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Fifteen years after the genocide that killed a million people, Rwanda's warring tribes have reached a truce. But will it hold? Here, the world's leading writer on Rwanda meets the killers, the survivors, and the man bringing them together

When I began visiting Rwanda, in 1995, a year after the genocide, the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who'd been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state with soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prisons crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty – hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers – and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succoured by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job. In the course of 100 days, beginning on 6 April 1994, nearly a million people from the Tutsi minority had been massacred in the name of an ideology known as Hutu Power, and, between the memory of the slaughter and the fear that it would resume, Rwanda often felt like an impossible country. Nowadays, when Rwandans look back on the early years of aftermath, they say, "In the beginning."

On the 15th anniversary of the genocide, Rwanda is one of the safest countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita GDP has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by almost 25%, to more than 10 million. There is national health insurance and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry. In Kigali, the capital, broom-wielding women in frocks and gloves sweep the streets at dawn. Plastic bags are outlawed. Broadband and mobile phones are widespread. Traffic police enforce speed limits and the mandatory use of seat belts and motorbike helmets. Rwanda's is the only government on earth in which the majority of parliamentarians are women. Soldiers in uniform are almost nowhere to be seen.

Kigali is now home to nearly a million people, and incessant construction – of new homes, office blocks, medical facilities, shopping centres, hotels, schools, foreign embassies and roads. A billboard used to stand beside one of the main traffic circles, riddled by machine-gun fire and advertising Guinness, with the slogan "The Power of Love"; today, a billboard across the street says, "Pay Taxes-Build Rwanda-Be Proud". Most of the prisoners accused or convicted of genocide have been released. The death penalty has been abolished. And Rwanda is the only nation where hundreds of thousands of people who took part in mass murder live intermingled at every level of society with the families of their victims.

"So far, so good," Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, told me last January. Kagame, who is 51, and is so thin that in official photographs it often looks as if his guests had been posed with a cardboard cutout of him, led the rebel force – the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) – that stopped the genocide. He has presided over Rwanda's destiny ever since, and is now recognised as one of the most formidable political figures of our age. "Fifteen years," he said. "It sounds like a pretty long time. But if you look at it, where the country has moved to and where it should be, it becomes a very small thing."

Kagame, who is commonly described as authoritarian even in the Rwandan press, was elected in 2003 with more than 95% of the vote, after running effectively unopposed. But he told me that if he cannot build the national institutions that allow him to retire and preside over a peaceful transfer of power by 2017, when the Constitution requires that he step aside, then "it's a failure."

In the meantime, it maddens Kagame when western observers assess Rwanda by how far it still falls short, rather than by how far it has come. In his view, the west is in no position to scold Rwanda, where the legacy of colonialism led directly to the genocide, and where some western powers (notably France and the Vatican) supported the génocidaires before, during and after the killing, while the rest did nothing to stop it.

Like most of his original comrades in the RPF, Kagame grew up in exile, in Uganda, as a refugee from earlier anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda, and he speaks with contempt of critics of his human rights record who had accepted for decades the ethnic apartheid of his childhood as a legitimate form of majority rule. He was four when his family fled Rwanda, in 1961, and in 1977, at the age of 19, he slipped back in for his first visit. "Even at that age, I would see the oppression," he said. "I could see the panic, the sense of frustration and desperation. I was just a student, just finished secondary school, and this is my aunt, this is my uncle… on the one hand they were happy to see me, on the other they wanted me away, because if the police discovered that I had come from a refugee camp in Uganda they could easily perish."

I had met Kagame five times between 1995 and 2000. He often spoke of how growing up in exile had led him, as a young man, to take up armed struggle. But when he talked of being Tutsi it was always as an identity that had been held against him. And when he came to power in Rwanda, the fact that he was Tutsi was still held against him. It branded him as a minority, and, to those who persisted in the belief that in Rwanda all politics must be tribal, that made him illegitimate. Kagame did not want to be perceived as the Tutsi president; he wanted to be accepted as the Rwandan president.

Emmanuel Ndahiro, Kagame's intelligence chief, told me how encouraged he was by Barack Obama's election. "Obama represents ideas and thinking, he doesn't represent the blacks," Ndahiro said. "So why can't a Tutsi be a president where the majority are Hutus?" The genocide made Kagame's challenge harder than ever, and also made it more essential that he succeed. So when Kagame spoke of the terror that his aunt and uncle had accepted as normal, I wondered if he could be sure that Hutus in the countryside didn't feel oppressed, in turn, in post-genocide Rwanda.

"It's better, Rwanda, far better than it has ever been," the president told me. "I have no doubt about it. Look around, go ask people, go to villages. If you fail to see the sense of hope in their eyes, then I won't be telling you the truth."

I set out the next morning for Taba, a village in the central highlands. I wanted to see what had become of a woman named Laurencie Nyirabeza, an elderly genocide survivor, and Jean Girumuhatse, the man who in 1994 had massacred a number of people in her family, and left her for dead, too, after striking her with a machete. I had met them in 1996, a few weeks after Kagame sent his army into Congo (or Zaire, as it was called at the time) to drive the vast majority of the Rwandans in the UN camps there home, and to hunt down those who resisted repatriation.

