Fiche du document numéro 13373

13373

Sunday April 24, 1994

19940424

Smerdon, Peter

1994-04-24ReutersRottingCorpsesAndFightings.pdf

88151

1994-04-24ReutersRottingcorpsesandfightingshowRwandanagony..html

Rotting corpses and fighting show Rwandan agony

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Reuters

Boudiguet

Dépêche d'agence

EN

NAIROBI, April 24 (Reuter) - A hundred rotting corpses and a tiny girl
fainting with fear provided grim evidence of just one of Rwanda's
terrible massacres on Sunday.

Just south of the shell-blasted capital, Kigali, where U.N. officials
said rebels and government troops battled overnight and most of Sunday,
journalists came across a six-year-old girl hiding among the bodies of
other children and their parents.

She pretended to be dead when rebels approached and collapsed from fear
when one picked her up and took her to a bush medical post. The gaping
machete wound in her neck needed first aid.

The girl, who said she had seen all her family slaughtered, was hiding
under a blanket outside of one of the mud huts near the pile of about
100 bodies. Dozens more corpses spilled from hut doorways.

A small baby boy, only months old and still wearing a white sleeping
suit, lay dead, spreadeagled on his back with his arms flung out, a few
metres (yards) from the main mass of corpses covered with flies.

Survivors of the massacre said they were among up to 2,000 Tutsi
civilians who were stopped on April 17 by government troops as they
were trying to reach Amahoro stadium in Kigali. Allied militiamen
forced them to climb Nyanza hill.

My wife had a child on her back and she was cut because she could not
walk quickly, a factory worker, wounded in an arm and leg, told
Reuters Television from inside territory controlled by the Rwanda
Patriotic Front (RPF).

We were beaten. Everyone was trying to hide in the group so they would
not be beaten or cut with machetes. When we reached Nyanza they told us
to sit and we sat. We were almost more than 2,000.

We sat there. They (militiamen) said to get the grenades ready. No one
was moving. We were surrounded by the militias. And then they threw the
grenades...

Like many of the other massacres in the pitiless war mainly between the
majority Hutu and minority Tutsi, no absolute figures will ever be
known. Aid workers have spoken of wounded crawling away to escape, then
dying alone.

But their agencies estimate 100,000 people have been slaughtered since
April 6 -- more than 5,500 dead every day.

Two million people have been made homeless since that day when the
country erupted over the death of Rwandan President Juvenal
Habyarimana. He and his Burundian counterpart perished when their plane
was hit by a rocket.

In the capital on Sunday, U.N. troops evacuated 300 people, mostly
civilian refugees but including about 15 U.N. staff and some
journalists, from the nearby Meridien Hotel and took them to the King
Faisal hospital.

The hotel was not hit by shells but it was becoming much too dangerous
to keep anyone there, said Abdul Kabia, executive director of the U.N.
Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR).

An estimated 9,000 refugees are already sheltering under U.N.
protection at the King Faisal hospital in addition to 5,000 at the
national Amahoro stadium near U.N. headquarters.

A U.N. convoy evacuated 32 foreigners from the International Committee
of the Red Cross compound. They were driven to Kigali airport for a
flight to Nairobi.

They comprised nine French, 17 Swiss, one Briton, one Pakistani, one
Dutch, one Irish, one Canadian and a Norwegian.

Among those evacuated from the Meridien Hotel were members of a U.N.
team sent to Kigali to examine the possibility of starting distributing
food to civilians trapped in the capital.

Rebels who went to abortive peace talks in Arusha, Tanzania, on
Saturday announced a unilateral but conditional ceasefire from midnight
(2200 GMT) on Monday. One condition is an end to all killings within 96
hours.

Diplomats said they doubted the government would be able to respond.
The government is in complete disarray. It has a huge problem of
coordination and communication between its ministers in Gityrama and
its forces in the field, one diplomat said.

The government fled to Gityrama, about 40 km (25 miles) southwest of
Kigali, after rebel forces attacked the capital.

UNAMIR is cutting its forces in Rwanda to the bare bone on orders of
the U.N. Security Council, which decided on Thursday only 270 members
of the originally 2,500-strong force should remain.

Aid agencies say tens of thousands of civilians will be left without
protection after the U.N. pullout.

(c) Reuters Limited 1994