From: LeoCasey <LeoCasey-AT-aol.com> Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 19:47:19 EST Subject: M-TH: What Does A Non-Existent Genocide Look Like? Remembering the contention of our friend James H., that there was no genocide in Rwanda and that the remnants of the exterminist Hutu government and military pose no problems, I offer the following news report from Rwanda which appeared on the front page of Monday's New York Times. New Rwanda Killings Defy Attempts at Ethnic Healing By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR. GISENYI, Rwanda -- The little girl's head had been split by a machete. A long ragged suture ran from her left eye across her ruined skull. Her breath fluttered shallow and light, and her frail body seemed to cling to the world of the living with no more than a butterfly's strength. The 4-year-old girl, Alice Mukeshimana, was 1 of 227 wounded people who were brought to the Gisenyi Hospital after Hutu guerrillas attacked a Tutsi refugee camp in northwestern Rwanda last week, killing at least 272 people and leaving nothing but burning tents and leaflets preaching genocide in their wake. Three years after Hutu massacred half a million Tutsi and a Tutsi-led rebellion overthrew the government that orchestrated the killing, the ethnic bloodletting has returned and intensified. The attack was the latest atrocity in a growing war between the Rwandan army, which is dominated by the Tutsi minority, and Hutu guerrilla bands, who advocate the extermination of the Tutsi and the return of a Hutu-controlled government. The spiraling violence has made a mockery of the Tutsi-controlled government's attempts to heal the wounds of the genocide and reconcile the two ethnic groups, who have been locked in a cycle of racial violence since the country gained independence from Belgium in the early 1960s. The conflict has grown in the last six months, turning the northwest region of the country into a deadly militarized zone where no one feels secure. The ranks of the guerrillas have swelled as more and more Hutu ex-soldiers and militiamen, who fled the country after taking part in the 1994 genocide against Tutsi here, have drifted home from the Congo along with masses of other refugees. In recent months, the guerrillas have stepped up a campaign aimed at making Rwanda ungovernable. They have assassinated local officials, laid ambushes on the roads, massacred scores of Tutsi civilians in their homes and attacked jails, freeing hundreds of Hutu men who were awaiting trial on genocide charges. They have also begun distributing racist literature and broadcasting hate radio messages from a pirate station in the Congo, echoing the propaganda technique that fueled the 1994 genocide. "We are not fighting war here," Col. Nyamwasa Kayumba, the regional military commander, told Reuters. "The people who did this have no political agenda, no economic agenda. It is genocide, pure and simple." The attack, which began shortly before midnight Wednesday and lasted six hours, was the second by the guerrillas on the Mudende refugee camp, 15 miles north of Gisenyi. It is not clear whether it was timed to coincide with the visit to Rwanda on Thursday by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who met with Rwandan officials. Until the latest massacre, the camp had been home to about 17,000 Tutsi from neighboring Congo. Those families fled that country, then called Zaire, in mid-1996 after the same Hutu guerrilla groups now operating in Rwanda started killing Tutsi there. At the time, the Hutu guerrillas were living in U.N. refugee camps in Zaire. They had fled Rwanda in 1994 along with a million other refugees to escape the advancing Tutsi rebel army that stopped the genocide, seized power and set up the current Rwandan government. Those Hutu militants began to return home last year, after Laurent Kabila's successful campaign for power overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's dictator. In recent months, the attacks have been confined to the northwest, but the guerrillas appear to be better organized and more brazen than in the past, military analysts say. They often move in groups of 500 to 1,000 and hit their targets during daylight. The 40,000-member Rwandan army is stretched thin and its soldiers are tired, diplomats say. Many of the troops in this region fought alongside Congolese rebels in the rebellion against Mobutu, U.N. security officials and military analysts said. The Rwandan army's reason for entering that war was not only to oust Mobutu, a longtime foe of the Tutsi, but also to destroy the Hutu militants and soldiers who had used U.N. refugee camps in Congo as a base for raids into Rwanda. At least 6,000 people have died in the violence since April, according to U.N. human rights monitors, though the number is