Rwanda Death Toll at 100,000, Red Cross Says
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that more than 100,000 Rwandans may have been killed in the last two weeks of ethnic slaughter and called it a “human tragedy on a scale we have rarely witnessed.”
The report coincided with a recommendation by U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to sharply scale back the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, and with news accounts that the African nation was edging closer to a deadly outbreak of disease and famine sparked by growing fighting.
Human rights groups charged that any withdrawal of U.N. forces would put at risk of massacre more than 20,000 Rwandans who have sought U.N. protection in hospitals and a stadium in Kigali, the capital.
In Tanzania, President Ali Hassan Mwinyi said Thursday that the warring sides would meet in the town of Arusha to try to end the bloodshed.
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