Heading up into the mountains behind Poso in Central Sulawesi, the rice paddies of the coastal plain soon give way to lush mountain vegetation. Cocoa plantations large and small, mangoes, vanilla and cloves against a backdrop of the rich green tropical forest. All this to the sound of Bryan Adams’ ‘Summer of 69’ and Phil Collins’ ‘True Colours’ wafting out from the jeep’s tapedeck for the 100th time in the week. This may be a long way from home but driver Ahmad’s musical tastes are somewhat limited and distinctly Western.

First impressions make it hard to believe that this seemingly idyllic Indonesian backwater with its forest covered mountains dipping down to palm-fringed beaches has so recently been the scene of vicious sectarian violence. After an hour’s bumpy ride uphill I find Ari Pattinasarani taking pictures of a classroom full of junior high school kids at the Sanginora village school. The road doesn’t yet extend to the school and to visit this class we’ve had to traipse through the mud left by yesterday’s heavy rains.  The session has been organised by the local youth committee of which Ari is a leading member. One of his friends is talking to the teenagers about what physical and psychosocial changes they can expect as they grow up. It’s a lively affair and the children interact well, their giggling at some of the more intimate parts of the lecture interspersed with serious faces when they are asked to think about how they feel.  After the talk, I ask Ari to tell me a little about the conflict which has been such a crippling part of all their recent lives.

The violence, which has left deep physical and mental scars in this beautiful region of Sulawesi, came late, he says, to his home sub-district, the eight villages of Poso Pesisir Selatan. Trouble first erupted in the provincial town of Poso in 1998, during the nationwide turmoil as Suharto’s long presidency came to an end. The violence in most of the rest of the country was soon brought under control but around the towns of Poso and Tentena the downward spiral into sectarian violence which eventually left over a 1000 dead and 100,000 displaced had only just begun. The new millennium brought terrible bloodshed and destruction to the region. Jihadis saw the area around Poso where Christians and Muslims lived peacefully side by side, as a launchpad for their activities throughout the country. On the other side, Christian militias were determined to preserve their enclave in a predominantly Muslim country. The violence that followed was horrendous -  lynchings, church and mosque burning, the destruction of homes and schools, of businesses and shops, and almost the entire population forced to flee.  But Ari’s village of Tankura seemed to have escaped, until finally in November 2001 they heard that a mob was on its way.

Not waiting to see whether or not the rumours were true, Ari and his family along with the rest of his village, fled, first into the mountains to more remote villages but eventually to the provincial capital of Palu. When four months later word came through that it was safe to return home he and a few friends returned to find devastation. Ari is a Christian but at the same time as he returned so too did his fellow villagers from the Muslim community. He said it was moment of truth. The destruction was total, not aimed at one side or the other.  Both Christian and Muslim houses had been destroyed. The realisation dawned that those who had instigated this were not local.  He and his friends from both sides of the religious divide decided that this could not be allowed to happen again and they saw joining their local Youth Committees as a way they could play their part to make sure it didn’t.

Ari’s Majulea Youth Committee in Poso Pesisir Selatan and seven other committees in the worst affected sub districts of Central Sulawesi were set up as part of a CARDI programme, (Consortium for Assistance and Recovery toward Development in Indonesia) with funding from the European Union. The programme’s aim, to which Ari and his friends have fully bought in, is ‘building bridges between conflict affected youth.’ They believe that if young people learn to understand themselves and each other and form friendships based on that understanding, they can learn to trust each other so that the fact that they come from different religious communities will never again be enough for the ‘outsiders’ on whom they all blame the conflict, to pitch one group against another with such devastating consequences.

Sitting side by side, a bit embarrassed to have been volunteered by their friends to be victims of my interview, Kurniawan and Iren look very similar, two Indonesian teenagers working together to produce a newsletter. But they are as different as it gets in Poso, Central Sulawesi. Iren is a Christian Business School graduate with her eyes set firmly on a civil service job and a pension. Kurniawan is a Muslim, who has dropped out of college, unable to see any point in continuing his studies.  What they do have in common is that they are both youth committee members working together on building a peace that will hold in this remote region of Indonesia so recently torn apart by devastating sectarian fighting.

