KIVUMU REFUGEE CAMP, Burundi -- The mob ran Venerande Bakashema down like the most helpless prey. Eight and a half months pregnant, she had no chance. Then they slaughtered her.
Francois Sekayuku, 32, a Tutsi farmer in mud-spattered trousers, numbly told the story of his wife's death. He sat under blue plastic sheeting at this camp in north-central Burundi.
From his family's hilly farm in southern Rwanda, Mr. Sekayuku said, he saw spear-carrying Hutu militiamen draw near, followed by soldiers.
Violence and unbridled cruelty had radiated out from the capital of Kigali after the Rwandan president was killed April 6. Tutsis, the tall, cattle-raising minority who once ruled Rwanda as kings, were being singled out for death by mobs of Hutus, the short, crop-growing majority who have run the Central African nation since independence.
The poverty-wracked little country, once dubbed the "Switzerland of Africa" and known best for its "Gorillas of the Mist," had descended into hell. Now the flames licked at Mr. Sekayuku's home.
"First of all, they burned," Mr. Sekayuku said. "All the [Tutsi] houses were burned. . . . Then they killed."
He gathered his wife, three sons, ages 6 to 10, other relatives and five head of cattle. They ran up and down hillsides. Looking back, he saw the mob douse his small mud-and-wood house with gasoline and torch it.
They ran, but after two miles over rugged terrain, Venerande Bakashema, 30, gave out.
The boys, running with their uncles, did not see their mother fall. They didn't see the mob catch up with her, and hack and slash their mother's life away with machetes. Mr. Sekayuku saw.
Then he kept running.
*
A month of horror flows out of Rwanda in the gruesome stories of refugees cast across northern Burundi, in the whispered telephone calls between Rwandans still cowering at home and their friends in the West, in the thousands of bloated corpses floating down the Akagera River along the Tanzanian border.
Patients were pulled from hospital operating tables and shot to death. Children were ripped apart by shrapnel from grenades thrown into church sanctuaries. Innocent Tutsis were bludgeoned and dismembered by club, mace, spear and machete.
The deadly numbers -- an estimated 100,000 Rwandans killed in only a month -- are chilling, even cold. But visits to Rwanda and the sanctuaries for survivors of the carnage in neighboring Burundi make clear the unspeakable pain and human tragedy, the lives forever scarred, behind the statistics.
The massacres began after the suspicious plane crash in Kigali that killed Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of neighboring Burundi, both Hutus.
It has far exceeded even the violence of the 1959 revolution that first brought Hutus to power, and it has spurred renewal of a civil war that began in 1990 when mainly Tutsi rebels invaded Rwanda from their base in Uganda.
The shock of the savagery that has carpeted Rwanda in cadavers is exceeded perhaps only by the slaughter's methodical nature.
What has happened in Rwanda is not an orgy of ethnic violence but orchestrated political killing, according to refugees, human rights activists, international relief workers and U.S. diplomats.
There is broad agreement that Hutu extremists -- fearful of a Tutsi takeover and clinging to their clique's hold on power -- are probably behind both the president's death and the bloodshed.
"The slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda is genocide, a planned campaign to eliminate this minority people," Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch/Africa told a congressional subcommittee Wednesday. "But the massacres go beyond genocide to target those of the Hutu majority who show a willingness to work with Tutsi in building a more democratic nation." The Rwandan government attributes the violence to "popular anger" at the president's death (which it blames on the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front). It denies that killing continues in government-held zones -- despite widespread reports to the contrary.
The Rwandan tragedy has a more complex underpinning than simply hatred between Hutu and Tutsi, although that is a major factor.
It also involves regional rivalries among Hutus (northern hard-liners vs. southern liberals), and demographic pressures that make Maryland-sized Rwanda (population: 8 million) the African continent's most crowded country.
For five centuries, Hutus and Tutsis have shared the "Land of a Thousand Hills" that is Rwanda. The two ethnic groups speak the same Kinyarwanda language and often live side by side.
