Rwanda’s Simmering Conflict Raises Fears of New Ethnic War

While the government is downplaying a deadly surge in rebel violence in northwestern Rwanda, concerns are rising over this country’s stability and the failure of the Rwandan army to quell a slow-burning conflict that some observers fear could explode into ethnic war.

Rwandan officials say they take the rebel Hutus’ killing sprees seriously, but they insist that the individuals involved are not organized and are devoid of any political objective.

“We don’t think we are fighting an army,” Rwandan Interior Minister Sheik Abdul Karim Harelimana said. “We are fighting just bandits. . . . I assure you that we can contain the situation.”

But what started late last year as random attacks against a community leader, farmer or motorist here and there has now turned into big raids on supposedly secure commune offices, prisons and refugee camps.

The violence--which is keeping farmers from growing badly needed food, preventing children from going to school, disrupting international relief programs and government efforts to build roads and boost the local economy--has been worst in the northwest, near the provinces of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi.

“Now they are killing more people than they did in the past,” said Josue Kayijaho, who heads an umbrella association of Rwandan human rights groups. “The situation is more serious in those prefectures than in the past.”

The most recent rebel attack occurred Thursday at a refugee camp in Mudende, near Gisenyi about 60 miles northwest of the Rwandan capital of Kigali. The incident left at least 234 people dead and as many wounded, primarily by machetes and nail-studded clubs.

United Nations refugee workers were trying Friday to relocate the Tutsi refugees who survived the attack, and relatives and residents began to bury the victims in common graves, Associated Press reported.

Quoting a military official, AP said Hutu rebels raided a jail holding imprisoned comrades hours before they attacked the refugee camp and slaughtered the Tutsi refugees.

An unknown number of Hutus--both attackers and inmates--were killed in the Hutu rebel raid Thursday on Mutura jail, where 407 rebels were imprisoned within shouting distance of the refugee camp, said Col. Kayumba Nyamwasa, head of the northeast military region. All the inmates either escaped or were killed.

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Nyamwasa said the army was prepared to defend the jail, which has been targeted by the rebels three times this month. But he said the slaughter at the refugee camp took his small garrison by surprise.

This was the second attack on Mudende camp since August, when more than 100 refugees were hacked to death or fatally shot during a raid also blamed on Hutu rebels.

The refugees, Congolese Tutsis, had fled the Masisi region of neighboring Congo in mid-1996 to escape attacks by Hutu rebels, who were then based in camps in eastern Congo, formerly known as Zaire.

Meanwhile, clashes were also reported in Rwanda’s southwestern region of Cyangugu, when about 500 gunmen crossed from Congo the day after they attacked the Congolese town of Bukavu just across the border.

These recent assaults came on the heels of a daring raid earlier this month on a prison in the central town of Gitarama, in which 500 prisoners were freed.

The number of insurgents and the source of the extent of their arms remain unclear. But officials put the number between 30,000 and 130,000 and say the insurgents are probably camping in the jungles of Congo.

The rebels--for the most part former Rwandan Hutu soldiers and militia members--had left Rwanda en masse, fearing reprisals for the 1994 Hutu slaughter of more than 800,000 people, most of them Tutsis. The Rwandan Hutus returned late last year when more than 1 million Hutu civilians were repatriated.

“At the bottom of this is definitely hard-core militia and army,” said Patrick Mazimhaka, Rwandan minister of state in the president’s office. “We knew it was only a matter of time, a matter of reorganizing” before they launched another attack.

He noted that the government was also “determined to fight back and make it difficult for these people to operate, while leaving doors open for them to surrender.”

At this stage, such a scenario seems unlikely, and concern has been raised over the failure of Rwanda’s 50,000-strong army to crush the rebels once and for all.

Rwandan officials dismiss claims that their army is overextended because it is helping to police neighboring Congo, where Rwanda intervened last year to help topple the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and install a new government under Laurent Kabila.

“That might have been the case at the beginning of the year, but certainly today it would be beyond us to think Rwanda is thin on the ground,” Mazimhaka said. “The number of soldiers in Congo is not significant enough to have an impact” in Rwanda.

In Kinshasa, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ordered David Scheffer, the Clinton administration’s chief expert on war crimes, to investigate the Rwanda massacre. She told a news conference in the capital of the neighboring Congo that Scheffer will try to determine what happened in the refugee camp.

Kabila, who shared the news conference with Albright, complained that the United Nations seemed less interested in the latest killings--blamed on renegade Hutu soldiers from the deposed government of Rwanda--than it was in earlier attacks blamed on Tutsi troops from the Rwandan and Congolese armies.

Mazimhaka said the Rwandan army’s counteroffensive against the rebels has been blunted because they have blended in with the civilian population, moved from village to village and used guerrilla tactics.

“Any good army can be challenged by operations of this nature,” Mazimhaka said. “A great army cannot say we’ll cordon off and shoot everything in sight.”

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The Rwandan Patriotic Army, which has a record for largely maintaining discipline, has recently been accused of committing human right violations while attempting to quell the insurgency.

In September, Amnesty International reported that at least 6,000 people, mostly unarmed civilians returning to the country, have been killed in Rwanda this year--by Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated army or by opposition groups from the Hutu majority.

Harelimana, the interior minister, said his government had launched a program to “mobilize people to disassociate themselves with these killers.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Kinshasa, Congo, contributed to this report.