170 Massacred in Rwanda Hospital as Talks Fail, Fighting Continues

About 170 patients and staff, helpless in a southern Rwandan hospital, were killed Sunday in the latest massacre in that central African country’s civil war, an international medical aid group said.

Doctors with the international relief group Doctors Without Borders reported the killing from Butare, in southern Rwanda.

“This has been the most vicious single incident in this current wave of violence. It was a direct attack on civilians in what is usually a neutral place,” said Anne-Marie Huby, a spokeswoman for the organization in London.

The reports of the massacre came as Rwandan rebels and government forces exchanged heavy mortar and gunfire in the capital. In neighboring Tanzania, efforts to mediate an end to more than two weeks of bloodletting failed.

“The fighting has been exceptionally heavy today,” U.N. spokesman Abdul Kabia said in the capital, Kigali. “The fire is very, very heavy.”

Kabia, interviewed by telephone, said government representatives to the peace talks did not show up when the United Nations sent a plane Saturday to bring them to Tanzania.

Military officers in Kigali told the United Nations on Sunday that they were unable to contact officials in Gitarama, the town southwest of the capital where the government fled the fighting two weeks ago.

In the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, where the talks were to be held, Tanzanian Foreign Ministry official Kassim Mwawado said: “There will be no talks for sure. The Rwandan Patriotic Front representative has just left.”

Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi had invited Rwanda’s government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front for talks on ending the carnage that has killed an estimated 100,000 people.

Two million people have fled their homes, and thousands more are barricaded in buildings in desperate efforts to escape the bloodletting, which began a day after the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi died in a mysterious plane crash April 6 in Kigali.

U.N. relief agencies have pulled their staff out of the country to escape the slaughter, leaving the International Committee of the Red Cross and a handful of other private aid organizations to cope.

On Sunday, Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Huby said the group is pulling its staff out of southern Rwanda, where the hospital massacre occurred.

Butare lies about 15 miles from the frontier with Burundi, and thousands of refugees fleeing Rwanda’s civil war have been trapped because the border is closed.