For four centuries, hatred between the minority Tutsi tribe and the majority Hutus has been the curse of Rwanda and its tiny Central African twin, Burundi. Only last October, as many as 50,000 Tutsis were slain in Burundi after the Hutu president was assassinated in a failed military coup. That’s killing on the order of Bosnia, but it was little more than a news brief throughout the world. With a handful of whites threatened, the slaughter is getting noticed.
Western nations rushed to evacuate their citizens. The United States moved 330 marines from ships off Somalia to Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, to aid in the evacuation of some 250 U.S. citizens from Rwanda. At dawn Saturday, 280 French paratroopers landed at Kigali airport and drove to the center of the Rwandan capital. Belgium planned a mass airlift but was blocked initially when Rwandans opposed to its presence barricaded the airport runway with firetrucks. With phone lines cut, relief officials told foreigners by radio where to gather to be evacuated. Escorted convoys head ed south by road to the relative peace of Burundi.
The latest violence began when a small plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira and eight others crashed as it returned to Kigali from regional peace talks in neighboring Tanzania. Rwandan government officials who had been waiting on the tarmac said the plane was hit by a surface-to-air rocket; some blamed the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, a guerrilla group that had been demobilizing under terms of a peace accord. Burundi remained calm, but a bloodbath in Rwanda threw that nation back into a full-blown civil war another major setback for the United Nations’ beleaguered peacekeeping efforts.
It was wholesale carnage. Victims included government officials, human-rights figures, clerics, aid workers and ordinary people, both Tutsis arid Hutus. Corpses were strewn “in the houses, in the streets -everywhere,” said Herve Le Guillouzic, medical coordinator of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He said deaths were in the “tens of thousands.” Angered by the death of President Habyarimana, described by some as their “Caesar,” Hutu soldiers took vengeance on anyone suspected of having opposed him. “They’re lashing out at those they perceive to be a threat to themselves,” said U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard. In response, 600 armed Tutsi guerrillas, camped in the capital under terms of the peace accord, broke out of their compound and engaged the Hutu presidential guard with heavy weapons. The rebels, who denied shooting down the plane, quickly seized roads to the airport and began a drive on the capital from bases on the heavily forested border with Uganda, just 80 miles to the north. A rebel broadcast said the group had “irreversibly decided to fight this clique.”
With memories of Somalia still fresh, the West was gun-shy about any direct intervention. The U.N. Security Council rejected changing the peacekeepers’ mandate to permit the Somalia-style use of force–and the 2,500 U.N. troops in Kigali stayed in their barracks. Efforts to broker an end to the fighting also proved frustrating. On Friday, U.N. officials announced that an interim government had been formed, but the fighting only intensified. Last spring, the guerrillas nearly took the capital by force. if this time they persist, it will make the latest tragedy even more horrific.
The deaths of two Hutu presidents sparked more violence in one of the world’s least known but bloodiest regions.
