Stench of death remains to remind us

TWO years after the genocide, the stench of death still hangs heavy over the simple red brick church at Ntarama, one hour south of Rwanda's capital, Kigali.

The pews are a fetid mess of bones and skulls and rags, all that remains of up to 5,000 Tutsi peasants who were massacred here by their Hutu neighbours on one terrible day in April 1994.

Outside, hundreds more skulls are neatly stacked on a shelf in rows. Machete blows have sundered many of them. The victims include children and women, their skulls smaller than the others, still covered by tattered headscarves.

"You should smell it when the rains come," says Alphonse Mihayo, a Tutsi who lost many family members in the killings and has returned from Zaire to work with Trocaire in Kigali.

The dirt track back to the capital is lined with mass graves of Tutsis who died during the 10 weeks of frenzied bloodletting in 1994. On a hilltop over Kigali lie the tombs of moderate Hutu ministers of the old regime, who were murdered for daring to support power sharing with the minority Tutsis.

Everywhere, the houses are empty and the fields overgrown; we pass the district of Kazenza, where out of 50,000 Tutsis only five survived the massacres, according to Mihayo. The death toll throughout Rwanda was at least 500,000.

The horrific images carried by the international media at the time dovetailed with popular Western prejudices about modern Africa: a place where tinpot dictators lord it over starving peoples riven by tribal warfare. As an explanation of the Rwandan tragedy, this was both misleading and incomplete.

Rwanda is no basket case. True, it is densely populated about eight million people in a country the size of Munster. Yet the land is fertile and the country self sufficient in food. Dense plantations of banana, matoke, coffee, tea, sorghum and maize cover its verdant slopes. In comparison with its neighbours, Uganda and Zaire, Rwanda is wealthy - the main roads are better, the shops have more to offer.

In the days before the genocide, this land earned a variety of nicknames any tourist board would envy - "the land of a thousand lakes", "the Switzerland of Africa", "the land of the spring".

Moreover, at least some of the roots of the country's ethnic conflict are European. Belgian colonists developed the myth of the Tutsis as "black Aryans", a race supposedly noble enough to run the country for their white masters. Meanwhile, the Hutu majority was described - and treated - as no better than peasant savages.

Unfortunately, as in so many other African states, the "divide and rule" philosophy of the colonists survived long after they had packed up and gone home.

Yet even Rwandans have difficulty distinguishing between Hutus and Tutsis. Generations of intermingling and inter marriage have muddied the differences to the extent that the old racial cliche's no longer apply. The roots of the problem lie in the wild exploitation of the peasantry - both Hutu and Tutsi - by controlling cliques of various hues during the country's history.

Today Rwanda remains tense, its people uncertain whether peace will last. The jails are full, but the 70,000 Hutus suspected of organising the massacres remain untried. More than 800,000 Tutsis have returned from exile many of them now squatting in houses vacated by Hutus who fled from the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). More than 2.5 million Hutus now live outside the country; the wealthy have taken their booty to Kenya or France, but the peasant masses are housed in refugee camps across the border in Zaire and Tanzania.

The RPF says it wants the refugees to come home, but so far there are few takers. Meanwhile, the militias which organised the massacres are again recruiting and drilling in the camps.

More than $600 million has been pledged in aid, yet the international aid agencies are starting to pull out. Already, their number has fallen from 200 to about 120 today and more - including Goal - are set to leave shortly.

The RPF talks of national reconciliation - the ethnic identity cards introduced by the Belgians in the 1920s have been "dropped, for example - yet the government is clearly Tutsi controlled. Outsiders see signs of growing patronage in the new regime and the army has been accused of collaborating in killings.

However, claims in the French media that up to 100,000 Hutus have been killed since 1994 are largely dismissed by international observers. Not surprisingly, the French, who backed the old regime up to the last moment, are deeply unpopular in Rwanda today, so much so that English is rapidly supplanting French as the main European language in use in the country.

"Never again" the world said after the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust were uncovered. The reaction to the Rwandan genocide has been quite different; during the killings, the small UN force in the country followed orders to do.

And since then, neither UN nor the neighbouring African states have shown much appetite for intervening militarily to prevent more bloodletting.

It's not surprising, therefore, that an air of pessimism pervades Rwanda. The last time, people are heard to say, they killed with clubs and machetes; this time, both sides could end up using machine guns and grenades.

Add to this the troubling scenario unfolding in neighbouring Burundi, where another Tutsi controlled regime is under attack from well organised Hutti rebels, and the prospects seem even grimmer.

Instead of running away from the problem - in spite of its complexity and intractability - the international community should surely be thinking of intervening. The massacres of two years ago left a stain of shame in humanitarian politics, but the price of doing nothing now could be even greater.