Just a few short years ago Poso saw previously peacefully coexisting Muslim and Christian communities collide in a deadly explosion of violence. Now every month Iren, Kurniawan and a dozen other young people gather to put together a newsletter. They come from volunteer youth committees in the eight areas worst affected by the conflict where CARDI (the Consortium for Assistance and Recovery toward Development in Indonesia) is rolling out a European Union funded programme, working with young people to prevent a return of the violence. The newsletter, which the next day I see being distributed in schools, has no editor. CARDI staffers in whose offices in downtown Poso they meet, have helped them get started, but it is Kurniawan, Iren and their friends who decide on the content and do all the work. They want me to tell them how they are doing and critique their efforts so far. I sit with three copies in front of me and am very impressed. They are learning fast and the most recent edition is bright, colourful and full of items that their young target audience will want to read. They ask if they can interview me for the next issue and I agree but only on the condition that I can interview some of them in return.

When Abdi my interviewer has retired with his tape recorder to try and make sense of my answers, I turn to Kurniawan and Iren. As the conflict is never far from the surface in this weary town I ask whether it had directly affected them, and of course it had. Both their families had been forced to flee. Iren, who now looks like any chic teenager in her cut off jeans and stylish top says that for the first few months she and her family had been forced to live in the forest before ending up in the Christian stronghold of Tentena. Kurniawan’s family, on the other hand, had joined the mainly Muslim exodus to the west and the safety of Palu. Neither of them was an original member when the committees started last year, but they both saw their friends taking part and wanted to get involved. For Iren, I feel, it is part of her meticulously planned future. Kurniawan is a bit more complicated. He told me that he had seen some of his friends go seriously wrong and although he’d dropped out of college he didn’t want to follow the same route. He saw the Committee as a way to get involved in something good and make decent friends at the same time. Now there they sit, the young Christian and the young Muslim, she smiling coyly, he clowning for the camera, totally relaxed and at ease in each other’s company, firm friends across what until recently was a massive divide.

If there is anywhere in Africa where people might have lost all hope, it is northern Uganda.  The Acholi people of this region suffered for twenty years from a war in which the main targets were civilians and, especially, children.  The weapons used most commonly against them were rape, abduction, and torture. 
 
Remarkably, though, hope is on the rise again in northern Uganda.  Peace talks in Juba (in nearby southern Sudan) between the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda continue pretty much on track. Encouraged by the progress of the peace talks and by a sharp decrease in attacks by LRA, people are going back to their homes.  Most weeks, UN Security reports indicate no LRA activity in northern Uganda.

Not everywhere, and not all at once, but for the first time in a long time masses of people are able to act out of hope instead of fear.  In Lira District, 95% of people have returned home.  In some areas it’s hard to even spot the camps where the displaced once lived - as they leave, people dismantle the crude, temporary huts in the camps, a signal that they believe that these horrible times are coming to an end.
 
Of course, life does not return to normal immediately when people leave the camps.  The first stop on the route home may be either satellite or transition camps.  When people do return to their villages, the challenges are everywhere: homes need to be rebuilt brick by brick.  Schools, used by rebels as garrisons during the conflict, need new roofs, desks, and chairs.  Long-abandoned fields need plowing, which farmers, having lost their livestock in the conflict, will do by hand.  Rebuilding is a difficult process that will take many years.
 
This week, the Government of Uganda announced a landmark reconstruction package of unprecedented scale - $600 million for roads, schools, and health clinics in northern Uganda.  This represents a significant promise of investment in the marginalized areas of the north by international partners.  More importantly, the Ugandan Government has committed to provide 30% of that funding itself.  Right now this is a highly symbolic gesture – but an important one, and IRC will lobby donors to follow through on their commitments.
 
There will be setbacks on the road to recovery.  Recent floods showed just how fragile the recovery is, and just how thin the margin of survival is for most of Northern Uganda.  Unrest in the northeast of the country – the Karamoja areas – also demands attention, development and peaceful solutions to conflict.  But a nascent peace and promises of new investment mean that the primary ingredients for stability and security are moving into place.  The International Rescue Committee will strive in the coming months to match the resilience of the people of Northern Uganda with a dedication to help restore and rebuild.  With hard work, someday the war may become just an awful memory.

Anne will be speaking at the GuluWalk event in Washington, DC tomorrow–last year’s GuluWalk brought together more than 30,000 people in 82 cities and 15 different countries to urge the world to support peace in northern Uganda. 

