Citation
ACCRA, April 20 (Reuter) - Ghana has confidence in the United Nations
and will not unilaterally pull its 850 troops out of the crumbling U.N.
peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Defence Minister Mahama Iddrisu said on
Wednesday.
He told the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation Ghanaian soldiers were
stationed around Kigali airport and had not come under attack. Only one
had been wounded, by a stray bullet.
Belgium has evacuated all its 450 troops from Rwanda after 10
peacekeepers died while trying to defend the prime minister who was
hunted down after President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed in a rocket
attack on his plane on April 6.
Iddrisu said Ghanaian troops were in Rwanda under the auspices of the
United Nations in which we have faith and hope that the safety of our
troops will be paramount and will be protected
.
Belgium has called for a complete withdrawal of the UNAMIR force, which
after the Belgian pullout must rely on more lightly-armed contingents
from Bangladesh, Senegal and Poland as well as Ghana.
U.N. officers in Kigali said on Wednesday they had been told the rest
of the once 2,500-strong force would soon quit the central African
country, ripped apart by civil war and tribal savagery since
Habyarimana's death.
They said the decision had been triggered by the refusal of government
forces to hand the airport over to neutral U.N. control. Some 250 U.N.
blue helmets
would stay in a final attempt to broker an end to the
slaughter.
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says as many as 100,000 people may have
been killed in the past two weeks.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