Girumuhatse had come back from Congo in the mass return a few days before my first visit to Taba. Nyirabeza said that he had asked her to forgive him and she had refused. Girumuhatse told me that it was true: he had been the leader of a band of génocidaires who manned a roadblock in front of his house, and he said he was responsible for the killings there.

I had been collecting stories of the genocide for a year and a half by then, and Girumuhatse was the first who told me that he had killed. Yet he hedged his guilt. He said that he had ordered others to kill and that he "might" have been a killer himself. He would admit to having a part in "only" six murders. Some of his accomplices at the roadblock, whom I found in the local lock-up, said he had killed more. The survivors I spoke with in Taba agreed: many more, they said. He had even tried to kill his own brother-in-law – Girumuhatse's wife was a Tutsi – but the brother-in-law had escaped into the bush, and when I met him he told me he believed that Girumuhatse had killed at least 70 people.

I had always driven myself in Rwanda, but this year Jean-Pierre Sagahutu, my Kinyarwanda translator, drove, and without him I'd have been lost. It wasn't just Kigali that has been transformed in recent years; the roadside landscape, as we headed west into the countryside, also seemed rearranged. Where I remembered an empty valley overgrown with bush, there were now neatly planted fields of beans, manioc and sorghum, dotted with men hoeing and women stooping to harvest and reseed – a saw mill here, a livestock corral there. Much was familiar. Indeed, much felt eternal: the rise and fall of the sweeping, vaguely Tuscan vistas – rigorously terraced hills, pocked by low stands of banana trees and an occasional towering eucalyptus, with farmhouses clinging to the slopes, and every so often an imposing red brick church on the summit, its bell tower cut against a hazy, cloud-spattered sky. But I didn't recognise the turnoff to Taba, and the road seemed wrong. Then we came around a bend, and the picture resolved itself: this was the spot where Girumuhatse's roadblock had been. There was someone standing under the eucalyptus tree now. It was Girumuhatse, right where I'd left him. I got out of the car and he came over – a lean man, with a distinctive loping gait. He wore a torn and filthy yellow windcheater, grey trousers shapeless from use, and yellow rubber clogs. I asked if he recognised me, and he said, "You were here 12 years ago." I was surprised by his memory, which had been so elusive in the past. "When you left, it was a Saturday," he said. "I was arrested the same day. I spent 11 years in prison, then I confessed everything in gacaca. I asked forgiveness," Girumuhatse said, "and I was released about a year ago."

Gacaca is a system of outdoor community courts, convened for genocide cases. It was designed to reward confessions, because the objective was not only to render rudimentary justice and mete out punishment but to allow some emotional catharsis, by establishing a collective accounting of the truth of the crimes in each place where they were committed. During a trial run of gacaca courts, in 2005, there were many reports of corrupt judges, and of intimidated witnesses, including an alarming number of cases in which genocide survivors were murdered before they could testify. "You can't imagine the psychosis in this country," Richard Sezibera, the minister of health, told me.

Last year, however, the government decided to clear the genocide caseload. More than 12,000 gacaca courts were convened and more than a million cases adjudicated, with a remarkably high degree of public participation, and limited violence. There were surely false convictions of those who insisted on their innocence, and there was a surprising number of acquittals of those who had probably been falsely accused in the first place. But in many cases, like Girumuhatse's, confession was its own reward: a sentence for multiple murders reduced to little more than time served.

Girumuhatse led us to his house, a low adobe with no windows and no door, only a doorway. Girumuhatse fetched folding chairs, and we sat down to talk. He was breathing hard, in short, rapid puffs. He said that in prison he had been given a diagnosis of severe asthma, and he showed me his prison-release papers, which he kept in a book entitled Glorifying God in Song – a hymnal. I asked him if his punishment had been just. "I think it was a short sentence," he said. "For my crimes, I should have been punished much longer, and still be in prison." Sagahutu, my translator, whose father was killed in the genocide, remarked, "Yeah, they all say that."

Girumuhatse said that the judges at his gacaca trial had found his confession to be accurate and complete, so I asked him how many people he had confessed to killing. He began reciting names. "Eric and his brother Mugabo. Munyaneza. Oswald Twamugabo. Candide. Donatille and the baby on her back. Stanislas Busirimu and his son Wellars Busirimu. Gakombe. Ntampuhwe. That's all."

Eleven people. I asked how old they were. "Eric and Mugabo were about 13 years old, they were brothers by different mothers. Munyaneza was about 70. Oswald Twamugabo was in his early 30s. Candide was about 55. Donatille with the baby was 30. Stanislas Busirimu was 60 and his son Wellars about 25. Gakombe was 50. Ntampuhwe was 65." He said, "None of these were killed at the roadblock. They were people I hunted at their houses and in the bush. And the other dead, at the roadblock, I explained in gacaca what had happened in those cases, too." But he did not tell me their names. "During the gacaca trial, all the people of the village were there. I said, 'I will tell you everything.' I even showed them where I threw the corpses. And I was a witness in the trials of others, all the trials."

