10,000 Die in Rwanda; Many Foreigners Escape : Africa: Bodies are strewn along capital’s streets in three days of carnage. Belgians appear trapped.

With as many as 10,000 dead in their blood-soaked capital, warring ethnic groups in the Central African nation of Rwanda resumed fighting following a brief cease-fire Sunday, as Americans and other foreigners arrived in the relative safety of neighboring Burundi after harrowing overland journeys and air evacuations.

Three days of unabated violence took their toll on the Rwandan capital of Kigali, with fires burning on the outskirts, aid warehouses looted, doctors accusing soldiers of slaughtering patients in hospital beds and sketchy reports of a massacre at a Roman Catholic Franciscan mission.

The commander of 400 Belgian troops assigned to a 2,500-member U.N. peacekeeping force said Sunday morning that the Rwandan Patriotic Front, dominated by members of the minority Tutsi, and the Rwandan army, dominated by the Hutus, had stopped shooting.

“At 10 o’clock this morning there was a cease-fire, and it seems to be holding,” said Col. Luc Marchal in an interview with Belgian television. “The two sides agreed to a cease-fire. . . . There is a certain stabilization.”

Interviewed at 7:30 p.m., however, he said the fighting had flared again. “Expatriate (Belgians) are remaining in their homes,” he said. “Belgians are among the casualties, but (in Kigali) this seems to be more because they have been trapped in cross-fires by warring groups and not because they have been specifically attacked.”

The 1,500 Belgians in Rwanda are considered in the greatest danger among the foreign residents because Belgium was the nation’s colonial power until 1962.

Philipp Boisserie, reporting for French television from Kigali, said fighting was continuing Sunday evening.

“They are still shooting,” he said. “We don’t know where the shooting is coming from or whom they are shooting at.”

Rebel leader Theogene Rudasingwa said in remarks broadcast by a French television network that “we have little option” but to press southward toward Kigali from positions in the north.

In addition, reports broadcast by Tanzanian radio and monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp. said ethnic violence was erupting in Burundi. According to the radio report, Hutu residential areas of Bujumbura, the capital, were attacked, prompting about 500 Burundians to flee the tense capital.

The violence has flared in the wake of an airplane crash Wednesday that killed President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi, who were returning from a regional conference in Tanzania intended to halt the years of violence that have racked the rival Hutus and Tutsi. Both leaders were members of the Hutu tribe. Rwandan government officials said rocket fire brought down the airplane as it approached the Kigali airport.

While about 300 U.S. Marines, deployed from the amphibious assault ship Peleliu in the Indian Ocean near Somalia, stood by in Bujumbura, troops from NATO allies in Western Europe took up positions in Kigali to oversee the departure of the European and U.S. citizens.

Belgium dispatched 600 paratroopers aboard a U.S. Air Force C-5 Galaxy to reinforce the 400 Belgian troops who departed Saturday to evacuate their compatriots from Rwanda. The first of seven Belgian C-130 aircraft landed late Sunday afternoon in Kigali after having been prevented from landing Saturday by obstacles placed on the runways, apparently by Rwandan army units.

“The atmosphere in Kigali has been completely anti-Belgian,” Belgian Foreign Minister Willy Claes said in Brussels. “We recommended Belgians not try to leave by road, but to wait for aircraft.”

Many of Rwanda’s majority Hutus believe that Belgian diplomatic efforts have favored their enemies, the Tutsi, since a peace agreement last August stopped fighting between the two ethnic groups.

Ten Belgian soldiers serving as U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda were killed Thursday, apparently by extremist Hutu members of the elite Presidential Guards. They had been attempting to protect the acting prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a Tutsi.

Most other Westerners trapped in the initial fighting appeared to be safe by late Sunday evening. The French government reported Sunday evening that the majority of its 600 nationals had been evacuated, either to Bujumbura or to Bangui, in the Central African Republic.

Among those arriving in the Burundian capital was the Mueller family of Kalamazoo, Mich. Scott Mueller, a Baptist missionary, said he, his wife and two children dashed three miles by car to the Kigali airport Sunday morning during a brief lull in the shooting. “We passed about 20 bodies,” he said.

Cindy Mueller, his wife, said they huddled in fear in their house for three days. While they hid on the roof, she said, a mortar round landed in the back yard, killing the family dog.

Before mustering the courage to flee, Julio Gamba, the World Bank representative in Rwanda, and his wife, Amelia, said they spent four days under mattresses in their hallway. Bullets riddled their home, pieces of the ceiling had fallen, and windows were shattered. The Argentine couple arrived in Kenya after sundown.

“If there is such a thing as luck in this world, we’ve got it,” Amelia Gamba said.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher said Sunday morning that the 258 Americans in Rwanda--about half of them diplomats and dependents, and the rest missionaries--had been contacted by the U.S. Embassy and that “all of the Americans who wanted to leave Kigali have just now finally left.”

He said that some of the Americans were being flown from Burundi to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, and that others had crossed overland into Zaire or Tanzania.

“It’s an evacuation that’s gone very well,” he said, and only “one or two” had chosen to remain in Rwanda.

Signs of the carnage and chaos of the previous three days were everywhere in Kigali.

According to one report, drunken men with machetes, knives and grenades built roadblocks, and the Red Cross was asking people to dig mass graves because more than 1,000 bodies had piled up at the central morgue.

“I don’t find words--the weather is nice, it’s green, the lovely scenery, but you have all this violence in front of your eyes,” Patrick Gasser, deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told the Associated Press. “And there is a smell to it. It’s strong, penetrating.”

Eric Bertin, a coordinator for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, was quoted by the Associated Press in Kigali as having said he and his colleagues arrived at a hospital to find that patients they had treated had been killed by soldiers overnight. Some were in beds in tents set up on hospital grounds.

“We have decided it is no use to work here anymore,” he said. “It is useless to cure someone who is going to be killed anyway. They were just lying in their tents dead.”

Elsewhere in the city, bodies were strewn about the streets--the remnants of a horrific rampage in which citizens were shot or hacked to death.

After escaping to Bujumbura, Canadian missionary Vernon Demille told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that “people were being pulled out of our church and slaughtered out in front of the church. We’re seeing people running for their lives, houses being grenaded, people being shot. Some of them are being butchered by machetes.”

The report of the massacre at the Franciscan order came from a spokesman for the Oxfam humanitarian group in Oxford, England.

The spokesman, John Magrath, said three Oxfam workers--from the United States, Britain and the Netherlands--saw Hutu forces enter the mission in Kigufi.

“They looted it, they flushed out all the Tutsis who were there and killed them all,” Magrath said. He said the three aid workers escaped across the border to Zaire.

Gerstenzang reported in Washington and Marshall in Brussels. Researcher Isabelle Maelcamp also contributed to this story from Brussels.