The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; then the Iraq fighting with Alissa Rubin of the "Los Angeles Times" from Baghdad, and a look at America's civilian contract soldiers; a ten-years-later report on the horrific genocide in the African nation of Rwanda; a reprise conversation with Anne Applebaum, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; and a Roger Rosenblatt essay about the world of those who write books.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Coalition forces battled both Sunni and Shiite fighters in Iraq today. In the Northern city of

Ramadi, dozens of insurgents mounted a fierce assault on a U.S. Marine force. A Pentagon official said up to 12 of the marines may have been killed. In Fallujah the marines fought their way into the center of the city. They apprehended suspects in the deaths of four American contract workers there last week. The marines pulled back to the city's outskirts at nightfall. U.S. planes then fired rockets into the town destroying four houses. In the south coalition forces fought supporters of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr. Ukrainian soldiers were hit by rocket-propelled grenades in Kut. And Italian forces in Nasiriyah fought gunmen for control of bridges across the Euphrates River. Also British troops clashed overnight with Shiite insurgents in Amarah. And amid the upsurge in violence, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld talked about troop strength at a news conference in Norfolk, Virginia.

DONALD RUMSFELD: At the present time we have about not 115,000 but something like 135,000 troops in the country. We are at an unusually high level, and the commanders are using the excess of forces that happen to be in there because of the deployment process. They will decide what they need and they will get what they need. At the present time they've announced no change in their plans.

JIM LEHRER: The deaths of eight other American troops and one Ukrainian soldier were also announced, bringing total U.S. casualties to 20. More than 60 Iraqis were also killed. We'll have more on the story right after the News Summary. Al Sadr, the cleric behind the Shiite uprising, left Baghdad today and went to the holy city of Najaf. U.S. officials said he'd be arrested without warning. He is being protected by armed militiamen. An audiotape said to be from a senior al-Qaida operative aired today on an Islamic web site. He promised more attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, and called for the country's Sunni Muslims to attack rival Shiites. He claimed to be Abu Musab al Zahqawi, but U.S. Officials said it was too early to confirm it was him. Al Zahqawi was also sentenced to death in absentia in Jordan today. He was convicted along with seven others in the October 2002 assassination of a U.S. diplomat. China today ruled it alone had authority to decide how and when Hong Kong might hold elections. The former British colony's constitution grants Hong Kong's citizens the right to directly elect their leaders, starting in 2007. But today, a committee of China's parliament said Chinese law overrode that. The president of Lithuania was impeached and removed from office today. The parliament found Rolandas Paksas guilty of corruption charges. They included granting citizenship to a Russian businessman in exchange for campaign money. In the U.S. presidential race today, both President Bush and John Kerry talked economics. At a community college in Arkansas, the president promoted a plan to overhaul a federal vocational education program. He said the country was on its way to recovery, and educators had to prepare workers to be part of it.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: There's a lot of second chances in this world to go back to school. If you're wondering whether or not you want to stay at the end of a shovel hurting your back or you want to get some new skills to take advantage of the jobs that being created right here in this community take a look here at the community college. There's help. That's what we're here to talk about. We want every citizen in this country to be able to get the skills necessary to fill the jobs of the 21st century.

JIM LEHRER: Senator Kerry spoke to supporters in Cincinnati, Ohio. Among other things, he vowed to create ten million new jobs in four years, and roll back recent tax cuts.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: The wealthiest people in the nation are getting bigger and bigger tax breaks, growing more and more in their income. It's coming at the expense of fairness. One thing I learned long ago, this country is built on fairness. We're going to restore it to our nation's values.

JIM LEHRER: Kerry said he will lay out the specifics of his economic plan tomorrow in Washington -- 40 people have died in the flash floods along the Texas-Mexico border. More than a dozen remained missing today. Six of the dead were in Texas. Mexico's President Fox sent troops to aid search and rescue operationsand repair damage. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 12 points to close above 10,570. The NASDAQ fell 19 points to close below 2060. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the increasing violence in Iraq, America's contract soldiers, Rwanda ten years later, a Pulitzer winner, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay.

FOCUS - TURMOIL

JIM LEHRER: The Iraq story. We begin with a report from Julian Manyon of Independent Television News.

JULIAN MANYON: The sounds of gun fire crashed and echoed as Shiite militiamen fought Spanish coalition troops 200 miles south of Baghdad. This was the town of Diwaniya this morning as Spanish soldiers battled to regain control of the Shiites loyal to the militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr seized kill buildings and ran riot. After several hours, the Spaniards withdrew having failed to secure the town. British troops seemed to have been more successful. Today they were patrolling the empty streets of Amarah after 48 hours of clashes which cost the lives of 15 Iraqis. Six British soldiers were likely hurt. In other parts of Shiite southern Iraq fighting continued; eleven Italian troops were hurt and one Ukrainian soldier died. In Baghdad today, another American soldier was killed in a rocket grenade attack. American armor rumbled through the streets of Shiite districts as the coalition struggled to reassert its authority.

