Citation
AN eight-year-old girl lay catatonic on the floor of a tent nursing a
wound in her back. She had been gang-raped by militiamen in Rwanda's
capital, Kigali, and had not uttered a word since she was taken to the
hospital three weeks ago. But at least she was not dead. According to
the Rwandan government, which may have connived in the genocide of the
Tutsi, 60,000 other people have been buried in mass graves.
That is almost three in five of the estimated 350,000 people who used
to live in a city which is at war with the rebel Rwandan Patriotic
Front, and with itself.
Aid workers agree that a nationwide death toll of 500,000 from the
massacres of the government's political opponents and members of the
Tutsi tribe is probably an underestimate it could be as many as a
million.
The murder rate of government troops and the militias some 12,000 a day
beggars the imagination. Until one comes face to face with the
murderers. Then, heavily armed gendarmes shake like men on the way to
the gallows.
Yesterday the tension was obvious as a lieutenant with an AK47 guided
journalists into Kigali. A score of wide-eyed youths, armed with
blood-stained clubs, hammers, machetes, grenades and rifles, took a
close look at his pass. Belge? Belge?,
their leader screamed Belgians
are unpopular in Rwanda. Non, Anglais,
he replied. The routine was
repeated with increasing hysteria during the drive to the capital,
which is being pounded by rebel artillery as the Patriotic Front seeks
to seize the international airport and contain the government's forces,
while exercising a flanking manoeuvre to cut off its access to the
south.
Heavy shelling rocked the city and the clatter of machineguns formed an
background which residents ignored. Their main fear remains the
militia, which were now based in Gitarama, 30 miles south of the
capital and beyond the control of the government, according to the
Defence Minister Augustin Biziman. With nobody left to kill, the
militias are bored, making life for the 15 workers of the International
Committee of the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres a 24-hour
trauma.
Few bodies from the slaughter are left on Kigali's streets, but the air
stinks of death. Red Cross workers who have lived through the holocaust
are barely able to talk.
Patrick Gasser, deputy head of the beleaguered Red Cross delegation,
said: We have had no piped water for four days, and there is no way
that these people can get food. Sooner or later they will have to
emerge from the shadows, and then the killing will start again. They
might get 250 yards. But I doubt it.
