By Rudy Brueggemann

I am 3,998, a number I will never forget. 

Since July 1994, 3,997 visitors before me have come to the small Catholic parish in farm country 45 kilometers south of Kigali, Rwanda. Like me, they've come to view the rotting remnants of genocide housed inside a small brick church called Ntarama.

Here, on April 15, 1994, and until the arrival of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers on May 14, 1994, killers of the radical Hutu-led Rwandan government brutally massacred an estimated 5,000 ethnic Tutsis. The compound is no bigger than a 7-11 mini-mart.

The murderers included government soldiers, or FAR, and organized bands of young men known as Interahamwe, the shock troops of the Rwandan genocide that claimed as many as 800,000 lives between April and July 1994. Ordinary civilians, many neighbors of Ntarama's victims, also participated in the slaughter.

Eerily, the pastoral hill country around Ntarama offers no evidence of war, disturbance, or any violence. Brick and tin-roofed buildings not far from the church look untouched by the three-month war that ended in July 1994. The victorious RPF (later renamed the Rwanda Patriotic Army, or RPA) forced the interim Hutu-government into exile in Zaire with nearly 2 million refugees, most of whom have returned since late 1996 when the camps were dispersed during the Zairian civil war.

To reach Ntarama, I board a tightly packed Toyota minibus from Kigali with 18 Rwandans for the bumpy, two-hour ride. We sit four across, five rows deep. I can't move. It's mid-June and hot.

My fellow passengers can't understand why a white person would take a local bus, when I should be driving an expensive four-wheel-drive jeep, like many aid workers in the Maryland-sized country. They joke about me in their native language, Kinyarwanda.

We pass a security post manned by camouflage-clad teenage RPA soldiers carrying automatic rifles. They check the passengers' identity cards and my passport. Ten minutes later, I climb out at an unnamed intersection, joined by a thin, civilian-dressed RPA security officer. He may have followed me from the Kigali taxi park. I'm not sure. Alone, off the bus, he merely shows me his card and says he will join me until Ntarama.

The soldiers and my RPA shadow assure me that deep rifts underlie Rwanda's relatively calm facade. Though President Pasteur Bizimungu is Hutu, ruling a multi-party system under the country's 1991 constitution, real power rests with General Paul Kagame, a Tutsi.

Kagame led his troops to victory in the war and now serves as vice president. He faces armed insurrection in Rwanda's mountainous northwest that has claimed 2,300 civilian lives between May and July alone, according to Amnesty International. The London-based group blames Kagame's troops for massive killings, including 120 deaths in a Protestant church on June 8. Kagame also must deal with more than 100,000 genocide suspects awaiting trial and too few resources to rebuild a poor country destroyed by fraternal violence.

RPA official in tow, I begin walking a red-dirt road to the Ntarama church complex three kilometers away. We don't talk. I try, in French. He won't answer questions.

Crops of corn and bananas grow in the fields. Cows, goats, and chickens line the road. I take some pictures, only after asking my companion, who nods his consent. The mud and grass huts next to the road appear unscathed, except by weather and time. I see children in the fields and a few bicyclists. The kids yell, "Mzungu," or white person. Again, locals are surprised to see a white person walking, not driving.

It's hot now, about 10 a.m. in the morning. I'm sweating, anxious for what lies ahead. Nothing I have seen gives any evidence of the mass grave beyond.

A white sign on the road finally announces the church. In French, Kinyarwanda, and English, it reads, "Ntarama Church Genocide site +/- 5000 [sic] persons." Another sign in Kinyarwanda explains that events here should not be forgotten.

My escort still with me, I walk under an arch and then up a small manicured path to the tree-shaded complex that little more than three years ago was a mass killing ground.

My RPA escort introduces me to Marc Nsabimana, a graying Tutsi man in his 50s and the site's guide. Marc tells me no one knows exactly how many were killed, but estimates are based on administrative records that also were used to track and kill Tutsis.

Prior to the genocide, all Rwandan citizens were required to carry identity cards, indicating their ethnic group: Hutu (about 87 percent of the population), Tutsi (about 12 percent), Twa (a pygmy people making up the final 1 percent). Rwandans whose cards indicated Tutsi were killed at road blocks around the country during the genocide.

Speaking quietly in French, Marc tells me he escaped the Ntarama slaughter by hiding nearby until the RPF secured the area in mid-May 1994.

