Refugees Slaughtered Even As Albright Urges Peace In Rwanda Lays Wreath At Mass Grave, Says Reconciliation Will Be Hard

Just hours before Secretary of State Madeleine Albright arrived in this ethnically divided nation to promote peace, Hutu guerrillas attacked a Tutsi refugee camp on Thursday with grenades, guns and machetes, killing at least 231 people and wounding more than 200 others, U.N. officials and aid workers said.

The raid on a refugee camp at Mudende in northwestern Rwanda on Thursday morning underscored the fragility of Rwanda’s peace and the uphill battle the Tutsi-dominated army here faces in bringing stability to the region.

It was unclear if the attack was timed to coincide with Albright’s visit. But the carnage stood in stark contrast to her message on Thursday urging reconciliation between the Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority, who have been locked in a cycle of violence since the country gained independence from Belgium in 1962.

Arriving in the morning before news of the massacre had filtered into the capital, Albright met with Rwandan leaders and then reaffirmed America’s close alliance with the Tutsi-controlled government, despite its questionable human rights record in recent months.

She later laid a wreath on a mass grave outside the capital holding the bodies of about 1,700 Tutsi who died in massacres here in 1994.

Albright pleased many leaders here and in the region when she said earlier in the week that the United States and other nations must share the blame for the 1994 massacres. She acknowledged that the West had waited too long to respond to Hutu massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda, and that the Hutu militants had rearmed themselves inside U.N. refugee camps that cost about $1 million a day to operate.

On Thursday, Albright said: “I think there is clearly room for improvement in the human rights record of Rwanda. But I think it’s also important for us to understand how difficult it is for a country that has seen a half million people slaughtered to put itself back together and reconcile.”

“They have done a lot already,” she added. “But they have a long way to go.”

While she spoke, some wounded were beginning to limp into a hospital at Gisenyi, a town on the border with Congo, the former Zaire, about 15 miles from the Mudende camp, aid workers said.

After talking for an hour on Thursday with President Pasteur Bizimungu and Vice President Paul Kagame, Albright praised the government for managing the peaceful return of more than a million Hutu refugees over the last year and said she was impressed with the government’s efforts to reconcile the two ethnic groups.

But Albright expressed concern about reports that the army has massacred unarmed civilians in its attempts to flush out and defeat the Hutu guerrillas, many of whom took part in the massacres of Tutsi in 1994 in which more than 500,000 people were killed.

Albright acknowledged that it was difficult to curb reprisals against Hutu civilians by Tutsi soldiers, given the scale of the killings in 1994. In recent weeks, the guerrillas have not only killed hundreds of Tutsi civilians but have also begun distributing racist propaganda and broadcasting radio messages like the ones that fueled the mass killings three years ago.

In the attack before dawn on Thursday, the guerrillas raided the camp at Mudende, sending its 17,000 inhabitants fleeing into the hills and leaving the ground covered with bodies, U.N. refugee officials said. In August, 148 people at the camp were killed during a similar assault attributed to the Hutu rebels.

The refugees in the camp were ethnic Tutsi from Congo who had fled into Rwanda in mid-1996 to escape attacks by the Hutu guerrillas, who at the time were based in refugee camps in Congo.

Most of the Hutu guerrillas fighting the government here were once soldiers under the previous Hutu-led government or militiamen who took part in the 1994 massacres. They fled Rwanda later that year to escape an advancing Tutsi rebel army, which seized power and formed the present government.

For two years, the Hutu militants lived in U.N. refugee camps, where they rearmed themselves. They also mounted attacks on the Tutsi living in Congo and made frequent raids into Rwanda. Last year, Rwanda’s army backed Laurent Kabila’s rebellion in Congo partly in order to shut down the refugee camps along the border and rout the Hutu guerrillas.

But the plan has backfired. As hard-line Hutu militants have drifted home among the other refugees, many have taken up arms again. Since May, when Kabila took power in Congo, the Hutu guerrillas here, many of them believed to be the same militiamen and soldiers who perpetrated the 1994 massacres and then fled to Congo, have stepped up their attacks, killing Tutsi civilians and attacking prisons to free thousands of jailed Hutu.

In response, the Tutsi army has also at times committed atrocities, killing scores of unarmed Hutu civilians in operations aimed at destroying the guerrillas, diplomats and human-rights groups say.