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Posted on Tue, Jul. 05, 2005



Suburban America: Hiding place for thousands of war criminals?

BY DON TERRY
Chicago Tribune

(KRT) - Imagine you are a man called Zuzu, living a quiet life in suburban Chicago. Back home in Rwanda you were a big shot, a prince of the streets in the capital city of Kigali. You were also feared as a suspected member of the Interahamwe, one of the Hutu militias that caused the green hills of Rwanda to run with the blood of your Tutsi ethnic rivals.

If half the things your accusers say about you are true, you had the power to spare a life or take one with the wink of an eye.

They say you took part in the slaughter of 800,000 men, women and children in 100 spring days in 1994. The victims were machine-gunned while praying in church and blown up while bathing their newborn babies. They were hacked to death limb by limb with machetes and thrown into rivers. Husbands were killed in front of their wives and then the wives were raped in front of their children. Infants were bashed with clubs.

Eventually, though, your side lost. The Tutsis rallied and threw tens of thousands of Hutus into overcrowded, crumbling stone prisons. Some of the most brutal or most unlucky were tied to poles driven into the dusty red clay of a soccer field, sheathed in black hoods and shot through the heart and head in front of thousands of cheering survivors.

You managed to escape capture and ran all the way to the United States.

You are smart and tough and it wasn't all that hard to get the gates of America to open up: You lied. Easy as that. You changed your name and turned reality on its head by telling immigration officials that you were a victim of the genocide.

In your heart you are still a prince, even though in America you are just a clerk at the Chika Market in Bolingbrook, Ill., selling goat meat and Plantain Fufu Flour.

From morning to night, immigrants from Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, Rwanda and elsewhere come into the store to purchase a small taste of home.

One day, a countryman recognizes you. He sounds the alarm: Zuzu is alive and he is here.

The ghosts of the past begin to close in.

When Zuzu Vanished from the streets of Kigali in 1994, many assumed that some vengeful father or husband had hunted him down and hacked him to pieces. So the reports that Zuzu had been spotted had to be a mistake.

Yet the rumors would not die. They swept through the Tutsi immigrant community by telephone and e-mail from South Bend, Ind., to suburban Chicago to Washington, D.C., to Canada.

Zuzu is here. He is alive and well. Go see for yourself.

That is what Gerard Sefuku finally did. Sefuku has lived in and around South Bend, Ind., since coming to America in 1989 to go to college. When the genocide began, he was safely in the States, but his mother and father and the rest of his family were in Rwanda. His father was killed; his mother narrowly escaped. All told, he lost 20 members of his family.

He had never seen Zuzu before, but his friends knew him well. One of them had done business with him back home; the other had played on the soccer team Zuzu sponsored in Rwanda.

Since that night more than two summers ago, Sefuku has led the fight to have Zuzu arrested and deported to stand trial in Rwanda.

He spent several months investigating Zuzu. He wanted to be sure the stories about him were true. "Anyone can accuse anyone else of genocide," he said. "We don't want to accuse anyone who is innocent."

He searched for witnesses living in the States and in Rwanda, hoping to retrace Zuzu's steps. He telephoned "the network," an informal group of Tutsis and Hutus around the world who pursue genocide suspects. He was in frequent contact with the Rwandan government and American law enforcement.

Satisfied that they had the right man, the network wrote U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft a letter in February 2002.

Soon after, government investigators joined the hunt.

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In a Romeoville, Ill., subdivision there is a street of middle-class dreams that curves gently past two-story houses with trimmed lawns cluttered with skateboards and soccer balls. Each driveway has been issued a minivan and a portable basketball stanchion. Scores of identical blue mailboxes stand sentry along the curb.

The couple down the block says it's a great place to live and would you like a cupcake just out of the oven? But please don't use their names. They are still shaken about what happened last year and everything they've been hearing since. The husband says you'd be cautious, too, if agents from the Department of Homeland Security made several visits to your home.

Put yourself in their place. It's early on a spring morning and you haven't had your first sip of coffee when there's a booming knock on your front door. Looming on your threshold is a pair of strangers flashing badges. You look over their shoulders and see your quiet street flooded with police cars, heavily armed men and a neighbor being led away in handcuffs.

The agents say good morning and ask to come in. The way they put it, it doesn't sound like you have much choice.

They want to know everything you know about the man across the street, the man you call Zuzu.

You want some answers, too. Is he a terrorist? He doesn't look like one. Maybe this is a mistake.

Just answer the questions, please.

