KIBUYE, Rwanda

At times, a smoldering anger consumes Marguerite Mukabazanira. Her normally friendly face is contorted and she starts to hiss.

Marguerite Mukabazanira lost her husband and five children in the genocide.

She is mad at the Rwandan government, which she regards as craven for letting killers walk free in the name of national reconciliation. She despises former neighbors, whom she holds responsible for the murder of her husband and all her five children.

But she reserves something akin to pure hatred for her former best friend and the godmother to her youngest child, Olive Mukarugagi, under whose protection Delphine Umutesi, 7, was placed, only to be handed over to the killers.

"She is the one who killed my youngest child," Mukabazanira declares, sitting stiff-backed in her temporary home in this southern town. "Ever since the war ended, I have never been at peace, because I always see people who killed my relatives, my family, roaming around. Many were close friends before the genocide. I was the teacher of their children. But no one lifted a finger to help us."

Mukarugagi, 40, sits for now in Butare Central Prison, where she has been held for the past seven years on charges of conspiring to murder little Delphine, as well as for the crime of genocide. Mukarugagi admits that the child had been placed in her care, but insists that her husband's family had taken her away to be killed in the street. She was powerless, she says, to stop them.

"Marguerite is furious and bitter, which is understandable," she says. "But I was not responsible. My husband's uncle killed her. I had nothing to do with it."

Perhaps sometime this month, Mukarugagi will walk out of Butare Central Prison. She will be freed provisionally as part of a government program to release most of the 130,000 genocide suspects who have been held for years in prisons so overcrowded that inmates take turns to sleep. Last year about 23,000 suspects deemed to be mere foot soldiers during the genocide, or who were seriously ill, were sent back to their villages. Any day now, another 30,000 will be similarly released conditionally. Only a few thousand regarded as the architects of the genocide, or who demonstrated especially depraved enthusiasm for killing, will eventually be tried in regular courts.

The vast majority of suspects, such as Mukarugagi, will be required to appear only before traditional open-air tribunals of village notables, who will begin to sit in judgment sometime this month in communities throughout Rwanda. In exchange for a full public confession, those found guilty will be sentenced mostly to time already served, community service and perhaps be required to pay compensation to survivors, such as helping to rebuild a home destroyed.

By resorting to this compromise, the Rwandan government is only facing the reality that the very magnitude of the crime committed 10 years ago puts it beyond the possibility of just sanction.

On April 7, 1994, a day after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down and he was killed, units of government soldiers, police and Hutu militia organized and funded by the government began implementing a carefully planned program of mass eradication directed at the country's Tutsi minority. The ruling party's ideology of Hutu Power saw no room for coexistence with the Tutsi, whose rebel forces eventually stopped the genocide, though too late to save about 80 percent of the Tutsi population. Within 100 days, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, and Hutu opposed to the genocide, had been killed. From a distance, the world watched.

A 'Nation in Prison'

For scale and speed, the genocide was the most efficiently carried out in recorded history, with people being killed, mostly with machetes, at a rate seven times faster than in the Nazi Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed.

The total mobilization of the Hutu population, which accounted for about 85 percent of Rwanda's 8 million people, made it possible.

And made justice virtually impossible.

"There was never any real possibility of justice," says Rakiya Omaar, executive director of the London-based humanitarian group African Rights and a leading authority on the genocide. "The degree of popular participation was so deep and widespread that it would be like putting the whole nation in prison."

Rwanda's ministry of justice estimates that for every suspect detained, six others were left alone, which would put the number of direct participants in the genocide in the neighborhood of 1 million. At the current pace of judicial proceedings, Rwandan courts would literally still be trying genocide cases for the next century, long after the suspects are dead, officials say.

The situation is complicated by the fact Rwanda has a death penalty.

"It was a question of making a choice, whether to attempt real justice and thereby create legalized genocide, or attempt to balance the desire to eradicate impunity while allowing the country to move on," says Martin Ngoga, the deputy attorney general. "We were not in a position to enforce the law."

Rwanda's judicial system was at any rate destroyed during the genocide. Almost all the country's lawyers either were killed or fled into exile. Meanwhile, many of the suspects already are in their 10th year of detention, with no prospects of a trial date in the foreseeable future.

So the authorities reached into the country's past for a form of traditional conflict resolution that strives less for retribution than for reconciliation. "Our larger purpose is we want Rwandans to be Rwandans again," Ngoga says. "The genocide succeeded, but we want people, nevertheless, to live together. There is no other practical way."

Gacaca: On the Grass

After a two-year pilot program to adapt them to today's realities, 9,010 village tribunals, called Gacaca courts, will begin trying suspects from this month, says Charles Kayitana, spokesman for the program.

