Rwanda Government Struggles to Gain Cash, Credibility : Africa: The country is bankrupt, its export crops destroyed. But aid flows only to private groups as world weighs whether new leaders can be trusted.

For the past two months, civil servants have gone unpaid and have lived off aid parcels from the World Food Program. The government’s coffers are empty. At the moment, it can afford one ambassador abroad, an envoy at the United Nations.

In the shabby building where the prime minister has installed his office, the telephones don’t work, there’s no electricity and the water doesn’t run. Jagged shards of broken glass litter the stairs, and in the main suite on the second floor, patches of carpet have been ripped from the floor.

“We are working in this ruin,” Prime Minister Faustin Twagirimungu exclaimed one morning last week to visitors, throwing up his hands.

Africa’s newest government is one whose employees nowadays must hitch rides with foreign correspondents to conduct state business. Does any other regime face vaster challenges or problems?

Maimed by civil war and massacres, Rwanda has lost between a half-million and 1 million people, the United Nations estimates. About 2 million other Rwandans fled into exile and are trickling back only slowly. Throughout the country, there are something like 85,000 orphans and abandoned children.

Fifty thousand land mines, sinister leftovers from the civil war, dot the gorgeous, rolling landscape; U.N. peacekeepers say only heavily traveled roads should be considered mine-free. Most of Rwanda’s 1,600 primary schools were pillaged during or after the fighting, and some were booby-trapped.

War and the fastest exodus of refugees in modern times have wiped out this year’s coffee and tea crops, this poor landlocked African country’s largest earners of foreign exchange.

“The situation is gloomy,” Twagirimungu summed up. “No matter what happens here, we need foreign assistance in all domains.”

Yet, Rwanda’s new leaders complain, rich Western countries--including the United States--are hanging back and scrutinizing Rwandan officials’ actions to see if they prove to be as bloodthirsty as the people they ousted from power. For the past two months, they say, they have received no foreign aid.

“It’s a major disappointment,” said Maj. Wilson Rutayisire, a government spokesman. The Rwandans say they can’t even get their hands on the $200 million in assistance pledged by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“There is a condition,” Twagirimungu pointed out, “that Rwanda must pay arrears that amount to $6.5 million. Where do we get the $6.5 million to pay the arrears?”

Meanwhile, employees of the United Nations and foreign relief agencies zip through Kigali’s streets in fleets of white Toyotas and other spanking-new cars. Working in offices powered by diesel-fueled generators, these expatriates can communicate more easily via satellite telephone and fax with their home offices in Geneva or New York than Twagirimungu’s subordinates can phone across town.

An entire alphabet soup’s worth of U.N. agencies and foreign charities has arrived on military transports and special charters to deal with the emergency needs of Rwandans, especially those who fled their homes. When a cholera epidemic broke out in the squalid refugee camps across the border, in the Zairian town of Goma, some of those organizations rushed to the rescue.

Now about to begin its third month in power, Twagirimungu’s government of “national unity” is struggling to piece together a shattered economy and society, feeling the outside world is largely indifferent, if not suspicious.

Twagirimungu and the rest of Rwanda’s leaders are now in power because the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front’s army routed the old government in a 3 1/2-month war that ended in July. “Civil war, not negotiation, decided the issue,” is the laconic summary one official of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda scrawled on a lecture pad in the briefing room at the U.N. peacekeepers’ headquarters.

Proclaiming magnanimity in victory, the RPF implemented a power-sharing plan that had been agreed to by the rebels and the late President Juvenal Habyarimana in the northern Tanzanian city of Arusha on Aug. 3, 1993.

A Council of Ministers was formed of people from five parties as well as two independents. Twagirimungu, 49, a member of the Hutu ethnic majority who was a Canadian-trained university teacher and once ran a trucking company in the western city of Cyangugu, became its head. He is not from the RPF but leads another party, the Democratic Republican Movement.

Simultaneously, though, the RPF created a powerful executive not mentioned in the Arusha accord and awarded itself the presidency and vice presidency. Among the ministerial portfolios, it grabbed most of the heavyweights: defense, public service, interior, health, transport and telecommunications, rehabilitation, women’s affairs, youth and sports.

