly because the road to the hospital was too risky. This was the beginning of very perilous political years, during which men let rip with joy in their hearts.

When finally the president's plane crashed, three years later, the radio stations forbade us to go out....

One day, the Hutus told us: "That's it, the killers are coming to get you." We took refuge in the Electrogaz factory....We set off again on the road to Kabgayi, my husband, my son, my newborn baby, two sisters, a little maid and me....

An overload of refugees was waiting for us in Kabgayi, and again we slept out under an open sky. Tutsi refugees fleeing the genocide in their districts were mixed with Hutu refugees fleeing the RPF as it advanced towards the border. So, one day, it had to happen: Hutu refugees started killing Tutsi refugees to interahamwe applause...

In the first days of the month of June it was Satan's turn to come to town. Here is what he ordered: every morning, soldiers would park a bus near the camp and make Tutsis get aboard. They started with important people - priests, nuns, teachers, businessmen. They took fifty passengers away into the bush and, in the evening, the bus came back empty. On the 29th of June, they put my husband aboard. His name was Jean de Dieu Nkurunziza, he was a brilliant intellectual and a very considerate man.

Ever since that day, every night when I find myself in bed, I think of him. Next I think of my mother, of my father, of my brothers and sisters, of my parents in law, of everyone who was killed. Then I think once more of my husband who is dead, until sleep is ready for me....

The genocide made me, at the age of twenty-seven, both a widow and orphan. One thing that makes me sadder than sad is that I do not know how my husband died and that I did not bury him. This is what disturbs me night and day. Because they made him get on a bus, and no one can tell me how he was killed. If I had seen him dead, if I had some clues as to his final journey, his last words for his family, if I had put him in a Christian grave, then perhaps his disappearance could be borne more easily.

Four days after his death, RPF troops came into Kabgayi. I returned to Ntarama along a sad road. Because the neighbours had been killed, because my two older brothers had gone, because the house had been burned down, because the bush had got the better of the fields, I decided to settle in Nyamata. Today, I would not wish to live a single morning in Ntarama, for fear of meeting up with memories.

In Nyamata too, the dead were on display on the ground when I arrived; at the church, in the middle of the streets, in the undergrowth, in every dwelling. If you went into the fields looking for something to eat, you tripped over corpses; the same for the forest trails. The air you breathed was thick with death....

I was born in the midst of two brothers and nine sisters. When we were small, we walked through the forest in a children's procession to the school in Cyugaro. On the benches, there was no place for ethnic responses. Even when there were disturbing massacres in the area around Rulindo, it was forbidden to swap testimonies amongst ourselves. Even if you could hear young men in battle training near the Akanyaru bridge, it was forbidden to express surprise. We wrapped our fears in leaves of silence.

The day the plane crashed, we huddled up in our houses; we could hear groups of interahamwe hunting from hill to hill, in an uproar. In the banana grove below the house, I heard news that they had killed our old neighbour, whose name was Candali. We immediately went down in a family procession to the church in Ntarama; supposedly Christians respected places of worship. We waited three days for spirits to calm down. We actually believed that we would soon be returning to our land, but this time the interahamwe came.

In a little church wood, they gathered a circle of young men; then they began to smash holes in the walls with grenades and they entered singing songs. At first we said to ourselves that they had gone mad. They were brandishing machetes or axes and spears and yelled: "Here we are, here we are, and this is how we prepare Tutsi meat."

Behind the church, the boldest amongst us slipped through the trees in the park. We ran without thinking and finally reached the marshes of Nyamwiza. That evening, the rain poured down incessantly, and we sought refuge in the school at Cyugaro, in the eucalyptus wood not far from the marshes. This was our route for a month; the marshes, school, the marshes....

The evening of the 30th of April, I discovered the bloody remains of Rosaline and Catherine, my two little sisters. That night, I was wild with grief. After this in the marshes wisdom sometimes took leave of me when I saw they had killed little children or close neighbours, or when I heard the groans of those who had been chopped.

I caught myself wishing to die. But I never got up out of my hiding place when I spied the hunters. When they came, I could not command my muscles, they refused to move. At the very last minute, they would not agree to my making a move so that a killer could come and slice my head off. Like other people you saw through the branches who could not stop themselves from raising a hand one last time over the head, fending off the machete blow which would have killed them straight off; even though, in doing so, the multiple wounds would make their suffering much longer lasting. In our deepest core is the will to survive that listens to no one.

When the inkotanyi freed us one afternoon, they escorted us - a flock of filth - to Nyamata. I can find no other words. I was dressed like a thief, in rags and scraps of fabric scratched by branches. We walked in a slow-motion dream because although we were walking in broad daylight, we did not run for fear of being chopped down.

In the evening, in Nyamata, some young men caught a goat, lit a fire and handed me a kebab. So I tasted grilled meat again - I took my time, ate very slowly; I calmly lay down on a mattress, closed my eyelids, then I felt that once again I was myself.

I lasted three months in the camp. I was nearly empty of ideas, I could no longer feel my intelligence working. Above all, I dozed. The liberators told us that the threat of massacres had gone away from our lives forever, that we had won....

