“The one image that tormented me for years,” says Frida Umuhoza, “was my mother’s head being chopped off as she was beheaded.”
Her words are a weight on the quiet of a school auditorium in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. “Those memories,” she says, “those images don’t leave you.”
Umuhoza was 14 when Rwanda’s Genocide Against the Tutsi erupted in Nyanza, a historic city in the south of the country. When the mob who had come to kill her – friends, neighbours, colleagues and classmates – arrived at her home, she was hiding in the dark, alongside members of her extended family.
They were found and marched down a hill to lie in a ditch near a grove of banana trees.
“When my grandfather sat up again to try to beg them for the last time, one young man jumped in the ditch and hit him and my grandfather fell on my legs.
“Then they all jumped in that ditch and started killing and killing and killing.”
She remembers witnessing her mother’s beheading. Then a young man – whom she had begged “please don’t use a machete on me” – hit her across the back of the head with a club.
“I lost consciousness. I didn’t wake up until everybody had died and they were burying us as if nothing happened.”
Packed into the soil alongside her slain family, Umuhoza dared not cry out. Terrified hours passed before she was dragged from the earth by a neighbourhood boy.
“Everybody called me a ghost … I’m the only survivor of my family.”
Umuhoza says she doesn’t know how she survived, only that she was supposed to.
Today, living in Australia, she speaks to schools and community groups about Rwanda’s genocide – its horrors and its legacies – determined it is never forgotten.
“I’m using my story … to preserve the legacy of my family, and to teach the next generation.”
The headmaster
Few places feel as far away from Rwanda’s genocide as suburban Melbourne.
The Guardian/Four Corners have come to speak with Umuhoza after learning that a man accused of involvement in the genocide, who the Rwandan government believes is also living in Australia, is from her home district.
Umuhoza did not know Celestin Munyaburanga, a former school headmaster who is accused in an indictment from the Rwandan authorities of participating in deadly attacks on the Tutsi minority in 1994 in Nyanza.
Munyaburanga was not involved in the attack on Umuhoza’s family and she did not witness his alleged involvement in the genocide.
But she knows the part of the city he was from, and the school where he worked, and many people who are from there. She spends a fraught evening on the phone, dialling friends and relatives on the other side of the world.
She reaches the mother of an old school friend. The woman wasn’t an eyewitness but she’s heard the allegations about Munyaburanga and has been told his alleged crimes hit close to home.
“We were even neighbours,” she tells Umuhoza. “I worked with his wife before the genocide.”
Munyaburanga escaped prison and has not been seen for years, the woman tells Umuhoza.
We think he might be here in Australia, Umuhoza responds.
There is quiet on the other end of the line.
The indictment
In April 1994, as genocide roiled across Rwanda, a Hutu mob took control of the hardscrabble Hanika neighbourhood in Nyanza, in Rwanda’s south.
Dozens of Tutsi died there, most suffered terrifying, confused deaths at the hands of those they once knew as friends and neighbours, teachers and colleagues. Those who could, fled. Others hid or sought sanctuary in places where they thought they might be safe, a church or the home of a brave ally willing to defy the mob.
The killing continued for weeks. Two survivors and a confessed perpetrator from Hanika have accused Munyaburanga of taking a leading role in some of the attacks, although the indictment itself does not make this claim.
The 2017 indictment, sent by Rwanda to the Australian government, requested Munyaburanga’s arrest, pending extradition to Rwanda to face trial. The Guardian/Four Corners obtained the document and the Rwandan government has confirmed it is still current. At the time that it was issued, Rwanda believed he was living in Canberra.
Munyaburanga was complicit, the 14-page document alleges, in the deaths of 21 named Tutsi in Hanika – as well as an unknown number more not identified.
“Based on the available evidence, Celestin Munyaburanga is individually liable to have, from April 1994 to July 1994, committed crimes perpetrated with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, the Tutsi ethnic group in … Nyanza district.”
“Celestin Munyaburanga, with Interahamwe [Hutu militiamen] … intercepted and killed with traditional weapons, Tutsi civilians,” the indictment reads. They went searching too, it states, scouring villages and houses “to hunt down and kill Tutsi”.
Rwanda’s National Public Prosecution Authority (NPPA) claims Munyaburanga was jailed following the genocide and his case brought before a community “gacaca” court. The NPPA alleges he escaped during his trial. It claims he was convicted in absentia by gacaca of genocide crimes, and sentenced to life in prison.