The killings here are almost inconceivable, though this was among the genocides' smaller mass-murder sites. The brick church is approximately 50-by-20 feet in size. The small store, catechism, and two offices around the church are no larger than storage sheds.

Tutsis came here for safety after Hutu extremists unleashed the bloodbath three years back.

On April 6, 1994 a missile downed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimama's plane over Kigali, killing him and Burundi's president, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Habyarimana was returning from power-sharing talks in Tanzania with leaders of the rival RPF, a Tutsi-led rebel force which had settled into a ground war with Rwanda's Hutu troops in northern Rwanda since 1990. But radical elements of the MRNDD, Rwanda's ruling Hutu-led party since 1975, chose to eliminate the Tutsi ethnic/political problem, permanently. The hard-line Hutu elite are widely believed to have organized their leader's assassination and the ensuing mass killing.

Across the country, local political leaders and extremist propaganda broadcast on the radical-Hutu-controlled radio station, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, urged Hutus to eliminate the Tutsis, or "Inyenzi" (Kinyarwanda for cockroach). Almost overnight FAR troops and their supporters systematically killed opposition leaders and potential critics.

Among the first killed was Rwanda's prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The mob also tortured then killed her 10 Belgian peacekeeping guards, assuring a rapid withdrawal of most foreign personnel, including U.S. AID workers, who disgracefully left their Rwandan colleagues to face waiting killers. A plaque honoring U.S. AID's murdered Rwandan employees now hangs in the agency's Kigali office lobby.

The U.N. reduced its military force from 2,500 to 270 by May 1994. By then the genocide already had begun across the country.

Marc said the local bourgmestre told Tutsis to come to Ntarama, just as local Hutu leaders instructed other Tutsis to seek refuge at Rwanda's churches. The buildings are visible in almost every hill and community in the small, overwhelmingly Christian country. Before the war, up to 80 percent of all Rwandans were Christians, most Catholic.

Marc said the Tutsis believed their local leader, thinking they would be safe in a house of God. But Ntarama was turned into a killing factory, as were hundreds of churches, stadiums, and gathering places around the country.

Signs of the physical violence at the Ntarama church building are still evident.

The doors have been ripped off. Stained-glass windows are broken and holes punched in the walls, all presumably to kill those inside the tin-roofed building. Marc said grenades were tossed inside. Mainly, the Interahamwe and other killers used machetes to slaughter their victims.

Next to the church, authorities have constructed an open-air shed containing two long tables of unidentifiable body remains.

One table has victims' skulls neatly lined in a long rows. There are about 300. The skulls show visible signs of machete blows -- long cracks along the cranium. Other skulls have holes punched in by spearheads. Drying flower wreaths sit atop the skulls saying in English, Kinyarwanda, and French, "We remember you dear parents, children, brother, and sister."

Decaying assorted body parts sit on the table next to the skulls. The bones are mixed with tattered clothes in a tangled heap. I see a rib cage protruding near the entrance. The stench of rotting matter is strong here, but not overpowering. Thirty-eight months have passed since the massacre.

Inside each of the five buildings lie the remains of cadavers, old clothes, broken furniture -- all left largely as the victorious RPF troops found it.

By the church-building entrance, I see a hip joint and tibia. Light breaks through a hole at the church's far end, illuminating the altar. On it, a Bible sits open next to four skulls, an obvious post-killing altar arrangement.

The RPA-led government has turned the Ntarama site into a genocide museum, unlike other Rwandan churches that today show no signs killing. Before coming, normal Rwandans and government officials said I could and should visit the church and take pictures. My Tutsi associates were pleased I came to see for myself, so I could tell my friends back home.

Visitors have included family of the deceased and employees of the many aid agencies working in Rwanda. But few, if any, Western "tourists" will come to Ntarama.

If they come to Rwanda at all -- and most wisely will not -- tourists will have booked mountain gorilla tours in Rwanda's Parc National des Volcans, near the border of the former Zaire (renamed the Congo). (During my visit in June, a gorilla-tour organizer announced at a security briefing by Rwanda's U.S. embassy staff that her tours to visit Rwanda's remaining 300 or so endangered primates were "booked solid" through August. This despite well-publicized firefights between RPA troops and groups of up to 500 armed former Interahamwe and ex-FAR soldiers in territory around the park. Speaking in his polite Southern drawl, the U.S. ambassador, Robert Gribbin III, told the tour leader it was "a very bad idea to see the gorillas this summer.")

