Assigning blame in Rwanda: how to break the cycle of revenge in ethnic conflict.

• Author: DeSouza, Leo J.

On September 26, 1996, the United Nations's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda began genocide trials in Arusha, a small town at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The man in the dock was Jean-Paul Akayesu, former mayor of Taba in Rwanda and the first Hutu to be tried by the Tribunal. He is accused of atrocities in his district, where 2,000 Tutsi lie buried in two mass graves after being hacked to death with machetes.

Akayesu pleaded not guilty and asked for postponement, but when the trial resumed in January of this year, the international community renewed its cry for justice, i.e, for the blood of the Hutu.

Certainly, the public outrage is understandable. The story of the majority Hutu population's massacre of Rwanda's Tutsi minority is one of unimaginable viciousness and violence. The events immediately preceding the massacre and the subsequent months prior to the overthrow of the government by Tutsi rebels are familiar to -- and abhorred by -- most readers:On April 6,1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was returning from a peace conference in Tanzania. Also aboard his plane was Cyprien Ntaryamira, president of neighboring Burundi. Both were members of the region's majority Hutu tribe. Preparing to land on the palace grounds, the plane was shot down, killing both men.

Reaction was instantaneous. Within hours the Rwandan Presidential Guard (dominated by Hutu) went on a rampage, killing Rwanda's Tutsi Prime Minister and other members of the opposition party sympathetic to the Tutsi. Soldiers and militiamen joined in. They fanned out across the city looking for Tutsi.

The slaughter had begun.

From Kigali the killing spread to towns, prefectural capitals, and hillside settlements. Across the country, the Tutsi were massacred in their homes, in open fields, along broad roads, and even as they hid in the bushes. They were slain with stones and axes, machetes and clubs, hand grenades and guns.

In a Roman Catholic church, an orange brick building in the town square of one village, 1,200 Tutsi sought refuge. The local Hutu mayor had promised police protection. But the following morning, soldiers appeared, blew open the locked church door with a hand grenade, and fired into the huddled mass. They returned the next morning to finish off those who had survived, leaving only bodies, blood and silence.

In another "safe" church, a Hutu mob swarmed in, hacking and clubbing frightened women and children to death. Tutsi patients disappeared from hospitals; Tutsi students from schools. Tutsi teenage girls were raped. Hutu mothers with babies strapped to their backs killed Tutsi mothers with babies strapped to their backs; Hutu 10-year-olds killed Tutsi 10-year-olds. Before it was over, half a million Rwandans were dead. They were almost all Tutsi, along with a few Hutu who had refused to go along with the carnage.

As the Tutsi were being decimated in Rwanda, Tutsi exiles living in Uganda felt the time for action was at hand. Calling themselves the "Rwandan Patriotic Front," the rebels entered the country from the north and advanced swiftly toward the capital. They had had a running battle with the Hutu ever since the country gained independence in 1962 and democratic elections had put the more numerous Hutu in power. Now, pushing with the ferocity of the dispossessed, the exiled Tutsi overran the country and by July 18 had taken over the capital and declared victory.

The victorious Tutsi quickly...