Title
Quatre hommes et quatre femmes de la minorité tutsi viennent d'être massacrés à coups de machettes, sous les yeux d'étrangers évacués. Les soldats français en armes, qui assuraient la sécurité du convoi, n'ont pas bougé
Abstract
- This morning 500 meters from the airport, eight bodies lie in their blood. Four men and four women from the Tutsi minority have just been massacred with machetes, under the eyes of evacuated foreigners. The armed French soldiers, who ensured the security of the convoy, did not move. Their mission clearly specifies that they must not side with any of the belligerents.
- It is in a city delivered to the fights that the French soldiers carry out the last evacuations. Submachine guns but also grenades, mortars sometimes punctuate the call of those who can finally leave. A few meager luggage as the only memory of the years spent in Rwanda. And then it's off to the rutted track that bypasses the city. The only one safe for traumatized people. A blonde woman: "They killed a lot of people. It was the presidential guard especially who started. Soldiers, the army, the gendarmes. There were a lot of civilians too. They killed a lot of people. We saw a lot of people we buried. They made huge holes to bury them."
- Then they win in close ranks the military planes which since yesterday do not cease to make rotations with the close countries. Evacuations which should continue in the coming days even if almost all the French have already left.
- At the French Embassy, we also sort out the past. We burn the archives as if we were also planning to leave.
- Many foreigners on the way out wondered if the 2,500 UN soldiers present here were very useful when they allowed such massacres to take place. Yet with the departure of foreigners, the UN remains the only force present here without being sure to avoid the scenario already experienced in Somalia or Liberia.