A bony-faced warden stands before Gikongoro prison, a citadel-like hilltop complex in southern Rwanda. There is just one entrance in the redbrick wall. The warden opens a padlock, pulls the bolt, and the gates swing open into a heaving, clammy warren of 4,000 suspected murderers, writes Declan Walsh
The walls are dirty, dark and greasy. A sea of prisoners is crammed into a narrow passageway.
Hundreds of eyes turn in unison towards the rare visitors. Almost all are standing because there is nowhere to sit. Only the sick are stretched out; feverish men whose eyes are heavy with malaria.
Around the corner are the sleeping quarters, a rabbit-hutch of wooden cubicles. Each coffin-sized space sleeps two men. Next door is the shower room, where the handpainted sign says "No urinating here". A dozen men stand naked in the concrete cubicles, cupping water from a bucket. One wears fluorescent rosary beads around his neck. There are four washing spaces for 1,107 prisoners on this block.
Irish missionary Fr Nicky Hennity passes through the wretched prison, pausing to exchange greetings in Kinyarwanda, the national language. The softly-spoken Kiltegan Father was sent to Rwanda just months after the genocide, when blood streamed down the hills with the slaughter of more than 500,000 people. A decade later, the Co Down man is still grappling with its terrible consequences. These men living in this wretched prison have been accused of leading the killing, but some are also his parishioners. And one is his colleague.
Fr Thaddée Rusingizandekwe sits under a home-made wooden cross in a small room at the centre of the jail. He rises with a smile to greet Fr Hennity, and the two men bump their heads together in a traditional mark of friendship and respect. The 52-year-old priest wears a blue wool scarf over his pink prisoner's uniform. "Another bout of malaria," he explains.
Fr Thaddée, as he is widely known, stands accused of some of the most serious charges ever levelled against a Catholic cleric. At the height of the genocide in April 1994 a Hutu militia encircled Kibeho church, 40 km south of Gikongoro. Then, armed with machetes and guns, they attacked for hours, slaughtering thousands of Tutsi refugees sheltering inside. Fr Thaddée is alleged to have been among the killers. "I personally saw \ with a gun at the church dressed in shorts and banana leaves," one woman told the organisation African Rights. "I saw him kill." Fr Thaddée, who was arrested a decade ago, dismisses the accusations as pure lies. "I am completely innocent," he said during an interview outside the prison governor's office. His accusers were motivated by personal malice or a grudge against the Catholic Church, he said.
And, like 90 per cent of the inmates in Gikogoro, he has yet to be tried. "I have asked [the authorities] several times to bring me to the hills to be judged. They say no," he said.
THE LEGACY OF genocide continues to trouble the Catholic church in Rwanda. Before 1994 the tiny, densely-populated country was the jewel of the Catholic crown in Africa. More than 60 per cent of the population was Catholic, many drawn to the church by the efforts of the mostly Belgian and French White Fathers missionaries.
But when tens of thousands of people took up crude weapons and slaughtered over 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in just 100 days, the fundamentals of evangelisation and the conduct of the church leadership were called into question. Much of the killing was done by machete or hand, lending it a terrible intimacy. "It wasn't dropping a bomb, like the Americans are doing," explains Fr Hennity. "It was looking a person in the eye and using your machete to kill someone you knew, who was your neighbour. That's a different quality of killing." Not only were many such killers ordinary, mass-going villagers, some were priests and nuns. In 2001 a Belgian court convicted two nuns, Sr Gertrude Mukangango and Sr Julienne Kizito, of genocide crimes.
Witnesses testified that they handed Tutsi victims to the Hutu militia at Sovu monastery, 20 km from Gikongoro prison. Three priests have been brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, where they are awaiting trial. One, Fr Athanase Seromba, is accused of ordering bulldozers to level a church packed with Tutsi parishioners.
Another 20 clerics, of whom Fr Thaddée is probably the most prominent, are awaiting trial in Rwanda.