You do as you are told. He's not a bad guy, as far as you can tell. He goes to work every day and seems like a good father. He's popular. People are always coming over to his place for beer and barbecued goat. He does have an arrogant streak. He acts like he thinks he's a prince or something. When he first moved onto the block, you took him a plate of homemade cookies, because that's what folks do around here. He dismissed you with a grunt, and you left feeling like a servant.

His wife and kids are nice, though, and over time he warmed up. The way he told it, his life story sounded like a movie. He spun out a harrowing tale about how he almost got his head chopped off during the genocide that swept through his native Rwanda in 1994. He led his family and friends on a trek of hundreds of miles, through jungle and desert until they reached a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His pregnant sister died along the way. Now he's raising her surviving children with his own.

Every day, he says, he gets on his knees and thanks God his family made it to the safe haven of America.

The agents tell a much different story. They say the man eating your cookies is a suspected killer and rapist. He's been on the run for a decade and there's an international warrant for his arrest. Prosecutors on two continents claim your neighbor is a dangerous man.

Zuzu's arrest in 2004, was not for crimes against humanity, but for a lie.

When he entered the United States in 2000, he said his name was Thierry Rugamba. But after his arrest he pleaded guilty to lying on his asylum application and acknowledged that his name is Jean-Marie Vianney Mudahinyuka, the man who has been called Zuzu since boyhood.

He also admitted to assaulting a federal agent sent to arrest him. He was awaiting sentencing as this story went to press. He also faces deportation to Rwanda, to face charges that he participated in the extermination of 10 percent of his nation's population.

At the time of Zuzu's arrest, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said, "It is particularly galling and offensive that a man would seek to enter our country by claiming to be fleeing a genocide that he participated in."

Government officials and human-rights advocates estimate that more than 1,000 "Zuzus" may be in the United States - men and women from around the world suspected of committing acts of mass murder, rape and torture in their home countries.

They were Central American generals and Haitian death-squad leaders, Bosnian thugs and anti-Castro terrorists. Some of them were once U.S. allies, trained and employed by the CIA when the Cold War wasn't so cold.

"It is easy to come to the United States and hide," said Zac Nsenga, the Rwandan ambassador to the United States. "Americans don't know that amidst them are people who did very bad things."

Since 2003, a special unit of the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, has been tracking them down, taking them to court, jailing and then deporting them for even the slightest infractions of immigration laws. "They have a propensity towards violence," said Claude Arnold, head of the ICE unit. "It's a public-safety issue."

For 25 years, the only foreign criminals the government seemed to care about were the hundreds of former Nazis who used phony names and life stories to enter the country and melt into the landscape.

But then came Sept. 11, 2001. New legislation allowed the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations to arrest and deport all human-rights abusers, regardless of their origin. Private groups such as the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, which sues human-rights abusers in civil court on behalf of torture and rape victims, work closely with the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.

Moira Feeney, a staff attorney for the group, estimates that at least 500,000 torture survivors from around the world are living and being treated in the U.S. They are often the people who alert authorities to the human-rights criminals who slip through the immigration net. They'll run into them on the street or at church or while shopping at a store that sells foods from their home country.

Richard Krieger started hunting down Nazis 30 years ago. Now 71, he works out of his den in Florida, tracking all kinds of human-rights violators from Eastern Europe to Central America and sub-Saharan Africa. It's personal with him. "If you've been to refugee camps, as I have," he said, "and you've seen the attitude about suffering from `good' people, you know something has to be done."

Not long ago, Gerard Sefuku called Krieger.

"I want him to be my teacher," Sefuku says. "We still have much work to do."

Zuzu entered the United States in 2000. He and his family first lived in Roanoke, Va., where he was issued a Social Security card. In 2001, he moved to the Chicago suburbs, eventually settling into a three-bedroom house in Romeoville.

He drove a cab for a short time before going to work at the Chika Market, an African grocery store in a strip mall just off Interstate Highway 355 in Bolingbrook.

On weekends, Chika's is as much a gathering place as it is a market. Immigrants from across the African continent drop in to shop and gossip, to rent movies made in Nigeria and to soak in the smells and sounds of home.

Zuzu worked at the store for more than two years, cutting meat, stocking shelves, manning the cash register. He was a hard worker with the soul of an entrepreneur. When Zuzu was on duty, customers often left with more than they had planned to buy. He'd flash his smile and turn on the charm and sell them an extra phone card or jar of face cream.

When store owner Ben Muoghalu went to Nigeria for three weeks, he left Zuzu in charge. "I trusted him," Muoghalu said, shaking his head. "I liked him. A lot."

But Zuzu was always talking on the telephone to his countrymen, says Chika Muoghalu, Ben's wife. So much so that customers complained that he kept them waiting while he finished his conversations. "If he was here right now," Chika said. "There would be 50 calls and all of them would be for him."

