U.N. Fears New ‘Cycle of War’ in Rwanda

In the most alarming sign to date that Rwanda’s agony is set to resume, young men carrying stocks of rations and weapons are slipping into the country’s forest borderlands in what appear to be “classic preparations for guerrilla war,” the top U.N. official here said.

In his weekly situation report to U.N. headquarters, obtained by The Times, Shahryar Khan, special representative of the United Nations in Rwanda, gave the frankest assessment yet of recent security problems that spokesmen for the U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda had vaguely described as “incidents.”

If action is not taken by the United Nations and Rwanda’s new leaders, Khan said, “The cycle of war, and possibly of massacres, that Rwanda has known could continue.”

Khan’s report, sent by fax to New York, said “military-age males, along with large supplies of rations, water and arms, have been observed coming across the borders of Zaire and Burundi into Sector 4 (the southwest) of the country” in the period from Aug. 29 through Sept. 4.

“Areas of concern,” Khan said, are the Kibungo prefecture, especially the area of Rusumo, the Gishwati Natural Forest, the Nyunge Natural Forest and the Akagera National Park.

“These forests are dense and difficult to patrol,” Khan said, implying that they are being used as hide-outs by armed infiltrators hostile to Rwanda’s new government and that stopping them would be extremely difficult.

Aid agencies reported that on Sunday night or Monday morning, a family of 15 Tutsi exiles returning from Uganda was slaughtered in the Byumba prefecture bordering on the Akagera park. There was no proof of who was responsible, but the agency said the killings bore all the hallmarks of a massacre by the ousted party’s youth wing, the Interhamwe.

The U.N. official’s report, which termed the security situation as a whole in this pain-racked Central African country “stable,” did not say how many men with weapons had been spotted. But the infiltration occurs against the backdrop of the phased-in introduction of troops from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) army to the southwest for the first time.

On Tuesday, the new government sent about 150 soldiers into a protection zone set up by French troops in the southwest. The French last month withdrew from the zone, where half a million Hutus have sought U.N. protection against feared reprisals for the massacre of at least 500,000 people, mostly civilians from Rwanda’s Tutsi minority.

The new, Tutsi-led government, installed by the victorious RPF rebels in July and now trying to consolidate its victory, has promised it will not tolerate such reprisals.

For the previous two weeks, the only troops in the region had been three battalions of U.N. peacekeepers from other African countries, which officials said totaled about 2,000 troops.

Khan’s report was a tacit admission that even the presence of the detachments under the U.N. flag had not stopped enemies of Rwanda’s new government from gearing up to resume the civil war they lost in July.

The ousted Rwandan government of hard-line Hutus fled with the bulk of the refugees into Zaire, and Khan said in his summary that, according to unconfirmed reports, as many as 10,000 soldiers of the former Rwandan government forces had followed with half of their weaponry.

“About two-thirds of the soldiers were recruited during the civil war and are perceived to be poorly trained,” Khan said. “There have also been reports that Zairian soldiers are training these forces.” He stressed that the reports had not been confirmed.

“To counter the development of guerrilla warfare/border incursions,” Khan recommended several steps, including broadening the support base of the new government, which its foes see as Tutsi-dominated despite the presence of a Hutu president and prime minister.

“If these efforts at reconciliation are not made, the cycle of war, and possibly of massacres, that Rwanda has known could continue,” Khan said. “In addition, the risk of regional involvement in the conflict is real, and thus the problems of power-sharing and ethnic equality must be addressed inside Rwanda before they infiltrate and involve neighboring countries.”

By the risk of broader involvement, Khan may have been referring to the extension of the conflict to Burundi--where a similar ethnic feud has long existed between Tutsis and Hutus--or to Zaire.

Also on Wednesday, U.N. human rights investigators said they received credible evidence that at least 50 people from villages in the country’s center, including returning Rwandan refugees, had vanished without a trace after being detained by soldiers from the new government.

Some of the arrests took place as recently as Sunday, said Benedicte Giaever, field coordinator for the U.N. Secretariat’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs. “The thing is, no one knows what has happened to these people,” Giaever said.

The fear that the government will conduct reprisals is one reason so few of the refugees who fled en masse into Zaire this summer are returning. On Tuesday, U.N. relief officials in Rwanda said the flow back homeward was averaging 1,000 a day--a fraction of the more than 1 million Rwandans now in Zaire.

As part of a five-member team, Giaever traveled to the villages of Ruhango and Rugogwe in Gitarama prefecture on Wednesday following persistent reports that from 30 to 75 people disappeared in August, as well as two more Sunday.

“There are two possibilities: They have either been killed or are alive in detention,” Giaever said.

In rural Ruhango, Giaever said one motive behind the detention seemed to be property disputes between new settlers and the returning refugees. “It’s about property, old disputes, cows,” she said.

In some cases, she said, it appeared the new occupants of the homes and small farm plots had gone to the army and had soldiers arrest the returnees, most of whom were members of the Hutu ethnic majority in whose name the former government ruled.

In contrast, in the poorer farming settlement of Rugogwe, the soldiers seemed to carry out the arrests from lists, she said. That could mean those affected might be suspected of having taken part in this spring’s frenzied massacre of members of the political opposition and Tutsi minority.

Giaever’s findings appeared to indicate that the actions of the soldiers in the Gitarama region villages were carried out without the blessing of Rwanda’s new leaders. On Aug. 17, she said, Vice President and Defense Minister Paul Kagame, the Tutsi who led the rebel army to victory, held a general meeting in the area.

“It seems like the higher levels of the RPF are trying to keep a very clean line,” Giaever said. After Kagame’s visit, some units of the RPF army were pulled out of the area and control was handed to civil administrators, she said.