The translator wouldn’t ask the question. We were sitting in the community meeting space of a “reconciliation village” near Rweru, along the southern border of Rwanda with Burundi. We’d been talking with five villagers, three Tutsi who had survived the genocide and two Hutu who had been perpetrators – and who had also been their neighbors before the 1994 killings.

I’d been in a few other reconciliation villages – all founded by Prison Fellowship Rwanda, a religious non-profit which began working in Rwanda’s prisons over a decade ago to convince genocidaires to ask for forgiveness once they were released, and to counsel them in the Bible’s teachings about it. PFR has built six villages for Hutus and Tutsis who are willing to live together again, and to work in co-ops for the benefit of the community. They hope to build a total of 15 to 20 in the next few years as more genocidaires come out of prison.

The five villagers appeared relaxed and comfortable with each other, the Tutsi women even throwing their arms around the Hutu men with an easy affection when they posed to take a picture. Forgiveness took a lot of time, and work, explained one of the women, who lost almost all 48 members of her family during the genocide. But in the end, she said, “You forgive to separate yourself from the hatred.”

After we’d talked for a while, I wanted to move the conversation in a different direction. I wanted to ask about the tens of thousands of Hutu civilians who’d been killed by the armed forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of mostly Tutsi refugees, which had stopped the genocide – and whose leader, Paul Kagame, has been president of the country since 2000, and its de facto leader since 1994.

I carefully posed the question to my translator, who works for Prison Fellowship Rwanda, which is closely aligned to the government: “Was real reconciliation possible in Rwanda if there was no punishment for the killings of Hutus, no acknowledgment of their deaths?”

He shook his head. No. He would not ask the question. “It’s political,” he said.

“It’s above their level.”