Rwanda Fighting Rages; Burundi Coup Aborted

Heavy shelling echoed around Rwanda’s blood-soaked hills Monday as rebel forces battled government units blamed for some of the worst mass killings of innocent civilians in this century.

“I don’t know from which direction it is coming, but it is heavy and intermittent,” said Abdul Kabia, executive director of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda. He added that Monday’s fighting followed a “heavy exchange of fire on Sunday night.”

Every day brings news of more massacres. Aid agencies and the United Nations say as many as 100,000 people may have been slaughtered and 2 million displaced in the blood bath.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that troops and gunmen had killed as many as 170 patients and staff at a hospital in southern Rwanda.

Earlier, journalists in rebel-controlled territory just south of the capital, Kigali, came across a pile of 100 decaying corpses in the Nyanza district, as well as more bodies spilling out of mud huts.

Rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, who control most of the north of the country and the northern approaches to the hilly Central African capital, tightened their grip on Kigali before a promised cease-fire.

U.N. sources said the rebels, who are mostly Tutsi, had also encircled the Hutu stronghold of Ruhengeri in the north and had total control of the main northern towns.

Meanwhile, a coup by paratroopers failed in neighboring Burundi when other soldiers, fearing it would trigger an ethnic blood bath like the massacres in Rwanda, refused to take part.

Bujumbura, the Burundian capital, slowly returned to normal after the early morning coup bid failed, witnesses said.

Army chief of staff Col. Jean Bikomagu said that coup organizers and supporters had been arrested and were being questioned by the military high command.