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THE last members of Rwanda's rump government fled towards the
French-protected southwestern town of Cyangugu after troops of the
rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front captured the northern garrison town of
Ruhengeri, a government minister said last night.
The President, the Prime Minister and many of the ministers are now in
Cyangugu,
Jean-de-Dieu Habimeza, Social Affairs Minister, said in
Goma, eastern Zaire, where he and some of his colleagues had fled.
In Paris the French Foreign Ministry announced that the fleeing
ministers would not be welcome in the safe zone set up to protect
civilians in southwestern Rwanda. Tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees
poured into Zaire after the fall of Ruhengeri.
In Geneva, Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said
her agency could not cope with the exodus and appealed to the warring
factions there to guarantee their safety.
Faustin Twagiramungu, whom the front named last week as the Prime
Minister, said after his arrival in the capital, Kigali, that the
people fleeing the region needed to be reassured. Mr Twagiramungu, a
member of the Republican Democratic Movement and Hutu moderate, is
expected to form a broad-based
government by the weekend.
There has to be reconciliation and regeneration,
he said.
The front has vowed to declare a unilateral ceasefire soon, but has
insisted that it will stop fighting only when the interim government,
formed after moderates were murdered in the first bloodletting in
April, steps down and those who organised the massacres are arrested.
The main problem facing the front is how to restore its international
and domestic credibility after the people it has claimed to be freeing
have constantly fled ahead of its advances. No evidence of widespread
or systematic massacres committed by the front has emerged over the
past three months.
Years of propaganda have convinced the Hutu population that they would
be slaughtered if they were overrun by the front.
It will take a generation to get over that sort of mistrust,
Philippe
Gaillard, former head of the Red Cross in Kigali, said.
Aid officials issued a warning that unstable Zaire may have to host
between 500,000 and a million Hutus.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that people had been
crossing at one border post between the Rwandan town of Gisenyi and
Goma in Zaire at a rate of 15,000 an hour. The committee said it had
enough food in Goma to feed 150,000 people for a month.
Gemmo Lodesani, director of the World Food Programe in Burundi, said
that western Rwanda now faces a human and ecological disaster
.
