RWANDA: U.N. Rep Sounds An Alarm Bell Over The Cycle of Violence

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jan 16 1998 (IPS) - A United Nations representative has sounded an alarm bell over the cycle of violence in Rwanda, which seems to be slipping into a bloodbath similar to the 1994 one in which up to a million people were slaughtered.

“The situation is very precarious. If there is no intervention, we could have a problem on our hands,” the UN Representative in Rwanda, Omar Bakhet, told a European radio station on Friday.

Bakhet urged the international community to stop fresh killings in the country.

His warning came just two days after the Tutsi-dominated army said it had killed 24 Hutu rebels in the northwestern Ruhengeri prefecture.

Army spokesman Major Emmanuel Ndahiro told journalists in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, this week that operations to flush criminals out of Ruhengeri were continuing.

Ruhengeri and Gisenyi — where a 1,000-strong rebel force freed 68 genocide suspects from a prison at the weekend — are the breadbasket of the tiny Central African nation.

Both towns, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have been experiencing rebel incursions since the fall of the regime of Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994.

But the activities have intensified following the return to Rwanda of over one million refugees — among them suspects of the 1994 genocide — from the DRC in late 1996.

Last week, a rebel group calling itself the Rwandan Liberation Front (RLF), distributed leaflets threatening to chop people into pieces.

The leaflets were distributed soon after 14 people were killed by the rebels — said to be Hutus — using automatic guns, grenades, machetes and small hoes at Nyabikenke. A local administrator was the only one among the 14 killed who was beheaded.

The incident in Nyabikenke, in western Rwanda, was followed by a pre-dawn attack in nearby Nyakabanda where 52 people, some of them badly mutilated, were slaughtered on Jan 6.

Condemning the on-going spate of violence, Seth Sendashonga, a minister of interior in the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government between 1994 and 1995, urged both the authorities in Kigali and rebels to abandon fighting and find a peaceful solution.

“I’m afraid that if a solution is not found now, it’s going to be a stalemate … for a very long time,” he told IPS.

To stop the chaos, he urged Rwanda’s belligerents to accept “dialogue and look at the root causes of the problems in our country”.

Sendashonga, who is a member of the exiled opposition Resistance Forces for Democracy (RFD), said Rwanda should embrace “multi-party democracy, respect human rights and good governance” so as to forge a lasting peace.

Tutsis form a minority in Rwanda where they wield enormous political and military power, a “domination” which is being challenged by the Hutus who make up about 85 percent of the country.

The government in Kigali alleges that the rebels in Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC — formerly Zaire — coordinate their military activities against their perceived enemies in the region.

The buddies — made up of the Hutu rebels in Burundi, the defeated ex-Zairean army and the notorious Interahamwe Hutu militias who have been accused of the pogrom in Rwanda in 1994 — are currently fighting the armies of their respective countries.

One such “cooperation” occurred on Jan. 6, when the Hutu rebels in Burundi — who according to the authorities in the capital Bujumbura were allegedly backed by the ex-Zairean army and the Interahamwe — attacked Maramvya village in Bujumbura province, causing around 8,000 civilians to flee. The incident was condemned by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata.

Those fleeing the Maramvya attack included around 3,000 survivors of the previous week’s massacre at the nearby village of Rukaramu, which left more than 150 people dead.