Soldiers in Rwanda Rape, Kill Civilians

Rwandan soldiers raped and hacked to death civilians while battles with rebels raged for an 11th day in the capital city of Kigali after the breakdown of cease-fire talks, witnesses said Sunday.

“It is like the mayhem has gathered pace. There are massacres all over the place. The army’s delight is to murder civilians, while civilians turn on each other in ethnic revenge,” said one witness trapped in Kigali.

He said in one incident soldiers tied the hands of civilians behind their backs and then butchered them with machetes, or just “emptied round after round as if on target practice.”

“Sometimes people pleaded for their lives for 20 to 30 minutes, then the soldiers just shot them dead,” he said. “Women are in trouble; they are raped first, then killed.”

Savage fighting continued for control of strategic hilltops around the city. No one appeared to be in control of Kigali, and army units and rebels fought with heavy artillery, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, the witness said by telephone.

About 3,600 rebels had infiltrated the city, but army units and the presidential guard were still resisting fiercely.

An interim Rwandan government official said cease-fire talks that began Friday between rebels and army units had stalled over stringent conditions each party set ahead of negotiations.

“We are not talking just now,” the official said.

The interim government has been rejected as “a clique of murderers” by the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.

In neighboring Burundi, former President Cyprian Ntayamira and two ministers were given a state burial Saturday. They were killed along with Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana when a rocket brought down their plane in Rwanda on April 6.

Habyarimana’s death sparked the orgy of ethnic violence in Rwanda between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups, which have a long history of enmity. Thousands of people have died in Kigali and the countryside.

A Belgian armed forces spokesman said Belgium’s 420 U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda can start withdrawing overland with a convoy of about 150 vehicles on Tuesday.