Citation
Blue flowers of morning glory hanging from the eaves of mud huts
trumpet the fertility of soil that produces giant vegetables, jasmine
and frangipani. In Mayangi, however, the air is perfumed only by the
smell of death.
A few weeks ago this small village was the centre of a thriving farming
community. Now untended goats and cattle feed on ripening crops of
beans and sweet potatoes. Apart from soldiers fighting on the front
line near by, there is barely a living human for miles.
Every member of the Tutsi tribe has been killed, as well as Hutu
moderates. Everybody else has fled the scene of barely imaginable
carnage, which has been repeated in thousands of villages throughout
Rwanda.
The advancing rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has cleared away most
of the bodies in Mayangi. But, as Lieutenant Innocent Kabandana said:
We buried perhaps a thousand people, maybe more. But this is an
operational area so we did not get time to inter them all.
This week the United Nations Security Council voted to increase the
number of blue berets in Rwanda to 5,500. What use will they be? When
these people were being killed the UN was running away,
he said.
In Bonn yesterday, Klaus Kinkel, the Foreign Minister, said they would
comply with a UN request to fly humanitarian supplies into Rwanda. In
Paris, President Mitterrand and Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister,
also approved an increase in French humanitarian aid to the country.
Additional aid would be sent to Rwandan refugees in neighbouring
Burundi whose health and food supplies were threatened. The French
government will send an emergency medical team to Burundi's border with
Rwanda to treat refugees.
In Rwanda, Western intelligence agencies and the RPF had feared mass
attacks on political moderates and Tutsis even before President
Habyarimana was killed on April 6. His plane was shot down as it landed
at the airport close to the capital, Kigali. The missile that killed
him is believed to have been fired by his own presidential guard which
believed he was on the verge of signing a peace deal with the rebels.
Immediately after the murder of the President, the Hutu militia,
already armed with rifles, grenades, machetes and clubs, was unleashed
on the population in villages and hamlets across the country.
It is possible when walking around the deserted hamlet to piece
together the nightmare that struck after April 6 and which continued
while the UN Security Council debated for six weeks what to do about
Rwanda. A bloody patch by a hole in the ground marks the spot where
men, woman and children were dragged by their Hutu neighbours, slashed
or clubbed, and then flung in.
The interahamwe meaning those who kill together
clearly picked on
individual houses. Metal doors bear the marks of battering rams. Some
of the barriers remain intact because the murderers came in through the
mud walls. Outside one hut the energy of the killing spree is
symbolised by a huge nail-studded wooden club, and a 30-inch-long arrow
caked in blood.
A scuffling sound came from a house on the edge of the village. Its
door was closed; there were no signs of attack. In the courtyard behind
the house a goat was tethered. The cause of the scuffling became clear
when we tore back a curtain from the outside. Next to a dead sow,
bloated to bursting point, lay a woman. Her legs were splayed, her
skirt pulled above her waist. Her throat had been slit, and the piglets
jostled around her left shoulder.
By Sam Kiley in Mayangi, Southern Rwanda.
