Rwanda’s genocide killers learn new life back home

MUTOBO, Rwanda: Dozens of ex-militia killers stroll around an open camp beneath mist-shrouded volcanoes in Rwanda. They are learning to reintegrate into the country whose government they have spent years trying to overthrow.

These are men who helped carry out Rwanda’s horrific 1994 genocide, and then formed a rebel army that has been fighting ever since.

After the carnage of the Rwanda genocide, which began 25 years ago this April, the men who carried out the massacre of at least 800,000 mostly Tutsi people fled west to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

Some of them are former members of Rwanda’s army. Others had joined the militia known as the ‘ Interahamwe’, club and machete-wielding Hutu gangs that carried out the killings targeting the Tutsi minority.

Chased out of Rwanda, they formed a notorious rebel army, the Hutu fighters of The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda, known by its French acronym, FDLR. But after a quarter of a century haunting Congo’s forests, many of these veterans were exhausted and wanted to give up the fight.

So a stream of rebels have returned home. Rwanda houses them at Mutobo, a camp some 100 kilometres northwest of the capital Kigali and beneath the Virunga mountains, seeking to reintegrate them into society.

Joseph Kabalindwi, a 50-year old former rebel major, said he laid down his arms in 2014 ‘ to promote peace.’

Kabalindwi was one of 1,563 former FDLR fighters who returned to Rwanda in November 2018, after Congo refused to keep them on their soil any longer. But he says he is happy to be back. — AFP