Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 3, 1994 TAG: 9408040024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MORT ROSENBLUM ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: GOMA, ZAIRE LENGTH: Long
The Rwanda killings were not the ``tribal slaughter'' of the sound bites but rather a spasm of something centuries old, ethnic enmity as complex as anything found in the Balkans.
One similarity stands out with blinding clarity: Here was another ethnic mass murder outsiders did not stop. In each case, hundreds of thousands of people died and millions of others fled their homes in panic.
Both ethnic cleansings were systematic, premeditated by fanatics and spearheaded by well-organized bands of mass murderers.
But in Bosnia, there was lingering war. In Rwanda, it was a blitzkrieg of blood, scant weeks of savage hacking and stabbing by not only Hutu military people but also solid citizens run amok.
No one had the excuse that a wrong move might degenerate into World War III. In hindsight, almost everyone agrees that the quick dispatch of neutral troops could have averted the cataclysm of Goma, Zaire.
In a splendid setting of deep green mountains, you can look anywhere to see the price of waiting. Bloated bodies are so common you'd hardly notice them but for a smell you would never forget.
It is worst when you get up close. For example, there is that little boy at SOS Village, naked but for all he has in the world: filthy torn shorts. All day, he lays listlessly in foul dirt.
Who knows? With the late but dedicated aid effort under way, he may yet grow up to discover a cure for AIDS or a strain of miracle corn. Looking around, I doubt it.
I came to Goma steeped in deja vu. I was here three decades ago on the same story. This time, with more modern methods, the death toll of Tutsis had an extra zero at the end.
It is likely to happen again in a few years, but there will be no additional zero. Not enough Tutsis are left alive. A 15 percent minority a generation ago, they are now closer to 4 percent.
Edouard Rutaganira, a tall and gentle grade school teacher, is one of the few trained people left to help a new Tutsi-run government pick up the pieces and hold the Hutus at bay. That is, if he makes it safely back from Zaire.
``I am resigned to Rwanda being what it is, and I'm ready to start again,'' he told me, behind the barbed wire of a refugee compound. This meant more than it sounded like.
Rutaganira had just recounted his losses.
``My parents were exterminated,'' he said. ``My brother and sister were exterminated. And my wife and children, they were exterminated. I was the only one left.''
It seemed like an open-and-shut case of Hutu monstrosity, which it was. But, as with Bosnian Serbs, you had to see the other side. Although innocents paid the price, the Tutsis were hardly blameless.
Long before English settlers reached America, Tutsis drifted into Rwanda and stayed. Tall, patrician and good at war, they shaped a feudal society in which Hutus were the vassals.
Germans took over Rwanda last century and followed colonial style. A few Europeans exercised authority via the dominant tribe. Later, Belgium took over and favored a Tutsi elite.
After independence in 1962, Hutus took power in Kigali, the capital. A year later, the machetes came out. About 20,000 Tutsis died, many of them whacked off at the shins symbolically to make them shorter.
Every so often, ethnic tension flared into slaughter, and thousands fled to neighboring countries.
Warriors still, Tutsi leaders lent a hand to a guerrilla chieftain named Yoweri Museveni, who fought to depose a corrupt government in neighboring Uganda. When he won, he gave his allies arms and a base.
The Tutsis' Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from the north in 1991, slowly inching forward. The Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, went to Paris for help. France sent military advisers and heavy weapons.
After a paralyzing stalemate, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Africa, Herman Cohen, persuaded Habyarimana to negotiate.
Cohen was a young American diplomat in Zaire, then the Congo, when I first went to Goma. Over the years, he has proved to be what journalists call ``a usually reliable source.''
In a recent conversation, he explained events like this:
As part of the peace accords, the RPF insisted on sending a token armed battalion of Tutsis to Kigali. Hutu extremists, led by men Cohen likened to the Bosnian Serb leaders, whipped up a fury.
``It was as if 30 years later, Afrikaner troops would come back to Pretoria,'' he said. ``Hutus saw their old masters coming back, and they went wild.''
And then a plane carrying Habyarimana and the Burundian president crashed mysteriously. Like the spray of gunfire from the Sarajevo Holiday Inn - Serbs shooting Muslims in April 1992 - that was the spark.
It was meticulously organized in advance.
In some places, trucks collected Tutsis and drove them to grave sites. After they dug holes, they were shot and pushed in. Some were random captures. Others were hunted down from lists prepared in advance. Tutsis by the thousand were hacked to death with machetes and stacked up in churches. Hutu militiamen, under a name meaning ``those who kill together,'' forced ordinary people to kill their neighbors.
With mass hysteria, many killers needed no encouragement. Some young had thought about it for a long time, carefully hammering nails into clubs or honing a fine edge on their banana knives.
In the end, the toll was 300,000 or 500,000.
To stop it, RPF rebels pushed to Kigali and beyond, seizing power again after three decades. They installed a government with a nominal Hutu president and promised to punish only the instigators.
But the people who fled for their lives, those millions in Goma and elsewhere, would be hard to convince.
Over and over, Rwandan refugees are told that they run no risk; foreign troops will protect them. But even the farmers from tiny mountain backwaters keep up with reality.
In Rwanda, as in Bosnia, the world's track record is not great.
by CNB