I had always been told that Girumuhatse killed with a machete, but he said that he had preferred to use a masu, a nail-studded club. He described killing Oswald Twamugabo. "I hit him in the head with my club and when he fell to the ground I crushed his skull." It was that easy. "The Tutsis in 1994 knew they were to be killed," Girumuhatse explained. "They had got weak in their heads, and so their bodies were weak. They expected it. We felled them like cows." Since his release from prison, he said, he had made amends with "everyone in the village": "I went from door to door asking forgiveness. I come to the house. I ask for the person. I say, I am here to ask for your pardon." He was not afraid of the survivors, although he was sometimes afraid of the other killers he had testified against. "Nobody ever threatens me," he said. "But I don't stay out late. I come home by seven o'clock. I stay in with my wife and children."

Everything Girumuhatse said came out with the same swift, emotionless directness. He never hesitated before answering a question. He listened, hunched slightly forward on his chair, watching a chicken pecking around the doorway. He was a veteran of many gacaca trials: a professional witness – he knew what to say. He said, "I regret killing people for nothing. I regret killing neighbours who were friends or I had no problem with them." He said, "In 1994, we were just like animals, we could not reason. It was the state that told us the enemy was a Tutsi, and when I killed it was like communal work duty." The fact that his wife was a Tutsi hadn't troubled him, he said, "because I love her very much" and "really, she had become a Hutu like me." Nothing seemed to have troubled him when he went to work with his club, and I wondered whether he had enjoyed it.

"Yes," he said. "For me, it became a pleasure to kill. The first time, it's to please the government. After that, I developed a taste for it. I hunted and caught and killed with real enthusiasm. It wasn't like working for the government, it was like working for myself." He said, "I was very, very excited when I killed. I remember each killing. Yes, I woke every morning excited to go into the bush. It was the hunt-the-human hunt." And he said, "The genocide was like a festival. At day's end, or any time there was an occasion, we took a cow from the Tutsis, and slaughtered it and grilled it and drank beer. There were no limits any more. It was a festival. We celebrated."

So Girumuhatse had found his vocation as a murderer. Before that, he had been a peasant, as he was again now, tending the fields for beer money and enough beans and bananas to sustain himself, his wife, and seven children. But for a few months in 1994 Rwanda had become a kingdom of death and he had lived more fully, more like a lord, than he had ever imagined possible. It occurred to me that, just as the genocide had set him free, the gacaca process had liberated him to talk about it. I had no doubt that he was still hiding more from me than he was telling, but Girumuhatse had revealed himself. The law required that he be accepted for that. "Now," he said, "when I go to people's houses and ask forgiveness, they say, 'OK, you told the truth.'"

It was not so easy for the survivors. Girumuhatse's brother-in-law, Evariste, lived just a few hundred yards away, in a new house. Evariste and his wife had six children; the oldest was 13 and the youngest was two, a cheerful little boy who pranced from room to room, playing with a ball. A sister of Evariste's was there as well, visiting from out of town, and wearing a festive dress. Evariste had attended Girumuhatse's gacaca trial. "He really said everything, everything," Evariste said. When Girumuhatse had come to him and asked for forgiveness, Evariste told him that he forgave him. But he said to me, "All this reconciliation and the confessions – that's the programme of the state. And when a killer comes and asks your pardon you can't do anything else. You pardon him, but you don't really know if it comes from your heart, because you don't really know if he is asking forgiveness from his heart."

Still, Evariste believed that it was better to fake it than not. "For a survivor, when you see a killer you can't do anything. You can't kill him. And the killer… it's better if he comes and says hello, because it creates a climate of great distrust when a killer avoids a survivor and won't greet him. But there is really no solution. In the evening, you see someone, you fear. At home, at night, when I think of it I'm afraid. It's the situation of the whole country."

Evariste's sister, Mariane, who had seemed high-spirited and chatty when I arrived, had turned away with pursed lips at the first mention of Girumuhatse. Now she let loose: "I can't understand a person who kills 10 people and asks for pardon. If I could afford to live somewhere else I would leave this country." Girumuhatse's wife (Mariane's sister) had come with him when he asked Mariane for pardon. "But this is all theatre," she said. "It doesn't mean anything. A killer is a killer, and you have to abandon them. Yes, I visit my sister. My sister lives with a killer because they have children together, and it's not the children's fault. Yes, when I visit my sister I speak with him, but it's theatre… If ever the occasion arose, they would kill again. I think they're all killers. They only asked pardon because of gacaca. It's because of the president that they don't kill. He's the one who pardoned them." She glanced up at the enormous poster of Kagame on the wall. "Yes," she said. "If he were not there, we would all be killed."

With that, Mariane sat back in her chair, her tension apparently spent. The conversation drifted for a while to happier subjects – the economy, the harvest, the cow out the back. Then Mariane spoke again. "It becomes a bit easier with time," she said. "Because people are more or less safe, and we're at a stage where the killers and the survivors can speak. It's a kind of trust, and it takes a very, very long time."

