Rwandan Atrocities Ignite Hatreds

Screams of agony ripped through the silence that had blanketed Rwanda’s northwestern Mudende refugee camp as darkness fell and hundreds of rebels brandishing machetes, guns and nail-studded clubs descended upon the refugees, most of them asleep under makeshift tents of plastic sheeting.

Rangwida Ugiriwabo watched in horror as her husband and four children were shot to death, then she scrambled for safety inside a nearby bush. But the attackers spotted her feet and began to chop at her with machetes, slashing her heels and severely lacerating her legs. They tried to slice off her ears, but she covered her head with her hands, and her fingers were sliced instead.

Ugiriwabo was lucky to survive. When Thursday’s orgy of violence led by suspected Rwandan Hutu rebels ended 15 minutes after it had begun, at least 270 Tutsi refugees lay dead.

Now the survivors, hundreds of whom were seriously injured--often by farming tools--are struggling to make sense of their ordeal and figure out how to continue their already shattered lives. And although many say they would not personally seek revenge on their assailants, they admit that they most likely will never forgive them.

“They did not have pity on me. How can I forgive?” Ugiriwabo asked Saturday as she lay on a bed in a makeshift tent ward at Gisenyi Hospital, 60 miles northwest of the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and 15 miles from Mudende. “I am alone. I have no children. My husband is dead.”

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Such sentiments have convinced some observers that the cycle of ethnic bloodshed that has dogged this tiny Central African nation of 7 million for decades might never end. Every new attack appears to breed new and intensified resentment.

The Mudende massacre was the latest incident in a recently stepped-up insurgency campaign in Rwanda’s northwest by Hutu rebels who are presumed to be mostly ex-soldiers of the formerly Hutu-dominated Rwandan army.

These Hutus left Rwanda in droves in 1994, fearing reprisals for the slaughter that year of more than 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, but they returned late last year with more than a million Hutu civilians. Many Mudende survivors--Congolese nationals who fled the Masisi region of neighboring Congo in mid-1996 to escape Hutu rebel raids there--believe that they were assaulted simply because they are Tutsis by ethnicity.

“It is hatred,” said Rwamucyo Semariba, 44, who together with his wife and four children survived Thursday’s blood bath despite a grenade landing in their hut. “There were also some Hutus in the camp, but they were not attacked.”

The Semariba family scattered in different directions. Eight-year-old Nyirakamana got separated from her father. The rebels caught up with her, chopped at her head with a panga and left her for dead.

Bleeding, she managed to find a place to hide. The attackers came again. This time, they asked her what ethnic group she belonged to.

“She said Hutu and saved herself,” Semariba recounted as his daughter lay asleep in a hospital bed.

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Rwandan officials say containing the rebels has been made more difficult by Rwandan Hutu civilians, many of whom are relatives of the insurgents.

“There is a problem with the population, who are supporting the infiltrators,” said Ndagijimana Epimaque, governor of Gisenyi province. “That’s typical of a continuation of the genocide” against Tutsis.

Some say this explains why the rebels would also hack to death helpless babies and infants: It is a way of ensuring that no Tutsi child grows old enough to take revenge.

In one ward at Gisenyi Hospital--where less than a dozen qualified medical personnel struggled to cope with a patient population that has doubled to about 500 in the space of a week--seven children ages 1 to 10 lay semiconscious Saturday, their severed limbs and battered heads wrapped in bloody swaddlings.

Their parents were either dead or missing, and as with the remaining 17,000 or so refugees who used to live in Mudende and are now being housed at a nearby transit camp, it was still unclear where these children will eventually be settled.

“They want to go back home, but it’s not safe for them to go back home,” said Robert Parnell, a UNICEF security advisor. “In the Masisi region right now, it’s the Wild West.”

While the government of Rwanda claims to be making strong progress in reconciling its divided population after the 1994 massacre, Interior Minister Sheikh Abdul Karim Harelimana said last week that it is “natural” some genocide survivors might hold a grudge against those who slaughtered their family and friends. But he said the government is trying to dilute the hostility.

“We do our best to ask people to live together,” he said. “We ask them to wait for justice to do its work. This does not mean our people became angels. There are some of them who are not good. There are some of them who are not tolerant. Sometimes we hear of revenge.”

Patrick Mazimhaka, minister of state in the president’s office, noted that reconcilation is not just a matter of the two groups “shaking hands” and “smiling at each other.”

The state minister said the barriers between Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis will be be broken down and hatred diminished “when the population can look at each other without subtitles, but just as Rwandans--without categorizing people.”

Augustin Sakindi said he had little faith that such a day will come soon. Coughing up blood as he lay in a hospital bed recovering from a stab wound, a gunshot and the grenade blast that blew up his wife and three children, the 34-year-old refugee said burying the animosity he holds for his family’s murderers will be almost impossible.

“They are wicked people,” Sakindi said. “I cannot forgive.”