Citation
KIGALI, April 8 (Reuter) - Nuns, priests, aid workers and U.N.
peacekeepers fell victim to massacres in Kigali as tribal bloodletting
and renewed civil war gripped the Rwandan capital.
Some of the killings were blamed by witnesses and Western officials on
Friday on members of the Rwandan army and presidential guard.
Soldiers were apparently retaliating for the killing of President
Juvenal Habyarimana, a member of the majority Hutu tribe, in a rocket
attack on his plane on Wednesday night.
Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, of the majority Hutu tribe, was
killed by government soldiers on Thursday.
Fighting continued on Friday for a second day around the parliament
building which had been the base for an estimated 600 rebels of the
predominantly Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) who entered Kigali in
December under a U.N.-backed peace plan to end four years of civil war.
France said on Friday that several Rwandan government ministers and
leading figures, as well as Belgian, Ghanaian and Bangladeshi U.N.
peacekeepers, had been killed in the central African country.
We are dismayed by the assassinations, that of the prime minister,
those of ministers and of several leading figures,
Foreign Ministry
spokesman Richard Duque told reporters. He did not name the ministers
or identify the killers.
Belgium said earlier that 10 of its U.N. peacekeepers assigned to
protect the prime minister had been killed by soldiers.
A U.N. spokesman in Kigali said on Thursday that members of the
700-strong presidential guard abducted Information Minister Faustin
Rucogoza, Labour and Social Affairs Minister Landuard Ndasingwa and
Agriculture Minister Frederic Nzamurambaho. The ministers' families and
three U.N. military observers guarding them were also seized. Their
fate was unclear.
In Rome the Jesuit order said 11 nuns and eight priests -- all Tutsis
-- were killed at the order's Centre of Spirituality in Kigali on
Thursday. It did not say who was responsible.
Three European Jesuits who were at the centre when the massacre took
place were spared,
a statement said.
Several dozen Rwandans working for international aid organisations in
Kigali had been massacred, the director of the Belgian branch of the
charity Medecins sans Frontieres said.
MSF director Georges Dallemagne said in Brussels that armed men,
believed to be from the presidential guard, had shot the aid workers
dead in front of expatriate staff.
They went to the houses of MSF Belgium and MSF Holland, UNICEF and
Oxfam, called out the local staff and shot them,
he said. Expatriate
staff were unharmed.
With the country in a power vacuum, Friday began in Kigali with the
scream of mortar bombs and crackle of rifle fire.
One resident spoke of an orgy of killings out there
.
Fires raged in the city as rebels and soldiers battled around
parliament and Tutsis and Hutus fell to slaughtering each other,
opening a new chapter in their history of violence that goes back
decades.
They fight, then rest, then resume. It's calm one moment, then
suddenly there are explosions,
the resident said.
Pogroms and (ethnic) purification are taking place throughout the
city,
Carlos Rodriguez, the UNHCR's representative in Kigali, said in
a report released in Geneva.
There is continuous fighting, there is pillaging and killing... Things
have got completely out of hand,
Belgian BRTN radio correspondent
Katrien Van der Schoot said from Kigali.
She said the violence was not aimed at Europeans. It's clearly aimed
at Rwandans, the Tutsis,
she said.
Military sources in Paris said France was considering using troops
stationed in the Central African Republic to evacuate its nationals
from Rwanda. There are about 600 French nationals in Rwanda, most in
the capital.
Belgium, former colonial power in Rwanda, has put a unit of crack
paratroops on alert for a possible evacuation of foreigners, government
sources said.
A spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also
said about 5,000 Rwandans and Burundis had fled their countries for
Zaire since the violence began.
U.N. officials feared violence between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi tribes
would spread outside the capital.
The U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) appealed to Rwandans to
end violence and urged countries that helped broker a peace accord
between the rebel RPF and the government last year to act to restore
order.
Rebel reinforcements were reported to be moving on the capital.
President Habyarimana, who took power in 1973, and Cyprien Ntaryamira,
president of neighbouring Burundi, died when a plane bringing them back
from regional peace talks in Tanzania was hit by a rocket on Wednesday
night.
Who killed them was not clear. The RPF denied involvement.
Residents said many killings were being carried out by members of the
army who were searching house-to-house for Tutsi RPF sympathisers and
their Hutu political allie s.
Youths wielding machetes, knives and clubs stalked Kigali, settling
tribal scores by hacking and clubbing people to death or simply
shooting them, witnesses said.
The U.N. Security Council in New York denounced the violence. It took
no fresh decision on whether to leave U.N. troops in place. It asked
Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to gather information as soon
as possible.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