A light rain began as we left Evariste's, and we drove a few hundred yards back past Girumuhatse's place, to the home of Laurencie Nyirabeza, the woman who had first told me about him. In the damp, gloomy light of the late afternoon, a young woman came out to greet us; another was in the parlour – Nyirabeza's granddaughters. They were sisters, in their mid-20s, and had been orphaned in the genocide; Nyirabeza had looked after them, and now they looked after her. She was 79, and in bed. Eventually, she emerged, a tiny bowed figure, barefoot and wrapped in a bright blue-and-yellow batik, supporting herself with both hands on a tall wooden staff, which she worked in a rowing motion, easing her way to a chair as if she were in a dugout in shallow water. Her wizened face wore a quizzical, inward expression, at once witty and distant, but she spoke with great presence.

Nyirabeza had worked for the gacaca courts, and she had not been impressed: "Even when the killers ask forgiveness, it's from the government and the Rwandan people and the victims, but they never name our names." I read to her the names of the people Girumuhatse told me he'd killed. "Munyaneza was my brother," she said. "I was at his house during the genocide. Oswald was my nephew. Wellars and Stanislas – neighbours. Gakombe, too, a neighbour. Ntampuhwe was also my nephew. And he also killed Ntampuhwe's children, which he didn't say." One of the granddaughters told me that the 13-year-old brothers Girumuhatse killed, Eric and Mugabo, were her schoolmates.

"When he killed Munyaneza, my brother, he struck him and he threw him alive in a latrine to die," Nyirabeza said. "So it's true that he told a lot in gacaca – because he was a big killer." But she had not attended Girumuhatse's trial. "I was sick," she said. "Ever since Jean hit me, I don't feel well." And, she said, "He never came here." She spat on the floor and turned away. "Nobody's come to see me and ask for pardon, and I wouldn't give it. Reconciliation doesn't bring back my family."

As she spoke, Nyirabeza pulled her batik wrap slowly up from her shoulders until it covered her head. Then she fell silent, and curled into herself until she was entirely covered. After a while, she began to shiver, and her granddaughters helped her to her feet and led her back to bed.

I didn't see any great hope in the eyes of the people I visited in Taba. But as I travelled around Rwanda there was a greater sense of ease than I remembered. The country was becoming less spooked. At times, it was like anywhere else. It was normal, which was extraordinary.

I never did meet a survivor who spoke well of gacaca. "It's awful," a friend of mine in Kigali said, a gentle family man of enormous quiet strength, who had served for a time as a minister in Kagame's government. For nearly a year, he had had to go back again and again to the village where his mother had lived, to attend the trials of her murderers. He was glad to learn the truth, but he said, "The arrogance of these guys, just standing there, telling how they killed my mother, where they threw her. It was nothing to them."

But none of the survivors I spoke with thought that there was a better solution. Never mind reconciliation, Tutsis and Hutus had to coexist. Sagahutu, my translator, expressed the sentiment most succinctly: "It's our obligation, and it's our only way to survive, and I do it every day, and I still can't comprehend it."

"At the beginning, it is very fragile, but with time I think it holds," Kagame told me. Then he told me a story. Every year, on 7 April, Kagame presides over a national genocide-commemoration ceremony at one of the major massacre sites that have been preserved as memorials to the victims. In 2005, a young man in his mid-20s got up to speak. "A survivor," Kagame said. "Somebody who was killed, almost, and dumped in a mass grave of close to 4,000 people. Our forces arrived after they had just been killed and brought out 12 people from the grave who lived. They had been cut with machetes and were in very bad shape."

Kagame told me that when the young man got to the end of his account he said, "Recently, some of those people who killed our families have been released… They are there in the village, living normally." It was Kagame, of course, who had granted the killers their reprieve, so he called the young man over. "And I asked him, 'How do you manage? When you meet them, what is your feeling?' This young man looked me in the face and he said, 'Well, President, I manage because you ask us to manage.'" Kagame repeated the man's words in a tone of astonishment. "This is what he told me." But it turned out that the released killers avoided the survivor in his village. "They would rather take another route," Kagame said. "When he passes them, they always look down. You see, it's like, 'We are managing because… what else?'"

In other words, I suggested, the young man wasn't managing so well, after all.

"Yes," Kagame said. "That's really what he meant."

Such was the hard bargain of Rwanda's reconciliation project. The common presumption among western critics of gacaca, who lodge their complaints in the language of international law and human rights, is that the system fails to offer the accused sufficient protection. But the shortcomings cut both ways. "Not the victims, not the perpetrators – nobody will tell you he is happy with the gacaca," Kagame said, and he thought that was probably the best one could hope for. He didn't want either side to be happy, "because whichever way we go we are left with nothing." Gacaca, he said, "gives us something to build on," and he understood that ultimately the system asked more of survivors than it does of génocidaires.