probably higher. Each time the guerrillas have struck, the army has retaliated, often killing unarmed civilians in their efforts to flush out the enemy. One large problem for the army is that the guerrillas still enjoy popular support among the Hutu in this region. The former president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, came from Gisenyi, along with most of the soldiers in the former government's army and the militia. Those men, who make up most of the Hutu guerrilla army now, have many relatives and friends in the villages and communes, local officials said. "We have to bear in mind that this region was primarily occupied by the former militiamen and army," the governor of the Gisenyi region, Epimaque Ndagijimana, said. "The most crucial thing about this crisis is that the attackers are always related to the local people. They are their cousins, brothers, uncles." Colonel Kayumba, the regional commander of the army, told reporters the 500 guerrillas who raided the Mudende camp fled into Congo after the attack. He said the camp had been left undefended because the 72-man garrison there had been diverted to respond to an ambush, when the guerrillas launched their assault. Still, he maintained that while the guerrillas were able to wreak havoc and sow terror among civilians, they were not yet strong enough to defeat the Rwandan army in battle. "We have got the capacity to control the situation," he said. "If they were stronger they would have a territory that they control." The evidence of the guerrillas' work can be seen in Gisenyi Hospital. Eleven tents have been erected to deal with the flood of trauma victims. The wounded lie in rows on the ground, bloody rags covering the gashes and gunshot wounds. Children, many maimed with machetes, scream in pain as the handful of nurses and doctors try to dress the wounds. The survivors told of horrific scenes of carnage. They said the raid began about 11 p.m. with the sound of gunfire. As people scrambled out of their beds and ran for their lives, they found the guerrillas had blocked the four roads leading in and out of the camp. Many attackers wore uniforms and carried guns, but others wore civilian clothes and had white cloths tied around their foreheads and machetes, witnesses said. Some of the attackers yelled racist slurs as they descended on fleeing refugees with guns, clubs, hoes and machetes. Some women were rolled in plastic sheeting and burned to death, survivors said. Others were dismembered by machete blows. "They started firing at us while they shouted," James Nzabanita, a 40-year- old farmer, said. "Wherever we tried to escape, we found they had already blocked the way. They shouted: 'Kill the cockroaches! Kill the cockroaches." Nzabanita, who has several deep gashes in his back and arms, said he had run into a nearby abandoned university campus and while he was being hit with a machete, he rolled underneath a metal storage shed to escape. From his hiding place, he saw the militiamen hack several people to death, he said, adding, "Very few of those people survived." Scores of others took refuge in two nearby university halls, barricading the doors and waiting for the army to arrive. Survivors said the raiders threw hand grenades into the rooms and hammered down the doors. Mayuki Mbonyshutu, a 43-year-old farmer, was one of several men who were holding the door closed, trying desperately to keep the attackers out. His wife and five children were in the room with him. He said he pushed with all his might against the hammer blows coming from the other side. "I was holding the door and they threw a hand grenade and the fragments hit my fingers," he said, lying on a cot with bullet wound in both legs and the stomach. "Then they burst in and they started firing at me. I lost my father and two children." Mbonyshutu's wife, Shushanya Mukamndekezi, 36, said she had dived to the floor with her three smallest children under her. But the two older children did not escape. One of the killers hacked them to death. Their bodies fell on top of their mother, who played dead and stifled the cries of the three smaller children. "It's a genocide, of course," Mbonyshutu said. "Can you imagine? To be hacked to death by someone whom you never talked to, and you don't know?" In another tent, Esperance Nranduhuke, a 52-year-old mother of 8, was nursing her youngest daughter, 10-year-old Mbabazi. The girl had been shot in the arms and legs and her hands were maimed from deflecting machete blows. She lay listless in the lap of a sister. Mrs. Nranduhuke lost her husband in the last attack on the camp in August, in which 148 people were killed. Monday, December 15, 1997 Copyright 1997 The New York Times --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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