Africa Rights, which has compiled evidence against several Catholic officials, describes the charges against him as "among the strongest and most substantial" against any cleric since 1994. Several local priests confirmed that Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, a Papal envoy who visited Rwanda in June 1994, was shocked to find Fr Thaddée carrying a gun over his shoulder and a cross around his neck. Fr Thaddée confirmed he had carried a weapon at that time.
"It was a way of protecting people, and also for my own security," he said outside the prison governor's office.
But despite the cloud of accusations, Fr Thaddée continues to practise his priestly duties. On Sundays he says mass inside the church; for the rest of the week he administers to the sick, runs pre-marriage courses for those nearing release and - most galling to those who disbelieve his denials - hears confession. The local diocese sends altar wine, communion hosts and liturgical texts.
He also receives regular visits from his local bishop, Augustin Misago, who lives just five minutes away. Dr Misago can empathise with his situation better than most - he was arrested, jailed and brought to trial on genocide charges in 1999, but acquitted 14 months later.
The Church's staunch support for clerics such as Fr Thaddée enrages its critics, who accuse it of being more interested in guarding its reputation than in uncovering the unsavoury truth about some of its own officials.
"It is wrong, but not surprising, that the Church allows Fr Thaddée to practise as a priest while in prison," said Rakiya Omaar of African Rights. "The Church has refused to carry out investigations into accusations against its clergy, and instead has sought to protect them."
In an interview at his home, Dr Misago said Fr Thaddée was as entitled to the same presumptions as anyone else. "Under the law, one is innocent until found guilty," he said. And he rejected the suggestion that priests accused of genocide should be suspended in the same way as European or American priests must step aside when accusations of paedophilia surface. "The prison authorities have no problem with Thaddée saying mass. So there is no problem," said Dr Misago.
The controversy extends as far as Europe. Religious orders in Italy, France, Ireland and Belgium have been sharply criticised for sheltering genocide suspects, and even helping them evade justice. For example before their trial the "Sisters of Sovu" lived in Belgium and were publicly defended by the Benedictines. Their Irish superior, Fr Celestine Cullen, claimed the allegations were baseless. Instead of delivering Tutsis to their death, he insisted in one interview, Sr Gertrude had in fact "opened the monastery to receive refugees." Clergy from other denominations were also involved in the genocide.
Last year an Adventist pastor and his son were imprisoned by the ICTR, while last August the Anglican bishop of Kigali apologised for his church's failings. But the Catholic leaders are seen as particularly responsible because of their unique position of influence and power.
Before the genocide, the hierarchy had an uncomfortably close relationship with the hardline government that later led the genocide. For example, the Archbishop of Kigali, Dr Vincent Nsengiyumwa, was a senior member of the ruling MRND party until 1990. Later he was official confessor to the president's wife, Agnes Habyarimana, who becamea key architect of the genocide.
But in 1994, if some Catholic officials became swept up in the wave of hatred and murder, others plucked up martyr-like heroism. At Kibeho church, where Fr Thaddée is alleged to have killed fellow Catholics, another priest, Fr Jean-Pierre Ngoga, rallied fellow Tutsis to defend themselves. He was eventually murdered on the roadside. Elsewhere, other heroes were Hutu. In the lakeside town of Kibuye a Hutu priest, Fr Boniface Senyenzi, refused to desert his congregation as it came under attack. He died inside the town church, with 11,400 parishioners.
In total about 320 priests, nuns and seminarians died in the genocide - many times more than the number of those accused.
"It's very easy to say the Tutsis are the goodies and the Hutus are the baddies, but that's too simplistic. The situation is much more complicated," said Fr Hennity.
FR HENNITY HAS found himself at the heart of Rwanda's painful post-genocide dilemmas. Arriving in Cyanika parish, 6 km on a bumpy road from Gikongoro town in December 1994, he found a shattered community and a broken church.
His predecessor, a Tutsi priest, had been slain in front of the parish church, probably by some of his own parishioners. Bloodstains smeared the walls of the priest's house. Thousands of refugees were camped inside the hilltop church. Some cooked on the altar while others sold beer in the sacristy.
There were just two priests in the diocese; his bishop had fled.
The atmosphere was fraught with tension and fear.
