Citation
TUTSI refugees crowding the camps around the seat of the Rwandan
government have a grim choice: stay inside and face starvation or try
to leave and face murder.
Inside the camp a young man explained. The army and the militia kill
anyone who leaves the camp. We men are starving and sometimes sneak out
to look for food. But if you leave, you will never come back. Here we
die from starvation and disease.
About a dozen people were dying in the camp each day. In Kabgayi four
corpses lay unburied in the mud. Yet Rwanda's putative minister of
primary and secondary education, speaking only minutes after the murder
of a man a few hundred yards away, insisted: The Rwandan people are
peaceful. The militia is disciplined and have been armed to weed out
Tutsi extremist infiltrators sent by the (rebel) Rwanda Patriotic Front
(RPF). The Tutsi want to exterminate the Hutu.
It was Augustin Bizimana, the Defence Minister, who became the first
government member to admit that the Hutu population had tried to
exterminate the Tutsi. When the President (Juvenal Habyarimana) was
killed in April the people were very angry. They feared that they would
be wiped out by the Tutsi and RPF infiltrators,
he said. But it is
clear that many, many innocent people were also killed Tutsi who
supported us and Tutsi who had never heard of the RPF. I regret that
deeply. I was almost killed by a mob when I tried to deliver a message
to the Prime Minister.
The minister, who also admitted that he did not
know if the government would be able to hold Kigali, the capital,
against the rebel attacks, insisted that the armed forces were
regaining control of the militias.
It is very difficult to end these hatreds,
he said. The UN should
start by separating the belligerents and starting talks to end the war.
But the ultimate solution must be between the people. There must be an
end to the vicious circle.
In Gitarama, the Hutu headmistress of a local high school who had
complained about the rape of her pupils was hacked to death, as was
another woman who had the misfortune to look like the teacher. Kabgayi,
near Gitarama, is known as the Vatican of Rwanda. One man trying to
bring some succour to those cut off from regular food supplies is
Father Vieko Curic, a Franciscan priest, who manages to talk food
supplies past sceptical fighters manning roadblocks.
At one roadblock, two sweaty-faced figures emerged from the banana
plantation, one carrying a club with a head the size of a football, the
other a 4ft machete. Both had blood spatters on their arms and chests.
Salut,
the priest said as if greeting old friends. Under his breath,
he uttered Salop
, meaning swine.
Grumbling along behind him were three lorryloads of food donated by the
World Food Programme to their only, and unpaid, representative in
Rwanda for distribution among the few thousand Tutsi who have survived
the tribal pogrom, which has killed several hundred thousand of their
clansmen in a few weeks. With a mixture of bonhomie, banter, and
extravagant cajoling, he was going to get the food through 30
roadblocks on the 100-mile road between the border with Burundi and
Kabgayi.