CAPT. JEFF MERCIOWSKI, U.S. Army: Right now we're here because last night we were engaged from around that mosque. We took casualties. We've done numerous community improvement projects in this area and right now we're trying to find out why we were being shot at last night.

JULIAN MANYON: All around was evidence of the fighting. And some Shiite families were mourning their dead, a sight which promises further revenge attacks.

UMM OMAR (Through interpreter): Why did they do this to us? What did we do? If I had a weapon I would fight them.

JULIAN MANYON: Moqtada al-Sadr has now issued a statement through one of his aides. It says that the uprising will continue unless the coalition withdrawals it troops from Iraq's town and cities.

QAYS AL-KHAZALI (Through interpreter): The uprising will continue until our demands are met. If U.S. forces continue this escalation against the Iraqi people, the uprising will spread until it reaches Kurdistan in the North.

JULIAN MANYON: U.S. troops have now launched a major operation in the Sunni town of Fallujah where four U.S. contractors were butchered last week. The Americans are determined to punish the people who did it. But local militants say they will fight to the death.

JIM LEHRER: And after that report was filed the pentagon announced up to 12 marines were killed in the fighting in Ramadi.

JIM LEHRER: Terence smith has more on Iraq. He talked earlier this evening with Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times in Baghdad.

TERENCE SMITH: Alissa Rubin, thanks for joining us. Can you give us a sense of the state of play in Iraq today from Baghdad to the other cities?

ALISSA RUBIN: Yes, some sense. I think what we saw today was scattered violence across the South, an area that, until the last few days, had been relatively calm with only very, very sporadic violence. This is... really what we're seeing is elements of a Shiite sort of religious militant uprising that is taking... gathering force and sort of taking shape in different southern cities: Najaf, Amarah, Nasiriyah. We've seen some protest in Basra, but there was no real violence today. It's hard to see how this down scales at all. It feels as if it's building up toward something, but it's hard to know exactly what that is. In Baghdad, there have been some outbursts. There were outbursts over last night in one of the Sunni neighborhoods. There also... just yesterday, there were several more outbursts in Shiite neighborhoods, confrontations with coalition troops and between coalition troops and the followers of the... Moqtada al- Sadr, a young Shiite cleric who is violently anti-American.

TERENCE SMITH: And you, Alissa, you were in Najaf today. What was the situation there?

ALISSA RUBIN: Al-Sadr has taken over, in large measure, the city of Najaf. It's significant because Najaf is not just another city in Iraq. It's one of the two most holy cities in Iraq and in Shiite Islam. It also receives pilgrims from all over the Shiite world. And it is the seat of the most distinguished and scholarly clerics and their sort of institutions of learning. So it's a very, very important city, symbolic of sort of the whole intellectual framework of Shiite Islam. And so to....

TERENCE SMITH: When you say al-Sadr has taken it over, you mean military control of the entire city?

ALISSA RUBIN: Well, quite close to that. He moved personally from the shrine where he had been staying in Kufa, about seven to ten miles away, to Najaf last night. And his mighty army, which is a militia of sort of black- uniformed, armed men are surrounding... posted all around the shrine in Najaf, to the very holy place. They've entered and taken control of a number of the police stations. They've... according to the police, they've stolen the bulletproof vests that the police got from the Americans. They've stolen the cars, guns. So they are now posted in most of the police departments there, at some of the hospitals. They have established checkpoints in different places around the city. For all intents and purposes, they are the power on the ground right now.

TERENCE SMITH: And was there any opposition to all of that from coalition forces today?

ALISSA RUBIN: No, there was none in Najaf. Any operation in Najaf would have to be very, very carefully planned, and it would not be easy. There's been a promise by the coalition not to storm into the holy sites. It's an agreement with the clerics and with the city elders there, and also in Karbala, that the coalition troops would keep their distance and allow the policing to be done by Iraqis. Now, what happens when the Iraqis are not able to police because they've been essentially defanged by the militia of al-Sadr's remains to be seen. I think that's something that will unfold in the next few days.

TERENCE SMITH: And it sounds as though that would make it even more difficult for coalition forces to go in and capture al- Sadr as they have said they would like to do.

ALISSA RUBIN: It's extraordinarily difficult. The dilemma facing the coalition is that they want, I think, probably with some good reason, to bring al-Sadr under control. But to do so... the only way to do so is with force. And that would mean possibly bloodshed in a holy place-- bloodshed by people certainly perceived as infidels by Muslims here, and with the... an enormously fraught venture from a sort of public relations standpoint. But beyond public relations, it could rally people further against the coalition and kind of create... creating a backlash. So however it's done, it has to be very carefully considered.

TERENCE SMITH: Earlier, Alissa, you mentioned the senior Shiite cleric there, the Ayatollah Sistani. Is he playing any role in any of this?

ALISSA RUBIN: Well, I think his role has been very much in the background. He is not -- probably doesn't feel terribly safe right now with al-Sadr occupying the shrine that's about a block from his office, and he has been quite silent. He has urged to refrain from bloodshed. He's urged to keep an atmosphere of calm, but he's also said that al-Sadr's demands are reasonable, and therefore he shouldn't need to resort to bloodshed. So it's... he's treading a very difficult line, attempting not to alienate al-Sadr but at the same time, not to approve of his more violent approach to confronting the coalition.

TERENCE SMITH: Well, obviously it remains a very tense and unresolved situation. Alissa Rubin of the "LA Times," thanks very much for filling us in.

ALISSA RUBIN: Thank you.

FOCUS - SECURITY FOR HIRE

JIM LEHRER: Now, a look at the private contractor Americans who are involved in the Iraq fighting and are taking casualties. Gwen Ifill has that story.

GWEN IFILL: The attack was violent and shocking. As the four Americans drove through Fallujah last week, they were ambushed, their SUV's set on fire, and the corpses mutilated. But it quickly became clear these were not soldiers; they were civilians, among the hundreds of bodyguards and former military men hired to provide private security in Iraq. The four in Fallujah worked for Blackwater U.S.A., a security and training company based in North Carolina.

SPOKESMAN: Safety on.

GWEN IFILL: Like many Blackwater employees, each had once served in elite military fighting units. At the 6,000-acre North Carolina facility, employees and visiting law enforcement personnel practice at firearm target ranges and in a simulated town built to train for urban warfare. About 450 of Blackwater's contractors work in Iraq for private firms and for the Pentagon, many charged with providing security for non- military coalition employees, including U.S. Administrator, Paul Bremer. The "Washington Post" reported today that Blackwater commandos also fought off an attack on U.S. Headquarters in Najaf on Sunday. There, Blackwater helicopters dropped supplies and lifted out a wounded marine.

GWEN IFILL: So what are the pros and cons of hiring freelancers to fight a war? For that, we turn to Doug Brooks, the founder and president of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade organization for the military service companies; and Peter Singer, a former Pentagon official and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry." He's also a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Doug Brooks, most of us until last week had never heard of these free lancers, these military free lancers, these private companies. How many are they? How big a factor are they right now in this war?

DOUG BROOKS: Well, they're very important to the war. The military uses private companies to do all sorts of things, logistics and support and in some cases to provide security assistance. It's not really such a new phenomenon. They've been using private companies since the beginning of the military. But what I think we're seeing a little bit more is the military is focusing more on its core functions and using private companies to provide support and to provide a little security in areas that the military doesn't want to get involved in.

GWEN IFILL: How many would you say are currently working in Iraq?

DOUG BROOKS: The numbers vary. It depends if you're counting - you know -- the private Iraqis that are working there and so on, I mean, anything from maybe 6,000 westerners, British, Americans, South Africans and so on and I have Nepalese that are working there doing security work and then quite a few Iraqis who have been hired by these private companies to protect the oil industry and other places.

GWEN IFILL: Peter Singer, is this something that has just been happening all around the world and we're just noticing it now in Iraq?

PETER SINGER: Well, I think it's global; the scale in Iraq is greater than ever seen. But this industry really took off at the end of the Cold War. Right now it operates in about 50 different conflict zones.

GWEN IFILL: Why is it that? Why are they needed?

PETER SINGER: It's basically three things coming together right now. One is good old-fashioned market forces. We have much smaller militaries. The U.S. Military is about 35 percent smaller and it's deployed to more and more places. So these companies are meeting a gap in the market. The other thing is you have changes in warfare. Basically civilian technicians are playing greater roles as we use more technology off the commercial market. And then the final thing is basically the power of ideology, the privatization revolution. We've seen everything from private security, private prisons, all sorts of government functions that have been turned over to private companies. Well the last one, the core one was the military realm. And we're seeing that happen right now.

GWEN IFILL: Are these private organizations accountable in the same way that a military organization would be?

DOUG BROOKS: Ultimately they are. And especially in Iraq they're working as contractors for the U.S. Military. The U.S. Military can pull the plugs on their contracts if they do anything wrong. They have rules of engagement the same as the military. Their rules are graded depending on the capability of the company. There are lots of ways to take, to ensure the accountability of these companies.

GWEN IFILL: But I've read in Fallujah with these particular four contractors from Blackwater that they were in an unarmored vehicle they were traveling without back up. That is something that a CIA or a military operation would have never allowed.

DOUG BROOKS: That might be true. In fact, I think they do take risks when they do these sorts of jobs. Now they may have been covered under military back-up that just didn't arrive. Remember there were other attacks going on in the area at the same time. I believe five engineers were actually killed just outside of town before this attack. So there may not have been a back-up available.

GWEN IFILL: Is this a cost-saving issue, peter singer? Does it save money for us to do it this way.

PETER SINGER: You have to think of costs in two ways: On the economic side and the political side. On the economic side what's interesting is that we've never seen a study that proves global savings here. We've never seen a study that establishes that there are actually cost savings because in a lot of cases we're comparing what happened and what didn't. Theoretically if you had good competition, if you had good oversight, if you're only using these companies when you needed them maybe it would save you money but we're talking about government contracting. So often you don't have good competition, politically connected firms tend to win contracts. You don't have good oversight. Then finally we often kid ourselves for political reasons. We don't hire and fire these companies because the operations they're in last a long time. The Bosnia one is still going on today. The Iraq ones will probably still be going on five years from now. Now, there's another part of this equation which is the political costs. You definitely do see those. For example, when the casualties happen they don't carry the same weight that they do with American soldiers. We've had between 30 and 50 contractors killed that we just haven't heard about in the press here.

GWEN IFILL: Why don't you weigh that for it, the political versus the fiscal costs.

DOUG BROOKS: Well, I think it's a lot cheaper to use private companies. You use far fewer private people to do a task rather it's logistics or cooking or whatever else. Oftentimes private companies will do things differently. They use a lot more local resources. To bring an engineering unit for example to build barracks for our troops in Iraq would be extremely expensive to bring in the troops and their equipment and so on. When you hire a private company, they can hire local companies to actually build the barracks. They just simply provide the supervision and the cost savings are enormous.

GWEN IFILL: We've heard two nights running from reporters on the ground in Iraq, Alissa Rubin tonight and Jeffrey Gettleman last night, both talking about what appears to be the sorry state of the Iraqi police, the people who are being trained the take over. Is this a gap that especially if the June 30 handover happens on schedule that these private firms are going to be expected to fill?

PETER SINGER: They've already started to contract out some of these services not only on the training side. The training for the post Saddam police, paramilitary force and army has all been outsourced to private companies but now, for example, the security for the CPA headquarters, that contract was just let out. So the role is already extensive -- at least 15,000 of these guys on the ground carrying out military jobs. It's likely going to grow after the June 30 handover.

GWEN IFILL: Do you agree with that?

DOUG BROOKS: I agree. In fact I think what these private companies offer is a real surge capacity. When you need to do a large- scale training, when you need to bring in a lot of people fast to do a certain thing you can go to the private sector. There's an enormous capability to add to what the military is able to do. Without these private companies the military would have to bring in ten or even hundreds of thousands of additional people.

GWEN IFILL: So speaking of bringing in tens of thousands of additional people let's talk about troop strength. Peter Singer, does this... does the existence on the ground of these kinds of private military companies essentially allow the United States not to send additional troops to back up the troops who are already on the ground? We've heard Secretary Rumsfeld say time and time again he's waiting to hear from General Abizaid to see if he needs, he says he doesn't need anything, would he need more troops on the ground if he didn't have these private contractors?

PETER SINGER: Oh, I think he already needs more right now. That's pretty obvious. If you didn't have the contractors you'd need even more. Basically this market is filling a demand. And the demand has both political causes and economic causes. But really you have sort of four choices here. You either expand the force by sending in more regular forces or reservists. You either don't carry out these kinds of discretionary operations which don't involve a national mobilization which Iraq falls under that. Third, you make the political concessions necessary to bring in allies or the U.N. to fill these tasks or, four, you bring in private contractors. So far because of the cheaper political costs, we've chosen to go to the private route. But of course that has a lot of short- and long-term implications that we really haven't thought of here. What concerns me is how we've sort of ad hoced our way into this system. There hasn't been a public debate and discussion and I think most people are really surprised to find out how extensive and how mission critical the role that these private forces are carrying out. Remember they're not part of the chain of command. And each of them has their own operating procedures and not all the businesses can have the best practice here.

GWEN FILL: Let's follow Peter Singer's lead-in and use the word ad hoc as a verb. Have we ad hoced our way into this situation without enough public oversight of essentially what is a public role?

DOUG BROOKS: I think this has been going on for a long time. I don't think it's particularly unusual. I think what we're seeing is as I say a military that's more focused than before. Whether we take just about any of those options we're still going to have a private sector supporting it. That's fine. The private sector can do whatever needs to be done to fill in the gaps. If the military is going to bring in additional logistics people, then the private sector can work on something else. I mean it's not a big deal from the private sector perspective. They'll be there and always will be there in this kind of mission. Do they provide critical services? I think yes. Is there any risk in that? Not really. We're seeing that the private companies do have staying power in Iraq. As far as I know not a single company has left Iraq because of what's going on. I think we see lots of people still willing to work in these services and take risks. The money is not bad but I think people believe in the mission there.

GWEN IFILL: Does the government have other than just pulling a contract, does the government... I want to return to this idea of what control the government actually has over these contractors. They don't leave but they don't leave because they're getting paid perhaps. Does the government have the right to control their movements the way they dress, the way they cradle their arms in public, the way they do things that maybe a straight military man wouldn't do? Can they control that on the ground or do they just say you figure it out, do it the way you need to do it and we'll move on?

PETER SINGER: Unfortunately again this is another example of how we've ad hoced our way into this is that essentially the companies set up their operating procedures and there's no other than a minimal registration that sort of sets limits in training them what kind of weapons you carry -- it's up to the firms to determine that. And also we're talking about extra territorial law here so they're not part of the chain of command. They're also not part of the code of military justice. We have to remember that they're also not exclusively working for the Defense Department. They're working for other companies, whether they be reconstruction or even media. So when they get into trouble, there's not established systems to support them and also if they do commit some kind of malfeasance, you know, you have professional companies that act like professionals and you have other companies that are made up of cowboys that act like cowboys. There's not a legal response to it. The most that the combatant commander can do is pull the registry and say leave this zone. Well, that's not sufficient response if someone commits a felony for example. In turn the companies often complain that, look, we're not getting the support from the military. When we come in under fire you're not supporting us. There's contractors that have gone missing and there hasn't been the kind of support out there searching for them the way we've had if say an American soldier went missing.

GWEN IFILL: One of the... when you weigh those two options on one hand they're not accountable by court martial for instance on one hand. On the other hand, maybe marines aren't rushing to rescue non-marines as aggressively as they would marines -- if those are the two risks....

DOUG BROOKS: There is more accountability than that. Essentially because it is an occupied country they are under U.S. law. They can be taken back and tried in U.S. Courts in fact. In terms of the back-up, I mean that is an issue. This is what we're hearing is that the companies often go to the back-up of military units in trouble but it is questionable whether the military is going to be able to back up the companies. So we'd like to see more coordination. One of the things that my association, International Peace Operations Association, is trying to do is set up some standards, set up some coordination and make sure that people are communicating over there. The military does control these companies quite tightly in terms of what they're allowed to carry, in terms of what weapons they use and things like that. It does have a lot of control over these companies that I don't think is fully recognized.

GWEN IFILL: Doug Brooks and Peter Singer, thank you both very much.

DOUG BROOKS: A pleasure.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the Rwanda genocide, the non-fiction Pulitzer winner, and Rosenblatt on writers.

FOCUS - 10 YEARS LATER

JIM LEHRER: Ten years ago this week, the African nation of Rwanda plunged into mass killing and genocide. At least 800,000 people died. Lindsey Hilsum of Independent Television News helped cover that story for us then. She recently returned to Rwanda for this report.

LINDSEY HILSUM: They thought God would protect them, so they gathered in his house, and that's where they were slaughtered. Ten years on, the church at Ntarama is a memorial to those killed here. The Hutu government of the time tried to wipe out the Tutsis. The few who survived are caught between those who killed their families and newcomers to Rwanda. They're alone, prisoners of memory.

PERPETUA MUDELE (Translated): Only death will make us forget. It's ten years now. It could be 50; it doesn't change anything. It's something that happened. Nothing can make you forget. 20 years, 30 years... it doesn't matter. It's there forever.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Maybe the bible is as much a habit as a comfort. Perpetua Mudede's husband and seven of her ten children were killed, so she left her village for the town.

PERPETUA MUDELE ( Translated ): Could I live alone? All by myself? Could I feel happy like that, with no family, no neighbors, no one? Could I live alone amongst the killers? I came here because at least here I can be with others like me.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Many survivors have come to the town of Nyamata, where they feel less isolated and safer. But the government is releasing from prison killers who confess, and some of them have also come to town.

PERPETUA MUDELE (Translated): I never hide from them. When we meet, we greet each other. I can't say who killed whom exactly. But sometimes we meet in church, sometimes in the market. We meet everywhere. If they don't feel remorse, that's their problem. Blood is strong, and the blood they shed will haunt them forever. ( Congregation sings )

LINDSEY HILSUM: They worship together: Hutus, Tutsis; the innocent, the guilty; those who remember every day, and those who would wipe away the past. Perpetua says she has lightened her burden by forgiving the people who killed her family and the families of the six orphans she now looks after. But to forgive is not to forget. No Sunday service at the old church a few yards away; many were slaughtered inside, and 20,000 genocide victims from the area have been buried in the grounds. The old man is keeper of the bones. His companions are the dead. His own wife and children are buried here. His job is to show visitors the church. "This," he tells me, "is blood." "The killers slashed the mothers with machetes, then pulled the babies from their backs and dashed them against the walls. They threw grenades which exploded, killing more."

