Kigali has pulled itself out of abyss but still lives on edge

WELCOME to Kigali Frontiersville, Rwanda home of soldiers, spies, arms dealers, sanctions busters, squatters, thieves and assassins. A town, which has pulled itself out of the abyss hut still lives on the edge.

For it isn't just aid workers and missionaries who have been drawn to the Central African state since 800,000 people died in the genocide of 1994. The planes arriving at Kigali's airport, where bullet holes still decorate the walls and windows, carry a variety of people who smell profit or most plain excitement in the precarious existence Rwanda offers.

The bars of the capital hum to the daily round of rumours and news. Mostly, the diet is a drip feed of stories about rural atrocities. This week, for example, more than 20 people died in Kibuye, to the east, in an attack on genocide survivors. Three more were killed in Gisenyi by a renegade band based in a nearby forest.

In the same area, western human rights monitors were roughed up by an armed gang. Just across the border in Burundi, more than 100 returned refugees were massacred.

Over big bottles of Mutzig or Primus beer, expatriates try to guess the government's intentions. They want to throw all foreign workers out of the country. They're backed by American military advisers. They're leading the rebels in eastern Zaire. Whatever the rumour, the only certainty is that the rnuzungus (swahili for whites) are the last to know when anything goes wrong.

The locals are also living on the edge. Many of them are squatters who took over houses vacated when the refugees fled two years ago. Any day now, they may have to give them back. But there's nowhere else to go, so what's the point in worrying?

Out on the streets, soldiers barely out of short trousers keep the peace. By dusk, the banana beer is flowing and the army checkpoints grow more sullen.

There was a military coup in Burundi last June, and so international sanctions were imposed. But the talk around Kigali is of nightly convoys travelling down to cross the border only three hours away.

The arms dealers are here too, doing a brisk trade from their temporary offices in luxury hotels. Out in eastern Zaire, a machine gun can be had for $40, grenades for a fraction of that. With a little help from the Rwandan army, Laurent Kabila's rebels in eastern Zaire now control an area maybe six times the size of Rwanda itself.

The so called Democratic Republic of the former Congo (exZaire) urgently needs cash to buy oil, food, arms. It has captured gold mines and other natural resources. Not surprisingly, the commodity traders in Kigali are interested.

The profits are potentially enormous, but so are the risks. With the Zairean army, aided probably by mercenaries, intending to counter attack any day now, such deals are not for the faint of heart. Who remembers Biafra, Katanga?

For all its poverty, Rwanda is a highly organised, intrusive state. The government's officials keep a close eye on what is going on. Even expatriates are not immune from this paranoia. Aid agency staff are treated with suspicion if they have worked previously with the Hutu refugees in the camps.

The Milles Collines is the best known address in Kigali; a luxury hotel with lousy food and an even lousier past. It was not spared the horrors of the genocide. Victims were made to swim in the outdoor pool until they died of exhaustion. Later other Tutsis were just killed and their bodies dumped in the pool.

Many Tutsis took refuge in the hotel, protected from those baying for blood outside by only a handful of UN troops. The dramatic events of spring 1994 are recounted in the book, Season of Blood, by Fergal Keane of the BBC. Keane was back in Rwanda this week for the first time since 1994 to make a television documentary on the changes which have occurred.

Today, hotel guests placidly back stroke up and down the pool. But the sight of a staff member scrubbing away a stain on the carpet is still enough to make you shudder. When I was there, tinny loudspeakers were playing the usual muzak. Hotel California came on, with lines like "you can check out any time you like but you can never leave", and "they stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast". I left.

By night, the main business now in the hotel bar is prostitution. As a result, one Irish visitor rechristened the hotel the Milles Cailini. Another visitor to the Milles Collines back in 1994 was Froduald Karamira, whose trial for orchestrating the genocide began this week. Karamira was a Tutsi turned Hutu zealot, who tried to persuade the Tutsi businessmen holed up inside the hotel to come out (to certain death) and to call on the RPA to halt its advance.

A wealthy businessman and politician himself, Karamira also used his gifts as a propagandist on Radio Milles Collines, a virulent, hate mongering station which incited Hut us to kill Tutsis.

He was on the radio again this week, but only because the national radio station broadcast the first day of his trial live. Karamira will probably make his last programme in a fortnight, when he is likely to receive the death penalty as one of the ring leaders of the genocide.

Come the end of the week in Kigali, it's time to unwind. The most popular stop is probably the Cadilliac night club, which plays a mixture of Zairean pop and American soul. Or, for those with a total regard for history, across the road is Kigali Nights, which stayed open for the duration of the genocide.

A BBC foreign correspondent testified yesterday that she saw a pile of bodies "like a mountain" in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, at the start of the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutu militia and mobs in 1994.

Lindsey Hilsum was testifying at the UN tribunal for Rwanda, which is hearing cases against key suspects behind the genocide of Tutsis and killings of Hutus.

Hilsum was one of the few correspondents in Kigali on April 6th, 1994, when the mass killings began. She told the court she saw around 500 bodies outside Kigali central hospital.

"There was a big pile like a mountain outside and these were bodies with slash wounds with heads smashed in, many of them were naked," she said.

Hilsum, the prosecution's fifth witness and the second expert to testify, did not mention in her testimony the accused, Mr Jean Paul Akayesu. But her evidence is key to the prosecution, which must prove Mr Akayesu (43) participated.

Mr Akayesu, the former mayor of Rwanda's central Taba commune, has pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. If convicted he faces life imprisonment, the tribunal's highest penalty.

Hilsum said on the evening of April 6th she heard two loud explosions coming from the direction of the airport and later learned that President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane had been shot down. She said soldiers prevented her from leaving her house for more than a day after April 6th, but she finally ventured out in a car.

"I knew I had to get out and see with my own eyes what was happening," said Hilsum, who arrived in Rwanda in February 1994 on contract with the UN Children's Fund. During a tour of the city she followed up reports of killings close to a depot for the Belgium Red Cross and found corpses by a house guarded by two soldiers.

Hilsum's testimony on Kigali followed evidence by a doctor for the aid agency Medecius sans Frontieres who said he saw hundreds of corpses and scores of killings in southern Rwanda in April 1994.