Abstract
- In Rwanda the numbers clash: the figure is put forward at 100 to 200,000 victims and from one to two million refugees. Imprecise information but which can be explained by the chaos that the country is experiencing: the massacres perpetrated between two rival ethnic groups who have been vying for power for decades.
- 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.
- UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali suggests considering the use of force to stop the killings in Rwanda, "even if that, he says, requires reinforcements from blue helmets".
- Rony Brauman: "It is indeed a butchery. But it is not a butchery which is due to inter-ethnic clashes. It is a butchery which is due to a real unilateral massacre! The Jews and the Aryans, they do not did not throw themselves on each other to cut each other's throats. The Aryans, the Nazis, killed Jews. There, you have a faction, which is the presidential guard, which, on the occasion of the assassination of their President, for which they themselves are probably responsible, wanted to radicalize the regime a little more. And as soon as the plane fell, in the hours that followed, the massacre was launched by well-identified militias, by a faction of the army and by the Praetorian Guard of the President. And it is they who criss-cross the country and who, with grenades, machetes, machine guns, shoot at anything that looks like a Tutsi, because they believe that the Tutsi are a bit like the Jews of Rwanda, and what looks like a Hutu opponent whom they know very well because Rwanda is a small country where everyone knows everything about everyone. […] Interference is a non-issue. When a private, independent humanitarian organization, which has no other objective than to bring relief to men and women in distress, crosses a border, it does not interfere. In the name of the duty of humanitarian initiative, she will bring relief to people who are going to die. When a State, on the other hand, crosses a border, when it establishes relations with another State, hostile, friendly, etc., it is playing politics. So if his interference is political, fine! At that point we are in another area. But what I do not believe in at all, what I find carrying very heavy perverse effects in addition, is the so-called humanitarian interference practiced by the States".