THARCISSE MUAKAM ( Translated ): In my heart, I want revenge, but there's nothing I can do. I have to obey the law, as the government says. It's as if the people had been walking together, but then they slipped off the straight and narrow path. Now the government says they must reconcile.

LINDSEY HILSUM: In the last year, another 150 bodies have been brought to the church. Sometimes when the killers confess, they show where they stuffed bodies down pit latrines. The bones have been exhumed for reburial on April 7, the tenth anniversary of the genocide. A lot has changed in ten years. Superficially, there's peace, and that in itself is remarkable. But while the government uses words like "reconciliation" and "consensus," the survivors still fear to live in their own homes. In the countryside around Nyamata, where for 100 days the Hutus slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, there are almost no survivors left. They don't want to revisit the swamps where they hid. Their houses have been destroyed, and the release of killers from prison makes them frightened to go home. In the village of Gahwiji, they gather under the tree for an experiment in traditional justice called Gacaca. Killers who confessed in prison now face judges drawn from the community. The government says this process will enable people to live together again.

FRANCIS NKURUNZIZA: If these people, especially the genocide perpetrators, came from prison, and the genocide victims are now cohabiting, living together, fetching water together, being in the same school, being in the same meeting like this one, without even confrontation, that really shows that there's some signs of reconciliation.

LINDSEY HILSUM: But they're not. All but five Tutsis in Gahwiji were killed. I had expected to find survivors confronting killers in the court, but the survivors have fled, so now the killers accuse each other. This man is accused of being in a group of local men armed with machetes and clubs, which killed a man one night. "I was there," he says, "but I wasn't a member of the group." He also denies killing two children. But another man steps forward with a different story. Furogence Gasana confessed while in prison, and has now been released to implicate others. "I think he is lying," he says. "He just wants to escape blame for the killing. I know. We were on that patrol together." Everyone must account for themselves. This woman denies that she checked out a house where a Tutsi family was living and gave the information to a band of killers. But one of the judges says there's evidence. She went there twice, and was seen climbing up the wall to look. Another accusation, another denial. "I swear you're lying," he says. Those who confess face little punishment unless they are mass murderers or rapists. The collective pressure is to confess, just as ten years ago, the collective pressure was to kill. They say they're sorry, but the survivors say that's a lie. We found Florence Gashumba back in Nyamata. She's one of the survivors from Gahwiji. In ten years, she's had three children, but that doesn't stop her mourning her six children who were murdered in front of her by the killers now facing Gacaca.

FLORENCE GASHUMBA ( Translated ): What's the point of thinking about what should happen to someone who killed a member of your family? Even if he stays in prison or they kill him, no one that he killed will be brought back to life. All I wish is that they would realize that all human beings are the same. We all have the same blood flowing in our veins.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Rwanda's capital, Kigali, has become prosperous. It's developing fast. Tutsis whose families had lived in exile for three decades have returned to the motherland. For them, it's a land of opportunity, a place to make money. They're building huge houses with swimming pools and satellite dishes. Times are good. They came after the genocidal government was overthrown in '94, and seem scarcely aware of what happened. Beatha and Ernestine came to the capital for safety and anonymity. Ernestine's entire family was wiped out in Nyamata, and she was badly injured. She feels trapped now between the killers being released and the Tutsis who've come from exile and just don't seem to care.

ERNESTINE MUDAHOGORA: (Translated): In daily life, you see, no one is interested. I feel there's no point in telling them what happened to me because it means nothing to them.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Her injuries have attracted little sympathy.

ERNESTINE MUDAHOGORA ( Translated ): This man from Burundi grabbed me here and asked, "what happened to you? Did you have an accident?"

LINDSEY HILSUM: Beatha is also the only survivor in her family. Aged 14, she was held at a roadblock waiting her turn to be killed before somehow managing to escape. She only realized that her mother was dead when she found a neighbor wearing her clothes.

BEATHA UWAZANINKA: I still hear the voice telling me, "your mother has been thrown in the river." Sometimes I think I want to have a job, have a proper school and get over, but I can't get over. It keeps pulling me back. So for some people, like, from our exile for long, who have been having... who have got chance to get their education, they're building up; they're going. But for us, genocide keeps bringing us back.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Ten years on, the dead lie where they were killed. Many of those who murdered them are settling back in their homes, regaining their old lives. The newcomers want to move on. Only the survivors of genocide can find no peace, no end to their grief and pain.

SERIES - PRIZE WINNER

JIM LEHRER: Now, we begin a series of conversations with the winners of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners in the arts. Up first, an encore look at a conversation done earlier with the author of the book that ended up winning the Pulitzer for non-fiction, and to Ray Suarez.

