Citation
From Sam Kiley in Bisesero, near Kibuye, and Charles Bremner in Paris.
The United Nations yesterday put off an attempt to rescue a group of
unaccompanied Rwandan children and orphans among 30,000 civilians it
says are trapped in Kigali by the civil war.
After days of intense fighting, the capital was ominously silent for
much of the night but the UN said it had postponed plans to evacuate
about 200 trapped Tutsi - mostly children - after failing to win guarantees
of safe passage.
As the UN hesitated, French troops fanned out across the southwest of
the country to prevent fresh massacres after the killing of tens of
thousands of people in two months of ethnic and related bloodletting.
In Paris, French leaders claimed that their military expedition had won
over the endangered Tutsi population and that growing international
support was vindicating the decision to send troops in.
We have managed to get ourselves accepted as a force for peace,
said
Francois Leotard, the Defence Minister, in a report on the success so
far of what France depicts as a purely humanitarian mission. He said
that the main problem France now faced was to draw in the help of
non-government humanitarian organisations to take care of the protected
population and to encourage African states to send troops to support
and replace us
.
The slaughter of Tutsi by Rwandan government supporters continued
unabated in spite of a meeting between the government and the Pope's
envoy, who pleaded for an end to the killings.
When the French troops left Gisenyi, where Cardinal Roger Etchegaray
met representatives of the Rwandan government, houses continued to burn
in the commune of Bisesero, ten miles inland from Lake Kivu near
Kibuye. A source close to the cardinal said that his plans this week
included meetings with members of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Murderer's mission: Sylvester Gscumbitsi, blamed for the massacre of
3,000 people in one of the worst atrocities in Rwanda, is in charge of
distributing international food aid to members of Rwanda's majority
Hutu tribe in a refugee camp in Tanzania, according to a BBC Panorama
programme to be shown tonight.
