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The Pope yesterday added his voice to the slowly growing chorus of
outrage over the genocide in Rwanda which this week claimed the lives
of a total of 22 clergymen, including the Roman Catholic Archbishop of
Kigali, in two separate massacres.
The rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front admitted on its own radio station
yesterday that four soldiers, guarding 13 bishops and other clergymen
suspected of complicity in the murder of hundreds of people in the
Kabgayi seminary, had killed the churchmen. One of the soldiers had
been shot dead by other rebels, and three others, the front said, were
being hunted down
. The United Nations said yesterday that earlier
this week nine clergymen and at least 63 other people were killed in
Kigali by government militias while soldiers looked on.
The UN Security Council has given approval for about 5,000 UN troops to
start moving into Rwanda to guard aid convoys and protect civilians in
special humanitarian zones
. The council voted to approve the
deployment on Wednesday night, after the United States lifted earlier
objections to sending UN peacekeepers into a battlefield without a
ceasefire being agreed.
Washington originally wanted the reinforcements to operate only in
border areas and to move towards Kigali when the fighting subsided. But
the new resolution allows the extra peacekeepers to go to Kigali, if
possible, and fan out through the country to places where civilians are
most at risk.
To prevent UN troops getting embroiled in the civil war, as in Somalia,
the United States insisted that the security council should bar the
peacekeepers from using force to stop the fighting between the Hutu-led
rump government and the predominantly Tutsi rebel movement.
Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal and Zimbabwe have each offered an infantry
battalion of 800 men, and Nigeria, Congo and Mali have pledged enough
troops to make up a fifth battalion. United Nations officials say the
troops might not arrive in Rwanda for weeks because of a lack of
equipment.
The Pope said in a statement that the Central African country was being
torn apart by the conflict in which half a million people had been
killed since April. He said: (I) beseech God ... to allow
reconciliation in this martyred nation and to receive its victims with
kindness.
I adjure all Rwandans, as well as the leaders of nations which can
come to their aid, to do everything without delay to open the way to
agreement and reconstruction in this country which has been so gravely
ruined. I unite with you in deploring cruel deaths,
he said.
The Pope's words will strike a hollow note with many leaders of his
church in Rwanda, which is 65% Catholic, because the Vatican has been
almost silent during the killings that began in April. In addition,
Western priests have reported that they believe some of their Rwandan
colleagues were helping to identify opposition supporters and members
of the Tutsi tribe before the genocide. A Catholic relief agency said
yesterday that it believed that at least one of the bishops killed by
the renegade rebels in Kabgayi had had a part in the killing of Tutsi
refugees who had sought sanctuary in the town's seminary.
The readiness of the Rwandan Patriotic Front to admit that its men lost
control of themselves after they suspected the bishops of complicity in
the killing of their families is a clear attempt to show itself to be
open after a series of unsubstantiated reports that the front had also
been involved in massacres.
These reports, from Hutu government officials who took part in the
early weeks of the genocide, have been repeated by the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, but there has been no evidence so far
to support the allegations.
The murder of Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva of Kigali, chairman of the
bishops' conference, Bishop Thaddee Nsengiyumva and Bishop Joseph
Ruzindana of Byumba, is a severe blow to the clean image of the Rwandan
rebels.