Rwanda was 85 percent Hutu, 14 percent Tutsi and 1 percent Twa (the original Pygmy inhabitants) until hundreds of thousands of Tutsis fled during the Hutu revolution.
Until the eve of independence in 1962, Tutsis were lords and Hutus serfs, first under the traditional monarchy, then under Belgian colonialists who chose to rule through the Tutsi aristocracy. In the colonial era, a Hutu with more than 10 cattle could become a Tutsi.
Tutsis, better known as Watusis, were traditionally lanky,
thin-nosed and brown-skinned pastoralists. Hutus were stocky, broad-nosed and dark-skinned dirt farmers. Intermarriage has been common enough in recent years that Rwandans now often can't identify strangers' ethnicity at a glance.
Yet all Rwandans must carry identity cards that show ethnic group and parentage. That system, imposed by the Belgians, may have provided a road map for the past month's massacres.
Bloodletting has ebbed and flowed in Rwanda. Since the 1990 invasion, there has been a marked increase in political strife, ethnic intolerance and human rights abuses by the Hutu-dominated government -- and, to a lesser extent, by the Patriotic Front rebels.
As recently as last fall, Rwanda seemed poised for a political breakthrough, U.S. officials say. An August 1993 government-rebel accord provided for power-sharing, merger into a single army and eventual democratic elections. A transitional government was named. International aid agencies regarded Rwanda as a country where things could get done.
But the 20-year-old Habyarimana government, apparently pressured by northern Hutu allies, stalled on implementing the accord.
Meanwhile, events in neighboring Burundi, which has the same ethnic mix and tensions but where Tutsis control the army, spilled over into Rwanda. The country's first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated in October -- leading to ethnic warfare, flooding Rwanda with 175,000 refugees and heightening tensions.
Still, the average Rwandan could have had no inkling of the African holocaust in store for the "Land of the Thousand Hills."
Images in survivors' minds
A parade of Rwandan suffering and loss haunts Kayanza, Burundi, a provincial mountain town just south of the Rwandan border.
These are the survivors. Whether they are more fortunate than their loved ones who didn't escape death in Rwanda is a question maybe better left to theologians.
Godelieve Uzamushaka, 57, squatted outside an open-air ward of Kayanza's primitive hospital, clutching a traditional imikenyero cloth tightly around her, a slight and vulnerable figure of pain.
She survived a machete attack, apparently because she was taken for dead or because her tiny body and facial features don't fit those of the stereotypical tall, angular Tutsi. Her husband, four children and four other relatives were massacred.
Bernardin Nyandwi, a Tutsi, sought to flee with four others across the river separating Rwanda and Burundi. Militiamen blocked their escape, forced them to strip and moved in with machetes for the kill. Their bodies -- and Mr. Nyandwi, presumed dead -- were dumped in the river, which witnesses say has become a wet grave for many Rwandans.
He clutched a tree at river's edge to avoid drowning. Now, his head heavily bandaged, he wonders whether his wife and two children in Butare, a town in southern Rwanda, survived.
John Butera, 43, a Tutsi schoolteacher, hid among banana trees when militiamen in stocking masks invaded his Butare neighborhood early the morning of April 18. Still in bed at home were his wife and seven children, ages 3 months to 17 years.
The thugs attacked with guns, machetes and spears. Mr. Butera could hear gunshots and cries. He doesn't know now which came from his house. The massacre took about two minutes. He later found his whole family dead. The baby's body was in bed with his wife's.
The massacres severed families at the swipe of a machete blade. The killing has left an untold number of orphans. One Belgian Red Cross physician counted 61 orphans between 18 months and 16 years old among 3,000 refugees at a camp near the Burundi border.
Beata Mukamana, 12, huddled under a batik shawl at Kayanza hospital, cradling a bandaged arm injured when soldiers and militiamen hurled grenades at her family near Butare. Her sister was killed. Her parents are unaccounted for.
