I feel sick

In Congo last month I interviewed three Hutu soldiers who had deserted their army, which has been hiding in eastern Congo and causing trouble since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The army's commanders include some men who led the genocide, and won't return to Rwanda for fear of being prosecuted for war crimes. They have a shaky grip on their foot soldiers, who are tired of living in hiding, and some of the men -- like the three we met -- are risking their lives to escape, which is what I wanted to write about.

In an only-in-Africa bit of political theater, the Hutu rebels have a website, with contact information and spokesmen based in Europe. I called a number in Paris and found myself speaking with a man who was articulate, gracious and spoke in complete sentences -- which journalists love. We spoke for 15 good minutes. Before I hung up, I asked him to spell out his name, and when I googled him, I suddenly felt nauseous.

Callixte Mbarushimana was a United Nations employee in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1994. According to news accounts (such as this by PBS), he allegedly directed the killing of several Tutsi colleagues at the U.N. Originally hired as a computer technician, he is said to have funneled U.N. supplies and technical equipment to Hutu killers and helped them to identify up to three dozen Tutsis who later turned up dead. PBS Frontline quotes one former colleague of his as saying, "Wherever Callixte went, the next day people would be found dead."

In 1998, four years after the genocide, he was found -- and here's why John Bolton might not completely insane -- still working for the U.N., in Angola. Three years later, international media reported that he was with the U.N. in Kosovo, eventually leading to a war-crimes indictment. The document alleged he provided material support to genocidaires (four witnesses said he murdered people himself). But a few months later, the war-crimes tribunal dropped the case, in part because there was increasing pressure from the international community to focus on the top leaders of the genocide, not those at the middle level. In June this year AP reported that the U.N. is asking France -- where he has refugee protection -- to try him, but that hasn't happened yet.

In the end, I didn't include any of his quotes in my story -- not on purpose, I just didn't need them. But when I got to my thousand-word limit and realized I had said what I wanted to say without him, I was relieved. I couldn't have quoted him without including the story I've just told here. Maybe he is innocent, as he says. Without a trial we might never know for sure. But I was reminded of what someone told me before I moved here -- that in reporting in Africa requires you to give audience to some pretty terrible people, men with blood on their hands. Maybe that person was right. But at that moment I wanted to vomit.