Rwanda Death Toll Put at 100,000 : Africa: Unable to halt the bloodshed, U.N. Security Council decides to pull its peacekeeping force out of the country.

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.”

Powerless to halt the bloodshed, the Security Council decided late Thursday to pull the 1,700-member U.N. peacekeeping force out of the country, except for about 270 security guards and military observers.

In a bleak report before the unanimous vote, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote: “There is no prospect of a cease-fire being agreed upon in the coming days.”

He said the 1,705 U.N. peacekeepers now there should either be reinforced by thousands more and authorized to coerce the combatants into a cease-fire, or be mostly withdrawn. He advised against a complete withdrawal, saying that would cause further bloodshed.

U.N. members are reluctant to provide troops for another operation like Somalia, where the United Nations came to be regarded as a hostile force.

Those remaining from the U.N. mission to Rwanda would remain in Kigali, the capital, to try to arrange at least a temporary cease-fire and the resumption of limited humanitarian relief operations, Boutros-Ghali said.

At least half a million people have fled their homes in the central African nation since fighting between the Hutus and the Tutsi broke out two weeks ago. But fewer than 20,000 have crossed into neighboring countries, their traditional sanctuaries in times of trouble.

Rwanda’s interim government, which is dominated by the majority Hutu ethnic group, has put the number of displaced people at 2 million, nearly one-quarter of the population. But most aid agencies consider that figure inflated.

Other aid officials feared the worst.

Heather Wall, in charge of humanitarian affairs at the Canadian Embassy in Nairobi, said the Rwandan army had sealed the country’s borders with Burundi, Zaire and Tanzania.

“The Uganda border is open, but the few people arriving there are in very bad shape, many of them wounded,” she said.

“On the Tanzanian side, there are reports that people trying to get out have been killed by the army,” she added. “There are bodies in the river that marks the border.”

A similar report of bodies clogging the Rusizi River between Rwanda and Zaire came from Catherine Newbury, a professor who specializes in African affairs at the University of North Carolina.

Tony Cavalho of the U.N. Children’s Fund said his office had received reports of makeshift barricades on many roads manned by either Rwandan soldiers or gangs armed with guns, machetes, knives and spears.

There were also fears that Rwanda is edging closer to a deadly outbreak of disease and famine sparked by growing fighting.

The extent of the slaughter is masked by the absence of U.N. or private aid workers in Rwanda’s green, rolling countryside. Virtually all foreigners left last week. Only a handful, from the Red Cross and the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders, remain in the capital, where the orgy of violence began.

The U.N. force’s original mission was to provide a buffer between the Rwandan army, dominated by ethnic Hutus, and the Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The two groups signed a peace accord last August that ended a three-year civil war.

But the truce dissolved when the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, both Hutus, died in a mysterious plane crash April 6. Chaos erupted in Kigali the next day, and the army and the rebels went back to war.