Diary 3.

March 25th 2004

An extraordinary meeting in Kigali. At a restaurant I meet the celebrated documentary maker Anne Aghion – who is over here to make a film about Gacaca – a new judicial process where Rwandans indicted for genocide can confess their crimes and, judged by their peers from the local community, would then be released from jail to begin their lives again. With Anne is Jean-Pierre, her researcher and driver. Like so many, Jean-Pierre had a remarkable story of survival. He had hidden himself in a cess pit for fourteen weeks and evaded the killers. Next to him is his wife. J-P tells me that she had spent eight weeks in a camp at a place called Kabgayi. The camp was supposed to be protected by the local Catholic Bishop; in truth, hundreds from the camp had been pulled out and killed by the genocidaires and the government army. It dawned on me that this was the camp that Tom and I had discovered and reported exclusively on. And here I was looking at a woman who had been in the camp with her children, fighting for her life, whilst we had gone around, in the early dawn with our camera recoding their plight and hoping not to alert the army to our presence. It was a heart-warming and humbling moment to see her there with J-P, still alive having survived that terrible place.

-David Belton (Producer)