"During an ethnic war, there is no distinction between a child and an adult," said Dr. Jean Kamana, hospital director.
The day the killing began
Early the morning after the presidential plane exploded and crashed at Kigali airstrip, the killing began in the capital.
Radio Rwanda played classical music and asked the populace to stay at home -- which, intentionally or not, made the victims fixed targets for roving death squads.
The presidential guard threw up roadblocks and hunted down the political opposition. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, an opposition Hutu in the transitional government, was an early victim, as were two Hutu opposition Cabinet members.
Then the young thugs of the militias, political party goon squads organized and armed over the past two years, started to target Tutsi families. The killing was indiscriminate. Any Tutsi was considered an ally of the Patriotic Front rebels and a threat to Hutu power.
"This is really a struggle for political domination with very strong ethnic overtones," said David Rawson, U.S. ambassador to Rwanda. "A lot of Hutus have lost their lives, especially Hutus from the south who had expressed opposition to the presidential regime."
John Wilkens, working on an Adventist Development and Relief Agency project, saw a mob armed with machetes, clubs and spears raid the house next door in Kigali about 3 p.m. the day after the crash. A Tutsi businessman, his Hutu wife and their children were killed. The woman's body lay in the doorway for two days as looters emptied the residence.
Mobs of 25 people or so, ranging from uniformed personnel with rifles to 12-year-olds with clubs, stalked Kigali, targeting one house, bypassing another, Mr. Wilkens said.
The massacres spread to other parts of the country. Ms. Des Forges of Human Rights Watch/Africa estimated that perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 men, directed by no more than two dozen military officers, have carried out the killings across Rwanda.
The southern province of Butare, the only one in Rwanda under a Tutsi governor, remained calm until April 20, when the governor was replaced with a military hard-liner, according to Human Rights Watch.
"Mass murder of Tutsis and opposition political figures began that day," Ms. Des Forges said. The governor and his wife were among those killed.
'All you see is cadavers'
Dr. Rony Zacharia, a pediatrician with the Belgian branch of Doctors Without Borders, said the organization was forced to abandon Butare's university hospital April 23, when soldiers and militiamen began removing patients from hospital tents, presumably to be killed.
A nurse, Severine Heran, 32, saw men in uniform choose patients to be removed. A leader of the men instructed subordinates: "You take this one; you take this one." Other hospital workers restrained her from intervening. "I was really afraid for myself," she said.
Dr. Zacharia told of "one patient who was actually being sutured, on the table, and one of the expatriate nurses was pushed aside, the patient was taken off the table and was killed." The patient was Tutsi.
A locally hired Doctors Without Borders worker, wearing one of the group's signature T-shirts, was "beaten to death in front of our eyes" at a checkpoint near the hospital, he said. He was also Tutsi.
Driving through Butare in late April, Dr. Zacharia said, "All you see is cadavers -- either lying on the side of the road and specifically at the checkpoints you find a pile of cadavers. They had to bring in the prisoners to take them up."
When Doctors Without Borders staffers went to visit the home of a local official, who apparently had found himself on the wrong side of the political warfare, "all that met us were 15 cadavers," Dr. Zacharia said. "Among them were three children -- I would say less than 5 years -- and what was most dreadful was a 3-month, 4-month-old child with the mother. They were all shot in the back of the head."
Crowding, famine, frustration
Rwanda is a "rural city," a densely packed country of tiny family farms where peasants struggle on steep hillsides to grow enough beans and other staples for subsistence.
Almost everyone lives on the land. A few live by the highway, staffing the roadhouses where banana beer and sexually transmitted diseases, including the virus that causes AIDS, are dispensed. Kigali (population 300,000) is almost an afterthought.
Family planning campaigns have slowed growth, but the population still grows by 230,000 a year, with 130,000 young people entering the labor market.
"Rwanda is up against the wall because there's no land. What are these people going to do?" asked John May, a Belgian population expert with the Futures Group Inc., a Washington-area consulting firm.
Few would suggest that the Rwandan bloodletting is a Malthusian tragedy, but the scarcity of resources, the pressure on the land and the surplus of idle young men -- all aggravated by three years of warfare on Rwanda's fertile northern soil -- clearly increased tensions.
"It definitely contributed to the degradation of the political climate," said Chris Taylor, a University of Alabama anthropologist working in Rwanda. "Many persons in Rwanda were in a state of near-famine. The dry season was very prolonged. The war cost an enormous amount. The economic situation in Kigali was the most desperate I've ever seen. There were tons of beggars in the streets."
Now, the killings have spurred a resumption of the war, food shipments have come under fire, hundreds of thousands are homeless and water supplies risk contamination.
"Rwanda had coffee, the world's best tea, tremendous tourism potential with the mountain gorillas, a good road infrastructure, lovely vistas and a good telephone system," U.S. Ambassador ** Rawson said. "Now its economic future is simply humanitarian relief."
An act of humanity
One must listen hard to Therese Kankindi to detect suffering in her voice. A longtime widow of 70, she's a survivor, wrinkled, rail-thin, cheerful and free of the nagging cough that afflicts so many of the 4,000 refugees at the rain-sodden Kivumu camp.
Her new home is a tent erected from branches and a heavy plastic sheet provided by the United Nations. It is one of hundreds of such dwellings so closely packed on the terraced hillside that from a distance all one sees is an expanse of bright blue through a haze of wood-fire smoke.
She pauses to tend to the cries of a 5-month-old granddaughter, Carita Uwizeyimana, nestled in the plaid folds of her lap. Carita can't adjust to her new diet of corn porridge. She was still breast-feeding when Rwandan soldiers fatally shot her mother, Mrs. Kankindi's daughter-in-law, in a massacre at a Catholic church.
Mrs. Kankindi's family fled their small farm in Mubuga when militiamen began looting and burning houses nearby. At first, both Tutsis and Hutus fled. But looking back from another hillside, she saw that only Tutsis' homes had been torched.
The family sought refuge at the Catholic Cyahinda parish, between Mubuga and the Burundi border. They stayed for most of a week, without food or sleep, awaiting their demise. As it turned out, Cyahinda parish and other churches served as convenient slaughter sites for those bent on wiping out Tutsi civilians.
Mrs. Kankindi prepared for the worst when soldiers started killing cattle in the churchyard. Soon they turned on civilians with automatic rifles and grenades. She believes there must have been 500 soldiers who rained death on the churchyard that afternoon.
She tried to escape with her family. But her daughter-in-law was gunned down on the spot in the churchyard. Next her brother-in-law was shot and then her two daughters. A grenade blast felled a niece.
Mrs. Kankindi scooped up the baby and fled from the church with two sons, several female relatives and children in the family. She said soldiers with guns and young civilians with machetes, sticks and spears pursued them like quarry.
Staying well off the road, the family and many others scurried up and down the densely planted hills, falling, picking themselves up, scrambling to hide behind trees and bushes.
About 5 1/2 miles from the parish, young machete-armed thugs caught one of her sons and quickly hacked him to death. She kept on moving constantly for the next 24 hours.
Near the Burundi border, soldiers and militia slaughtered those who tried to cross. Mrs. Kankindi believes some 2,000 Tutsis were felled by grenades, machetes, spears and sticks.
Unexpectedly, the local government administrator, Paul Kadogi, a Hutu, arrived and ordered a halt to the killings. Accompanied by three soldiers and five policemen, she said, he saved the lives of about 2,000 fleeing Tutsis by escorting them to the Burundi border and to safety.
It was a striking act of humanity, a ray of sunlight at darkest midnight.
Mrs. Kankindi survived. She had to keep running, she says, fingering a chain around her neck, because "life is sweet."
CHRONOLOGY
16th century: Cattle-raising Tutsi people migrate from north to what is now Rwanda in Central Africa, joining Hutu farmers, who came several centuries earlier, and the original inhabitants, the Twa, a pygmy group of hunters.
18th and 19th centuries: Tutsi monarchy rules most of what is now Rwanda. Hutu majority are serfs.
1899: Ruanda-Urundi becomes part of German East Africa.
1916: Belgium seizes Ruanda-Urundi during World War I and rules through Tutsi aristocracy.
1959-1961: Hutu rebellion overthrows Tutsi monarchy with Belgian support. Up to 20,000 Tutsi are killed. Tutsi exiles stream into Uganda and form guerrilla army.
1962: Rwanda and Burundi gain independence from Belgium as separate countries. Hutus rule Rwanda. Tutsis control Burundi.
1972: In Burundi, Tutsi-dominated army crushes Hutu rebellion. More than 100,000 Hutus are killed.
1973: Maj. Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, takes power in Rwandan coup.
1988: Ethnic clashes in Burundi leave 25,000 dead.
July 1990: President Habyarimana begins political reform.
Oct. 1, 1990: 7,000-member rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front (mainly Tutsi, but with some Hutu leadership) invades Rwanda from Uganda.
1990-1993: Rwanda makes large weapons purchases from Egypt, South Africa and France. Rebels maintain close ties with Ugandan military. Some 2,000 Tutsis and opposition Hutus are killed by death squads.
1992: Hard-line Hutus arm party militias, political goon squads.
April 1992: President Habyarimana agrees to form coalition government with opposition.
L August 1993: Arusha peace agreement halts Rwandan civil war.
Oct. 1993: Burundi's first Hutu president is assassinated. An estimated 30,000 to 50,000, about half Hutu and half Tutsi, are killed in reprisals.
Nov. 1993: First of 2,500 U.N. peacekeeping forces deployed in Rwanda.
April 6, 1994: Presidents Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi are killed when plane explodes and crashes in Kigali.
April 7: Hutu-dominated presidential guard, army and militias begn killing campaign against Tutsis and Hutu political opponents, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Rwandan civil war is reignited.
April 9: The United States, Belgium and France evacuate their nationals. U.N. staff begin moving out.
April 11: Up to 20,000 people have been killed in Kigali alone in five days of savagery.
April 30: Death toll is at least 100,000. More than 1.3 million have fled their homes. April 29-May 1: About 250,000 Rwandan refugees flood into Tanzania.
7+ May 6: Kigali is under siege by rebels.
RELIEF EFFORTS
Adventist Development & Relief Agency
P.O. Box 4289
Silver Spring, Md. 20904
(800)424-ADRA
Africare
Africare House
440 R St. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
(202)462-3614
American Red Cross/"Rwanda Relief"
P.O. Box 37243
Washington, D.C. 20013
(800) 842-2200
Baptist World Alliance
6733 Curran St.
McLean, Va. 22101-3804
(703) 790-8980
CARE
151 Ellis St.
Atlanta, Ga. 30303
800-521-CARE
209 W. Fayette St.
Baltimore, Md. 21201
(410) 625-2220
Doctors Without Borders USA Inc.
30 Rockefeller Plaza # 5425
New York, N.Y. 10112
(212) 649-5961
International Rescue Committee
386 Park Ave. South
New York, N.Y. 10016
(212) 679-0010
Oxfam America
26 West St.
Boston, Mass. 02111
(617) 482-1211
United Methodist Committee on Relief
475 Riverside Drive, Room 1374
New York, N.Y. 10115
(212) 870-3816
World Relief
P.O. Box WRD, Dept. 3
Wheaton, Ill. 60189
(800) 535-5433
World Vision
P.O. Box 1131
Pasadena, Calif. 91131
(800) 423-4200