For a preparatory session of a Gacaca (pronounced gah-CHA-CHA) court near the southeastern town of Kibungo, villagers have gathered within a cluster of mango trees. Members of the tribunal, known as "the wise men and women," sit on a wooden bench while residents squat before them in a semicircle on the grass. Gacaca literally means "on the grass."

About two dozen suspects have been trucked in from the local prison. In their flamingo-pink uniforms, they stand out from their former neighbors, family and friends, who are all required to be in attendance so no one can pretend not to know the enormity of the crimes that were committed in their name.

The subject at hand stands in sharp contrast to the extravagant beauty of the surroundings. The hills roll off in the distance, all shades of green. The earth is red where turned or is otherwise carpeted in kikuyu grass and the inevitable profusion of banana trees and cassava. The sky is blue, like cobalt, and white and gray clouds drift over the land.

The presiding "wise woman" states the purpose of the gathering, leads the assembled in a moment of silence for the dead and starts the proceedings.

The sessions follow a more or less prescribed pattern: charges are read, survivors testify, naming some in the pink uniforms who allegedly used guns and sharp knives on their neighbors a decade ago. One by one the accused stand to state their case, invariably involving at least a partial confession. "It is participatory," Kayitana says. "It is by Rwandans, for Rwandans."

Justice Under Fire

But Gacaca has been criticized by some international human rights organizations for falling far short of the presumed balance and the protection of the accused's rights that regular courts afford. Significantly, the system does not allow for defense attorneys, and few suspects can resist the coercive power of the leniency promised in exchanged for a full confession. A presumption of innocence is not the system's strength.

Rwandan officials typically treat such criticism with dismissal.

"If there is a bar association somewhere that is willing to lend us 12,000 lawyers, we're happy to accept them," Ngoga says. "We have learned to ignore this nonsense. We decided to deal with our situation in the manner that suits our needs."

This homegrown solution offers little comfort to Cyriaque Habyarabatuma, the chief of police in Butare province under the old regime. For the past 10 years Habyarabatuma appeared to have pulled off an unusually seamless transition from serving the genocidal regime to serving the current one in similar capacities.

But a survivor denounced him at a recent Gacaca session for personally directing police officers a decade ago to mow down the innocent. On the evening of Feb. 6 police executed a warrant for his arrest, and now Habyarabatuma finds himself within the confines of the impossibly overcrowded Butare Central Prison, along with 10,814 other inmates.

Because of the importance of his position, Habyarabatuma may not qualify for trial under the more lenient Gacaca system, which cannot try "Category One" offenders. As a result, he disavows any involvement in the genocide, a position of moral heroism that a police commander almost certainly would have been unable to maintain during the genocide. Habyarabatuma says he is a victim of wrongful accusation.

"Not all who are in prison killed; sometimes there are false accusations," he says, suggesting strongly that this unfortunate state of affairs clearly applies to himself. "Problems arise when you release the guilty but hold the innocent."

A Reluctant Killer

By contrast, Cyriaque Sebera is counting the days to his return home for the first time in nine years. The farmer from Gashora, in southern Rwanda, first confessed six years ago to killing his neighbor, but the system was not ready to accommodate people like him. Now prison officials have notified him that he is on a list of those scheduled for provisional release, and might soon be allowed home to face a Gacaca court.

"I collaborated with others to kill the Tutsi of this area," he says. "There was a feeling we could get away with anything. In my area from 1992 to 1994, killing a Tutsi was not a crime."

Sebera, 50, confesses to direct responsibility for only one killing, the murder of a Tutsi neighbor and fellow farmer. But he killed only with reluctance, he swears, and only because he had no real choice. The pressure to join in the killing was severe, with the implied threat that whoever failed to participate was liable to be killed as a Tutsi-lover.

For this reason, he says hopefully, the Gacaca court will look kindly on him and, perhaps, his neighbors will accept him back. This has proved true for his son, who was released last year, he says.

"The survivors know that I tried hard to avoid killing," he says, "but there came a time when I could no longer resist."

During the genocide, the interahamwe militia, which carried out most of the killing, was indeed merciless with dissenters. Those hesitant to kill their neighbors, teachers or goddaughters were judged to be just as traitorous as the inyenzi, or cockroach, the name applied to all Tutsi. In this way, thousands of moderate Hutu were killed throughout the country in the last lunge by extremists to cleanse the land of the Tutsi.

"In April 1994," says Emile Rwamasirabo, rector of National University of Rwanda, "it was more dangerous to refuse to kill than to kill."

And while a confessed killer, such as Sebera, will probably be set free in exchange for time served, Gacaca courts still will be playing an invaluable role in the building of a new society of tolerance and rule of law, Rwamasirabo says.

"If you killed a Tutsi over the past 40 years in the name of Hutu Power there was no punishment," he says. "So today the simple act of recognizing it as a crime, of taking people to court, of public confession, already is a big leap forward."

