Fifteen years after the genocide that killed a million people, Rwanda's warring tribes have reached a truce. But will it hold? Here, the world's leading writer on Rwanda meets the killers, the survivors, and the man bringing them together
When I began visiting Rwanda, in 1995, a year after the genocide, the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who'd been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state with soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prisons crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty – hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers – and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succoured by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job. In the course of 100 days, beginning on 6 April 1994, nearly a million people from the T