“They have really turned around the concept of power sharing,” one openly skeptical diplomat here said. In Rwanda, anyone who carries a gun as part of his government job, in the army or police, now appears to be under the control of the RPF.

That is one of the reasons for the continued hesitation by many countries, including the United States, to provide badly needed support to Rwanda’s fledgling government at the same time they are lavishly doling out aid funds to help feed, resettle, educate and heal ordinary citizens.

The main reservation appears to be that unless the government does much more to reassure the Hutus, the vast majority of refugees will stay in the foul camps in Zaire and Tanzania, and stability will not return to the region.

For the Clinton Administration, at least two conditions must be met before Rwanda’s government is deemed to merit large-scale assistance.

As stipulated at Arusha, the RPF’s army must integrate officers and soldiers from the now-exiled force that it defeated, and a new National Assembly to be formed must include representatives of the former ruling party, Habyarimana’s National Revolutionary Movement for Development, commonly known as MRND in its French-language initials.

Such pressure has been persistent, if discreet. “I’ve never seem a written document,” Twagirimungu said.

But he and other Rwandan officials don’t hide their outrage at demands that they adhere to an agreement that predates the war, as well as the massacres last April and May masterminded by officials of the former government and the MRND’s youth wing, the Interahamwe.

“We are not going to negotiate with killers,” the prime minister said.

In the face of foreign demands that his government become more “broad-based,” Twagirimungu said he tried to enlist some “innocent people” from the old ruling party, including a former defense minister and the former ambassadors to Uganda and Canada.

But they refused, he said. “If people don’t really want to serve their country, we can’t fight, but there are millions of other Rwandans who could serve better,” Twagirimungu said.

Lines of authority are still being demarcated inside Rwanda’s new leadership. But at home as well as abroad, many people are carefully watching what sort of role Paul Kagame, 37, the soft-voiced vice president and defense minister, will play.

A 6-foot-3, painfully thin member of the Tutsi minority that was targeted in last spring’s genocide, Kagame now roars through the capital in a Mercedes jeep painted camouflage green, accompanied by a military escort worthy of a head of state. Many believe the former guerrilla commander, who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front army to victory, is the real power behind the throne.

Because of the great number of Tutsi fighters in Kagame’s force and in the RPF, further questions are being raised abroad about whether Hutus--85% of Rwanda’s population before the massacres and mass flight--are equitably represented in the country’s new order. Before the bloodletting, in which they were massively the victims, Tutsis made up only 15% of Rwanda’s population.

“ ‘Tutsi-dominated government’--I frankly hate this expression,” Twagirimungu said. “This is a Rwandan government.” Most of his ministers, he said, are Hutu.

But in Africa, the leader of the army has often determined who really rules. Tacitly recognizing this, the Arusha pact called for the RPF and the old government to evenly split the officer corps but for the rebels to supply only 40% of the troops and the government the remainder.

Clearly, nothing close to an amalgamation of the old rival forces is taking place, although scattered officers and men of the defeated Rwandan government forces have joined the RPF’s army. And the victors seem in no hurry to demobilize.

On Kigali’s Revolution Street, the young men in natty berets and mismatched uniforms from the Rwandan Patriotic Front army stand guard round the clock.

Maj. Rutayisire, the government spokesman, said there was a plan to get “children” out of the army and everybody else into barracks but that its implementation would depend on “the security situation.”

Meanwhile, Rwanda’s broke government is trying to cope. Many government employees have rallied to its support, Twagirimungu said. But since the new regime has been in power, there has been no money to pay them. Before they fled, the country’s former rulers cleaned out the vaults of the Rwandan National Bank.

Now “people don’t get their salaries--they can’t even get soap to wash themselves,” Twagirimungu said.

Private banks were likewise looted and remain closed. Hoarding their Rwandan francs to pay for essentials--many of which, from rice to gasoline, have doubled in price since April--people are waiting for Twagirimungu’s government to issue a new currency. He declined to say when that will happen.