Bloodshed Continues in Rwanda

Marauding gangs of youths armed with machetes roamed the bloody streets of the Rwandan capital again Friday, adding new bodies to the piles of decaying corpses already fouling the air.

U.N. spokesman Moctar Gueye said Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated government and predominantly Tutsi rebels agreed to direct talks that U.N. officials hoped would lead to a cease-fire. But the two sides continued to duel for control of Kigali, the capital, with mortars and rockets.

New reports of massacres emerged from the Rwandan blood bath, including an account of more than 1,000 men, women and children shot and hacked to death in a church where they sought refuge.

Thousands of people were still trying to flee Kigali, forming an eight-mile-long column of refugees, and thousands more remained huddled in hiding with little or no food.

“There are hundreds of thousands of people cut off from anything decent or human,” Gueye said by telephone from Kigali. “People are starving to death in their own houses. Babies have starved to death in their own homes. People are in hiding and cannot find food. Hospitals are not functioning.”

Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have died in a week of fighting rooted in the decades-old feud between Rwanda’s majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups. Many have been hacked to death by gangs with machetes, knives and spears.

At least 12,000 people were under U.N. protection at Kigali’s national stadium and at the main King Faisal Hospital. But Gueye said the lightly armed U.N. peacekeepers did not have the resources to cope with the refugees.

There was no safe refuge for people fleeing the ethnic slaughter.

Belgian news media reported that nearly 1,200 Tutsi, more than half of them children, were massacred Wednesday at a church in Musha, 25 miles east of Kigali. It was the largest reported massacre so far in the fighting.

Gueye said the United Nations received reports of the massacre but had not been able to confirm it. “We have received many, many reports of that nature, but our forces are stretched to the maximum,” he said.

Gueye said that after the withdrawal of 428 Belgian soldiers protecting Kigali’s airport, there would be about 2,090 foreign soldiers left in the country.