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By Sam Kiley in Nyarubuye, Eastern Rwanda.
RWANDA'S rebels and government troops agreed to the principle of a
ceasefire during talks yesterday, but the rebels wanted to discuss
issues relating to mass killings at another meeting this week,
participants at the talks said.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front delegation wanted a reply on their demand
for the closure of the extremist Hutu radio RTLM, which has incited the
mass killings and which again yesterday urged people to take up arms
against the minority Tutsi tribe.
Delegates from both sides met in Kigali for the first time since
fighting started two months ago and discussed the ceasefire proposal
tabled by the United Nations. They agreed to allow the continued
evacuation of civilians trapped in the capital. So far the UN has been
able to evacuate about 1,500 Tutsis trapped by the Hutu-dominated
government's murderous militia behind government lines, and sent a few
Hutu who wanted to cross from rebel areas to the government-held
territory.
Civilians continued to flood out of Kigali towards Gitarama, where the
government has its temporary base. Members of what the rebels call the
``clique of murderers'' have also been spotted in Butare, to the south,
and Kibuye, on the border with Zaire in the west.
Paul Kagame, the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front's military wing,
said before the talks opened that he had little hope for their success.
But clearly the government's forces, in agreeing to meet the rebels,
who refuse to talk to the government's civilian leadership, were
interested in a ceasefire.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the
government-orchestrated genocide of Tutsis and opposition supporters,
many of them Hutus. Among the victims were 5,000 people who sought
sanctuary in the seminary at Nyarubuye, eastern Rwanda. Here corpses
from the massacre on April 12 at the hands of the army and the
interahamwe (``those who kill together'') the youth wing of the ruling
Revolutionary Movement for National Development are stacked three or
four high in five classrooms and a barn. Others, mainly children, lie
dead where they were decapitated running from the carnage. Their skulls
lie several feet away from their bodies. A pile of bones lies inside
the church next to the baptismal register.
Hardened members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which has been
fighting to overthrow the country's one-party state since 1990,
blanched and rushed from the scene. Every step had to be taken over the
remains of a dead civilian.
Sister Ernest Nyiramugani, 53, was one of two survivors of the
massacre. She hid under a pile of clothes in the church vestry. The
other was a priest who remains too ill with shock to speak or walk.
Sister Ernest said: ``Because of the massacres that had started in the
rest of the country people, Hutu and Tutsi, rushed to the church for
safety. When the militia arrived the priests tried to protect the
people from them. The militias came from out of town but were organised
by the mayor (Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, who has since fled to Tanzania).
``The priests saw that they could not stop the militias and so told the
people to defend themselves. This they did and fought off the militias.
So then the militia went and got the army. After they came with their
machineguns and grenades, only myself and the other priest were left
alive.''
