Citation
REBEL forces yesterday intensified their stranglehold on the capital,
Kigali, cutting a road that links 3,000 troops in the last
government-held barracks to their commanding officers in the city
centre.
The road is the second route out of the city to be sealed in two
days. On Sunday, the Rwandan Patriotic Front attacked a United Nations
convoy on the road to Gitarama, the seat of the self-appointed interim
government.
Yesterday, in response to UN complaints, the rebels said the site was
a war zone. The day before it had been open to traffic.
The president of the government, based in Gitarama, 30 miles south of
the capital, yesterday promised to try the perpetrators of massacres
in which more than 200,000 have died. But he refused to condemn the
killings, which are continuing only two miles from the town.
Theodore Sindikubwabo, a paediatrician who became president on April 8
after the suspected assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana,
said both sides in the five-week conflict have been guilty of
killings, although no independent witnesses have verified this.
Speaking from his office, a former managerial training centre, the
president said: We have demanded that the population remains
calm. After the death of President Habyarimana there was a great shock
among the population.
Scores of heavily-armed paratroopers, gendarmes and presidential
guardsmen patrolled the grounds, harassing cameramen who tried to film
what is, in effect, a military base with a civilian puppet government.
A few miles away, at the Virgin Immaculata Catholic mission in
Kabgayi, up to 5,000 members of Rwanda's Tutsi minority shelter. They
are terrified of nightfall - in the past week 30 people have been
forced from the church after dark and never seen again.
They have come every night,
said a teenager. They look for young
people, or civilised, educated people, and take them outside. The
teachers and administrators are the people they want. And the
students. They want the people who are intelligent, and demand their
identity cards.
National identity cards clearly state a person's
tribe.
The refugees fell silent as a gendarme strode over to a crowd gathered
around a boy, aged 10, who had a five-inch gash across the top of his
head.
It happened yesterday morning,
a man whispered, pointing to the
boy. He went to find water, because there's hardly any here. He saw
some military and they attacked him. We thought he was dead, but
instead he came back badly injured. It happened just outside the
church.
All the people here are Tutsis expelled from their homes in Gitarama.
Two miles away, the prime minister, Jean Kambanda, was asked how many
Tutsis he has in his 19-member cabinet. I don't know. I have never
asked,
he replied.
But there are no Tutsis in government, because the entire Tutsi
political establishment was slaughtered within days of the violence
erupting.
He appeared unaware that Tutsis were still being murdered, every night
near the church. It is few minutes drive away in his Mercedes.
