Uganda Terror Aimed at Tourism, U.S. Says

The Rwandan rebels who killed eight foreigners on a gorilla-watching trek in Uganda were intent on scaring off tourists in a country that depends on the hard cash the adventure-lovers bring, the Clinton administration said Wednesday. But a survivor from California insisted that she will go back.

“It’s not the Ugandans who did this to us,” a visibly shaken Linda Adams, who lives in the upscale Bay Area town of Alamo, said upon arriving at San Francisco’s airport Wednesday.

U.S. and Ugandan authorities said the killers were members of the ethnic Hutu militia blamed for the 1994 genocidal rampage that left more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in neighboring Rwanda dead. Since that bloodletting, the militia has sought to undermine the current Tutsi-led government in Rwanda and its ally Uganda.

“These rebels deliberately marched into southwestern Uganda with the deliberate intent to sow terror among Western tourists, perhaps to discourage Western tourists from traveling to that part of Uganda,” State Department spokesman James Foley said. Two Americans from Oregon were among those killed in Monday’s attack.

Describing her jungle ordeal, Adams said she had her clothes on but was shoeless when she heard popping sounds and voices outside her tent.

“I came out of my tent and walked right into” four armed men, Adams said. The 52-year-old retired businesswoman said she never realized her life was in danger even after the gunmen ordered her to hand over her money and forced her and other tourists to march up a heavily forested mountain.

“My first reaction was, I hope no one is shooting the gorillas,” Adams said. She said she thought the French-speaking men armed with machetes and AK-47s were robbers or poachers. “I don’t know that I really realized that I was in danger.”

Although Adams, who escaped with her life by faking an asthma attack, said she had not been given any warnings by either her tour company or any other official about the dangers she could face in the region, her father said in an interview Wednesday that he had worried about her going to that part of Africa.

“I said: ‘That’s a place of a lot of uprisings. The Hutus and the Tutsis are fighting.’ But that was in conversation, and we just went on to something else,” Jack Adams said. “I’ve since found out that she did tell her sister that perhaps it was a risky place to be going to.”

Adams’ father said it was her fifth trip to view animals in the wild since she sold her book- and magazine-distributing business several years ago. “She was in Africa about three months ago and decided she wanted to see the gorillas,” he said.

The elder Adams said his daughter has taken expeditions to the Galapagos Islands and to other remote areas to view polar bears and colonies of seals, and that as far as he knows, she has never been in physical danger on any of her previous journeys.

British newspapers reported that the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had received warnings of possible attacks by Hutu militiamen on U.S. and British tourists but didn’t pass along the information to the governments of the two countries. Tony Lloyd, a minister in Britain’s Foreign Office, said his government will ask Uganda about the reports.

White House national security spokesman David Leavy said the administration “did not receive any specific warnings.” He declined to comment on the British reports that Uganda suppressed the warnings to avoid damaging its tourism industry.

In Kampala, the Ugandan capital, Museveni conceded that his government had not done enough to ensure the safety of tourists visiting Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park to track the rare mountain gorillas. But he put much of the blame on park rangers, who he said failed to alert soldiers to a possible attack by Rwandan rebels.

“The park authorities should have foreseen this problem and asked for support,” he said, according to Associated Press. “We therefore regret this mistake.”

A second team of FBI agents was sent to Uganda to assist in the investigation of the killings, the State Department’s Foley said Wednesday, bringing the number of agents to seven.

Foley said area governments were cooperating, but he warned that the region’s dense forests would make it difficult to track down the attackers, Reuters news agency reported.

Survivors of the massacre quoted their captors as saying Americans were targeted as revenge for what the rebels termed Washington’s role in the collapse of the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government five years ago. In notes left on the tourists’ bodies, the rebels wrote: “Americans and British, we don’t want you on our land. You support our enemy.”

That assertion astonished many U.S. observers because the United States failed to send in troops to prevent the genocide by the Hutus. President Clinton said last year that the United States and the rest of the world must share the blame for the bloodletting because of their inaction.

Administration officials said a more likely motive for the attack is economic. Uganda earns substantial hard currency from tourists who visit the rain forest made famous in the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”

“This will have an impact,” said Constance Freeman, director of African studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Increasingly, tourism is important for Uganda. They are working on high-end tourism that produces a lot of money from those who come.”

Tourism is an even larger part of the economies of Kenya and Tanzania, two neighboring countries in danger of losing the business of tourists who may decide to skip all of Africa until their safety can be guaranteed. The rebels may not have targeted Kenya and Tanzania, but the damage to those governments could be severe nevertheless.

Freeman recalled that earlier this decade a series of criminal attacks on tourists visiting Kenya resulted in a sharp decline in that country’s tourist revenue. She said the industry has since recovered, and predicted that the damage from the latest incident would fade over time as long as there aren’t more killings.

But for Linda Adams, the memory of her ordeal may never fade. At her news conference Wednesday, she told how she escaped death, saying she knew she would not be able to keep up with the men and their captives on the hike up the mountain.

“The previous day I did go on a gorilla hike, 2 1/2 hours straight up” the same mountain the men were ordering her to hike again, she said. So Adams faked an asthma attack, waving her inhaler in the air as she bent double.

One of the tour guides bent over her and whispered, “Make it good.”

The guide told the gunmen that Adams could not continue, and she was allowed to go back to the camp.

It was hours later that Adams learned that several of those who continued up the hill were hacked to death by their captors. “I feel very lucky,” she said. “In retrospect . . . I know that I would not be here today if I did not do that [fake the asthma attack]. I was the oldest and the slowest.”

Asked why she thought the gunmen let her go, Adams said she thought it was probably because “I am a female with gray hair and they have some respect for that.”

Although the U.S. government deplored the potential damage to African economies from the attack, it in effect amplified the impact by urging Americans to stay away from western Uganda and the gorilla parks for now.

“When something like this takes place, then we owe it to American citizens to warn them not to travel there any longer,” Foley said. “How long that warning would remain in effect would depend on events to follow: on the assessment of the threat, the assessment of what measures the authorities are putting in place--not only to chase down the perpetrators but to ensure that region becomes more secure and such events cannot happen again. It’s difficult to forecast when we’ll be able to revise our warning in that regard.”

The killings will no doubt tarnish the reputation of Museveni, one of Washington’s favorite African leaders because of his commitment to free-market economics and because he curtailed the human rights abuses that marked Uganda under the brutal regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote.

“It was a real affront to Museveni,” said Freeman, the Africa specialist. “It is a potential smudge on his international image, which he has worked very hard on.”

Walter H. Kansteiner III, a former National Security Council Africa expert, said the killings are “another black eye for Africa.”

“This is terribly unfortunate because there have been lot of wonderful successes,” said Kansteiner, now a partner in the foreign policy group headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

Kempster reported from Washington, Curtius from San Francisco.