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On April 17 1994, Madalena Mukariemeria stepped forward to die. "The killer was a very big man. He had this huge club full of nails and sharp pieces of metal. He was such an expert he could kill with just one blow to the head. I wanted this man to kill me. People had been dying in such terrible ways and he would do it quickly," she says....

In the capital, the bodies were already piling up. The killing began a little slower in Kibuye, isolated to the west among lush, rolling hills on the banks of Lake Kivu. But in time this place would come to be known as the "purest genocide" because of its high concentration of Tutsis, and because - though civil war was its backdrop - that fighting was far away: this was simply a slaughter of civilians.

The first to die in Kibuye was a Tutsi agronomist named Bigirimana. A few days later word reached the church that it was Dr Kayishema who had settled an old score by demanding the man's head. It was skewered on a pole in the middle of the town's only roundabout....

After the slaughter, the church became one of the safest places to hide. The rotting corpses kept the militia at bay and Louis buried himself under the bodies. "At night I would creep down to the lake to drink and eat bananas and sneak back into the church and hide under the bodies before dawn," he says. "On the first night, there were some wounded children in the brush, crying out all night. The crying attracted the interahamwe. They picked up the children and smashed them against the wall."...

Eleven thousand people were murdered in and around Kibuye church on April 17 1994. The next day, Dr Kayishema led the slaughter of about 10,000 people in the town's stadium.

A decade on, Madalena has not changed her view that it would have been better to die under the swinging club ... Madalena's tiny home is decorated with religious pictures even though she refuses to go near the church any more. She gestures at a painting of Christ on the cross. "I believe Jesus was crucified, crucified like the Tutsis." Now 52 years old, she has an open face, bright eyes and a schoolgirl giggle. But her expression switches suddenly to wrenching sadness as she tells how her sister-in-law and a dozen members of her family who survived the slaughter in 1994 were butchered three years later by Hutu militiamen who crossed from Zaire.

Madalena took in six orphans from her extended family, bringing them up alongside her own four children. Almost all the girls and women in the family were raped, and one of the adopted children died of Aids. The others show no signs of HIV but do not know for sure.

Survivor organisations estimate that two-thirds of Tutsi women who were raped are HIV-positive. One-quarter of all Rwandan children are orphans because of the genocide, war and Aids. Nearly one-third of all households in Rwanda are headed by women because so many of the men were killed ...

The government began releasing the genocidaire nearly two years ago. The nation's jail population had swelled to 120,000 and the established court system would have taken more than a century to try them. So the authorities revived a system of traditional courts - gacaca - designed to provide village justice with restitution through community service.

All but the worst killers - those who organised the slaughter, or were particularly noteworthy in the scale or brutality of their atrocities - are eligible for release if they confess their crimes, apologise to the families of their victims and agree restitution. The freed prisoner must also go before the gacaca courts as a witness against other genocidaire....