By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Last October, Rwandan authorities began investigations after a tip-off about the likelihood of a mass grave in a rural homestead in Ngoma village, in the country’s Southern Province.

After days of exhumations, this week, a total of 210 bodies were discovered. The discovery of mass graves of victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi continues unabated, and the Ngoma find is a relatively “small” one.

Last April, in the western district of Rusizi, 1,100 bodies were discovered in mass graves on land belonging to a Catholic parish.

The genocide survivors’ group Ibuka was this week quoted as saying the remains of more than 100,000 genocide victims have been unearthed across Rwanda in the past five years alone.

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In April, Rwanda begins the 30th commemoration of the genocide, and these mass graves pose very difficult questions. For starters, it means the question of how many people were killed remains open. Most estimates put the number of people slaughtered in the 100-day frenzy at between 800,000 and one million.

Having covered the war, the genocide, and post-genocide Rwanda for three-quarters of my professional journalism life, beginning with the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s (RPF) return-to-the-homeland war launched from Uganda in October 1990, I sense that even one million is a conservative number. The figure is likely over 1.2 million.

To begin, the focus has been largely on medium to big mass grave sites. But not all killings were at a medium to large scale level. Many of them were done at a small scale. There are likely thousands of sites with two or three people which are flying under the radar, the bones kicked aside by peasant farmers who stumble upon them.

Counting all the remains is politically messy, and can potentially open up new nightmares. The post-genocide political settlement on which present-day Rwanda is built functions best only when the victims are between 800,000 and one million.

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Anything much more could lead to disaffection, common among some victim families, that not enough has been done to get justice. To some of the survivors, nothing less than mass revenge would do. And it would increase the “perpetrator burden” in untenable ways on those linked to the extremists who carried out the killings.

On the 30th anniversary of the Genocide against the Tutsi, the equanimity in Rwanda cannot blur the trials that still bubble beneath the surface. In history, the shadow of genocide has been shortened by the fact that the perpetrators and victims usually went their separate ways in the end, or one side perished.

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide was the massacre of between 50,000 and 65,000 Herero, and 10,000 Nama people, from 1904 to 1907 by German colonial military forces in German South West Africa – modern-day Namibia. The Germans left, and the Herero and Nama survivors remained.

In the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews during World War II, Nazi Germany murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. The slaughter was carried out through mass executions and poison gas in extermination camps, in occupied Poland.

A defeated Germany went back home, where there were few Jews left. Before the war, and until 1941, Germany encouraged Jewish emigration. By 1933, there were 523,000 Jews in Germany. By late 1941, there were just 163,000 left – and most of them were finished off in Nazi camps. In any event, few Jewish survivors had to live face-to-face with their Nazi killers.

The Armenian Genocide, in which up to 1.5 million people were killed, was a deportation drive and mass killing conducted against the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turk government during World War I between 1914 and 1918. Well, the Ottoman Empire fell, and today Armenia is an independent country of three million people. Again, there was a separation.

Not for Rwanda. The result is that it is one of the very few places where victim and perpetrator have had to live nextdoor, marry, and work across the table from each other. I have been told many times that it takes something we outsiders can never understand, and requires digging to depths we can’t comprehend, to make the project of a nation work in that reality. I for one, don’t.

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Fourteen years ago, I went to rural Rwanda to cover a genocide commemoration and the burial of 360 remains that had been found in the area. I have never attended or covered another commemoration. It was simply too emotional to witness and difficult to write about. It is not the best way to keep one’s professional head on the swivel.

Three decades is a long time. To some, however, 1994 is like yesterday. For others, there has been forgiveness for the genocide.

Thousands of perpetrators were tried and punished. Genocide denial, fuelled by racist geopolitics, the need to lessen the guilt of the collaborators or those who did nothing to help stop it, is alive and well.

To many Rwandans, there is today to live for, and they don’t dwell for long on the horrors of the past. Millions of them have been born since, and they have to learn to feel the pain.

But, as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, and the Holocaust teach us, you can’t outrun the shadow of the genocide. Even on the 100th anniversary of genocide in 2094, an unforgiving poet in the mould of Jonathan Swift might write that the Rwandan lands on which the people live then were fertilised by the decomposing bodies that were felled in 1994.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". Twitter@cobbo3