The UN Tribunal

For its acknowledged sin of what can only be charitably described as moral cowardice, the international community, through the agency of the United Nations, also is hoping a similar public accounting will have a large symbolic impact.

Even its genocide tribunal's most bitter critics, including Ngoga, ascribe it significant value, however begrudgingly.

"This tribunal was not created to get us justice, but to nurse the guilt of the international community," says Ngoga, who was Rwanda's representative to the tribunal for four years. "But its mere existence has served a certain usefulness -- the international community officially recognized that a genocide occurred here."

Merely recognizing genocide now is counted as a virtue because the world's leading nations were reluctant to grant even that much in 1994. The French government supported and supplied the Hutu Power regime until the very end. The Clinton administration, smarting from the killing of two dozen U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia the previous October, actively dissuaded the UN from intervening. The UN itself turned a deaf ear to the desperate importunings of the commander of its peacekeeping force of 450 troops in Rwanda. After the genocide, the commander, Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, fell into depression and tried several times to commit suicide.

In a nondescript building in the East African town of Arusha, in Tanzania, the genocide tribunal sits in judgment. After nine years and more than $1.5 billion maintaining a vast apparatus of administrators and lawyers, the tribunal has so far convicted fewer than two dozen genocide suspects. It is on course to fail even to prosecute all the 65 suspects now trickling through its chambers before its mandate expires in 2007.

Yet for all its bumbling the tribunal has in custody some of the most prominent planners of the genocide, including the former prime minister, Jean Kambanda, as well as the chief of the army and various cabinet ministers.

But none is more important than the man widely acknowledged as the genocide mastermind, Col. Théoneste Bagosora, deputy commander of the Armed Forces of Rwanda. His trial is finally under way and is expected to be concluded sometime this year.

In late January in a bulletproof courtroom in Arusha, Bagosora sits impassive, lips pursed and eyes vacant, listening to Dallaire testify against him.

The Canadian general, now retired, recently published "Shake Hands With the Devil," his best-selling account of his failure to persuade the world to act against Bagosora and his comrades. The "devil" refers to Bagosora, who Dallaire now describes as "the kingpin" of the Hutu Power leadership that planned and set the genocide in motion.

Bagosora had kept detailed plans of the genocide in a journal that was subsequently retrieved. He also organized and armed the interahamwe, and got his associates to import enough machetes from China to arm one-third of Rwanda's entire population.

But in the courtroom his UN-paid attorneys are doing their best to challenge the very idea that a genocide took place at all, let alone whether their client was its chief executioner. The entire proceedings -- the red-robed judges and black-gowned lawyers, the endless arguments about the finer points of semantics, the rhetorical detours -- seem completely disconnected from the reality of Rwanda's existence.

After a week of testimony, Dallaire is excused. The general stands ramrod at attention, stares for what seems like a full minute at Bagosora, then finally pivots and marches out of the room. Bagosora only looks straight ahead, constantly pushing his big round glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Dallaire expresses relief afterward. "I've been waiting a long time to testify," he says. "I will never be finished with Rwanda, and all those connected to it will never be finished. The horror and the destruction will not allow me to be finished with it."

Last month, during ceremonies to mark the start of the genocide, Dallaire returned to Rwanda for the first time, talking to young people, apologizing for failing to protect the innocent and wiping away tears.

Neighbor to Neighbor

The tears flow freely for Marguerite Mukabazanira, alone in the world but for six genocide orphans she has informally adopted, who keep her company and allow her, at age 50, to be a mother again.

"Who will give us justice?" she asks in the tone of someone who already knows the answer. "The government is too interested in reconciling with the killers."

A school teacher, she was married to Onesphore Murekezi on July 23, 1978, and the two made their home that very day in the hilltop village of Mpare, just outside Butare. Life was hard for Tutsi anywhere in Rwanda but less so in Butare, a temperamental equivalent perhaps of California, where the climate soothed and the citizens were relaxed in their habits and friendly in their ways.

The couple became close to many of their Hutu neighbors, especially Olive Mukarugagi's family. She and Mukabazanira taught at the same school, Musange Primary, and their husbands were both in the brick-making business.

"Before the genocide the two families were so close, and we often exchanged presents," Mukarugagi says during a prison interview.

In 1987, after Delphine was born, her parents naturally asked Mukarugagi to be her godmother. In fact, all four of her older siblings also had Hutu godparents.

Neighborhood ties began to fray from about 1990, after the Tutsi rebel force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, invaded from neighboring Uganda with the objective of forcing Rwanda to take back hundreds of thousands of its Tutsi citizens who had been driven into exile in repeated pogroms since 1959.