When Jean Girumuhatse spoke of the pleasure that killing had given him, I asked him if he thought it could happen again. "No," he said. "Because 1994 was a big lesson. I respect the authorities today, but if they told me to kill I would not." A clever dodge: he was saying that he would not kill for Kagame's government. Yet, a moment later, he said that when he was in the UN camps in Congo, from 1994 to 1996, "there were a lot of extremists" who "always said we'd return in arms" to Rwanda, but "unfortunately" the Rwandan Army had attacked the camps first.

Girumuhatse said that even as he was rendering his confession to the gacaca tribunal, a year and a half ago, he had continued to hope that his old extremist comrades who had remained in Congo after the break-up of the camps would reconquer Rwanda. "In prison, we all thought there was still an army outside the country that would come to liberate us, and now we see that it's not true," he said. In fact, there still is a genocidal Hutu army outside Rwanda. It is right where Girumuhatse left it, in Congo, and its presence there is one of the chief causes of the wars that have ravaged that vast country since the Rwandan genocide. After all, for most of the past 15 years, the Hutu fighters have operated in Congo as the guests or allies of a succession of Congolese governments.

In Kigali, in January, I met a man named Paul Rwarakabije, who was, for nearly a decade, one of the top officers of this genocidal army in exile and, for a time, its commander. Rwarakabije was a professional soldier: a graduate of the École Supérieure Militaire, in Kigali, and of advanced officer-training schools in France and Belgium. He came from northwestern Rwanda, a region that had been the Hutu Power heartland; in 1990, when the war with the RPF broke out in Rwanda, he served at the front as the leader of a combat battalion. Yet today he is a general in the Rwandan Defence Force (Kagame's army). When I asked him how that came about, he told me the story of his life as an enemy of the cause he now serves, and he told it without apology, even at times with pride, as if he had only been fighting for his country all along and by losing he had wound up winning.

Still, Rwarakabije was circumspect. When he spoke of war he used the first person: he said "we" regrouped in Congo, "we" recruited in the camps, "we" got arms from Mobutu. (Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese dictator, was a great patron of Hutu Power.) But when he spoke of genocide – killing Tutsis for the sake of killing Tutsis – Rwarakabije used the third person to describe the crimes of his old comrades. "When they were in the camps, they went to hunt the Tutsis," he said of the ethnic cleansing in Congo.

Of course, Rwarakabije was deeply involved in all these activities. He was a brigade commander in his camp, Katale, in the Congolese province of North Kivu – the same camp, as it happened, where Girumuhatse had been. Katale was known as one of the most militarised of the UN camps. (In 1995, a relief worker named Richard Danziger told me that, driving to Katale early one morning, he had been greeted by a strange, high whining noise as he approached – a sound that he could not identify until he rounded a bend and found the road blocked by scores of young men who were using the tarmac as a whetstone to sharpen their machetes.) The message that camp leaders such as Rwarakabije used to recruit new fighters was simple: if you go home, the Tutsis will kill you. In reality, the vast majority of Hutu civilians who returned were reintegrated into their communities, while former soldiers were sent to demobilisation camps and sometimes even recruited into the Rwandan army.

After the camps were destroyed, in 1996, most of the Rwandan Hutus who remained in Congo fled west into the equatorial rainforests, where the Rwandan army pursued them, accompanied by a Congolese rebel alliance and with the support of the armies of at least half a dozen other African states. They overthrew Mobutu, installing in his place the rebel leader Laurent Kabila. The Rwandan army killed tens of thousands of Hutu génocidaires and their civilian followers.

Rwarakabije had remained in eastern Congo with a contingent of fighters from the camps, who waited until the Rwandan army had passed by, and then began moving in small parties into Rwanda to fight in the north and west of the country. The "war of infiltration," as this insurgency came to be known, lasted for a year and a half, and, as it intensified in the latter half of 1997, its original leader and then his replacement were killed, leaving Rwarakabije in command.

"That was real combat in 1997 and 1998," Rwarakabije said. In the camps, when the génocidaires plotted their return to Rwanda, "the aim was to retake power." But now, with their forces depleted and scattered, he told me, "We said, 'Instead of dying in exile, we'll go and die in our homeland.'" There was no hope of victory, and no cause to fight for; the objective was simply to visit destruction on the country they could not have. So Rwarakabije's forces slaughtered Tutsis wherever they found them, and the Rwandan army fought back just as hard – and at least 10,000 fighters and civilians were killed, while hundreds of thousands of villagers were displaced and rounded up into holding camps until the insurgency was suppressed, in the summer of 1998. "The army chased us out once more," Rwarakabije said. "They returned from Congo, and we returned to Congo."

At almost the same moment, 1,000 miles away in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, President Kabila, who had proved to be every bit as capricious as Mobutu, and even less popular, turned against the Rwandan army, which had helped put him in office, and embraced instead the Hutu fighters whom he had helped to pursue on his march to power. Rwanda struck back swiftly, reoccupying much of Congo. Anti-Tutsi propaganda filled the airwaves, and Tutsis were hunted in the streets. Kagame said that he wasn't leaving until there was a Congolese government in place that promised to disarm and disband the genocidal Rwandan renegades. Instead, the Congolese president put his son, Joseph Kabila, in charge of military operations, and, following in Mobutu's footsteps, he mustered the fugitive Hutu army as his special forces. "We profited," Rwarakabije said, "because it was he who gave us the equipment, the war matériel, the ammunition, and the arms."

