Abstract

“Please, Grandpa, do not kill me; when I grow up I will never be a Tutsi again.” The courtroom went silent as a witness in a trial described the events on a fateful day in the hills of Rwanda. Led in examination-in-chief, she narrated how she took her children to her Hutu father-in-law, in the hope that they would be safe. Before her very own eyes, the grandfather butchered all of them one after the other. The last of them to die, after his siblings were killed before him, pleaded with the grandfather to be spared. His efforts were futile. A few minutes later, he lay dead. His Hutu grandfather was not ready to brook any compromise with Tutsis or “cockroaches,” as he called them.