Abstract
- In Rwanda, General Jean-Claude Lafourcade, commander of Operation Turquoise, calls for help: the French troops need help to collect corpses in the city of Goma as there are so many of them.
- The mass graves are full. Hundreds of abandoned bodies pile up along the roads. The French army has just received authorization to bury them. It was she who, until this day, collected and buried the dead. Over 1,000 a day.
- In the camps the survivors do not have enough energy. They are engaged in another fight, that for life. The Tutsi are leading the most difficult battle: they must fight against the epidemic but also against all those who still seek to massacre them. Soldiers from the former Rwandan government camp a few kilometers away and don't hesitate to get their hands on anything that looks like a Tutsi.
- The bravest, terrified, try to take the way home. They ask UNHCR officials or French soldiers to escort them to the border. 40,000 Tutsi and Hutu mixed would march today towards the direction of Ruhengeri. 90,000 others are said to have left the area controlled by the French army. The road that brings them home is long, several days of walking. They will need to find food and drink.
- Those they leave behind keep their eyes riveted on the jumbo jets arriving in Goma. The Americans have still not resumed their drops, but they have succeeded in building a new airstrip and delivering a wastewater treatment plant. In a few days, it will be able to filter the water from Lake Kivu. The installation of a system to provide water to all the refugees will take a month, according to experts. In the meantime, cholera is spreading and threatening the population of Zaire. A new challenge for NGOs.
- One and a half million refugees in Zaire, thousands who roam the roads and the cholera which has been rampant here for more than 20 years. All the conditions are now in place for the development of a devastating epidemic. Already 14,000 dead for a week and confirmation yesterday [July 25] that this is indeed the germ already present in the region, and unfortunately known to be resistant to most of the antibiotics used. Professor Marc Gentilini, "Infectious and Tropical Diseases, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital": "It is a vision of the concentration camps when they were released with these emaciated bodies, emptied en masse, anonymously. And, next to them , we find the survivors or those who are going to die. And it reigns over all these camps, which are of very precarious structure, a deathly silence".