Congo was soon split up, with Rwanda and its local proxies occupying much of the eastern part for the next five years. The bond between Kinshasa and the fugitive génocidaires grew stronger in 2001, when Laurent Kabila was assassinated by his own bodyguard and Joseph Kabila succeeded him as president. By then, the scattered Hutu forces had fully reunited, forming an army of 12,000 fighters, who called themselves the FDLR (Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda), and in 2003 Rwarakabije became its overall commander. But, he told me, he no longer had the will to fight.

Rwarakabije said that his change of heart had begun two years earlier, after the FDLR attempted a major attack on Rwanda, and the Rwandan army captured nearly 2,000 of his men. Rwarakabije had assumed that they would all be killed. Instead, the prisoners were sent to demobilisation camps, to be reformed and instructed in the ways of civilian life in post-genocide Rwanda. "And after the training they were returned to their homes," Rwarakabije said. He was stunned. When he saw that the soldiers he had lost were spared, he convened several like-minded officers to evaluate the situation. "We said, 'We lost the war of 1990 to 1994. And '97, '98 we lost again. In 2001, we lost, and a great number of people were captured. Are we going to continue to fight? For what?' And so our reasoning brought us to the question: Can we still change?"

Rwarakabije wanted more information. In 2003, he said, the FDLR was preparing another attack on Rwanda, but this time, he said, he sent a spy into the country first, to talk to people who had supported the insurgents during the war of infiltration five years earlier. Now the message from those people was: "When you make war, it's we, the population, who suffer." Rwarakabije decided not to go ahead with the attacks, but he knew his comrades: they had always been glad to execute deserters.

"I began to think about my life, too," he said, and he told me that he set about establishing phone contact with the chief of general staff of the Rwandan Army, General James Kabarebe, the man who had led Rwanda's wars in Congo and whom the FDLR accused of killing its people en masse. When they spoke, Kabarebe told Rwarakabije that he would be welcomed if he came home. They stayed in touch, talking regularly for months. Rwarakabije then proposed that he be allowed to return to Rwanda with 103 men in arms: not to fight, but so as not to draw attention as they left Congo, and as a matter of pride. Which is how the scenario played out, on a November night in 2003.

"I was done with the war of rebellion," Rwarakabije told me. "So I was a collaborator with the country." Rwarakabije still speaks of himself as the commander of the 12,000 fighters he left behind, and for the past five years he has worked for Rwanda's demobilisation commission, sending the message to the FDLR that there is no future for them in Congo, and helping those who come home to adjust. And, gradually, singly or in small groups, about half of his men have returned in his wake.

Fighters who have genocide crimes to answer for may have to submit to gacaca, but a great many of the FDLR troops are too young to be charged. "I would say they are now indoctrinated in the ideology of genocide, but they are not génocidaires," Rwarakabije said.

Kagame said that last April, during the genocide- commemoration ceremony in the Bugesera district, south of Kigali, an old man addressed the gathering. At one point, Kagame told me, "This old man said, 'There was a man here called Rwarakabije.' And Rwarakabije was there with all of us. He was with the officers in army uniforms – he was a major-general." The old man had terrible memories of Rwarakabije, and he remarked that Rwarakabije must be with the masterminds of the genocide who were on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the UN court in Arusha, Tanzania. "You know, there was that atmosphere of sadness," Kagame said. "But everybody burst out laughing – the whole area where the officers were sitting." Remembering the moment, Kagame laughed again. "This is the way of our life," he said.

This summer, Rwarakabije was put on trial in a gacaca court, but was found not guilty of any crimes during the genocide. Kagame is often prepared to let former enemies go unprosecuted when they are working with him. "I have come under fire from my own people for some of the things I have done," Kagame said. "It's, 'No, no, you are favouring the other group.' And I tell them, 'No, for me I know one group: one group of Rwandans.' How we have treated Rwarakabije, it helps to win others over."

At Rwanda's demobilisation camps, former FDLR fighters are given reintegration training; they are taught to use banks, and to form business collectives. When they complete the programme, the government gives each of them a few hundred dollars (a handsome sum) to re-establish himself; and when they go home community monitors regularly follow up with them to ensure that they are finding a place in civilian life. This is more than the government has done for survivors, or for children born of genocide rapes. The political calculus is clear: resources are painfully limited, and neglected victims pose no immediate threat to society.