Government propaganda began to characterize all Tutsi as ibiyitso -- collaborators -- who were to be shunned and, later, eliminated. In school, Tutsi children were made to sit in the back of the class and were otherwise made to realize that "it was a sin to be a Tutsi." At home, Tutsi parents sometimes were threatened. The odd rock would be hauled through windows and occasionally people were beaten.

But it always was just a touch less hateful in Butare, and even after full-bore genocide exploded on April 7, 1994, it took two full weeks, as well as personal intervention of the interim president, before the people of Butare succumbed to cold-blooded murder.

"We never thought of moving because we didn't imagine that level of violence," Mukabazanira says. "We never thought it would get to genocide."

On April 21, as a few soldiers fired in the air and the mobs began a house-to-house search, Mukabazanira and Murekezi grabbed their children and ran for the hills. All the Tutsi of Mpare and surrounding hills began to gather in public buildings in the area, as well as places of worship, thinking they'd be safe. But the bodies were piling up quickly, and Mukabazanira and Murekezi decided to send their children to their various Hutu godparents.

Mukarugagi took custody of Delphine. The little girl stayed alive for only the next two days, until April 23. None of the other children survived the massacre, and neither did their father.

Mukarugagi at first blames the whole thing on "the militia."

"We don't know who conspired to tell the militia that there were Tutsi children hiding in our home," she says. "The militia grabbed the children from our house and killed them in front of my husband's grandfather's house." The families all lived in close proximity: Mukarugagi's father-in-law lived two houses away, followed by her grandfather-in-law's, which was next door to hers. Mukabazanira and her family lived around the corner, their home visible just beyond the banana trees.

At length she admits that the culprit was family -- her brother-in-law, an interahamwe member she identifies as Sentama, who took Delphine away to be slaughtered. "We thought he was going to protect her," she says, having also offered that at that very moment other Tutsi children were being hacked to death next door in her grandfather-in-law's compound.

Accusations and Arrests

"I let the child go because we wanted to save her," she says repeatedly, as if, by repetition, somehow she can reassure herself that she did her very best.

On June 4, 1997, after an embittered Mukabazanira filed a complaint with local prosecutors, Mukarugagi was arrested and has been held ever since in Butare prison. Mukabazanira has similarly lodged charges of murder against other former friends, targeting the godparents with particular zeal.

"We thought no one could kill their godchildren, but they were the ones who did the killings," she says. One of them, Cleophas Rugizama, was sentenced to 20 years for the killing of Jocelyn Iribagiza, the oldest of the five children who was 15. The godmother of Aline Umujanyagwa, 14, the second born, was out of Mukabazanira's reach. The woman, Goreti Mukabuyenje, died in the refugee camps in Congo, where much of the Hutu population fled after the Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the old regime.

For the past seven years of prison life, Mukarugagi misses most her own three children, who are being raised by their grandmother, though they visit occasionally. She says she has been isolated by her husband's family. "The killers are from my husband's family, but they are putting everything on my head," she says. "Even my husband's family is trying to blame me."

The only time Mukarugagi has met her old friend was during an investigative hearing four years ago in the prosecutor's office. She says she never had the chance to offer an apology or any expression of regret. "She never greeted me that day," Mukarugagi says, and being a prisoner, she was not permitted, she says, to speak unless spoken to.

Mukabazanira's anger is not limited to her close friends. Some of the other killers that she barely knew have been paroled and are back in the old neighborhood. Sometimes, just to eyeball them, Mukabazanira goes back up there from her new home in downtown Butare. She seems to relish the moment when, at her sight, they all scamper off into the brush.

A Turn of Luck

"I meet many of them around town, including one who had clubbed me on the shoulder. They are scared when they see me. One of them riding a motorcycle saw me and fell in front of my vehicle. I had to break hard to avoid running him over."

Ten years ago, by a stroke of luck she cannot now conclude was either good or bad, Mukabazanira survived the genocide. Her husband and two of the children were cornered while hiding with hundreds of others in the local dispensary. She was separated from them in the confusion, and hid in the pine bush and abandoned hospital buildings. Until finally the Rwandan Patriotic Front overran Butare and she was saved.

One recent afternoon, wandering around the field of millet that was once the site of her home, Mukabazanira kicks at the small pile of rubble that represents the only sign that her family ever existed on this patch of land. "They thought people like us who went to school were collaborators, so they not only killed us they destroyed our houses completely," she says. "They wanted to wipe away any trace of our existence."

In her sentimental moments, which admittedly are brief, Mukabazanira allows perhaps that if her former tormentors sincerely apologized, "then we will surely forgive them." Then she quickly catches herself.

"As for me, there is no reconciliation," she says finally. "What we have is tolerance, not reconciliation. We have no option; we cannot avoid them on the road.

"But it is too difficult to reconcile."