Holmes: Every Sunday, Angelique Mukabukisi thanks God for her deliverance. She hasn't much else to thank Him for. Her parents are dead. Her husband is dead. Her two young children are dead.


Four thousand people once worshipped every Sunday in Niamata. Of course, the village had a church in those days. It still does. But the living don't use it any more.

One day in April last year, Angelique and thousands of others fled there for sanctuary. There, they were found by the Interahamwe - Those Who Attack Together. And there, together, they died.

Mukabukisi (translated): People who entered by that door were hacked by machetes. Then a man came towards the altar and said, "Stop! You're killing your own people!" Then he said, "All Hutus stand up!"

When the Hutus were removed, they started killing us. My sister-in-law had my firstborn on her back. They stabbed the child with a spear here. I saw it.

The child's eyes rolled back and he died. My other baby was stabbed in the neck here while I was holding him on my back.

There have massacres in plenty in the tortured history of Rwanda. But this was something different, this was genocide - planned and deliberate, authorised from the top, widespread, ruthless and barbaric.

For nearly a year, investigators from the UN High Commission on Human Rights have been counting the bones, measuring the graves, interrogating the survivors.

LEE WOODYEARUN Human Rights commission: Ultimately what we want to do is document the genocide completely. We're talking about what could easily be a million people, and we're talking about four months. And you don't have gas chambers, do you? You don't have trains to drive these guys in there. You got people going out with hand held weapons, the majority, and killing with their biceps if you like. So it's an amazing thing that happened here. And for us it's very important that it's very very well understood.

It's now over a year since the people in this church, and hundreds of thousands of others, were butchered. It's known how and where and when they died. Many of the perpetrators have been named.

And yet so far not one single person inside Rwanda or out has been tried and sentenced for any of these crimes. The dead perhaps are past caring, but for the living, the issue of justice and legal retribution is crucial.

Wounded minds take longer to heal than wounded bodies. Many of the children of the Samaritans' Orphanage near Kigali saw their parents hacked to death before their eyes.

Gupta: Yes we can recognise when children have amputations when they've stepped on a landmine. And yes we can see when a child is starving, or an epidemic occurs in a camp.

But we can't see the wounds, the intrapsychic wounds, the scars of trauma, unless we stay for a while and look closer, beyond the surface of the children who appear happy and playing.

Holmes: In truth, says psychologist Leila Gupta, it's not just the children but a whole population which is traumatised by grief and shock.

Gupta: The major solution that I would see, that's so closely tied into adjusting and working through and coming to terms with this kind of grief, is the justice system, is the sense of retribution, a sense of accountability for the perpetrators of the genocide and the violence.

Holmes: This is the prison at Giterama, an hour's drive west of the capital, Kigali. It was built to house thirteen hundred prisoners, in conditions which most western countries would regard as intolerable. Today, it's holding eight thousand.

Many of these people have been here for eight months. The crushed ears and festering feet were the result, the prisoners claim, of beatings by the guards.

The Red Cross ensures a supply of food and fresh water. As a result, the death rate has declined from fifteen to five a day. But there's still no room to lie down.

Q: How do you sleep?

Prisoner: It's really a problem. Many people sleep standing up. Others sleep sitting down like these people here. Some find a place for themselves in the buildings over there - but even there people are really crammed together.

The seething prison courtyard was bad enough. Inside, it was worse. It's almost impossible to convey what it is like down here. The camera doesn't show smell, doesn't show heat. There are, I don't know, maybe five hundred people in this tiny room - over there are lavatories, perhaps two of them, and I'm told there's two more upstairs, that's for eight thousand people.

There's coughing, there's sickness, there's people with their feet festering. It's the most extraordinary scene I've ever seen in my life. And I hope I never see anything like it again.

Wherever we went in the prison there was rank filth, foetid air, and listless men packed cheek by jowl. In only one place was there some room to breathe - the room set aside for prisoners under sixteen years old. Over a hundred of them, some as young as ten.

Faced with the sheer impossibility of cramming more men into the prisons, the government has stopped arresting people, at least for now.

Nkubito: At present we have more than thirty thousand prisoners, and I can tell you that we will have more, considering the fact that the genocide was conducted in a systematic and massive way. Therefore I can't say that the arrests will not be massive. Our problem is to shelter them, guard them, feed them, and to have them judged.

Woodyear: Their problem is, how are they going to actually try all of those people? The infrastructure in this country, the judicial infrastructure, is completely wiped out.

Eighty percent of the personnel, that is judges, defence counsel, prosecutors, are either dead, outside of the country, or in prison, accused of having taken part in the genocide.

