Rwanda

More than a decade after the genocide, a mystery still lies at the heart of Rwanda's darkness. But France's most celebrated anti-terrorism magistrate believes he knows who assassinated two African presidents on April 6, 1994. The shooting down of the Rwandan presidential jet that night was followed by the killings of an estimated 800,000 people, most of them members of the Tutsi minority.

I sit outside the theater on the third street promenade in Santa Monica, dialing the same number over and over on my cellphone. "You have to come with me," I say to my friend and former "Nightline" colleague Rick Wilkinson. I demand. Then plead. "Please, I can't do this alone." We are talking about seeing a movie. "Hotel Rwanda." I am wondering if I can sit through it. Wondering if I will start sobbing the way I did in those cursed fields in Africa more than a decade ago.

Rwanda denied Thursday that it had sent troops into neighboring Congo, despite repeated threats from Rwandan President Paul Kagame to attack ethnic Hutu militias that have harassed his nation from the area. United Nations officials, however, said there was mounting though inconclusive evidence that Rwandan troops had crossed the border.

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.

In her heart, Eugenie Muhayimana didn't become a mother at the birth of her son. Yearning only for death, she could find no shred of love for the babe born of nearly three months of daily gang rape in 1994 by a band of genocidal killers. Her first revelation of motherhood came a little later: Janvier Turahirwa, the Hutu militiaman who had enslaved her, looked at the baby boy and said the child did not look Hutu. Kill it, he ordered her.

Attorney Barbara Mulvaney has spent three years prosecuting the accused mastermind of the Rwanda genocide. But her most personal contact with him came only recently, when he casually testified about how he would go about assassinating someone in the courtroom, his cold stare swiveling in her direction. Col. Theoneste Bagosora, a former military commander accused of overseeing the mass killings of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, was asked to explain how he had issued orders.

She grew up in a house hidden by broad-leaf banana trees. She was a Hutu, but it didn't mean much to her. Who was what in Rwanda's ethnic mix was mainly grist for teasing at her Roman Catholic boarding school. "We didn't think much about it," she says. "It was something we joked about--taunting each other, 'Hutu nose,' 'Tutsi nose,' stuff like that."

Rwanda's main Hutu rebel group said it was ending its war against Rwanda, and for the first time it denounced the 1994 genocide of Tutsis for which many of its members have been blamed. A delegation representing the rebel organization, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, made the announcement after secret negotiations at the Sant'Egidio religious community in Rome.