Abstract
- In Rwanda, increasingly frightening testimonies point to a massive exodus of civilians fleeing the civil war to seek refuge in neighboring Burundi. An ethnic war between the Hutu and the Tutsi but also a political war.
- In Rwanda there is an exodus. An exodus of such magnitude that it has been described as a major humanitarian disaster by the Red Cross. Half a million people fled the country, crossed the rivers. Not all of them were able to cross into Burundi so they flowed back to Tanzania where the UNHCR reports queues eight kilometers long.
- In the camps there are always the same wounded, the bandaged neck hiding the machete blow which missed its target. In Rwanda the massacres continue. According to one of the rare European witnesses still on the spot, an ICRC delegate whom we have just contacted in Kigali, a new massacre took place today in Gitarama, to the south of the capital, where the provisional government folded. Philippe Gaillard: "I don't think there is a single prefecture in Rwanda that has escaped the killings. There is a manhunt, for ethnic reasons, for political reasons".
- For political reasons, refugees are beginning to dare to talk about it like this man, one of the rare opponents of the regime in place to have been able to save his skin. Alphonse-Marie Nkubito: "It's not even an ethnic massacre. It's a political operation. It's a political game that was played between those who didn't want democratic change, that is to say the presidential movement, and the opposition. In fact the presidential movement wanted to put an end to all these attempts at democracy and they succeeded. If they caught me, even today, they would kill me even though I am a Hutu!".
- Hutu, like this woman: the former Prime Minister massacred in the early hours by extremists of his own ethnic group. Extremists who did not want to share power with the Tutsi. The Hutu democrats therefore joined the persecuted Tutsi in death and in the exodus.