TERENCE SMITH: The book is "Gulag: A History," the author is Ann Applebaum, a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. And I guess the best thing to do is to start off with a definition. It's probably a word that people... many people still aren't familiar with. What is, what was "the gulag"?

ANN APPLEBAUM: "Gulag" is actually an acronym, and what it means is main camp administration, which is a very boring bureaucratic- sounding term. And that was actually the name of the institution that ran many, many thousands of camps. And it was, in fact, a very boring bureaucratic institution. But it kept many archives, and it kept track of things, and it attained a kind of Kafkaesque status among prisoners in the camps. And I think it was Solzhenitsyn who first used the term "gulag" in his writings to describe the system.

RAY SUAREZ: So, this isn't a term that the ordinary Russian on the street would have used to, in conversation, describe the camps?

ANN APPLEBAUM: Later on it would have been. They were just called camps or the system, or something. And it was Solzhenitsyn who christened them the gulag, and made that term popular.

RAY SUAREZ: Did they start out to become almost a country within a country, as they ended up?

ANN APPLEBAUM: They... not in the very beginning. They started as something much more like ordinary prisons, and they were slowly taken over by the secret police when Stalin... first Lenin, and then Stalin decided that the Soviet Union needed a special system for its special political prisoners. Then in the late '20s, they grew because Stalin decided he needed slave labor in the Soviet Union. And they grew and grew and grew, and he conceived of more and more projects that they could be useful in, and he decided to use them to populate the far north of the country. They eventually became a major part of the economic system and a very, very important part of the country's politics.

RAY SUAREZ: At the very outset of the book, you almost remind people, remind them why this is an important subject in the first place, and compare it to the attention that the Nazi camps got during the period 12 years or so that Hitler was in power, and you compare the attention that the two have gotten and found that the gulag had sort of disappeared. Why do you think that happened?

ANN APPLEBAUM: There were a lot of reasons for it, I mean, some quite understandable. You know, we conquered Germany at the end of the war. After the Second World War, we had access to German archives, we had film of the camps, we had millions... not millions, excuse me, hundreds of survivors. The Soviet Union... the Soviet camps ended in a much different way. Stalin's camps, the mass system of camps ended while the Soviet Union still existed. There were no archives, there were no pictures, there were no images. And in our media-centric, media- driven culture there was nothing to look at. Of course, we also had a lot of... we have a certain amount of nostalgia in our culture-- and we did for quite a long time-- for Stalin because he was our ally during the war. Even now, it remains hard for some people to say, "no, we defeated Hitler with Stalin's help," or "we liberated Hitler's camps while allowing Stalin's camps to spread; we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another." There's an enormous amount of fond memories of the war and an understanding of the history of the 20th century that people don't want to see undermined. There was also... there were some not exactly left-wing bias, but there was a lack of interest in the camps on the left-- less in this country than in Europe, but still it was noticeable. You know, people didn't want to bring it out, didn't want to talk about it. You know, it sort of undermined or embarrassed people who... even people who didn't necessarily love the Soviet Union, but who maybe opposed America's role in the Cold War. There was a lot of ideological baggage attached to this argument, most of which I think is now gone.

RAY SUAREZ: Yetto catalogue the suffering, the horrors, the destroyed lives, you really need a book as big as the one you've written. It almost gets to be too much after a while. You almost think, "I just can't read another 50 pages about all these terrible, terrible crushed people."

ANN APPLEBAUM: Yes, it's... one of my ideas when writing the book was to try and calmly accumulate the detail. And of course my greatest problem was knowing what to leave out, because for every page that was included, there was another five books and 85 quotations I could have included. I mean, one of the striking things about "the gulag" is how much material there is now. In the last ten years, there's... archives have been opened up, Russian scholars have been working there. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of memoirs, including many unpublished ones. And very few people have yet used the opportunity, made it possible to make use of these things and start reading them.

RAY SUAREZ: The pointlessness of a lot of it was very moving in its odd way. People were sent to reeducation camps and not reeducated, sent to do work that had no economic purpose, sent to create public works that really made no sense, and yet hundreds of thousands of people were dying doing it all.

ANN APPLEBAUM: Yes, it's one of the things that people find hardest to accept now about the past. You know, there's an issue in Russia now about how much you discuss the past. You know, should we apologize for the gulag? Should we think about it? Should we find the people responsible? And there's really been very, almost no interest in exploring the past at all, particularly in the last ten years. And part of it is because-- again, many reasons for this-- but part of it is because it's very difficult for people to say now, you know, this system was entirely pointless. You know, I lived my life, if I'm a 70- year-old man or woman, in a system that had no purpose. And I was motivated by an ideology that was false, and I created a country that's not so much underdeveloped as mis-developed. You know, factories are at the wrong places, big cities are built in the far north where they have no... there's no reason for them to be there. And it's difficult for people to say this now, and reevaluate the last 100 years of Russian history. And I think it's part of Russia's problem today.

