Citation
UNITED Nations plans to send a force to Rwanda, after tribal slaughter
has claimed an estimated half a million lives, were scorned yesterday
as a mission too small in scope, too late and doomed to failure by
veteran foreign aid workers who are still daring to work in the
country.
The head of a UN organisation, who has been reprimanded twice for
breaking safety rules by crossing into the fighting in Rwanda from
neighbouring Burundi, summed up the feelings of veterans of UN military
adventures. ``I was in Somalia. I've already seen this movie and it's
bad. What can the UN do here with a few thousand men? Almost all the
Tutsi are dead or have fled the country.
``When they could have done something (after the deaths of the Rwandan
and Burundian Presidents in a plane crash last month) they ran away,''
he said. The Security Council has set itself a deadline of the end of
this week to decide on whether, and how, to send a boosted peacekeeping
mission back to Rwanda. This comes after a month of killings, the third
such wave in as many decades. In Gitarama, where street killings are a
daily routine, Father Vieko Curic, the only white man to have stayed in
the country south of Kigali, the capital, had harsher words: ``The UN
failed in the beginning and now it is trying to save face. Does it know
where to send its soldiers on their humanitarian mission?'' Father
Curic, who has worked in Rwanda for 11 years, witnessed ``thousands of
murders'' of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at the hands of the marauding gangs
of militia known as interahamwe ``those who attack together''.
The Franciscan father saw several hills covered with bodies resembling
``lawns of flesh''. When he drove the 70 miles between Gitarama and
Butare in the south, he saw a corpse every yard. ``I believe that at
least half a million people were killed. Look at the statistics there
were about two million Tutsi in Rwanda, some 80,000 have fled, a few
thousand remain in camps. Where are the rest? Is there any point in
coming when there is almost none left to save?''
As the criticism of the United Nations mounted, a UN official reported
in Nairobi that 88 Rwandan students were massacred in the
government-held southern town of Gikongoro. Seven other people were
hacked to death with machetes in the capital.
Bangladesh and Australia have offered troops for the 5,500-man force
proposed by Boutros Boutros Ghali, the UN Secretary-General. But their
mission, relief organisation, is probably impossible. ``To bring
security one would have to put a soldier on every one of Rwanda's
hills, perhaps outside every hut,'' Chris Hennemeyer, director of the
American-based Catholic Relief Services, said.
London: Oxfam and six other aid agencies launched an appeal yesterday
to help Rwandan refugees.
