RWANDA: The government is eager to move on but many can't forget the horror of Rwanda 10 years ago, writes Declan Walsh in Gikongoro.
It is a hill like any other in rural Rwanda. Proud, curvy-horned cattle ramble along a twisting dirt road.
Further up the slope there are thick banana plantations, and dozens of simple, mud-walled dwellings. Some house the survivors of the demonic genocide that blazed across these hills 10 years ago. Others hold the killers that carried it out.
Virginie Mujawayezo, a 25-year-old Tutsi, stood in her living room, nursing her baby. A decade ago she managed to skirt the bloodthirsty Hutu militias rampaging through the area. The rest of her family was not so lucky.
"The killers came with machetes. When I got home, everyone was dead except my mother," she said.
Two men, who were released from jail last year, live further up the hill. The government let them go for pleading guilty to genocide crimes and saying they have repented. Virginie cannot believe them.
"It's impossible to forgive them," she said, her infant baby suckling at her breast. "It's been 10 years now. They should have asked us for forgiveness a long time ago."
Next Wednesday Rwanda commemorates the start of the 1994 genocide. Foreign heads of state and diplomats will flood to the capital, Kigali, for solemn ceremonies to mark the largest, swiftest human slaughter of the late 20th century, which the West failed to stop.
Today the Tutsi-dominated government preaches a message of ethnic reconciliation. But on hills like this one, in the southern province of Gikongoro, division still runs deep and the wounds of heart and soul are bitterly raw.
Some of the earliest and most brutal massacres of 1994 took place in this area. Officials, army officers and simple farmers armed with nothing more than a farm hoe massacred tens of thousands of Tutsis. The victims' remains are still on display in Murambi, a local school that serves as a grim memorial to the slaughter. Over 3,000 suspected perpetrators are crammed into the jail across the valley, awaiting trials that may never take place in Rwanda's overburdened judicial system.
Last year the government released 28,000 prisoners from jails around the country to help relieve the pressure. Among them was 54-year-old farmer Vincent Seruvumba, who returned to his home on the hill a few hundred metres above Virginie Mujawayezo.
Yesterday morning the bare-footed farmer sat on the hillside and denied he had killed anyone. "I saw a baby being killed at a roadblock. They used a hoe. But I didn't take part," he said, eyes darting back and forth as he spoke.
His Tutsi neighbours had nothing to be afraid of, he said. "Things are much better now. There are no more problems. We can even drink together in the same bars." But down the hill, another survivor said she lived in fear of men like Vincent. Florien Mukarubuga said her husband and three children were beaten to death with hoes. "To tell you the truth, when the prisoners were released I was terrified," she said.
On the surface Rwanda has made near miraculous progress in the past decade. President Paul Kagame's government has secured the country, and millions of euro in foreign aid. Ethnicity has become a taboo subject in Kigali, where most Rwandans studiously avoid disclosing their tribe.
But under the surface, bitter divisions continue to fester. "Everything looks good on the surface but it's a pretence. Rwandans are very good at hiding things," said Father Nicky Hennity, an Irish missionary based in Gikongoro.
Tutsi survivors feel let down by the government. There has been no compensation for the killings. One third of the 90,000 genocide suspects are due to be released in June, theoretically to be judged in the Gacaca courts, a traditional justice system. But so far Gacaca has started in just 10 per cent of communities. And most suspects, such as Vincent, will return to hillside communities where they will live cheek by jowl beside survivors of their crimes.
The Hutu community also feels aggrieved, particularly by the Tutsi-led government's authoritarian tendencies. In last year's presidential elections, the main opposition candidate - a Hutu - was harassed, his supporters intimidated and ballot stuffing was rife. Mr Kagame took an incredible 96 per cent of the vote. He claimed it was a reflection of his popularity; critics feared it signalled a slide towards autocracy.
The government refuses to acknowledge Tutsi reprisals against Hutus in the wake of the genocide - estimated by some historians to account for 450,000 deaths in Rwanda and Congo - and has blocked Tutsi officers from being called before the war crimes tribunal in Tanzania.
Nearly all critical voices have been stifled, and the state security services maintain an iron grip on the few dissidents. Last week Robert Sebufirira, editor of the few independent newspapers, Umuseso, fled Rwanda after being visited by unidentified state security agents. He told researchers with a western human rights group that he was taken to a forest, tied to a tree and told that that was the place where he would die. Mr Sebufirira is currently seeking political asylum in Tanzania.
Western donors, who prop the Rwandan economy up, usually turn a blind eye to such abuses. They argue that President Kagame is stewarding the country through a transition from mayhem to democracy. But some fear the repressive measures are preventing an open discussion of the past, potentially with violent consequences.
"People are keeping a lot of anger inside. And if it is not managed positively, it could explode in a very destructive way," said Father Hennity.
The commemoration will also be a time of guilty reflection for the West.
Arriving this weekend is Lt Gen Romeo Dallaire, the courageous Canadian UN commander who sent frantic cables to New York begging for help in April 1994 - assistance that never came. Instead the UN mission was reduced from 2,500 troops to 270.
Documents released this week prove that President Clinton was aware of the genocide from an early stage, but refused to raise his voice in case American soldiers would be forced to intervene.
But on the rural hillsides, the historical arguments count for nothing. What matters now is piercing the sour veil of silence surrounding the slaughter, to make sure it doesn't happen again.