Citation
KIGALI, April 14 (Reuter) - Mortar bombs slammed into Kigali airport on
Thursday as Belgian forces left before a rebel ultimatum, gunmen
massacred wounded civilians and a tide of tribal slaughter raged into a
second week.
A total of 10 mortar rounds hit taxiways and the perimeter of the
international airport while the last Belgian troops were pulling out.
U.N. officers said they believed rebels unleashed the bombardment.
The mortars exploded in balls of black smoke and shrapnel only a few
hundred metres (yards) from a plane where Belgian troops were loading
light tanks at the airport, held jointly by U.N. and Rwandan troops.
Three of the mortars screamed in while what Belgian officers said was
the last planeload of 40 foreign passport-holders and journalists to
leave the blood-drenched capital was boarding.
The U.N.-chartered plane left the chaotic capital safely with more than
10 journalists aboard shortly before dusk.
Many of the Rwandans wept during the flight to Nairobi, mourning killed
relatives and reliving the horror of their escape from the city. Others
simply stared in silence, too shocked to speak.
Twenty-three members of my family in Kigali were killed,
said a woman
holding her three children. It is a catastrophe.
French Defence Minister Francois Leotard said the mortar fire delayed
the pullout of the last 40 of 500 French soldiers sent to Rwanda to
help evacuate foreigners, but the men would be gone as soon as
possible.
The foreign journalists were escorted in a convoy across the city to
the airport by a U.N. convoy including an armoured car from the Hotel
Des Mille Collines following a news conference there by U.N forces
commander Brigadier-General Rome Dallaire.
Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said
they suspended operations to evacuate casualties after armed civilians
at a roadblock in the capital stopped an ICRC vehicle and dragged out
six wounded civilians inside.
They then shot them dead in front of ICRC staff.
In Geneva, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies said at least 30 Rwandan Red Cross workers were killed in the
fighting in Rwanda and the toll could rise.
The workers were all killed as they helped families, friends and
strangers while the wave of violence swept through the capital,
the
IFRC Red Cross said in a statement.
Dallaire, commander of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR),
said he did not know who fired the mortars but he would tell both sides
it was not in their interests to do so.
Dallaire said he was shuttling between both sides -- the rebel Rwanda
Patriotic Front (RPF) and the government -- and was keeping the U.N.
open as a conduit for negotiations.
It will be a lot easier when both sides come to a state when they can
come and meet, even if it's not about peace...hopefully soon we will
get together,
he said.
There are massacres of civilians in the city and in the country. Most
of them are being carried out by militiamen helped by government
forces,
said an aid official, who declined to be identified.
He said massacres still under way on Thursday were centred in the slum
area of Nyamirambo in Kigali and the Bugasere area to the southwest and
the western port of Kibuye on Lake Kivu.
Heavy fighting between the army and RPF rebels broke out at dawn and
raged on for much of the day despite heavy showers.
Belgium, the only Western country with forces still in the remote
central African state, said it had decided to withdraw its contingent
of U.N. peacekeepers and paratroops.
An RPF ultimatum said foreign troops sent to evacuate their own
citizens must be out by midnight local time (2200 GMT).
Aid agencies said tens of thousands of refugees were streaming into
neighbouring Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda and Zaire. Tens of thousands of
people are believed to have perished in a frenzy of slaughter since
Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed by a rocket attack on
his plane.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