Today, Kagame will tell you that the number one threat to the country is not ethnic extremism or violence, but the scourge of poverty. Although Rwanda still relies on foreign aid for roughly half its budget, Kagame regards aid-dependency as one of the greatest obstacles to development in post-colonial Africa, and he sees his promotion of trade and entrepreneurship as a continuation of the liberation struggle. Rwanda has just signed a $300m deal with an American energy company to extract vast stores of methane from Lake Kivu, which forms much of Rwanda's border with Congo. The methane will drive electrical generators, more than doubling the national supply while cutting the price by more than half. There are now mining operations in Rwanda, and plans to create a large new airport and a free-trade zone about half an hour outside Kigali, and to set up a rail link to a port in Tanzania. Banks are proliferating, and, increasingly, white-collar professionals from other East African countries are coming to Rwanda in search of opportunity.

Everything is still very rudimentary; the country cannot train new employees as fast as they are needed, but Kagame is frequently out in the world – Davos, New York, Beijing – trying to lure private investors. At home, he plays host to visiting members of the global power elite, such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Michael Porter, the head of the Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness; Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, is in the loop, too. Kagame does not want Rwanda to be like any other African country; his model is Singapore.

Kagame is often referred to as the Boss, and he is known as an exacting taskmaster. He frequently travels the countryside lambasting lazy public officials in front of their constituents, demanding more hard work and higher standards. Communities are required to take responsibility for the poorest among them, and seek collective solutions to families that fall into delinquency owing to alcoholism or other dysfunction. And villages compete against one another in annual poverty-alleviation contests.

Kagame has effectively withdrawn Rwanda from the French-African orbit of influence and applied for membership of the Commonwealth; a decision on that is expected this month. There has been a broad shift away from the genocide-tainted Catholic Church on the part of Rwanda's overwhelmingly Christian population, and Kagame has responded by welcoming Protestant evangelists into the country, but he remains only minimally religious. "I go on the side of purpose," he said. "Fatalism, I don't go for it."

In the last months of 2008, trouble erupted once more, in eastern Congo. In 2002, Kagame had agreed to withdraw his army from Congo in exchange for a commitment from President Kabila to dismantle the FDLR. But Kabila had done nothing to disband his genocidal Hutu allies, and before long a renegade Congolese Tutsi general named Laurent Nkunda had launched a new rebellion in North Kivu, claiming to protect Congolese Tutsis from the renewed threat of genocide.

That threat was real. For several years after Rwanda's withdrawal, Kagame regularly sent Emmanuel Ndahiro, his intelligence chief, to meet Kabila and urge him to understand that as long as he supported the Hutu FDLR he was going to have a war in the east. Yet Kabila preferred to fight Nkunda rather than to negotiate a settlement with him.

Late last summer, Nkunda rebuffed a series of Congolese government attacks and went on the offensive, sweeping down from his stronghold in the highlands and routing the national army with ease. The fighting had come at a terrible cost to noncombatants. There was slaughter, pillage and an epidemic of savage rape. More than a quarter of a million civilians fled their homes in North Kivu, adding to the hundreds of thousands already displaced in eastern Congo. At the peak of the fighting, in late October, Nkunda's rebels were on the verge of overrunning the provincial capital, Goma. Then, suddenly, Nkunda called off his advance, and agreed to engage in negotiations with the government. Around the same time, his rhetoric shifted, and, instead of talking about ethnic self-defence, he claimed that he was waging a national-liberation struggle with the aim of regime change. The story caught on in the press that Rwanda and Congo were engaged in a proxy war.

So it was with some astonishment that I learned, as soon as I arrived in Rwanda in January, that Kagame and Kabila had been in regular phone contact for months, while exchanging high-level military and diplomatic delegations, and that the two Presidents had reached an agreement to conduct a joint military operation against the FDLR in Congo. But what about Nkunda? "The only thing we have in common with Nkunda is that he fights the FDLR. Nothing else," Ndahiro told me. "We don't supply anything. The only thing we do for Nkunda is we say 'Nkunda has reasons.'"

Kagame went further. He said that, of course, he was happy that someone else was fighting the FDLR, but he had never met Nkunda, and had never spoken to him. But, he said, "No question about it, day in, day out, we know what is going on." He said that the only time he had sent Nkunda a message, he had done so at the behest of President Kabila. That was when Nkunda was about to march into Goma, and Kagame said that Kabila had called him, pleading for help. Kagame's message to Nkunda was: Stop. "You will completely lose the justness of your cause." Nkunda wasn't happy about that. "He's gone on talking about blaming us for that," Kagame said. He did not deny that he had sympathy for Nkunda's cause. But Kagame was plainly disgusted by the fact that Nkunda – who loved to pose for press cameras in flamboyant costumes, wearing a white robe, or carrying a cane crowned with a silver eagle's head while sporting a "Rebels for Christ" lapel pin, or leading a snow-white pet lamb named Bettie around on a leash – had made the war in North Kivu so much about himself.

Kagame said that, when he agreed to help Kabila by telling Nkunda to back off from Goma, he knew that Kabila would blame him for controlling Nkunda. The blame was annoying – some European governments had cut aid to Rwanda – but what really angered Kagame was the assumption underlying that blame, that Nkunda was the big problem in eastern Congo. No, he said, the problem was that a pack of génocidaires was running loose in Congo, and nobody there wanted to deal with them. The problem was the FDLR, and, Kagame said, Nkunda was just a symptom of that problem, because if you got rid of the FDLR he'd have no reason to exist, whereas if you got rid of him, and the FDLR remained, someone would arise to take his place.

