Sixty men are waiting to die in Rwanda's overcrowded prisons. They await the result of appeals against the death penalty for crimes relating to genocide. It is unlikely that any of them will win their appeals.
Froduald Karamira was one of those who died in the first round of executions a couple of months ago. I met him in January last year. His name carries no resonance in Britain, but in Rwanda he was infamous. He was a successful politician and businessman and his voice was hardly ever off Rwandan radio in the run-up to the genocide of 1994. As the Tutsis invaded he asked people to "clear up" the villages. His compatriots took Karamira at his word. "Cut down the tall trees," urged the extremist Radio Milles Collines. Villagers took their tools and cut down their tall Tutsi neighbours.
I visited Karamira in Kigali Central Prison. (We were making a Panorama programme.) Karamira's hut was set apart from those accused of lower level genocide crimes. He looked at me with intelligent yellowing eyes. "You say you want to set up an interview with the BBC about the killings. I am not a killer. There was no genocide." As he talked, the centre of gravity in the prison switched towards the small hut. It felt as if 7,000 men who might have killed were listening in on our conversation. He agreed to the interview and I shook his hand as I left. The last time I saw him he was on trial for his life. I was certain that he would die.
When I heard that Karamira had been executed on a hillside outside Kigali, I felt nothing. When I heard that the UN had tried to intervene to stop the executions, I wondered what the reaction was to such efforts in Rwanda. During three months in 1994, between 500,000 and 1m people were killed in Rwanda. Four months before the genocide the UN commander on the ground had told his superiors that intelligence suggested a forthcoming genocide. The UN did nothing-then scaled down as the killing got under way.
Even a year later, the UN showed scant interest in the genocide. Boutros Boutros-Ghali had flown over Rwanda in 1995 while being filmed for a series about the UN. He hadn't wanted to interrupt his tour of Africa, but was prevailed upon to touch down at the tiny village of Nyarubuye. He spent 18 minutes there, guarded by western guns; then left.
Nyarubuye was one of the places Panorama had visited in 1994. There Fergal Keane had interviewed Valentina, a fragile girl of 14 whose mother, father, sister and brother had been killed in the genocide. She had lain for two days near the body of her sister, who was cut down by a machete. Valentina survived a machete blow to her own head; three of her fingers were cut off.
In 1997 we went back to look at the bigger political picture. But when we found Valentina again, we decided to tell her story and that of others in the village: the accused, the survivors and the dead. The local prosecutor showed me the file on Nyarubuye, one of 100 on his shelves. The massacre there lasted four days. It started at the market place. Just after 9am, local youths turned up, some hanging off a motorbike, others in an open truck. They were mostly between 16 and 19, armed with clubs and machetes. They cut down their neighbours in the market place. They went home for lunch. After lunch they killed those who showed some movement and knocked off work at 5pm. All of Valentina's family died that day-apart from her and her sister. The next day the youths moved to the church and cut down the survivors who had taken sanctuary there. Valentina's sister raised her head and was killed. At least 760 people died in Nyarubuye.
The trials of those accused in Nyarubuye have not yet all taken place. They wouldn't make the news here. But when the killers come to die, I expect Valentina to attend the public executions. "Those who killed must die themselves," she said in her interview. Will that be an end to her horror? We can't tell.
Rwanda is contaminated by death. Bodies were underneath each banana tree, on each dusty red road, even floating in the swimming pool of the main hotel in the capital. The cruelty which swept across Rwanda is hard to imagine. In the archive library of Rwanda's television station, there is a tape. The first shot on the tape is a long, shaky tracking shot along a row of bodies on a road in central Kigali. Then the camera stops. The cameraman gets out of his car-something no western crew did during the massacre: it was too dangerous. He frames his shot. A woman in a yellow dress, dying, on camera. He cuts away to her matching wrap, soaked in blood. He frames a close-up of her face, gasping for breath. The sound is good; the pictures are well shot. Shamin, Rwanda television's newsreader explained to me that the tape was to be used for a "documentary" which would have encouraged the killing to continue. The rebels reached the television station before it could be edited.
When the executions start again, so will the protests from the west. In the settled world in which we live, there can be no justification for the use of the death penalty. But it is not hard to see why in a place like Rwanda, traumatised by genocide, and bruised by international inertia, people feel it necessary to execute the perpetrators of genocide in public.