"I thought: What have I gotten myself into?" he recalled.
Ten years on, the perpetrators and survivors of the genocide live side by side on Cyanika's densely-populated hills. Fr Hennity ministers to all. One day he might hear the confession of a man who killed his neighbour, the next day he could be listening to the worries of a genocide survivor.
The key is reconciliation.
"Too many people, Tutsi and Hutu, have died in this community," he said one evening recently, standing by a mass grave for 6,000 people behind his house. "So now we are looking for a way forward." Fr Hennity has also found himself caught in the ethnic tensions that linger within the Catholic Church. He is supportive of his bishop, Dr Misago, but acknowledges that he remains a controversial figure. After the trial in 2000, when Rome sent Dr Misago back to his diocese, all but one Tutsi priest in his diocese left in protest for the neighbouring diocese of Butare - where the bishop is a Tutsi.
In his trial, Dr Misago was accused of ignoring the calls for help of three priests. One, Fr Joseph Niyomugabo, was Fr Hennity's successor.
The priests may have left for "personal reasons," Dr Misago speculated.
Then he added: "You know, one can be a priest without being a Christian." The Papal Nuncio to Rwanda, Mgr Anselmo Pecorari, admits that ethnicity continues to play a divisive role in the local church. "The Tutsis are happy with this government. The Hutus do not speak about it," he said.
He also admitted the turbulence has impacted on church attendance. Up to 12 per cent of Catholics have left. Islam and evangelical sects, in contrast, claim their membership levels are soaring.
Thousands attend the music- and miracle-driven services of the Zion Temple Church in a suburb of the capital, Kigali. Many are former Catholics. "Some people left because they say their church was linked with the previous government," said Pastor Dieudonne Vuningona, the secretary general of the Zion church.
The slew of allegations against clergymen and women raise "huge questions" about the quality of evangelisation in Rwanda, said Fr Hennity. "This was the most Catholic country in Africa, people looked happy, attendance in the church was very high. But then the whole thing blew up. When you see the depth of hatred you realise the evangelisation didn't penetrate very deeply at all. There's still a huge amount of work to be done to build this society." There is a sense of collective guilt among Hutus, but not all Hutus participated in the killing. And now there is a fear that repressive measures by the Tutsi-dominated government will store up further resentment and anger for the future.
Fr Hennity witnessed the aftermath of the army-led slaughter in Kibeho in 1995, when troops opened fire on a Hutu refugee camp. The death toll is estimated at more than 6,000, but the incident is all but ignored by the Rwandan government today. Western human rights groups estimate that several hundred thousand more Hutus were killed by Rwandan forces in the forests of neighbouring Congo.
And the sub-human conditions such as those in Gikongoro prison should not be tolerated, he said - no matter what the alleged crimes. "Otherwise people have a lot of anger inside," he warned. "And if it is not managed positively, it could explode in a very destructive way."
The Irish aid agency, Trócaire, has been accused of spreading a "genocidal ideology" in Rwanda through its support for outspoken local human rights groups.
A recent parliamentary commission concluded that Trócaire and three other Western agencies were "sowing ethnic divisionism" - an incendiary accusation in a country where more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 1994.
Trócaire denies the charges, which Western human rights workers say are merely a cloak for silencing President Paul Kagame's critics. His Tutsi-led government is "manipulating" fears of a second genocide to silence political opponents and quell criticism of its human rights record, according to Amnesty International.
"This is not a healthy thing," said Mary Healy of Trócaire. "We believe civil society is critical to the process of reconciliation in Rwanda." Fears of state-led repression have been growing since last year, when the opposition was effectively barred from participating in August's parliamentary election that President Kagame won by a margin of 96 per cent.
Now his government has targeted Liprodhor, an outspoken human rights group funded by Trócaire.
The parliamentary commission recommended Liprodhor be disbanded, with parliamentarians calling for its leaders to be executed. The government has not yet taken a decision, but six Liprodhor officials have fled into exile in Uganda.
Liprodhor appeared to have been targeted for its criticism of last year's election, Healy said.