Tina Susman

In Rwanda, Left to Die as Help Passes Them By

 
The Associated Press
June 8, 1994, Wednesday
Monastery Becomes Rwanda's Latest City Of Horror

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

KABGAYI, Rwanda _ There's a madman shouting nonsense in a corner. The bloated body of a government soldier, his eyes wide open in death, is sprawled in a nearby room.

In the middle of a courtyard, a man sits beside a cooking fire, surrounded by buzzing flies, corpses and others on the brink of death.

Six days ago, the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front took control of Kabgayi, the tiny Central African country's largest monastery, where thousands of people had sought shelter from the war, but where hundreds instead met their deaths.

The city monastery has become a nightmare of corpses and several dozen starving victims left behind in the evacuation by the rebels and the Red Cross.

Some have lost their minds, probably driven mad after weeks in this death camp. Others, like Innocent Rudasingwa, are all too aware of their surroundings.

"I don't have any hope," the emaciated man said as he sat with four other people in a filthy room once used as a medical clinic.

They are still here because they could not walk to the vehicles that have come in the last week to evacuate survivors.

Rudasingwa was living happily with his wife and five children in Kigali, the capital about 23 miles to the north, when a machete sliced into his skull on April 8 during an attack by pro-government militiamen.

His wife was killed. His five children have disappeared. His wounds have left his right arm and leg paralyzed.

The university-educated teacher, who is fluent in English and French, ended up here after hospital workers decided it was too dangerous to keep patients in the Kigali hospital.

"At the beginning we received medical assistance, but by the end it dropped. That's why they decided to remove all the patients from here," he said. "Unfortunately, we were unable to get to the trucks."

It is unclear why the Red Cross has not come back for these people. Perhaps they are not aware of them; perhaps they are simply too overloaded with other victims at a Red Cross hospital at Nyanza, about 20 miles away.

The rebels have been evacuating people when they can find transportation, but their priority is winning the war.

"The situation is the same everywhere. It is pretty hard to fight and rescue," said rebel Lt. Tony Kulamio as he wandered through a maze of leaf-and-stick huts on the monastery grounds.

An estimated 200,000 people have died since the Rwandan civil war erupted again on April 6, the day after the deaths of the president and his Burundi counterpart, both Hutus, in a mysterious plane crash.

The government forces are largely from the majority Hutu tribe while the rebel RPF is made up mostly of minority Tutsis.

The vast majority of victims have been civilians killed in widespread massacres, mostly conducted by Hutu militiamen, often backed by soldiers.

Survivors say this area was a concentration camp controlled by government troops and militiamen who each night would choose victims for execution. Others were left without food or water.

Now the huts, tents and a chapel house hundreds of dead or seemingly dead. One girl appeared long dead and lay in her decaying mother's arms on the floor of the chapel, but suddenly she moved.

Rebels bent down and removed the girl from the tangle of corpses. Within two hours, another child and an old man had been pulled from the dead. They were loaded into a truck and driven to safety.

Rudasingwa was not among them. He stayed behind, the stench of a dead man in the next room drifting down the hall. Outside the madman screamed words no one understood and waved his arms wildly.

A few steps away, another man sat staring vacantly at the dead government soldier. When asked why he did not move, the man pushed aside his blanket and showed a bullet-shattered leg.

"We don't survive. We don't eat - it is apparent," Rudasingwa said.

Rebel spokesman Wilson Gumisiriza said these living-dead would be evacuated, but he didn't say when.

"I don't know why the Red Cross is not here. How do you explain this situation?" he said with a shrug. "So, this is how Rwanda is."

The Genocide

May 31, 1994

Quiet Parish Paradise Destroyed By Massacre

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

NYARUBUYE, Rwanda

Once upon a time, the Nyarubuye Parish was a hidden piece of paradise high in the hills near the Tanzanian border, a complex of cool brick and clay buildings surrounded by banana trees and wildflowers.

Today, as many as 20,000 bodies cover the convent and its grounds.

The Roman Catholic parish is the most recently discovered - and possibly the worst - massacre site in the gruesome civil war destroying Rwanda.

Patrols of the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front discovered the legions of dead last week, about a month after seizing the region from government troops.

Nobody knows how many people died here beginning at noon on April 14. The number of bodies covering the parish health clinic, schools, homes, fields, offices and chapel is impossible to guess. But a frightened nun's estimate of 20,000 doesn't seem exaggerated.

Sister Marie Erneste Nyiramuganga, from the Convent of the Sisters of Benebikira, hid in the chapel as the killers struck: shooting, swinging machetes, hurling grenades and bludgeoning with nail-studded clubs. For hours she huddled in a corner as attackers returned four times in one day.

Waves of attackers coming from all sides were joined by several government police officers in uniform, she and several other survivors said Tuesday. Some of the attackers masked their faces with leaves from banana trees.

One of the survivors, 28-year-old Gaspard Ngarambe, spent four months as a seminary student at the parish. On Tuesday, he returned to find the headless corpse of a baby in the room where he read, prayed, wrote, and dreamed.

After stepping around the remains of hundreds of decaying bodies, he reached his room to find the tiny body on the cement floor, among his books, letters, clothes, and several wooden crosses.

Everywhere cadavers lay twisted in a tangle of death - in classrooms, the clinic, the kitchen and among the brilliantly colored bushes of wildflowers.

Some clearly ran for their lives. One man - now just bones and bits of withered skin - lies at the foot of the chapel steps.

Others might have accepted their fate, like the little girl whose shoes were placed carefully side-by-side on a rock near a pile of bodies.

Survivors say the killers were Hutus and separated the crowd into Tutsi and Hutu groups. The Hutus were ordered to kill the Tutsi, and those who refused were killed themselves.

Ngarambe joined a few survivors who fled into the bush, hiding by day and trekking by night toward the Kagera River that marks the border with Tanzania. About 350 people from Nyarubuye made it to a Tanzanian refugee camp, where some remain, he said.

Others, like Ngarambe, have since returned, saying life in the camp was too wretched to endure.

Attacks like those at Nyarubuye Parish have ravaged Rwanda since April 6 when a suspicious plane crash killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a member of the majority Hutu tribe.

A report of a new massacre was received in the capital on Tuesday.

U.N. spokesman Abdul Kabia said 500 people had reportedly been slain in Red Cross refugee camps outside the capital, Kigali, about 90 miles to the west. Most of dead in Kabgayi were also reportedly Tutsis, the minority that has been the main target of attacks by the mainly Hutu government soldiers and civilian militias.

As Ngarambe described his escape, a Hutu in baggy pants and a ski parka walked up the dirt road, his hands held high in surrender. The man, Theogene Biramahire, ran a carpentry shop on the parish grounds and recognized Ngarambe as an old customer.

The man carried a cap of the late Hutu president's party, which includes the Interahamwe militia blamed for most of the massacres. Biramahire said he found the cap and kept it for protection from the blazing sun. He denied killing anyone, although he said he was ordered to do so.

Within an hour, several more Hutu men had come out of the bush, all claiming they did not take part in the massacre and accusing a local Hutu village leader of ordering the killings.

That man, Karamagi Izayi, is still in Nyarubuye and makes no effort to hide. Standing proudly in a dirty, ochre safari suit, Izayi told a small group of journalists he had sheltered Tutsis and was himself on the run from angry Hutus.

In the end, the rebels left the Hutus behind, not believing their stories but realizing there were few left that they might kill.