Panicky Rwandan Refugees Flee Army Shuts Down Camps; An Estimated 2,000 Killed
Tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees escaped down rainslicked roads and into the soggy hills in full panic Sunday after the army had shut down their camps inside Rwanda - leaving an estimated 2,000 shot, butchered and trampled to death.
The army ordered the refugees to return to their former homes, promising them peace. But U.N. officials said many of those who tried to go home were pelted with stones and attacked.
Not since the end of the civil war last July has such violence occurred on Rwandan soil:
At least 250 children were abandoned in the chaos and collected by relief workers.
About 650 people were treated for injuries and wounds.
Rwandan soldiers, assisted by U.N troops, buried most of the dead in hastily dug mass graves.
In the process, Rwanda’s emerging efforts at national reconciliation suffered a tragic reversal - perhaps foreshadowing even worse consequences for its suffering people in the months ahead.
“A total tragedy,” said the U.N. headquarters in Kigali.
The death toll from three days of conflict at a refugee camp in southwest Rwanda remained a gruesome guessing game. Throughout the day Sunday, the United Nations said its field reports indicated that 4,000 may have died - the result of soldiers firing on refugees, of refugee thugs killing other refugees with machetes and of people being crushed by stampedes.
But late in the day, the U.N. military commander for Rwanda, Maj. Gen. Guy Tousignant, said that the earlier estimate was inflated as a result of confusion.
“I’ve just been informed that the revised figure would be closer to 2,000 people who have been counted by those who have been able to observe what happened there,” Tousignant told the Los Angeles Times.
Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu toured the Kibeho refugee camp Sunday and insisted that only 300 had died there.
“The figures that have been given have been exaggerated,” he told reporters. He defended the army’s attack on the mass of refugees Saturday, saying that radicals among the refugees had instigated the killings. “People in the camp had arms and were violent. It’s a pity that people died.”
A week ago, the hillside camp was a semipermanent home to 80,000 to 100,000 Hutus. But on Sunday, fewer than 1,000 remained.
Several thousand refugees fled to the city of Butare, where they took shelter in the soccer stadium. The United Nations reported that 10,000 more massed at various aid points in the region. As for the rest, some tried to return to their homes in the nearby countryside, while many thousands more melted into the banana groves and cane fields of rural Rwanda.
“Those who tried to go home were not welltreated. They were stoned by others; they were attacked and abused,” said the U.N. special representative to Rwanda, Shaharyar Kahn.
A year ago, the majority Hutus controlled Rwanda’s elected government. But the death of their president in a mysterious plane crash April 6, 1994, triggered what is regarded as the genocide of a half-million minority Tutsis.