The villa which serves as the Giterama office of the Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda was firmly locked; what post there was had been pushed under the door. At the gate, the United Nations flag hung tattered and limp.
"I guess it's a bit symbolic," says Geoff Peterson, investigations officer for Giterama province with HRFOR when I visited earlier this year.
Since February 1997, when five of his colleagues were murdered in the east of Rwanda, Peterson was confined to base in the capital Kigali and only travelled to Giterama during the day.
But extreme danger was only one of the problems that beset HRFOR, the largest UN human rights mission in the world. Conceived as a seeker of truth in the killing fields of central Africa, HRFOR became mired in criticism both internal and external.
The Rwandan government castigated its staff as incompetent busy-bodies, not surprising considering that HRFOR reports blamed the Rwandan army for the majority of the 6,000 killings it documented last year.
But Mary Robinson, who as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has overall responsibility for HRFOR, also criticised her own force. Last December, she came to Rwanda to tell her staff they had failed to facilitate an improvement in the human rights situation in the country.
The row made a difficult job even harder. Investigators like Peterson found themselves working in a land where secrecy and rumour go hand in hand. Vast cultural, political, linguistic and economic divides have to be bridged in order to get to the truth.
There is little tradition of human rights activism, and few independent political organisations to work with.
Peterson described his work as "a bit like journalism. You have to ask questions, find sources, evaluate information. The key is to talk to as many different sources as possible."
Giterama province borders on the unstable north-east, where the Tutsi-dominated army is locked in conflict with Hutu rebels. Its northern communes were always out of bounds for HRFOR, even during the day.
But throughout the province, both sides are locked in a battle for the hearts and minds of the local population, marked by acts of terror and assassination.
Peterson tried to get out and about as much as possible, using trusted interpreters to talk to the local farmers. "You have to be pro-active, because people are not going to take the risk of coming to you."
On the day I visited, he began his work with a courtesy visit to the local army commander. "We're generally not liked. They frequently accuse us of taking the other side. I just hope that although they may not like what I do, they may respect me."
Then we moved on to the local hospital, which had been run by a Croatian priest until he was murdered the previous week. Each ward is a litany of the human rights abuses committed in Rwanda; here a roomful of victims with machete wounds, there the operating theatre where patients are having bullets removed. But it also provided Peterson with a good starting-point to begin his investigations.
On bed 13, a tiny woman sits hunched and shivering, a head bandage covering the injuries inflicted in a machete attack nearby. It seems her husband was arrested in an army sweep on suspicion of assisting the rebels. She was then attacked by the rebels to discourage her husband from talking.
Peterson sits beside the woman on the bed and holds her hands.
Gently he starts to probe, through an interpreter. After a time, the woman begins her story: "It was about 1 a.m. when they came banging on the door. They carried machetes and they wanted money . . . "
This is the stuff of human rights investigations, a gradual piecing together of the facts, at the same time discarding the rumours, lies, exaggerations and false trails which crop up so often. Once Peterson has enough information about a particular incident, he goes to the authorities with it, but never before.
"If you get good information, you feel like a detective or a bloodhound. But sometimes, it feels like you are just chronicling all the horrors that humans can inflict on each other. You worry about it all becoming a form of war pornography."
"But you have to keep your sense of outrage at the violence, and not to say that this is `just Rwanda' or `just another cycle of violence'," he added.
Communications between Rwanda and Geneva were poor and HRFOR was probably the only UN department without email facilities. "It's as though headquarters don't care about us," he remarked.
HRFOR lacked the freedoms enjoyed by groups like Amnesty International. Under the UN charter, it had to work with the government. Its reports also took months to come out, by which time the conflict had moved onto new atrocities.
Yet Peterson is an old-style idealist who hopes his work can have a "damping effect" on the excesses of both government and the rebels. "I believe in universal values, in the rule of law as the only way we'll get along in this crowded world. I guess it's kind of secular religion."
Geoff Peterson and his colleagues in HRFOR pulled out of Rwanda last July after UNHCHR and the Rwandan government failed to agree on continuing their mandate.