By the same logic, Kagame argued, the FDLR was really a symptom of Kabila's weakness, because it would be nothing without his backing. This was what he had spent the last months of last year trying to explain to Kabila. Kagame said that he didn't want another war in Congo. Rwanda had paid a heavy price in international opinion for its part in the wars there, but Kagame had always depicted those wars as the price that had to be paid for reconciliation at home. And now he wanted to forge an alliance with Kabila, at precisely the moment when it appeared that they were at each other's throats. "That's why we are not so much focused on the FDLR per se," he said. "In fact, our view is that by relating to Kinshasa well, we eliminate the FDLR problem."

Kagame had always said that Rwanda's economic wellbeing required peace and trade with its neighbours. And now that the two presidents were working together, Nkunda suddenly seemed like the sideshow that Kagame had always said he was. On 5 January, Nkunda's second-in-command issued a statement announcing that Nkunda had been removed as the leader of his rebellion.

I wondered how Nkunda saw the situation. So one morning in the second week of January I travelled north out of Rwanda into Uganda, then west into a rebel-controlled zone of Congo, and onward, following a series of increasingly rough dirt tracks that ran through the bush of North Kivu province, until the road came to an end at the base of a steep hill. I continued on foot to the top, where, in a cluster of tents and the concrete shell of an unfinished house, Nkunda had his field headquarters.

Nkunda was wearing an immaculate white Adidas tracksuit with black piping, matching trainers, and a baseball cap inscribed with the legend "Survivors Never Surrender". He assured me that he was still in command of his movement and he spoke for nearly two hours about everything that is wrong with Congo. He spoke of the weakness of the central government, the need for an opposition party, the desirability of a federal system that would respect minority rights. When at last I thanked him for his time, and said I had to be going – my driver wanted to get out of Congo well before dark – he looked offended. He told me he had more to say. And what he said was this:

"There is one thing that gives me courage in life. I was in Rwanda during the genocide. And after the genocide I saw Kagame come to power. He was still young. And today, when I see what Rwanda has become I say, 'It's possible. It's possible.' If there was ever destruction in the world it was the destruction of Rwanda. But the Rwanda of today, I don't know if it is a miracle or what… but there is a man. A single man. The Rwandans are still the same, and without Kagame the genocide could come back. Perhaps the Tutsis would even avenge themselves against the Hutus."

And he went on: "Rwanda has no resources. And Congo with all this, why has it not developed? Why not? Because there is not a man." He said, "In Rwanda there is no petrol, but in Congo there is. In Rwanda there are no diamonds; in Congo there is. In Rwanda there is not this fertility – only in a little part of it – but in Congo it is everywhere. In Rwanda there's only a little forest, but in Congo there is the greatest forest in Africa, in the world. Why hasn't this country developed? Listen, Congo gives electricity to Rwanda. In Rwanda there are no blackouts, but in Congo it's black. What's happening? There's a man. Just one. There aren't two."

He thought about that for a moment, and then he wound up where he had started: "I have participated in the destruction of Rwanda and I have seen the reconstruction of Rwanda, and I tell you I still don't understand how that man did it."

Two weeks later, on the second day of the joint Rwandan-Congolese military operation against the FDLR, Kagame's troops arrested Nkunda. Rwandan officials say that they are considering whether to turn him over to the Congolese, but they do not seem to feel any urgency about it. "Nkunda, if you will, is our guest," Kagame told the BBC. In the meantime, Nkunda's army has disbanded and many of his troops have been integrated into the Congolese military.

Nkunda's arrest heightened the drama of the return of Rwandan soldiers to Congo. There had been great alarm about the operation among human rights activists and western diplomats, who predicted mass civilian casualties and displacement – as if that weren't the status quo that the operation was trying to change. There was great scepticism, too, that the Rwandans would ever leave Congo when the Congolese asked them. But everybody was on his best behaviour. The anticipated bad news never came. Some FDLR fighters were killed, and about 700 took the occasion to return home and demobilise, along with 1,000 of their civilian followers. The operation lasted a little more than a month, and, on a day that had been agreed upon in advance, the Rwandan troops lined up at the border to bid farewell to their Congolese counterparts. They were given a festive sendoff, and a festive welcome home.

Since the withdrawal of the Rwandan Army, the FDLR has gone on a rampage, killing and raping Congolese and causing them to flee their homes. And there are still countless other armed bands tearing up what is left of eastern Congo. There are also still about 50,000 Congolese Tutsi refugees in Rwanda, where they have been since 1996, when the génocidaires in the camps chased them there. At the news of Nkunda's arrest, these refugees staged angry demonstrations, and the police were sent in to quell them. There is still no peace in Congo. But Kagame has finally rewritten the script in the way he had wanted to since he came to power – the way he had tried to rewrite it when he installed Kabila's father in the first place, all those bloody years ago.★