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NAIROBI, April 25 (Reuter) - Heavy shelling echoed round Rwanda's
blood-soaked hills on Monday with rebel forces battling government
units blamed for one of the worst mass killings of innocent civilians
this century.
I don't know from which direction it is coming, but it is heavy and
intermittent,
Abdul Kabia, executive director of the United Nations
Assistance Mission in Rwanda, told Reuters.
Kabia said Monday's fighting followed a heavy exchange of fire on
Sunday night
.
Every day brings news of more massacres.
Aid agencies and the U.N. say as many as 100,000 people may have been
slaughtered and two million displaced in this month's Rwandan
bloodbath.
On Sunday, the medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres said troops and
gunmen killed up to 150 patients from a hospital in southern Rwanda,
simply because they were Tutsi.
Earlier, journalists in rebel-controlled territory just south of Kigali
came across a pile of 100 rotting corpses in Nyanza district and more
bodies spilling out of mud huts.
The United Nations says that adding to the horrors, a health disaster
is imminent.
In the capital Kigali there is literally nothing by way of medication,
no water, no sanitation facilities, no materials to build latrines,
said Peter Hansen, U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs.
Hansen, who has just returned from the Rwandan capital, appealed for an
emergency $11.68 million as a preliminary step.
He told reporters in Nairobi: In Kigali, there are decomposing bodies
being eaten by dogs, rats, birds...
Rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), who control most of the
north of the country and the northern approaches to the hilly central
African capital, tightened their grip on Kigali before a promised
ceasefire.
U.N. sources said the rebels had encircled the city's Hutu stronghold
of Ruhengeri and now had total control of the main northern towns.
The RPF this weekend announced a unilateral ceasefire from midnight
(2200 GMT) Monday.
Theogene Rudasingwa, RPF secretary-general said 8,000 soldiers had been
scattered in the north, where government forces had been concentrated,
over the last two weeks.
They left in disarray after trying to join their units in Kigali and
left behind huge quantities of weapons and ammunition,
he said.
A government team later announced a separate ceasefire for midday (1000
GMT) Monday, but such is the lawlessness and chaos that aid workers and
U.N. sources expect neither to hold.
The rebels, mostly from the minority Tutsi tribe, say the
Hutu-dominated army has slaughtered thousands of people since the Hutu
presidents of Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi died in an aircraft hit
by rocket fire on April 6.
Independent sources say most of the killings have been carried out by
units of the presidential guard, fiercely loyal to slain president
Juvenal Habyarimana, and by renegade army units and extremist Hutu
militias.
The entire anti-Habyarimana Hutu opposition has been killed in
addition to thousands of fleeing Tutsi refugees,
said one RPF source.
Fears the violence would spread to neighbouring Burundi, where
simmering Hutu-Tutsi rivalry has so far been held in check, grew on
Monday after a coup attempt was foiled.
Army chief of staff Colonel Jean Bikomagu said several soldiers refused
to join in out of fear it would trigger a tribal bloodbath, like the
one in Rwanda.
A group of soldiers from a barracks in Bujumbura planned a putsch but
they were stopped by loyalists when they left their post to execute
their plans overnight,
Bikomagu said.
Several soldiers have been arrested and the military command is
interrogating them to find out why they wanted a military takeover.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
