Abstract
- News abroad: hard to imagine the horror of a civil war in Rwanda which is more akin to genocide. Now we are talking about 500,000 dead. While waiting for the UN Security Council to send peacekeepers, the fighting continues.
- On the main road which winds towards Kigali, the quiet image of the villagers. And then, suddenly in front of them, everything can change. Barrage: the army is suspicious, the soldiers are nervous. A misunderstood word or gesture can degenerate very quickly. The interim government itself recognizes that the regular army commits massacres and abuses.
- Further on, above Kigali, this is what we still hear a month after the start of the civil war. The army bombards the positions of the Tutsi rebels. These rebels are not angels: they also massacre the enemy ethnic group, the Hutu.
- Between the two camps in the line of sight of the shells, the makeshift hospital set up by the Red Cross. Many relatives were massacred. They have sometimes been cut off a foot or a hand with a machete. Others were beaten until they bled.
- In Kigali Bernard Kouchner met the representatives of the two factions: regular Hutu army and Tutsi rebels. Bernard Kouchner: "It's one of the real humanitarian disasters of this time. So, using the word 'genocide' is not my habit. But these people were killed for what they were! Not for what they did! And so that's the definition of genocide".
- Provisional estimate: more than 500,000 dead. Hour after hour, day and night, no respite. Every day, after hours of walking, thousands of exhausted refugees reach the other side of the border in Burundi. They are now among the six million refugees in Africa.