- - - -

Gacaca courts, or “community justice,” are Rwanda’s way of dealing with and prosecuting genocide crimes humanely. Emily Holland, in-house producer for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), recently traveled to Rwanda with co-chairman of the IRC Overseers and NBC newsman Tom Brokaw. There, they spoke with 20 Rwandan citizens about the effectiveness of gacaca courts. Among those participating were imprisoned perpetrators of the genocide and genocide survivors—many of whom knew each other when the horrors occurred but had not met again until that point.

- - - -

Training my camera on Mukagatira, a 43-year-old Hutu mother of three imprisoned for her role in Rwanda’s genocide, I took a deep breath, grateful I wasn’t asking the questions.”Do you know these survivors personally?” Tom Brokaw asked.”Yes, we were neighbors,” she responded. “We knew each other.”"What do you want to say to them?”

“I hope that they have an understanding and an enduring attitude. What happened happened, but this should not be the end of life.”

“Some people worry that genocide could happen again,” Tom said. “Do you believe that’s possible?”

Mukagatira hesitated: “Given what happened, I hope it never does.”

It had been eight years since I’d worked in Rwanda, on a summer fellowship to monitor genocide orphans placed in foster homes and help jump-start the country’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. Nineteen years old and chasing concepts I barely understood—humanistic mediation, truth commissions—I knew enough to know that conversations between perpetrators and survivors of the genocide weren’t happening.

“Dialogue will never work,” I remember a cabdriver laughing harshly. “The dead never die. I will tell my son and he will tell his and together we will make sure the genocide is not forgotten.”

I wasn’t prepared to disagree. Genocide’s aftermath—broken families, bulletin boards of orphaned children’s photographs, chain gangs of prisoners marched down blasted roads—was daunting. Worst of all: grisly memorials like Nyamata Church, site of one of the ghastliest massacres in Rwandan history.

Nyamata Church is a 19th-century bush chapel founded by Dutch settlers. The Tutsi fled there in ‘94 in hopes they’d escape the Hutu Interhamwe. “They had done so before and been protected,” my boss told me. “They had no reason to think it wouldn’t work again.”

In the space of five days 2,500 Tutsi were killed. Bludgeoned to death as their own priest looked on—survivors say the priest led the killers to the church himself … consigned his own parishioners to their doom.

We visited Nyamata on my first day. “Brace yourself,” my boss said as we prepared to enter. I rested my hand on the doorframe, being careful not to touch the bullets lodged there nor the dried blood. “Welcome to Nyamata” is the last thing I remember hearing as I walked in a trance past pews heaped high with human skulls and bones.

- - - -

“What specific crimes were you charged with?” Tom asked Mukagatira.

“Genocide crimes.”

“What do you think would be justice for your crimes?”

“I feel I’m not guilty. I think I should receive justice for my crimes.”

“Do you understand that survivors and their families might have a different understanding of justice than you have?” Tom asked.

Mukagatira stood clutching her elbows, barely looking up, and spoke so softly that although I was wearing sensitive headphones, I strained to hear her. It was a beautiful setting—birds were singing, sunlight streamed through a covering of pine trees overhead—but Mukagatira seemed to see none of it. Twelve years behind bars had obviously taken their toll. A virtual prison now encased her.

“Yes, I think so,” she swallowed.

Kibuye offers its own harrowing genocide memorial: a place called Bisesero. Tom and I ascended its long, steep staircase, which culminates in a massive burial site overlooking a sweeping vista. At the bottom is a shed filled wall to wall with tables of bones. Thirty thousand Rwandans perished there. The air inside is motionless.

I wondered if Mukagatira had ever seen it. Or if it was the present, not the past, that haunted her, as was the case with our next interviewee, Jean-Baptiste. He’s a former primary-school teacher, a father of three, and a genocide perpetrator. His family had been forced to relocate for fear they’d be killed in revenge.

“You’ve been in prison for 12 years,” Tom said. “You’ve had a great deal of time to think about what has happened. Have you been able to explain your actions to yourself?”

“As prisoners, we take certain moments to convene and try to view what we did as a way of confessing and also see how this should never happen again,” Jean-Baptiste responded.

“Do you think Rwanda can move forward as one country without the divisions that brought on the days of darkness?” Tom asked.

“Yes, I believe that is possible so long as people come together. Rwanda is in a position to go forward.”

- - - -

From a development standpoint, Rwanda’s picture is certainly encouraging. I didn’t recognize Kigali’s manicured lawns. Tall buildings stand where I remember street children’s flimsy card tables. A stock exchange will soon open. Construction of another international airport is being considered.

