File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 576


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


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