A Cry From Killing Fields Of Zaire Rebels Cut Their Bloody Way Through Hutu Refugee Camps
She was lying in a makeshift hospital in the refugee camp south of this city, suffering from fever and the effects of a miscarriage, when the attack occurred. She does not remember the machete falling on her, or even the face of her attacker.
When she came to minutes later, Christine Mukamurenzi said, her right arm was severed, the hand and forearm hanging by a bit of skin just below the elbow. With gunfire rattling through the camp, she tried to run into the forest, but the pain and the unwieldy arm made it impossible. She remembers biting through the skin to cut away her forearm and then wrapping the stump in her dress before she fell unconscious on the jungle floor.
“I ran into the forest, but I had no strength left and so I fell and slept,” she said Tuesday as she lay on the filthy floor of the University Hospital in Kisangani.
Around her were other victims who were wounded when local villagers and rebel fighters attacked refugee camps a week ago, driving 80,000 Rwandan Hutu into the forest. About 20 refugees were lined up on mats - the dead, the dying and the wounded, victims of a dirty campaign by rebels to finish off the Hutu.
No one knows the extent of the killings at the Biaro camp - the survivors said they were running too fast to count the number of dead. But their stories provided compelling eyewitness accounts that the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila have attacked defenseless refugees in their sweep across Zaire.
As aid workers struggled Tuesday to begin a huge operation to find the scattered refugees in the jungle and airlift them home to Rwanda, more and more refugees like the ones in the hospital were emerging from the forest - about 10,000 have reached the Biaro camp about 25 miles from Kisangani.
The victims in the University Hospital told of being attacked a week ago, not only by local villagers wielding axes and machetes but also by Zairian rebel troops, who raked the camp with fire from assault rifles.
Their accounts undermine assertions by Kabila that his soldiers only intervened to save the refugees from the irate local population.
xxxx PEACE TALKS As rebels marched into Kikwit, the last major city on their path to the capital, President Mobutu Sese Seko and rebel chief Laurent Kabila agreed Tuesday to meet as early as this weekend. Kabila said the meeting will be hosted by South African President Nelson Mandela on a naval ship. There will be just one topic, he said: Mobutu’s departure.