Citation
NEW YORK, April 11 (Reuter) - About 70 foreigners, including Americans
and Europeans, working at a U.S. church college in Rwanda escaped to
safety in Zaire Monday after surviving a campus carnage in which over
200 people were killed, the Seventh Day Adventist Church said Monday.
Escorted by French and Belgian paratroopers, about 22 Americans and
about 50 other foreigners arrived safely in Goma, Zaire, after
surviving a tribal bloodbath on the grounds of the church-run Central
African University, it said.
Sheltered at two campus homes between Friday and Sunday, the
foreigners, including some from Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Bulgaria and
Madagascar, were unharmed as opposing Rwandan tribespeople fought on
the university grounds outside Mudende, northwest of the capital
Kigali.
The information we have is there were more than 200 bodies on campus,
there were no Americans or foreigners among them,
said Gerry Karst, an
Adventist official at the church's worldwide headquarters in Silver
Spring, Maryland.
Rwanda, a central African nation, was rocked by violence since
President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed by a rocket attack on his
plane in Kigali Wednesday night.
His death launched the age-old strife between the Hutu majority and the
Tutsi minority into a new orgy of slaughter in which the prime minister
and several Cabinet ministers, all Tutsis, were murdered, as were nuns,
priests, aid workers and 10 Belgian soldiers serving with the United
Nations.
Red Cross officials believe that 20,000 people could have died in the
violence.
At the onset of the eruption of violence, Tutsi villagers sought refuge
on the campus, which has about 300 students and was founded in 1979,
Karst said.
A mob of Hutus swarmed onto the grounds later and the killings began
and probably took place within a 24-hour period, Karst told Reuters.
On Sunday, the killings stopped,
he said.
It was unclear when the French and Belgian paratroopers arrived. But by
Sunday, the foreigners had been evacuated from the campus to the town
of Gisenye, near the Zaire boder.
The Adventists have 300,000 church members in Rwanda, a country of
about eight million people, Karst said.
Africans account for about two million of the worldwide community of
more than seven million Adventists. The church has been active in
Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, since the early 20th century, said
Karst, assistant to the president of the general conference of the
Seventh Day Adventists.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