Germany, Belgium, and China are buying Rwandan products at a brisk pace and American influence is certainly evident. Starbucks sells Rwandan “Blue Bourbon” coffee in its U.S. outlets, and Rwanda’s Ministry of Defense is known affectionately as “the Pentagon.”

“The little nation that could,” New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof called it recently and noted that Rwanda “is clean, safe, and enjoying economic growth more than twice as fast as the United States or Europe.”

I assume this excitement is largely lost on people like Mukagatira and Jean-Baptiste. I doubt it even reaches Uwamahora, 38, mother of four, genocide survivor, and the last person we interviewed that day:

“Have you met with genocidaires before?” Tom asked.

“This is my first time,” said Uwamahora in a hushed voice.

“What do you want them to say to you?”

“I hope that they feel sorry and confess to what they did.”

“Tell me what happened to your family.”

“I am the only survivor in my family. Ninety-two people in my family were killed.”

Uwamahora recognized some of the prisoners there that day. Asked if it was difficult to see them, she answered that she tried to be peaceful in her heart and that if any of the prisoners came to her and apologized, she would definitely forgive them.

Did she worry that genocide could happen again? Yes, she did sometimes. Did she think the country could move forward as one Rwanda without the rivalries that caused the past? She was hopeful.

Tom thanked Uwamahora. I picked up my tripod, and we proceeded toward a tent where she, Mukagatira, Jean-Baptiste, and 43 other Rwandans would continue to discuss what happened 12 years ago.

Sitting just outside the tent’s aperture, I listened to the melodic sound of Kinyarwanda being spoken. I barely remembered any words but didn’t need to: the body language of grief, incredulity, and weariness transcends them.

- - - -

Rwanda now isn’t the Rwanda the West thought it knew when I first visited. World leaders then had glibly applied the 21st century’s most controversial geopolitical term to the mass killing, but it would be years before filmmakers captured a hotel-manager-turned-hero’s story and taught the world what genocide actually meant.

A sort of filmmaker myself these days, I thought of this while listening to the people for whom genocide isn’t a term or a movie or even a memory. It’s the nightmare that continues to define their lives.

I left the tent and spent my last few minutes at the gacaca ceremony gathering “establishing shots”: the mountains, the light, the trees. People often revert to sensory cues in their struggle to describe the emotions of an experience, but these cues can also serve to consecrate it. The light that filtered through those trees was muted, intimate, and—though I’m hesitant to use this word when describing experiences in Africa (it has complicated connotations)—holy.

I felt buoyed by what was happening in Rwanda: both the hard work that was being done by its people and the encouraging signs that public opinion wouldn’t let another Rwanda happen.

For me, returning to Rwanda was certainly a rite of passage. Like taking a pencil to a long-abandoned sketch. I had never properly emoted about Rwanda, communicating only the vaguely positive (and generally unrepresentative) experiences I’d had. For who back home could understand coming face to face with something like Nyamata or Bisesero?

But here I was: back and able to contextualize Rwanda and the genocide’s role in my life.

And, more importantly, in theirs.

Labels like perpetrator and survivor will persist always, but there are positive aspects to long memories of past horrors: it may prevent their recurrence.

I had seen not just the physical but the real emotional aftermath of genocide: the horror show Rwandans had either carried out or survived but all lived with … the getting past and getting on.

We left after a midday meal: perpetrators and survivors sat down together to eat and reflect. We left them in the pine-tree forest. An appropriate metaphor, I thought—Rwanda isn’t through the woods but there are signs it’s doing better.

Driving back, I smelled Rwanda’s cooking fires and negotiated its cinnamon-colored dirt roads, not as set pieces of a sinister backdrop but scenes from a country in recovery. Plantain plants swayed in the breeze where bodies had once fallen, but now, somewhere in the woods, perpetrators and survivors were speaking.

They were talking about what had happened at places like Nyamata and Bisesero, and why, and why they shouldn’t again. They were realizing what each could and couldn’t do. For it’s this last reckoning—with each other and also with themselves—that takes the longest.

Perhaps there will be another movie. Everyone knows Rwanda now and everyone knows what genocide is. They see it as the killing only, but genocide is also about the aftermath. Of course, it’s up to us—humanitarian workers, Hollywood producers, and readers who don’t skip past the Africa opinion pieces in the New York Times—to keep the spotlight on Rwanda and help its citizens surmount the rivalries that caused the days of darkness.