Rwanda’s gacaca courts were a transitional justice mechanism established in the early 2000s, to try the vast number of alleged genocidaires overwhelming Rwanda’s jails and its national court system. Over a decade, more than 12,000 of the community courts – run by locally elected lay judges and often held under trees, in marketplaces or public squares – tried more than 1m cases.
The courts have faced external criticism over perceived weaknesses in trial procedures. Critics, such as Human Rights Watch, focus on the lack of legal representation for defendants, the potential for corruption or government interference, and the use of hearsay evidence. But other independent international observers have described testimony provided in gacaca as “robust” and the courts as a fair form of public accountability, vital to Rwanda’s recovery and reconciliation from the genocide.
Munyaburanga fled Rwanda, ultimately, it is believed, for Australia, where the Rwandan government believes he still lives. The Guardian/Four Corners understands he might be using an assumed name.
Members of Munyaburanga’s family live in Brisbane. They are not accused of wrongdoing and are not named in the 2017 indictment. A relative told the Guardian/Four Corners that Munyaburanga was innocent, but that they had not spoken to him for “many years” and did not know where he was, saying only he was “somewhere in Africa”.
Some members of the Rwandan community in Australia have raised the issue that allegations of genocide have in the past been politically motivated or been used by the Rwandan government as a way to silence dissent.
The Guardian/Four Corners made repeated efforts to find and contact Munyaburanga, including sending a detailed list of questions, but has not received a response.
Munyaburanga’s indictment “requests the judicial authorities of Australia arrest Celestin Munyaburanga”.
Rwanda experts told the Guardian/Four Corners that extradition is the best response in cases like this if there is sufficient evidence to suggest a trial is necessary. But they warn, too, that evidence from Rwanda’s gacaca system should be treated with caution, that some alleged perpetrators who fled the country might be innocent and should have the chance to defend the allegations made against them in court.
The Rwandan regime has been accused of politicising the genocide, and allegations of genocide are also weaponised against political opponents and dissidents. The Guardian/Four Corners has identified two cases where specific allegations of genocide were made against Rwandan nationals overseas, that were found, after foreign investigations, to be unsubstantiated.
A spokesperson for the attorney general said the Australian government did not comment on extradition matters until a person was brought before a court, but that “the Australian government is committed to tackling serious international crimes, and takes allegations of genocide very seriously”.
“The Australian federal police works closely with foreign law enforcement agencies, international bodies and mechanisms who prosecute international crimes to ensure perpetrators are held to account.”
The Guardian/Four Corners do not suggest Munyaburunga is guilty, only that these serious allegations deserve further investigation by an appropriate authority.
‘A respected man’
In December last year, the Guardian/Four Corners travelled to Rwanda to speak with locals about Munyaburunga and the crimes of which he has been accused.
The neighbourhood of Hanika is hilly country. The school where Munyaburunga was principal stands partway up a rise: his own mud-brick home is lower down, set against the fertile river valley.
Between the two, on a bend in the road, was the place where, according to allegations in the indictment, he was involved in setting up a roadblock patrolled by men wielding machetes and clubs.
Manassé Musabyimana – a convicted genocidaire who spent 20 years in prison for his crimes – says he was Munyaburanga’s student at school.
His name appears on Munyaburanga’s indictment, listed as an alleged perpetrator. He tells the Guardian/Four Corners he was stopped on the road by Munyaburanga one morning in April 1994 and claims he was ordered to man the roadblock.
The Guardian/Four Corners first encounters Musabyimana as he shuffles slowly to church at the top of the hill at Hanika. He says he is willing to speak with us, but says he is going to pray now, and he would like to talk somewhere quieter. We arrange to meet the next morning in a patch of forest, down in the valley.
“When I reached Hanika, I found Munyaburanga there together with soldiers, he had established the roadblock. There were three soldiers with him … he told me not to move on, he ordered me to sit down there,” he claims.
“After establishing the roadblock, they formed a team of strong youths who would go on the attacks, those of us who were older would remain at the roadblock. Those who had gone on the attacks would bring people to be killed at the roadblock.”
Those brought to the roadblock “were killed by machetes, clubs, they were beaten to death”, Musabyimana says.
He felt he could not defy Munyaburanga: “He was a respected man, he was a leader, my head teacher.”