Chika says Zuzu once stopped talking on the phone long enough to try to explain to her what happened in Rwanda. "To this day, the Tutsi and Hutu thing confuses me," she said. "I don't even know which one he was."

Although Zuzu's mother is Tutsi, the ethnicity "Hutu" was stamped on his identification card, the one every Rwandan was required to carry. So-called mixed marriages are not uncommon, but in Rwanda children inherit their father's ethnic designation.

The identity cards were the invention of the Belgians, who ruled the country for the first half of the 20th Century. As part of a divide-and-conquer strategy, they installed a government run by the Tutsi minority to help them control the Hutu majority.

In the 1950s, independence movements thundered across Africa, and one colonial regime after another fell. By the early 1960s, the Belgians and Tutsis were out of power in Rwanda and the Hutus were in.

Over the years, there have been several outbreaks of anti-Tutsi violence, and tens of thousands were chased into exile. The succeeding governments were often corrupt and brutal. Slowly a democracy movement developed, funded in large part by Tutsis in exile, and in 1990 a largely Tutsi-led rebel army invaded the country. It was the start of a four-year civil war that ended only after the Hutus' campaign of genocide in 1994, their last desperate attempt to stay in power.

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Among the witnesses federal investigators interviewed was a Tutsi living in the Midwest who told them, and later a grand jury, a chilling tale of murder, rape and Zuzu.

The man said he had known Zuzu since childhood. As an adult, the man said, Zuzu "was prominent and well-known in the region and in the entire country, so I always knew who he was."

Zuzu was the son of a successful merchant, and he worked in the tax-collection department of the Rwanda Ministry of Finance. Anyone who wanted to open a store or an import-export business went to see him. He was also a sponsor of a popular soccer team, Rayon Sports. Whenever the team won, Zuzu would throw a big party at his Kigali home.

When the genocide began in the spring of 1994, a Hutu friend of the witness took him in for protection and he pretended to be Hutu.

One day, everyone in town was required to attend a meeting in an outdoor square. Standing in the middle of the square next to a terrified Tutsi, the witness said, was Zuzu and another man from the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia.

"Hutu power," Zuzu's comrade bellowed.

"Power. Power. Power," the people shouted back.

The militiaman with Zuzu told the crowd that God had given them permission to slaughter Tutsis and he was going to show them how. He ordered the Tutsi to lie on the ground and then, according to the witness, he chopped the man's legs off at the knees with a machete.

Then Zuzu, the witness said, took a club studded with nails and hit the man in the head three times. "His head split open," the man said.

The man said he also witnessed the rape of his cousin by Zuzu. Afterward, the man said, Zuzu took a sharp stick and drove it into his cousin's genitals. Zuzu left her there, "bleeding and crying for help. She died."

Zuzu's alleged partner at the public square now lives in Michigan. He is married to an American woman who says her grandmother died in a Nazi concentration camp.

He denies ever hurting anyone, let alone chopping off a man's legs. He says he was far away from the square, guiding tourists through the mountains to see Rwanda's famous gorillas.

He also says that some of the people accusing him had offered to leave him alone if he paid them $30,000. "I was not going to give them anything," he said. "I said, `Go take me to court.' It's a rumor. Talkie. Talkie. They want to see what they can get from you. It's become a business."

Accusations of genocide may not be a business, but they are common among Rwandans. Along with memories and nightmares, refugees from war-torn nations often bring their hatreds with them to their new countries.

"The old conflicts revive," said Alison Des Forges, primary author of an exhaustive book produced by Human Rights Watch about the Rwandan genocide, "Leave None to Tell the Story."

"Sometimes you'll have people who fled anti-Tutsi violence," she said. "Then comes the next wave of guys, Hutus fleeing the new government. Then one group denounces the other, leading to arrests."

Phanuel Gatorano, who has known Zuzu since childhood, believes his friend is among those who are falsely accused. "Zuzu is a good man," he said, sitting in his family room, his American wife, Elizabeth, at his side. "Zuzu never killed one person."

Scattered across his coffee table are 20 pages of documents filled with accusations against his friend. "This is my personal investigation," Gatorano said, waving his hand over the papers. "I have a list of his accusers right here. Their statements are lies."

Gatorano, who is Hutu, was not in Rwanda during the massacres. Dozens of his relatives were not so lucky and 80 of them died, he said. "The Tutsis act like they are the only ones to lose people during the genocide," he said with a sigh.