RAY SUAREZ: Are there things that we still don't know, or perhaps will never know, about this almost haphazard system that grew up during the 20th century?

ANN APPLEBAUM: There are many things we still don't know about the Soviet Union. The internal politics of Stalin's politburo is still fairly mysterious. There are many, many details still to learn. But, as I say, it is surprising how much information is now available, and how much work is being done. I mean, the surprise, I suppose, is that there hasn't yet been more interest from the West, and there aren't more western scholars working on this subject, although I'm sure there will be.

RAY SUAREZ: So, what do we want to know next? What surprises are there waiting in some drawer or file somewhere in Moscow today? Are there things that you went looking for in preparing this book that you just had to leave because you knew that another ten hours or another twenty hours just wouldn't close this down for you?

ANN APPLEBAUM: There were a couple of stories I didn't find the end of. I heard a rumor when I was far out and I was in Siberia in the region called Komi, where there were a lot of camps in the '30s and '40, and I heard a story about something called "the English Camp," which was allegedly full of English prisoners, or had been at one point. And I spent a lot of time trying to track down whether this had in fact been true. The story was that they were spies who had been in a Nazi camp, who had been parachuted into Germany, were then taken back to Russia. I mean, it was a very fantastic story. And I was never able to prove it. But it was one of many stories like that. You know, you would pick up rumors. You would hear stories of Nazi spies who had parachuted into the Soviet Union during the war. You would hear about Americans pitching up in odd places. There... I'm sure the archives still have a great deal more to tell us.

RAY SUAREZ: Anne Applebaum, thanks a lot.

ANN APPLEBAUM: Thank you.

ESSAY - CELEBRATING WRITERS

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, and speaking of books, essayist Roger Rosenblatt considers the worlds of the people who write them.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: In March, "Poets and Writers," the writers' magazine and lecture bureau, and halfway house for every joyously miserable writer in America, throws its annual dinner "in celebration of writers." I should say so. No one else celebrates writers in America, which makes this an especially wonderful time. Everybody hates us. The government wants to peer over our shoulders or over the shoulders of our readers. Television and the Internet want to drive out words with pictures. Language itself has been shrunk. Is there a "firestorm" of protest? Are rumors "swirling"? Who sent these "shockwaves"?

SPOKESPERSON: Your total comes to $20.77.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: The general public is far more interested in getting and spending than in reading and weeping. A woman wrote a colleague: "I have prayed for the death of two other writers, and have been successful twice." Celebrities stalk the land, doing stupid and terrible things. Even our publishers ask, how much dough have you made for me lately? Could life get any better? What's more, these are delightfully dreadful and vacant times. What brings light to a writer more warmly than a deep and menacing darkness. Despair, commercialism, philistinism, greed. Life reduced to the bottom line. Love reduced to sex. Everyone isolated behind a computer screen. Man, it's heaven. Best of all, no one cares. In the beautifully-written new Canadian movie, "The Barbarian Invasions," there are idolatrous, nostalgic references to the great books born of pain, disgust, and rage. Whence come such works as "The Gulag Archiopelago," man's fate, and all the yearning, ranting, stormy novels and poems of past. From war, pestilence, oppression, and mass stupidity, that's whence. It is to say that a writer needs to feel alone and deserted by the world, a station equally depressing and elating in that it allows us to stand in relief of all the baser impulses. It takes a lot for a writer to feel superior to anything, so it helps to live in a time devoid of taste and inspiration. Jane Austen escaped her hostile world by writing novels so removed from current events one would never know that the Napoleonic wars were going on at the same time. Matthew Arnold gave his famous lament more directly, when he called his bride to stand beside him in a world shook up by Darwin and doubt and the collapse of tradition: "Ah, love, let us be true to one another! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night." In "Body and Soul," an older film about a boxer, a crooked fight promoter tells John Garfield.

ACTOR: Everything is addition or subtraction. The rest is conversation.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: God bless the fight promoter. Bless the liars, the hypocrites, the scoundrels. Bless the corporate thieves. Bless the celebrities behaving badly. Bless the decivilizing acts and impulses that have replaced people with machines, and thus have suggested that the human heart has had its day, and the world of kindness, honor and principle is lost forever. And bless "poets and writers" for creating its celebration of very odd and out-of-it folks who stare out the window, note that a tidal wave is about to flood the house, and thank our lucky stars. I'm Roger Rosenblatt.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of the day. Coalition forces battled both a total of 20 American soldiers died in combat as coalition forces battled both Sunni and Shiite fighters in a number of Iraqi cities. The Pentagon said 12 of the casualties were U.S. Marines killed in an assault by dozens of insurgents in the Sunni Triangle. And Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said military commanders in Iraq will get more troops if they need them.

JIM LEHRER: And again, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. Here, in silence, are eight more.

JIM LEHRER: We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.