Death returned to Rwanda last week-this time at Kibeho, the largest of nine refugee camps established by the French Army to protect Hutu civilians fleeing from the Rwandan Patriotic Army. For months, Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government had complained that the camps had become sanctuaries for Hutu guerrillas. In early April the army moved in to close them and return the inhabitants to their villages. But on April 22, things went horribly wrong. Troops began screening Kibeho’s 100,000 displaced people to identify those involved in last year’s genocide. When some tried to break through the cordon, soldiers opened fire. As many as 2,000 people died on the steep hillsides. “It was savagery,” says one peacekeeper who watched,
The massacre was a severe setback to the Rwandan government’s attempts to reconcile the country’s bitterly divided ethnic groups. It underscored fears that the Tutsi army was out of control and hungry forretribution against the Hutu population. And it made it increasingly unlikely that any of the estimated 750,000 Hutus who fled across the border to Zaire last July would come back in the foreseeable future. Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu rushed to establish an independent commission to investigate the massacre. And he ordered the exhumation and counting of the dead, who were hastily buried by RPA soldiers. The government maintains that only about 800 were killed.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of frightened Hutus evicted from the camps returned to an uncertain future in their villages. In Nyakizu district in southern Rwanda, 200 bedraggled refugees stood on line outside the town hall to register with local officials. District chief Ferdinand Nkurayita said he had held meetings with Tutsis to “sensitize” them to the influx of Hutus: “We don’t want to return to war. People must live together.” But just up the road Pauline Kubwimana, 70, said he and five family members had been beaten and robbed by vengeful Tutsis. “We are risking even walking on the road,” he said.
That fear has paralyzed the last holdouts in Kibeho. Thursday afternoon, Western ambassadors and relief officials begged the Hutus to leave. “There is food, water and medicine waiting for you,” U.N. special envoy Shaharyar Khan told the crowd. “You don’t have to suffer anymore.” But aid workers said that those who express a desire to go home are threatened or killed by hard-liners. A crowd gathered around a Red Cross official. “You must resume your lives,” he pleaded. “The war is finished.” A woman shook her head. Nothing, it seems, can break Rwanda’s endless cycle of violence and revenge.
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