KIGALI, Rwanda — The sight of a mob murdering his father has given Naphtal Ahishakiye no peace these last 11 years. It was May 28, 1994, one crime among millions during Rwanda's genocide. Helpless and hidden in a tree, he watched the mob stuff his father headfirst down a latrine.
But the long wait for justice has ended in disappointment. At a recent community hearing, witnesses identified the killers as militia members who had fled Rwanda after the genocide and were beyond the reach of the law.
Ahishakiye identified villagers who still lived in Rwanda, but no one would come forward to back up his story.
"You know someone, you know what he did, you know what he said and what his companions said. But they do not admit it," he said. "It's very disappointing. When you see all that, you develop a kind of hatred for the person who did not come forward ... even more than the person who did it."
In 2002, facing the prospect of putting at least 761,000 people -- and perhaps more than a million -- on trial for genocide, Rwanda introduced a form of traditional community justice called gacaca. The government has promoted the approach as the only way to achieve reconciliation.
But its objectives are sometimes contradictory: The government seeks to find the truth, give justice to survivors and help them recover bodies of loved ones. It also wants to empty the jails and cut spiraling prison costs.
Rwanda's efforts to deal with the genocide are a key step on a continent where war crimes often go unpunished, but problems with the trials eat away at public confidence.
In theory, Rwandans should stand up and make accusations, and killers should make public confessions. However, a code of silence in the villages puts justice out of reach for survivors such as Ahishakiye, an unemployed man in his mid-20s.
About 700 of the thousands of elected gacaca judges have been implicated in the genocide. Many of the judges, regardless of their record, are poorly trained. Defendants don't have lawyers, and there is no efficient alternative to the community trials.
In 1994, the government and militias exhorted Rwandan Hutus to slaughter Tutsis -- members of the nation's other primary ethnic group -- and anyone who tried to protect them.
Inflammatory radio broadcasts described Tutsis as "cockroaches," and the popular euphemism for killing was "going to work." The exact number of dead in the 100 days of killing is not known, but Rwandan authorities have put it at more than a million.
