Where Rwanda’s genocide perpetrators and survivors live side by side

A man killed his friend’s husband because he was Tutsi. Now the two live together in a ‘reconciliation village’.

Mbyo/Kigali, Rwanda – Mukaremera Laurence gazed at the ground as Nkundiye Thacien spoke about how he used a machete to kill her husband 30 years ago.

The three of them had been neighbours and lifelong friends, living together in the Rwandan village of Mbyo. But then, in 1994, Thacien received orders to kill.

“It was an order and if you didn’t obey they threatened to kill your family,” Thacien told Al Jazeera, “so I felt like I had to do it.”

He speaks about one of the 20th century’s most macabre events, when the majority Hutu group he belonged to, which ruled Rwanda at the time, began a campaign of mass killing against the Tutsis – the minority ethnic group to which Laurence’s husband belonged.

More than 800,000 people – by some estimates, a million – died during 100 days at the hands of machete-wielding Hutus. More than 250,000 women were targeted with sexual violence, according to the United Nations.