Citation
KIGALI, April 8 (Reuter) - Nuns, priests, aid workers and U.N.
peacekeepers were among many victims of massacres in the Rwandan
capital as ethnic bloodletting and renewed civil war gripped the
central African country.
The Jesuit order said from Rome on Friday that 11 nuns and eight
priests -- all Africans -- were killed at the order's Centre of
Spirituality
in the capital Kigali on Thursday. It did not say who was
responsible.
Three European Jesuits who were at the centre when the massacre took
place were spared,
a statement said.
The director of the Belgian branch of the medical charity Medecins sans
Frontieres said several dozen Rwandans working for international aid
organisations in Kigali had been massacred.
MSF director Georges Dallemagne told Reuters in Brussels that armed
men, believed to be from Rwanda's presidential guard, had shot the aid
workers dead in front of expatriate staff.
They went to the houses of MSF Belgium and MSF Holland, UNICEF and
Oxfam, called out the local staff and shot them,
he said. Expatriate
staff were unharmed.
With the country in a power vacuum following the killing of the
presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on Wednesday night and Rwanda's woman
prime minister on Thursday, a new day began with the scream of mortar
bombs and crackle of rifle fire.
One resident spoke of an orgy of killings out there
.
Fires raged in the city as rebels and soldiers battled around
parliament and people from the minority Tutsi and majority Hutu tribes
fell to slaughtering each other, opening a new chapter in their history
of violence that goes back decades.
They fight, then rest, then resume. It's calm one moment, then
suddenly there are explosions,
the resident said.
Pogroms and (ethnic) purification are taking place throughout the
city,
Carlos Rodriguez, the UNHCR's representative in Kigali, said in
a report released in Geneva.
Military sources in Paris said France was considering using troops
stationed in the Central African Republic to evacuate its nationals
from Rwanda. There are about 600 French nationals in Rwanda, most in
the capital.
Belgium, former colonial power in Rwanda, has put a unit of crack
paratroops on alert for a possible evacuation of foreigners, government
sources said.
The Belgian government said soldiers had killed 10 Belgian U.N.
peacekeepers on Thursday. They had been in charge of the security of
Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana who was also murdered on
Thursday.
A U.N. spokesman in Kigali said Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu, was killed near
the presidential palace in an area where U.N. forces had been denied
access. He did not make it clear who killed her.
National staff of the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF were also
attacked, but first reports indicated there were no serious injuries or
death, U.N. officials said from Geneva.
A spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also
said about 5,000 Rwandans and Burundis had fled their countries for
Zaire since the violence began.
U.N. officials feared violence between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi tribes
would spread outside the capital.
The U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) appealed to Rwandans to
end violence and urged countries that helped broker a peace accord
between the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and the government last
year to act to restore order.
The predominantly Tutsi rebels already in Kigali had been based in
parliament since December after they entered the city peacefully to
take part in the peace plan. Rebel reinforcements were reported to be
moving on the capital, an aid worker said.
President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu who took power in 1973, and
Cyprien Ntaryamira, president of neighbouring Burundi, died when a
plane bringing them back from regional peace talks in Tanzania was hit
by a rocket on Wednesday night.
Who killed them was not clear. The RPF denied involvement.
Members of the 700-strong presidential guard abducted opposition
leaders and their families, including three government ministers, the
president of the Constitutional Court and president of the national
assembly, U.N. officials said.
Residents said many killings were being carried out by members of the
army who were searching house-to-house for Tutsi RPF sympathisers and
their Hutu political allies.
Youths wielding machetes, knives and clubs stalked Kigali, settling
tribal scores by hacking and clubbing people to death or simply
shooting them, witnesses said.
The U.N. Security Council in New York denounced the violence.
The council took no fresh decision on whether to leave U.N. troops in
place. It asked Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to gather
information as soon as possible.
U.S. President Bill Clinton expressed horror that elements of the
Rwandan security forces
had murdered officials.
Battles between troops and the RPF shattered a peace accord made in the
Tanzan ian town of Arusha last August, aimed at ending a civil war that
erupted in October 1990.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