Gatorano came to the United States in 1988 to seek his fortune. By the looks of his spacious house and expansive back yard, he found it. He and his wife own an insurance brokerage and enjoy sharing their success with his family and friends from Rwanda. Zuzu was a frequent visitor.

He said, when the nearby Tutsi community got wind of the parties, "they thought we were having Interahamwe meetings."

Thousands of miles from suburban Chicago is a bustling neighborhood in Kigali called Nyamirambo.

Zuzu was the unofficial prince of Nyamirambo before he vanished. But when asked where he used to live, the young men of the neighborhood turn sullen and say they have no idea.

A middle-aged woman laughs at that response. She said the men are just trying to protect their fallen prince. Of course they know his old house. Everyone knows.

The woman said that before the killing began, Zuzu was a good neighbor. If you needed a ride up the hill to fetch water he'd drive you. No money for beer, don't worry; Zuzu would buy the whole bar a round. He had one of the neighborhood's few TV sets, and he had everyone over when a big soccer match was broadcast.

She says she knows Zuzu is in jail in America and will be in trouble if he is sent back to Rwanda. "But there are lots of guys here who killed plenty of people and they are not in jail."

Emmanuel Rukangira would agree with that. One of Rwanda's eight national prosecutors, he has been sending genocidaires to prison since 1996. "It was very difficult, especially in the beginning," he says. "The killers were still in the country. Suspects everywhere. The prisons were full."

Piled on his desk are dozens of files of the men and women on his long list of suspects still free, including Zuzu.

One of the witnesses in Zuzu's file is a bar owner who told investigators about the time Zuzu and 30 members of the Interahamwe came into his place with machetes and guns. Zuzu ordered beer for everyone and then distributed 10,000 Rwandan francs to the men for a job well done. They bragged in the bar that they had killed 16 Tutsis.

The man testified that he next saw Zuzu at a roadblock in Nyamirambo, distributing food to militiamen who were checking the identity cards of everyone passing through. When a Tutsi was discovered, he or she was pulled to the side of the road.

"I did not see any bodies at that roadblock, for the simple reason the Interahamwe would ask the victims to dig their own graves," the witness said. "I saw several mounds of fresh earth . . . I also saw individuals busy digging."

Rukangira takes me to meet some of Zuzu's alleged accomplices at Kigali's overcrowded prison. The inmates sleep in coffin-like cells stacked one atop the other. The cells are not tall enough for even a short person to sit up in, so the inmates - more than 6,300 - spend most of their days standing around in the courtyard in their pink prison uniforms.

Years ago, a politician who had fallen out of favor with a previous regime was imprisoned. In those days the inmates wore black, and that so depressed the politician that he swore if his star ever rose again he would dress the nation's inmates in a more pleasing color. The prison director, Misingo Karara, tells me the story as we wait for an inmate to enter his office for an interview.

Radjab Niyomugabo, 30, has been in a Kigali prison for nine years waiting to be tried on genocide charges. As he talks, he mostly keeps his eyes on the floor.

Of course he knew Zuzu, he said. Everybody knew Zuzu. And everybody knew he was an important man because of the company he kept. He was always with Georges Rutanganda, a wealthy businessman and a national leader of the Interahamwe.

Zuzu also had a bodyguard. Only the top guys had such a luxury. His name was Augustine and he was widely feared. "He killed a lot of people," Niyomugabo said.

One day, Zuzu went to visit his mother in a nearby town and discovered her house had been burned to the ground. Zuzu returned with Augustine. "You can imagine what he did to the entire village," Niyomugabo said.

What did he do? I ask.

"Zuzu told me (that) whoever he found, he put them down."

What does it mean to put someone down?

"To kill them."

Why are you in prison? Did you put someone down?

He sighs and explains that some people had died in his neighborhood during the genocide and he was blamed for their deaths.

How many people died?

"Thirty," he said, looking me in the eye for the first time. "I'm accused of being involved in their killing."

When inmate Amri Karekez enters the room, the prosecutor points at the man's stomach and chuckles.

"You're getting big," Rukangira said.

Karekez smiles, but just enough to appease. He has been in prison for eight years. He claims he didn't kill anyone with his own hands, but he sent others to do so.

He says his old comrade Zuzu supervised roadblocks by the Hutu militia. "Tutsis fleeing were stopped there. Then they were killed."

With the rebel army closing in, Karekez fled to Congo, as did Zuzu and hundreds of thousands of other Hutus. But life in the refugee camps was horrible, and Karekez slipped back into Rwanda. He was captured and thrown into prison.

I ask him if he knows what happened to Zuzu.

Karekez smiles, this time for real.

"We heard Zuzu was in America," he said with pride. "We know many other people who fled to the West."

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