Shown the indictment that alleges his involvement in crimes, Musabyimana says he confessed before the gacaca court. He says he didn’t kill anybody but admits he was part of the mob that attacked and killed Tutsi at the roadblock. He says he didn’t see Munyaburanga kill anyone.
“I admitted my role [in genocide] and asked for forgiveness because what happened was terrible. To today, it is something that continues to hurt me … it hurts me so much.”
Musabyimana says while he suffers every day for the crimes he committed, he has accepted the long decades lost in prison.
But he is fired by a stubborn sense of injustice that some of those who he alleges gave orders to kill, those with the wherewithal – the connections, the money, the influence – appear to have escaped justice.
“Maybe if he did not order me to stand on that roadblock … if he did not put me there, I would not have been in prison for such a long time,” he claims.
“It would be better if he showed up to face court the same way we were punished for what we did, and to show justice to the ones who lost their families.”
The list of the dead
On the same indictment that lists the alleged crimes of Munyaburanga and Musabyimana, survivor Marie Golithi Uwisenga finds the names of her murdered relatives.
Sitting in her low-slung bungalow, halfway up the hill at Hanika, Golithi wipes tears from her eyes as she points to the names.
“My uncle … my brother … my brother … daddy,” she says.
In her garden outside the window are the mass graves that hold her relatives.
Munyaburanga, she claims, took a leadership role during the attacks, although she did not witness him killing anyone.
“He would lead them during the attack, he was the leader of the roadblock,” she says.
“The attacks would go and search for people, bring them to the roadblock and Munyaburanga would give orders of whom to kill and whom to leave.
“When they’d caught a person, he would command them, ‘Take that one back, we’ll kill them later.’”
Golithi was 12 years old at the time of the genocide. She knew Munyaburanga. “I was scared of him,” she says.
Golithi would ultimately lose 14 members of her family in the genocide. She survived only by hiding, sometimes for days at a time, in neighbours’ houses or the dense sorghum fields near her house.
Golithi says she was upset to learn Munyaburanga might be living freely on the other side of the world.
“It hurts me, because we don’t have anyone.”
Golithi’s cousin Chaliroti Mutegarugori says she saw Munyaburanga abduct her 17-year-old brother.
“I saw him with my own eyes taking my brother; he even beat him as he was taking him.
“They had machetes and clubs; there was Munyaburanga with many others … they started beating [my brother], they struck him on his shoulders and the blood spilled out. I was afraid and ran away.” She did not witness her brother’s death.
Four of Mutegarugori’s relatives are alleged in the indictment as having been killed by a group of militia that included Munyaburanga.
Calls for further investigation
Graham Blewitt is a former director of Australia’s Special Investigations Unit, established in 1987 to investigate the alleged presence of Nazi war criminals in Australia. The unit was defunded in 1992, out of political expediency, Blewitt says, “because there were no votes in war crimes”.
Blewitt argues Australia has been apathetic for decades when it comes to investigating and prosecuting international crimes such as genocide.
He tells the Guardian/Four Corners that the allegations against Munyaburanga demand further investigation.
“There seems to be eyewitness evidence as to their [alleged] activities and formal court proceedings have taken place in Rwanda,” he said, adding that if the evidence still exists, then it might be able to form the basis of a proper criminal trial in Australia.
In Rwanda, the necessity for survivors and perpetrators to find a way to live together peaceably has fostered – even enforced – a sense of unity and cooperation.
A country so viscerally torn apart has chosen – to a degree has had imposed upon it by ruthless government diktat – solidarity, because it has lived the horror of its opposite.
Conversely in Australia, the small Rwandan diaspora remains deeply divided, riven by factionalism.
In Melbourne, Frida Umuhoza says she will take a break from public engagements and speaking about the genocide.
She’ll return to it, she says – a sense of mission seems to compel her – but reliving her experience over and over is wearying.
Her nerves are taut as she drives home across the darkening city. She is angry, she says quietly, that men accused of involvement in the genocide – including, perhaps, from her home district in Rwanda – might be living in Australia.
“Angry, and at the same time, uncertain. Where are these people? Do they watch us? Do they know where we are?
“There’s the fear.”
Do you know more? Email ben.doherty@theguardian.com
The full Four Corners documentary The Wanted is available to watch on Monday night from 8.30pm on ABCiview and ABC TV