Holmes: In the only functioning courtroom in Kigali, four of the capital's five remaining judges are hearing a civil case, a dispute over land.

There have been no criminal cases for months. Even if lawyers and judges could be found, there are no police investigators to question witnesses and prepare the evidence. What's needed, desperately, is money and skilled help. All that's arrived so far are promises.

But even if the Rwandan courts were functioning, they could not try the men who planned and organised the genocide. All have escaped abroad. That job is supposed to be done by a United Nations tribunal, set up to prosecute crimes against humanity in Rwanda.

But the international tribunal has been making no unseemly haste. It too has been starved of funds. So far, it's done almost nothing at all.

Justice RICHARD GOLDSTONE Chief Prosecutor: The United Nations has a funding problem which has been well aired and well exposed. And it really just can't commit itself to spend money which it doesn't have.

But just across Rwanda's borders, in the sprawling refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania, money, food, and international charity has been pouring in for a year.

The biggest camps of all, around Goma, in Zaire. Hundred of thousands of Hutus fled here last year to escape from the victorious army of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front.

At Mugunga camp, last July, the roads were lined with the corpses of cholera victims. Now there are permanent water supplies, restaurants, video cinemas. A thriving, semi-permanent city of two hundred thousand, housed in blue plastic, courtesy of the UN High Commission for Refugees.

Tuesday is ration day for Cyprien Ruhakama. For the UNHCR, he's a refugee whose wife and children must be fed. But to the government in Kigali, these camps are still providing food and shelter for thousands of perpetrators of the genocide, and a base from which its enemies can plan a reinvasion of Rwanda.

In recent weeks, it has barred all food convoys from crossing Rwanda to Zaire. As a result, the ration which Cyprien's wife, Marie, now has to try to stretch over a whole week, is barely half as much as the family really needs.

The government in Rwanda says the solution is simple: the refugees should come home. Those who took no part in the genocide, they say, have nothing to fear. Cyprien Ruhakama doesn't believe a word of it.

Ruhakama: What they are telling us is lies. People who go there disappear. People are killed. Those who started the war are now the rulers, and they're the ones doing the killing. When we ran away to Zaire, we were running away from them. That's why we can't go back.

Holmes: It's a point of view which dominates the camps. The present leaders of refugee opinion, people like Camp President Augustin Harindintwari, claim they have no connection with the former government and army.

They say the government in Kigali should negotiate with them for the safe return of the refugees. But the government regards many of these men as responsible for the genocide. And they, in a startling revision of history, regard the government in the same light.

The massacre of Tutsis, they claim, is a manufactured myth.

Harindintwari: When you are attacked and threatened, you have the right to defend yourself - and when you defend yourself, I can't deny that sometimes there were killings.

Holmes: But the High Commission for Human Rights, for example, has actually documented these crimes, it's been to the churches where hundreds of women and children were butchered. This was not a matter of self defence.

Harindintwari: But you must understand that when the RPF was advancing, many people fled to the churches, and the RPF found them there and massacred these people. What you saw was done by the RPF.

Holmes: It's a version of events which no one outside the camps believes. But only the international tribunal can resolve the impasse. And if it's not resolved, then sooner or later there will be war once more.

A few kilometres from Mugunga, at the end of a rough dirt track through a banana plantation, is a mysterious camp run by the former Rwandan Army. It's a place where the UNHCR has been forbidden to go, and where we were warned it would be dangerous to film without permission.

We were forbidden to film anything beyond the barrier. We were, however, allowed to take our vehicle into the compound in the camp, and interview a spokesman for the former army.

I asked Colonel Bahufiti if it was true that the former army is still training in Zaire, and is still receiving arms. Not surprisingly, he denied it.

Bahufiti: As far as training goes, I don't know of any, there isn't any...

Holmes: It's a denial that few impartial observers believe.

VINCENT FABERMedicins Sans Frontieres: Well, I think this can't be true, because we are still in a war process. And I could not imagine that the former Rwandan army just stays like this without doing anything. They are of course trying to build up a new military force. I don't know what their goal is, but probably I think the war process is not over yet.

Holmes: What almost everyone agrees on is that a new war is a definite possibility.

Bahufiti: Our preferred solution is a peaceful one, it's negotiation with the government in Kigali. But given the situation, I can't guarantee that there won't be some explosion somewhere or other which might relaunch a war.

Holmes: On the other side of the border, the orphans of the genocide are being taught that the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front must be defended. Without justice, the next generation in Rwanda, it seems, will be condemned to tread the same old path, the dance of war, the dance of vengeance, the dance of death.