By Kitty McKinsey

The date is etched firmly on Antoine Butera's mind: January 4, 2004. That's the day, more than seven years after he fled the ongoing chaos and slaughter of Rwanda's genocide, that news finally filtered through to the 56-year-old woodworker that it was safe to go home and search for his long-lost family.

Butera had spent those intervening years of exile hiding deep in the rain forests of the Congo river basin, eking out a solitary subsistence living as an odd-job labourer, literally cut off from news of any events beyond the nearest village clearing, fearing that the bloodbath at home continued unabated.

A chance broadcast by a United Nations station, Radio Okapi, picked up by a neighbour earlier this year, alerted Butera that things had in fact altered radically in Rwanda.

"It was the first time I heard there was peace," the grey-haired man with a grey-flecked beard explained recently as he waited patiently to board a truck taking him back from his long exile. "I was very happy. I prayed to God to show me a path to go home" to search for a wife and nine children who had remained inside Rwanda when he left in 1996 and of whom "I don't even know if they are dead or alive."

More than 2.3 million people had fled the tiny landlocked country at the height of the mass slaughter in 1994, and tens of thousands of others followed in the next few years as political and military instability continued. The great majority returned home by the end of 1996, but currently between 60,000-80,000 remain scattered throughout several neighbouring states. Most live in established refugee camps or are known to local authorities and are expected to be repatriated by the end of 2005.

RAIN FOREST SURVIVORS

But perhaps the most poignant histories are those of the "survivors of the rain forests" like Butera who disappeared into the interior of Rwanda's huge neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and are rarely heard from again unless and until, like some of the Japanese soldiers who staggered out of the Philippine jungles decades after the end of World War II, they suddenly and unexpectedly emerge from the triple-canopy foliage.

Survivors tell similar tales of harrowing escapes into the forest in the 1990s as they fled their towns and villages, a knife-edge existence for many years seemingly lost to the world, and even when news finally reaches them of peace in Rwanda, a reluctance sometimes lasting for years to return to a country where they might be accused of being accomplices to mass murder.

Many of those now repatriating had initially fled to border camps just inside Congo, but then trudged on foot deeper into the Congo basin in 1996, pursued by Rwandan and other military forces intent on taking revenge on the interahamwe and their followers. Untold thousands were killed or died of exhaustion and illness in a bloody chase across the waist of Africa.

Some walked for thousands of kilometres and, after months of wanderings, crossed the entire continent east to west and reached the Atlantic Ocean. Most settled in the interior where women gave birth by themselves in the forests and sometimes married local Congolese who could provide them with shelter and protection from rape. Many refugees became small-time labourers for local villagers. Some stayed in the forest, in homemade huts of twigs and leaves, foraging for berries and other fruits. Until word began reaching them that things had changed in Rwanda.

THE END

To try to bring closure to one of the last remaining threads from one of history's most traumatic and confused humanitarian crises, UNHCR recently launched a so-called mass information campaign to encourage remaining pockets of Rwandans to leave the forests. The U.N. Radio Okapi also beams similar messages which obviously have influenced some Rwandans like Butera, but is unlikely to persuade an estimated 17,000 and 30,000 hard-core interahamwe and their supporters still at large.

The refugee agency established a series of centres on the fringes of the forbidding interior to welcome the several hundred refugees who arrive each week from the forest. They are mainly women and children, most of these youngsters having been born in exile and never even seen 'home.' They are registered, provided with basic help and moved along a by now well oiled logistical train to transit centres inside Rwanda and then to their home communes.

Former Rwandan soldiers and interahamwe militias are separated out and sent for several weeks to a re-education camp where they are indoctrinated into the rules of the 'new' Rwanda, with particular emphasis on the fact that separate Tutsi and Hutu ethnicities and mutual animosity are things of the past.

According to Brigitte Bampile, a nurse in the Congolese town of Bukavu who examines returnees, many of the women and children bear the marks of their harsh existence, suffering from malaria, respiratory infections, skin problems, sexually-transmitted disease and AIDS.

And they face other hardships once they get back to their ancestral homeland. Rwanda is the most densely populated state in Africa and one of the world's poorest countries. Ninety percent of the population live off the land, but there is not enough of it for everyone. Tens of thousands of people still need homes. Children born in exile often speak Swahili rather than the local language, Kinyarwanda.

A MINOR MIRACLE

And then there is the shadow of genocide hanging over everyone. "I was told if I came back to Rwanda, I would be put into prison, so I stayed over there," 32-year-old Sebastien Mazimpaka, a Hutu, said before he finally came back to Buremera in southwestern Rwanda, a mixed village of Tutsis and Hutus.

"It's good with the neighbours," according to Lorence Mwitende, a Tutsi neighbour. "But there are other difficulties, just to find something to eat is difficult." She may earn the equivalent of 34-50 U.S. cents a day as a farm labourer, but from that she must feed four children, often with nothing but leaves from a neighbour's manioc plants. Another child died recently because her mother couldn't afford a doctor.

Back at the Rwanda-Congo border, Antoine Butera has just crossed the frontier. In 1994 this ramshackle post and the military bridge across the Ruzizi River was clogged with tens of thousands of frenzied refugees trying to escape the carnage.

In direct contrast on this particular day, the small group of returning refugees is processed in less than one hour with no fuss or delay. An elderly aunt has met the UNHCR convoy with astonishing news. "I've no idea how many convoys she came to meet, but she was there today looking for me," Butera said. "And my whole family is alive and living in Kigali. All nine children and their mother are alive – 10 people total!"

In the horror that was Rwanda, that an entire family survived could surely be considered a modest miracle.

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 135: "New Europe and Asylum – What Next?" (June 2004). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (520Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here