The slaughter has unleashed a tide of refugees and raised fears that the fighting will spread
by Eric Ransdell
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"Is anyone here still alive?" the young men shouted as they entered the Ecole Officielle Technique in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Like many survivors of the grenade and machine-gun attack on the school where some 3,000 people had sought refuge, Simon- Pierre Hitiyise raised his hand. "We've come to help you," said the men, dressed in long, blood-spattered coats and wearing bandannas that covered their faces. Hitiyise and the other male survivors were then separated from the women and told to lie face down on the ground. In the moment before the 23-year-old mechanic's skull was hacked open, his back and hands slashed and his right ear cut off, one of the attackers told Hitiyise: "You have to die because you are a Tutsi."
For the next two days, Hitiyise lay motionless among a pile of corpses that included his father, mother and three siblings. When soldiers of the Tutsi dominated rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) finally arrived, they found only 30 people still alive. Hitiyise was taken away to begin a 12-day, 45-mile journey to a makeshift hospital in rebel-held Byumba, north of Kigali.
The killing that has transformed the tiny nation of Rwanda into Central Africa's slaughterhouse is the worst of the post-cold-war era. In the last six weeks as many as 250,000 people have died in a campaign of genocide and retribution that rivals the Khmer Rouge's bloody purge of Cambodia in the mid 1970s. Last week the United States delayed a United Nations Security Council vote to authorize 5,500 peacekeepers for Rwanda. Even if a resolution is adopted, it would leave undecided which countries would provide the soldiers, where money would be found to pay for their operations, when they would go and where they would be deployed.
By contrast, the international community has acted swiftly to avert one of the worst refugee crises since World War II. Along neighboring Tanzania's northwestern border, some 200,000 Rwandans who filed into the country during a 24-hour period late last month are being fed, sheltered and inoculated by relief agencies ranging from the Red Cross Federation to Medecins sans Frontieres. Aid officials on the border say that although the situation has stabilized, problems of sanitation and disease will only escalate unless something is done to stop the slaughter.
That job now falls to the U.N., whose record in Rwanda so far offers little cause for hope. A 2,500-strong peacekeeping force known as UNAMIR (U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda) was deployed last November to supervise the implementation of the Arusha Accord, an agreement reached in August to end Rwanda's three-year civil war between the Hutu-dominated government and Tutsi backed RPF rebels. The accord called for the opposing military to be disarmed and demobilized, or integrated into a smaller national force, and for a multiparty transitional government to be established.
Standing by. Yet even before the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down outside Kigali on April 6, the peace plan had gone awry. The transitional government that was to unite the country's political factions was still not formed, and the demobilization process had yet to begin. Without a mandate to act against violations, UNAMIR did nothing to stop the ongoing training of the 2,000-strong presidential guard and the interahamawe militias that have been implicated in the worst atrocities.
Even if an international force eventually is sent, it may not be able to stop a country that seems intent on killing itself. RPF officials have so far rejected calls for a U.N. peacekeeping force. The rebels now control all but one major road into the capital, where rebel and government troops are engaged in daily artillery duels, and therefore are betting they will win the conflict outright. And like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the current Rwandan government, which is controlled by Hutu extremists, has already demonstrated that it controls its followers only when it suits its ends. In early May, despite government assurances of safe conduct, a UNAMIR-escorted convoy taking 300 civilians to the airport in Kigali for evacuation was turned back by Rwandan military and militias, who badly wounded two passengers.
"There is no way you can keep peace in a place like that," says a brigadier general of the Tanzanian Army, which has been mentioned as a likely component of any peacekeeping operation. According to the general, who asked not to be identified, the only way to solve the Rwandan crisis is through a "total military solution" similar to Vietnam's 1979 invasion of Cambodia or Tanzania's 1979 incursion into Uganda, which toppled the murderous regime of Idi Amin. "What you need is a force big enough to go in and clean up the place, get everybody settled, organize elections and build up a new national army," the officer insists.
"Zero Network." Initially portrayed as an ethnic war between the Hutu people who account for 85 percent of the population -- and the minority Tutsi, there is mounting evidence that the bloodshed was the result of a systematic plan to destroy Rwanda's nascent democracy. Last September the Rwandan newspaper Umurava reported the existence of a so-called Zero Network, run by Hutu extremists close to Habyarimana and organized by members of the military and police forces.
Many analysts believe it was members of this Zero Network, most of whom were northern Hutus, who killed Habyarimana to prevent implementation of the Arusha Accord. Violent demonstrations, assassinations and death threats in the first few months of this year were all attributed to the interahamawe. Yet it was the systematic precision of the killings of most major Hutu opposition figures and civilian Tutsi leaders within the first 24 hours after the presidents' fatal plane crash that convinced many that rumors of hit lists and death squads circulating in Kigali were true.
Hutu and Tutsi opposition figures who fled the fighting and now reside at Byumba with the RPF rebels describe a government growing dangerously paranoid as multiparty democracy allowed more opponents to speak out against the ruling clique. "All they wanted was power," says Joseph Ngengimana, the sole surviving leader of the Liberal Party. "They feared that if another government came in where they were not the key rulers, they would be asked by the law to account for the atrocities they had committed."
At stake was not only the stranglehold by northern Hutus on political power but also the wealth and privilege Habyarimana's clique had accrued during 21 years of military rule. Perks for the elite ranged from free cars and houses to customs and wildlife officials turning a blind eye to gorilla poaching in the country's eastern mountain reserves. In fact, Protias Zigiranyirazo, the late president's brother-in-law and reportedly one of the main financial backers of the Zero Network, has been widely linked to the 1985 murder of American primate researcher Dian Fossey, who threatened to expose his involvement in the illicit international gorilla trade.
The results of the blood lust are everywhere. Throughout Rwanda, fetid piles of hacked and decapitated corpses, many with their hands tied behind their backs, litter the countryside. Inside RPF-controlled territory, three little girls recently arrived at an orphanage after being buried up to their necks and left for dead.
In the hilltop town of Byumba, where the electricity is cut off after RPF rebels routed a government force of 5,000 in the town, nurses work by lamp- and candlelight as they attend to hundreds of wounded. In the darkened corners of the classrooms, only the white bandages are visible, many in the half-moon shape of head wounds. In one ward, a 12-year-old orphan screams when she is told that the only way of stopping the gangrene is to amputate both of her legs.
