Early last May, Mark Fritz loaded a satellite dish and a generator into a rented truck, drove into rebel-held Rwanda and began trying to make sense of an incomprehensible ethnic slaughter.
The Associated Press correspondent and AP photographer Jean-Marc Bouju were the first to enter Karubamba, a village where up to 2,000 people were massacred shortly after a plane crash that killed Rwanda's leaders and sparked the civil war."Nobody lives here anymore," Fritz's report began. "With silent shrieks of agony locked on decaying faces, hundreds of bodies line the streets and fill the tidy brick buildings of this village."
"Karubamba is just one breathtakingly awful example of the mayhem that has made beautiful little Rwanda the world's most ghastly killing ground."
At that point, up to 200,000 Rwandans had been slain - clubbed, shot and hacked to death often by neighbors and lifelong friends. Eventually, the conflict between Rwanda's Hutus and minority Tutsis claimed 500,000 lives.
Fritz's efforts brought the carnage in Rwanda to America's front pages and earned a Pulitzer Prize on Tuesday for international reporting. Bouju and three other AP photographers who covered Rwanda - Jacqueline Arzt, Javier Bauluz and Karsten Thielker - won the Pulitzer for feature photography.
The photographers' work included pictures of a teacher cut down beneath a blackboard in his classroom, a crying child trying to awaken his mother from a diseased sleep in a refugee camp, and a tiny, naked boy so tired he puts his head on a table because he can't stand in line for a vaccination.
"What I remember most about Rwanda is the smell of death," Bouju said. "For three months the smell of death was everywhere."
Fritz, who said credit should go to all the people AP sent to cover the story, called his prize "bittersweet."
"The only reason we won this award is because Rwanda happened. I would trade any amount of Pulitzers for Rwanda not to have happened," he said.
AP writers and photographers have won 39 Pulitzers, journalism's highest award. The news service has won Pulitzers for photo-graphs in four of the past five years. Fritz's award was AP's 19th for writing and first by an AP reporter since 1982, when Saul Pett won for a story about the growth of the federal bureaucracy.