Nairobi — As Rwanda marks the 1994 genocide in which nearly one million died this week, Special Correspondent ALAN MARTIN, revisits one of the country's worst calamities.

Justice is not an academic affair for Gerard Gahima. In his office across the street from a parliament building still pockmarked with the scars of machinegun fire and mortar rounds during the 1994 genocide, Rwanda's Attorney General has no illusions as to the challenge he faces delivering justice to his wounded country.

On his computer is a database containing the names of 571,934 alleged genocidaires. The country's jails may be bursting at the seams, but they hold only a fraction of the perpetrators. The majority of those responsible for one of the 20th century's worst human calamities remain beyond the grasp of Rwandan justice.

"After the genocide we felt strongly that we had to tackle any culture of impunity," the soft-spoken lawyer says. "That is why we didn't have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa. We had to send a message that people had to be held accountable for what they did.

"At the same time, we also realised that we couldn't carry out the letter of the law. We couldn't execute everyone who had committed murder. We had to find a lenient way to handle the rank and file, while severely punishing the organisers."

How best to deliver justice is cause for growing impatience and frustration among Rwandans. Public anger at the slow pace of justice is largely directed towards the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which many dismiss as an expensive and fruitless exercise in legal semantics.

In the eight years of the ICTR has sat in Arusha, Tanzania, over $800 million has been spent to successfully prosecute eight cases. "Countries that are supporting the ICTR should seriously ask themselves why they are giving so much money to something that doesn't work," says Mr Gahima. "They're not getting their money's worth."

Exacerbating matters is the reluctance of the international community to support the Gacaca trials - a grand legal experiment launched in March by Kigali in an attempt to lessen the burden placed on the conventional judicial system.

Literally meaning "justice on the grass," the traditional, quasi-judicial courts are presided over by committees of respected members of society, and seek to promote reconciliation by involving the community in the trial and sentencing process. Leniency is promised to those who admit guilt and express remorse.

Rwanda has earmarked $100 million for the expected three-year duration of the Gacaca trials, a figure Western donors have criticised as excessive and threatened to withhold aid over.

Leading human-rights groups are also unsupportive. Amnesty International has expressed concern that the Gacaca do not conform to basic international legal standards as the accused are denied legal representation and the right to appeal.

"These people don't have any interest in what is good for the future of Rwanda," says Apollon Kabahizi, co-ordinator of the Aegis Trust, a victim's rights group affiliated with the British-based Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre. "They care more about the conditions of prisoners, whether they get three meals a day, than they do about improving the lot of victims."

"Genocide is not a conventional crime," adds Kabahizi, who lost his parents and two siblings during the pogroms. "It demands unconventional justice. There is no other option for Rwanda but Gacaca." The past looms over the future like a thunder cloud. Without justice for the afflicted, there can be no national reconciliation, no economic miracle, no sustainable way forward.

One of the many grim reminders of the nightmare that visited Rwanda nine years ago can be found an hour's drive from Kigali, at the end of a red dirt road that leads to the parish of Ntarama. The way is lined with fragrant eucalyptus groves and oversized aloe trees.

The countryside is stunningly beautiful, a series of rolling, terraced hills that stretch for miles until they melt into the pink-blue haze of the horizon. Beside the road goats graze under the watchful eye of herdboys, women wash clothes in a slow moving river and peasant farmers till their plots in the simmering equatorial heat.

This picture of tranquillity is shattered when we arrive at a simple red brick church. Littered across the church floor are the human remains of a massacre that claimed the lives of an estimated 5,000 people.

A child's broken rib cage lies next to a pelvis. On a kneeling bench someone's lower jaw rests beside a corn pipe and a rosary. Scattered between the bones are some of the personal belongings of the victims: a pink shoe, a blue kerosene lantern, a couple of soiled mattresses.

Outside, in a makeshift shack, hundreds of skulls are piled neatly on a table, row upon row, as if to give sense to the unthinkable. Toy-size figurines of Jesus and the Virgin Mary have been placed among them in silent memory. "We took refuge here for four days before the Interahamwe militia came," says Pacifique Rutaganda, a retired farmer who lost his entire family of 12 during the genocide and now acts as a guide at the memorial.

"We thought we would be safe inside the church, but they broke open the windows and threw in grenades. When people tried to escape they were waiting for us outside with guns and machetes." The Rwandan genocide is unique among gross human rights violations.

Most of the killings were committed, not by trained soldiers, but ordinary people indoctrinated by a flood of well-calculated ethnic hatred. The social fabric of the country was destroyed as neighbours turned on neighbours. The rate of carnage during the 100 days of terror is estimated to be three times that at the height of the Nazi Holocaust.

In the southern prefecture of Butare, for example, 65,000 people were murdered between 10am and 3.30pm, a figure that translates to about 13,000 deaths an hour, or over 200 a minute.

Denied a proper mandate to intervene by the international community, United Nations forces under the command of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire could do little but watch the horror unfold.

As a consequence of the genocide, the Kagame government is uncompromising in its approach to perceived threats to its national security or quest for justice. A senior Western diplomat says such a stance is typical of the Kagame administration.

"Rwanda has started to act like Israel," said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It imagines itself to be surrounded by enemies, which explains why it is so security obsessed. Its attitude is 'No one will meddle in our affairs, we will never have another genocide, we will act before they do.'"

It is for this reason Rwanda is embroiled in a five-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that threatens, as at this moment, to periodically engulf the entire Great Lakes region. Kigali insists there will be no peace until Congo expels fugitive Hutu extremists who fled there following the genocide.

In Mr Gahima's eyes, pursuing justice for people like Pacifique Rutaganda comes before diplomatic niceties.

"The biggest lesson for us from 1994 is that you cannot wait for the international community to take care of you," he says, adding: "You look after your own interests or you perish."