Citation
KIGALI, April 8 (Reuter) - Belgian troops stood ready on Friday to
rescue foreign nationals from tribal and political butchery in Rwanda
which has already claimed the lives of U.N. peacekeepers, aid workers,
nuns and priests.
Residents said sporadic heavy machine gunfire echoed around the
rambling hillside capital Kigali after two days of bloodletting sparked
by Wednesday's killing in a rocket attack of the president and his
counterpart from neighbouring Burundi.
"It is not clear who is in control, movement around the city is
impossible, everybody is terrified," said Samantha Bolton, spokesperson
for the medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres in Nairobi, after
telephone contacts with MSF staff in Rwanda.
U.N. staff and Red Cross workers, hoping to make an assessment of the
death toll, were forced to return to heavily-protected compounds by
groups of machete-wielding youths and angry soldiers manning
hastily-constructed roadblocks.
"There is a lot of confusion, no-one knows what is really going on. It
is a little quieter this afternoon but sporadic bursts of gunfire can
still be heard," said Jane Miginiac, a teacher at the U.S.-backed
English Teaching Centre.
The leader of the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), Paul Kagame, said
his movement was considering a move on Kigali to restore law and order.
"There is absolute anarchy. No government, no authority. We have to
move to restore order if this continues," he said.
In New York, the International Rescue Committee relief organisation
said 4,000 Rwandan refugees had poured across the border into
neighbouring Tanzania. It predicted the refugee exodus could swell to
150,000.
Rwanda and Burundi have a bloody history of tribal rivalry pitting the
majority Hutu against the Tutsi, the former feudal overlords. Tens of
thousands of members of both tribes have died in recurring bouts of
ethnic bloodletting.
Relief workers said Burundi, where up to 50,000 people died in violence
following the October assassination of the country's first
democratically-elected Hutu president, was calm.
The latest killing in Rwanda began after President Juvenal Habyarimana
and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed in a rocket attack
on their plane as they returned from a regional peace summit in
Tanzania. Both were Hutus.
Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu serving in a four-party
coalition with Habyarimana, was killed by soldiers on Thursday and
three ministers kidnapped.
The RPF said they expected heavy resistance if they advanced on Kigali
where 600 rebels were reported battling government troops. The rebels,
dug in around the parliament under phase one of a derailed peace
accord, left their compound on Thursday and fought running battles with
troops loyal to Habyarimana.
Belgium placed its paratroopers, veterans of African conflicts, on
standby to evacuate foreigners from its former colony after 10 Belgian
U.N. peacekeepers were killed trying to protect Uwilingiyimana.
France said it was considering using troops stationed in the Central
African Republic. Foreign ministry spokesman Richard Duque told
reporters Paris was "extremely concerned" by the situation in Rwanda.
Belgium has some 1,500 nationals in the country and France around 600.
Rwandan radio broadcast an appeal from Rwanda's armed forces for public
support, blaming the violence on "wrongdoers".
In the first official confirmation that Habyarimana loyalists were
heavily involved, the radio said angry soldiers "escaped their barracks
and attacked and harmed the population".
The armed forces cannot tolerate such shameful criminal acts, "the
broadcast said". The armed forces once again urge people to be vigilant
and help them stop the wrongdoers.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been slapped on Habyarimana's hometown of
Gisenyi in the north, near the RPF frontline.
Most killings have been blamed on elite units of the Rwandan army and
presidential guard, dominated by Hutu and strongly loyal to
Habyarimana, who refused to share power with the Tutsi.
U.N. sources said anyone seen as anti-Habyarimana, not only pro-RPF
Tutsis, risked being killed by angry soldiers.
In Rome the Jesuit order said 11 nuns and eight priests -- all Tutsis
-- were killed at the order's Centre of Spirituality in Kigali on
Thursday. It did not say who was responsible.
"Three European Jesuits who were at the centre when the massacre took
place were spared," a statement said.
Several dozen Rwandans working for international aid organisations in
Kigali had been massacred, the director of the Belgian branch of the
charity Medecins sans Frontieres said.
MSF director Georges Dallemagne said in Brussels that armed men,
believed to be from the presidential guard, had shot the aid workers
dead in front of expatriate staff.
"They went to the houses of MSF Belgium and MSF Holland, UNICEF and
Oxfam, called out the local staff and shot them," he said. E xpatriate
staff were unharmed.
With the country in a power vacuum, Friday began in Kigali with the
scream of mortar bombs and crackle of rifle fire.
One resident spoke of "an orgy of killings out there".
Fires raged as rebels and soldiers fought around parliament and Tutsis
and Hutus fell to slaughtering each other, opening a new chapter in
their history of violence that goes back decades.
"They fight, then rest, then resume. It's calm one moment, then
suddenly there are explosions," the resident said.
"Pogroms and (ethnic) purification are taking place throughout the
city," Carlos Rodriguez, the UNHCR's representative in Kigali, said in
a report released in Geneva.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
