Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 25, 1994 TAG: 9404250094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NAIROBI, KENYA LENGTH: Medium
"The fighting has been exceptionally heavy today," said Abdul Kabia, a U.N. spokesman in the capital, Kigali. "The fire is very, very heavy."
About 170 patients and staff were slaughtered Sunday at a hospital in Butare, Rwanda's second-largest city, the international relief group Doctors Without Borders told CBS radio. The massacre prompted the group to pull its workers out of the region, aid workers said.
Radio France Internationale quoted a Red Cross official as saying widespread killing was continuing in Butare, 45 miles southwest of Kigali.
"The watchword is the elimination of those who are considered enemies, and no one is spared: children, wives, babies, all those close to the enemy," the Red Cross official said in a report monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp.
In Burundi, a Western diplomat said Sunday that thousands of Rwandans fleeing their homeland were arriving with gunshot and machete wounds.
Kabia said government representatives to the peace talks did not show up when the United Nations sent a plane for them Saturday.
Military officers in Kigali told the United Nations on Sunday they were unable to contact officials in Gitarama, the town southwest of the capital where the government fled two weeks ago.
In Arusha, Tanzania, where the talks were to be held, Tanzania Foreign Ministry official Kassim Mwawado said, "There will be no talks for sure. The Rwandan Patriotic Front representative has just left."
President Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania had invited Rwanda's government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front for talks on ending the carnage that has killed an estimated 100,000 people.
Two million people have fled their homes and thousands more are barricaded in buildings.
The majority Hutus and minority Tutsis have fought for political supremacy since independence from Belgium in 1962.
UNICEF said Sunday that it had resumed an airlift of urgently needed medicines and other supplies to Kigali.
A Canadian aircraft arrived Saturday with tons of soap and surgical supplies, the agency said. Another landed Friday with 117 boxes of emergency health kits and surgical instruments.
A U.N. team is in Kigali to assess the scope of the humanitarian disaster. There have been warnings of epidemics and possible famine.
U.N. relief agencies have pulled their staff out of the country.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB