Suspect Pleas

Believe some of those who answered genocide's call and there is no such thing as guilt or innocence, just a grey area in between.

Many prisoners in Kigali's central prison say they are not killers. They might have run errands for death squads and occasionally joined the hunt for victims but pull a trigger, swing a machete? No, they never did that.

Even their minimal involvement was coerced, they say. The country was at war. It was either help the killers, or at least pretend to help, or be killed yourself. What would you have done?

Interviews with four genocide suspects in the jail yielded much the same story: claims of at least partial innocence followed by a look of defiance and a challenge - what would you have done?

Not an easy question to answer given the often grim choices ordinary Hutus faced when an extremist Hutu regime decided to eliminate Tutsis and their sympathisers.

The way Esperance Nyirandegeya, 43, tells it she was a very minor player who aided the interahamwe militia solely to avert retribution for having a Tutsi husband.

"I wanted to show cooperation so I carried uniforms for them to help my family to hide," the former accountant for Air Rwanda says in a low voice.

Dressed in vivid pink prison garb with a headscarf and spectacles she does not look like a mass murderer but prosecutors say she directed the militia in Kigali's sector 43.

"I didn't kill anybody," says Nyirandegeya. "But ..." The voice trails off. She did lead a mob to the hiding place of four Tutsi men who were promptly butchered. "It was a mistake, I didn't know they were there."

The milita had been looking for different Tutsis, a family, and Nyirandegeya said she led the mob away from the house where they were hiding to another hiding place which she thought was unoccupied. That it was not will remain on her conscience, she says.

"When I was arrested I told the whole story. I felt guilty because I didn't refuse to participate with the militia."

In the same breath she adds that her husband and university-going daughter might not otherwise be alive today and that she considers her incarceration an injustice.

Gregoire Nyilimanzi, 37, bulky and also in day-glo pink, said he had been accused of leading homicidal mobs in Kigali's Nyamirambo district. "I can't deny my role because I was with the group that was killing. Although I personally didn't kill."

François Gahigi, 56, accused of leading killers in Kigali's Gasata district, said he left the area before the worst massacres. So he is innocent? Gahigi shifts in his seat. "I'm waiting for the trial to determine my innocence or guilt."

There is good reason for prisoners to be coy because on it may hinge their freedom. As Rwanda's jails became horribly overcrowded with 130,000 suspects, the government released about 40,000 to be tried in traditional village courts known as gacaca.

More will be released soon, said Jean de Dieu Ntiruhungwa, the interior minister, because detention was expensive and denied children their parents. "We hope to reduce the number in prison to 40 or 50,000 within three to five years."

To be eligible for early release suspects have to have confessed and repented for their role in the genocide, which could explain why the likes of Mrs Nyirandegeya have admitted partial guilt.

But it does not make sense to admit killing because that could reap a heavier jail sentence. And in areas of extensive massacres there are often no survivors to gainsay suspects' denials.