It is a fact that the genocide in our country began on the 11th of April at eleven in the morning and ended on the 14th of May at two in the afternoon. I was in my eighth and final year at school in Nyirarukobwa when it hit us....

Before the fatal month of April, our farmers were concerned about the evil ear of war. When we went to draw water, we heard Hutu neighbours spicing up their conversations in this way: "The Tutsis have started to crawl like snakes, they will end up beneath our feet" and other such intimidations. Joyful troops were chanting threats on the road. In their hands I saw shining machetes which had never got dirty in a banana grove, so I expected the situation would rapidly deteriorate.

When news came of the plane crash, I joined some fugitives in the forest of Kinkwi. We tried to defend ourselves by throwing stones. But our courage deserted us and we left the land and took refuge with everyone else in the church. When the first grenade exploded, I was most fortunately near the back door, and I managed to slip away. I knew that the hills were overrun by interahamwe, so without turning back I ran for the marshes. I could hear other fugitives in the thicket. We knew about the marshes by reputation. We had never gone there before because of the mosquitoes, snakes and the mistrust they cast as far as the eye can see. That day, without slowing our pace a single step, we belly-flopped into the mud.

That night, the eucalyptus forest seemed quiet, so we walked to Cyugaro. Little by little, the luckiest fugitives from the banana groves joined us. Our survival routine repeated itself. At dawn, we went down into the marshes and squeezed our way through the papyrus. So as to avoid dying all together, we split up into small teams. We put three children here, two children further on, two more in another place. We multiplied our chances, we curled up in a sleeping position in the mud, wrapping ourselves in leaves. Before the attackers arrived, we swapped ideas to give fear the slip; afterwards we would not even be able to whisper. We drank marsh water full of mud. It was fortified, pardon the expression, by the blood of corpses....

Some days, the Hutus would work mainly on the other side of the marsh, so we were able to chat and eat a little scrap of survival. The next day, they would work very hard on our side; so we did not even dare breathe and the children risked being devoured by hunger....

On the 30th of April precisely, they came down from every road. They attacked from all sides, they formed a very excited mob; they had a vast programme of killing which would go on all day without a midday break. That evening, there were thousands of corpses and dying people, in the bottom of the ponds, all over the place. I was so dejected I thought about forgetting myself lying in the marsh water, but I still did not dare wait for the machete....

Only once did I return to the marshes with a girlfriend to see these mud hiding places where we lived in the ponds where all these neighbours expired. Then I simply never went back....

For the journey we assembled three or four families in a large vehicle and we followed the road for Kirundo. June was coming to an end. I was a survivor from Butare, but I did not carry along with me the hope that I could go on all the way home, because the killings had not ended there.

In those days, it was still unthinkable to travel to whichever district you wanted. So we crossed the Bugesera, which I did not know. It was the first region which was slightly safe, because the genocide there had been interrupted [by the inkotanyi]. It looked like a great desert. We still could not go off into the surrounding area though, and passengers who strayed, for instance, from the main road to look for food in the fields, had to be accompanied, for fear of marauding interahamwe.

When we arrived in Nyamata, we could go no further; we were dropped off at the town hall....

I had travelled with my husband, my two children, little brothers and sisters and a newborn brought into the world during the genocide. The first three months in Nyamata, I stayed at home, hardly ever going out, taken up with household chores. Life was very difficult because there was nothing. You could spend four or five hours and still not find a full bucket of drinking water; the same for food, the same for wood....

I left many acquaintances behind me, very close ones. I am sometimes stricken by grief, but never remorse. My parents died on the 8th of April, and I didn't even hear of it at the time because I could not open my front door. The day we escaped, I watched many people dying in our wake. And I am alive, and I do not blame myself....

Deep down inside me, nothing important has changed. My life was diverted, the people in the neighbourhood are no longer the same, my work is not that which I studied for, but I still want to be the same person. I do not seek within the genocide excuses for giving up, for excusing myself. I do not know if you can understand.

In Butare, I remember the French soldiers, sweating in their new jogging suits early in the morning. On the first days of the genocide, they took off, driving all the Whites before them. What were they doing here, if they could not handle their guns? Why did they do a runner, if they knew nothing? I do not know why, but I know that the Whites never wanted to open both eyes to see the genocide.

Television cameramen and journalists came and travelled around. They watched but all they saw were extraordinary events, if I can put it like this. They saw columns of Hutus moving on the roads to the Congo and they commented: "Look at them, here are victims of war escaping death." They saw the army of the RPF marching and they explained: "These are Tutsi soldiers winning the ethnic war and chasing Hutus out." But as for the people who had hidden in the marsh sludge, in ceilings, at the bottom of well holes, not even able to move an inch for weeks - no one was worried about them. On the television screens, the reporters said: "Those who have not been killed are the people now fleeing on the long roads to the camps," and in the end they completely forgot the survivors of the Tutsi massacres....

RPF INKOTANYI WEBSITE

PRAY DON'T BE NEUTRAL (reader says Kagame's RPA stopped the genocide and will 'neutralize' ex-FAR/Interahamwe who are still trying)

NEUTRAL NOT RWANDA REPEAT

Reader says Kagame and the RPA didn't stop the genocide in Rwanda

RWANDA LIBERATION DAY 2006

READING ON RWANDA