Ntarama also has received visits from the international press corps and from members of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Based in Arusha, Tanzania, the tribunal was created to try alleged leaders of the former Rwanda government for genocide and other violations of international humanitarian law in Rwanda during 1994.

But since its start in November 1994, the tribunal has been plagued by "corruption and mismanagement," according to a July 19 report in the "New York Times."

As of May 1997, the tribunal still had not finished building a second courtroom for the second of its two three-judge panels. The tribunal has a parallel five-judge appeals chamber, which also serves the U.N. tribunal investigating crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Responding to an internal investigation that found rampant corruption and mismanagement, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan dismissed two of the Rwanda tribunal's top officials in January. Then, in a dramatic breakthrough on July 19, seven high-ranking suspects of the former Rwanda government were arrested in Nairobi, Kenya, on genocide charges.

(Many educated Tutsis in Rwanda told me former leaders of the interim Hutu-led government were living comfortably in Kenya with full knowledge of Kenya's president, Daniel Arap Moi.)

Prior to the July arrests, only 12 suspects of the former Hutu regime had been jailed in Arusha, with another two suspects in custody and awaiting transfer from Cameroon. Only four trials are under way, with no convictions. All told, the tribunal expects to hold 52 prisoners only, and construction of the jail complex in July was still unfinished after two years of work.

By comparison, the current Rwandan government has more than 100,000 suspects in overcrowded prisons awaiting trials, which at the current rate will take 407 years to complete, according to the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights.

Footdragging by the U.N.'s Rwanda tribunal is not for lack of funds. The 1997 budget for the 380-person tribunal (half "professional staff") comes to nearly $47 million, with another $650,000 donated by the United States exclusively for the investigation and prosecution of sex crimes.

A parking lot at the Arusha International Conference Center, housing the Rwanda tribunal, contains about 60 four-wheel drive U.N. vehicles, at the tribunal's disposal. One U.N. High Commission for Human Rights official told me that this fleet of pricy off-road vehicles would be of better used in Kigali, Rwanda. The tribunal's Office of the Prosecutor established a separate office there in March 1995 to gather information for the criminal proceedings held in more luxurious -- as well as safe and scenic -- Arusha.

"It's a strong message to the world," a U.N. tribunal press officer assured me in early July, referring to the long-delayed judicial proceedings. "We got to produce and work hard so the world sees."

Ntarama's visitors have asked for nothing less, even if the tribunal has failed thus far.

In the Ntarama genocide site guest book, where each visitor's name and country is logged, comments can be written under a column called "remarques." I read entries by visitors from other African countries, America, Europe, and Australia. Most entries in this particular guest registry have been left by Rwandans.

Some people leave homilies or prayers you'd expect at a site of mass killing. "God rest the dead," "There must be justice," or the expected but perhaps necessary "C'est incroyable."

Though four in five Rwandans were Christians before the genocide, that didn't keep them from raping, maiming, killing, and violating almost every Christian creed. Worse, more than 40 priests and other figures of the Catholic Church in Rwanda participated in the killings, according to the London-based African Rights, a human rights group that has published numerous reports on the genocide and its ringleaders. The most well-known church leader, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, presided over the St. Famille Parish in downtown Kigali, where up to 18,000 Hutus and Tutsi sought refuge during the genocide.

According to witness testimony and genocide survivors with whom I spoke in Kigali, Father Wenceslas raped young girls at the nearby Milles Collines Hotel in Kigali during the genocide in exchange for sparing their and their family's lives from the Interahamwe groups he personally directed. (Father Wenceslas now lives in exile in France. He denies the charges as inflammatory Tutsi propaganda, claiming he helped save most of the refugees' lives.)

Holding a pen and looking at the quiet church compound where you can still smell the odor of human decay, I cannot think clearly. I have no "remarques" worthy of the things I have just seen. What can one say about a place such as this? I can only write, "I will tell everyone, everyone, what happened here. It is the least I can do."

I thank Marc for his assistance and then walk away from the church on the hot June morning. On the dirt road, I feel creeping discomfort looking at the gentle hills and mud homes and odd passersby. Were they "genocidaires" too? Which villagers here killed their neighbor, which hid in terror, which forcibly fled to the former Zaire after the RPA's victory? I mutter, "Freaking unbelievable," but I feel strangely empty saying it.

A month passes before I can connect any emotion with the things I have seen. Back in the comfort of the United States, I peer at my slides of human skulls with machete cracks. I feel queasy. I've seen these victims' remains firsthand, but I can hardly believe my pictures are real. "C'est incroyable."