Articles

Rwandans See Justice in Bullets Firign Squads Claim 22 Genocide Leaders

Neely Tucker, Free Press Foreign Correspondent - April 25, 1998 Saturday

The firing squad took no chances.

Six executioners in a white van came through the angry crowd of 30,000 people jammed around a red dirt soccer field. They stopped 30 feet from where four condemned prisoners stood lashed to stakes.

Then, pressing the barrels of their assault rifles against the four, they fired again and again. The crowd roared approval.

With that, the first of Friday's 22 public executions were carried out. The condemned were among 112 Hutu sentenced to death for their roles in a 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 rival Tutsi and moderate Hutu in this central African nation. More than 130,000 are still awaiting trial.

Many countries conduct public executions, but most don't open them to the news media as Rwanda did. Rwanda had waited four years to see its tormentors punished. The day was charged with anticipation.

The executions, carried out at five sites around the country, were cause for school holidays, public celebrations and a near-stampede for spaces at the Kigali killing field.

About 15 miles to the south, at Nyamata, the site of one of the conflict's worst massacres, schoolgirls in blue skirts and white blouses brought their textbooks as they came to watch the executions.

"This is a great day," said Jacqueline Mukamukaragye, 36, whose husband was killed by one of the condemned in Kigali. "Wherever my husband's soul is, he must like this."

At the soccer field in the capital, the executioners shoved open the door to their van at 10:49 a.m.

The crowd, mostly male and mostly Tutsi, pushed for a better view. Police beat them back with sticks. Boys ran to the trees behind the crowd and scrambled up the trunks and out onto the limbs. Six executioners stepped out of the van, black masks over their faces.

The prisoners, three men and one woman, were lashed to stakes. All were well-known radical Hutu leaders who had urged their ethnic kin to slaughter Tutsi.

The four wore bright pink prison pajamas, shorts that stopped at the knee. Each had a white cloth tied around the chest. A black rectangle marked the heart. A black hood was draped over the head. Each was tied at the feet, legs, waist, chest and neck. The only things that moved were their toes, which twitched, and the black hoods, which sucked in and billowed out with each breath.

The condemned made no sounds.

The executioners went to work. One man led the others. He sprinted toward the prisoner tied at the far left. He put the barrel of his AK47 against the man's chest and pulled the trigger. There was a flat "pop" and a bloody hole opened on the white cloth. The executioner moved the rifle slightly and pulled the trigger again, and then again and again. The toes stopped twitching.

The crowd cheered. The other executioners moved in. They worked from left to right. They shot at point-blank range, into the heart, the stomach, the head.

They took turns shooting Froduard Karamira, once the vice president of the most radical Hutu party.

They shot Elie Nshiniyinana, the former minister of agriculture, and Silas Munyagishary, a former director of the Kigali prosecutor's office.

They saved the woman for last.

She was Virginie Mukankusi. She once was a school inspector in Kigali. During the genocide, she helped round up Tutsi children to be killed.

The crowd roared with delight.

"That's the way they killed my family," shouted one man. "This cannot satisfy me! This can never satisfy me! They killed nearly a million of us and we are supposed to be happy with four of them?"

Other soldiers began to untie the bodies, which slumped forward as each rope was unlashed, until they sprawled, still bleeding, onto the ground. The corpses were loaded onto cots and taken away.

"I don't like to feel happy when people are suffering or even being killed," said Yvonne Batamuriza, 18. "But my mother, father, two sisters and my other brother were murdered. I was raped and forced to be a Hutu soldier's wife. I was 14. And I have to tell you, despite my prayers over the past four years, that today, after watching this, is the first moment I have felt at peace."

The international community was not swayed by such emotion, and a range of governments and organizations pleaded with the Rwandan government to stop the executions.

"Revenge is not justice," said Marc Saghie, an Africa specialist for the human rights group Amnesty International, who said several of the trials were not conducted properly.

U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin had urged the government to stay the executions pending appeals, and Pope John Paul II asked Rwanda President Pasteur Bizimungu to show mercy.

But few Rwandans were troubled by such appeals. They said international war crimes tribunals, whether for the war in Bosnia or for the Rwandan conflict, have been too slow. The Rwandan courts heard about 330 cases last year and have handed down 112 death sentences.

It was also noted that other countries carry out death sentences in public. In China, Amnesty International estimated there were more than 4,300 executions in 1996, many of them in public.

"We are not sadists, but we have had a legacy of political ruthlessness and now justice must be done," said Cabo Ninyetegeka of the president's office. "We didn't hear the pope asking for forgiveness then, in 1994," scoffed Patrick Mazimhaka, the Rwandan minister of state.