KIGALI, Rwanda -- Government and rebel forces are still fighting each other over this capital, but it's hard to see why.

The city is a charred shell. Most of its inhabitants -- those who have survived the orgy of killing that began April 6 -- have fled. Only the bougainvillea and hibiscus thrive as if part of a gaudy funeral arrangement.

From a hillside overlooking the capital, the cannons of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front boom.

In the city are roadblocks, manned by ragtag youths. The stretches between checkpoints have become a sniper's alley.

Shaded downtown streets of the city, which sprawls across a cluster of hills in the center of the country, are deserted except for government and military vehicles and the occasional Red Cross truck.

Few civilians are in the streets. Modern office buildings are gutted, their windows shattered, some crumbling from rocket attacks.

At the Catholic National Pastoral Center of St. Paul, where many displaced people are sheltered, a young seminarian says no one can move around the city except in a military vehicle. The center itself depends on the Red Cross for food deliveries, he says.

The busiest area of Kigali is an impoverished section of the Nyamirambo neighborhood sprawled around an aging, green-and white-painted mosque.

There, on a crowded dirt sidewalk outside decayed one-story concrete huts, the city's commercial vacuum is filled with people selling flour, cigarettes and cooking oil from open-air tables.

An affluent residential neighborhood seems deserted except for a few blue-uniformed houseboys guarding driveway gates. But this appearance may be deceptive.

"People can't move. A lot of people are rotting in their own houses," says the resident of a new middle-class neighborhood on the other side of town.

The man won't give his name. Like so many here, he has a story to tell about the slaughter that followed the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana in a suspicious air crash April 6.

As many as 500,000 people are said to have been killed in the civil war between government troops and supporters dominated the Hutu ethnic group against the minority Tutsi.

On his street, he says, a whole Tutsi family was killed. Another family lost a father and two children, a third lost a mother, and a fourth lost a father.

He said that the neighborhood was fired on by the army in the early days of the conflict, apparently to terrorize residents.

Methodical slaughter

The accounts of refugees from Kigali confirm this brutality over and over, stories like the ones told by Nicolas Harelimana, an importer, and Marie Mushonganono, a housewife with intricately braided long hair -- both of whom fled from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi, where they were interviewed.

Mr. Harelimana, 36, lived in a residential neighborhood called Gikondo east of downtown Kigali. It was a mixed neighborhood of Hutu and Tutsi, mostly businessmen, considered a stronghold of opposition to the regime of President Habyarimana.

A day after the president was killed, the neighborhood was virtually wiped out by Rwandan presidential guard soldiers.

At 5 a.m. that day, the government radio broadcast a message from the army instructing all residents to remain indoors, he says.

At about 7 a.m., dozens of soldiers entered the neighborhood. At each house, they ordered occupants outside and shot them.

They approached Mr. Harelimana's house about 10 a.m. The family was hiding in a bathroom. Mr. Harelimana quickly moved his wife, Angele Gatashya, and two children, Yves Rukundo, 9, and Robin Muhirwa, 8, to their car and slipped away to the Milles Collines Hotel, about two miles away, where many foreigners had found refuge.

Begun to kill everybody'

From the hotel, he says he began telephoning neighbors, urging them to leave their houses. But by then, neighbors reported that the entire neighborhood had been surrounded by the military and that soldiers "had begun to kill everybody."

"For a long time, they made lists of people in the opposition who had to be killed," he says. "They killed everybody in six hours. Everything was well-organized."

Marie Mushonganono, 39, lived in Remera, near the Kigali headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping forces. Her husband, Evariste, operated a grocery store. They have a daughter Samantha Butaeli, 9, and twin sons, Gael and Michael Butaeli, 16 months.

Soldiers from the presidential guard arrived at her neighborhood on April 8, two days after the presidents' plane crashed. Her daughter was on vacation in Kenya.

Sensing trouble, Mrs. Mushonganono's family, who are Tutsi, tried to move in with Hutu neighbors, but were told to leave because the neighbors were afraid of becoming targets.

They returned to their house, but kept the doors locked and the drapes pulled. Each time soldiers approached, the same neighbors covered up for the Mushonganono family, insisting they had left.

Neighbor refuses to help

On April 12, when soldiers again approached, Mrs. Mushonganono asked a different neighbor if she would take the twins. The neighbor refused. But the family found a third neighbor willing to take them all in.

The next day, two soldiers entered the house where they were staying. One of the twin boys was with a servant, the other with Mr. Mushonganono in a bedroom. Mrs.Mushonganono hid in a bathroom.

When the soldiers entered his bedroom, Mr. Mushonganono held his son tightly in his arms. The soldiers ordered him out of the house, where they shot him but spared the boy. Mrs. Mushonganono later found her son crying, covered in his father's blood.

Soldiers also killed the neighbor with whom they were staying, his wife, a second woman and a 12-year-old girl, all of whom were in the house at the time.

Mrs. Mushonganono was left in the house with her own boys and three neighbors' children. After killing the five people, soldiers dug a hole in the yard and buried them.

Eventually, friends rescued Mrs. Mushonganono and her twins and she headed toward Burundi. At the border, a Belgian friend negotiated for a day with Rwandan officials, eventually paying $5,100, before they allowed her and the twins into Burundi.

Slaughter largely ended

The slaughter of minority Tutsis that marked the early days of the five-week civil war has largely ended, with many having fled or been killed.

Abandoned, rubble-strewn Tutsi homes dot the roadside, their window and door frames knocked out. Almost no Tutsis, distinguished by height, prominent cheekbones and chiseled noses, are now to be seen outside refugee camps.

A notable exception is 30-year Catholic Bishop Jean-Baptiste Gahamanyi, who remains quietly at his home in Butare.

The civilian government's minister of primary education, Andre Rwamakuba, speaking in the government's temporary headquarters in Gitarama, points to the bishop's survival as evidence that the government did not have a policy of killing Tutsis.

"The Bishop of Butare is a Tutsi and he isn't killed," the minister says. He acknowledges, however, that: "We are in a war #F between these ethnic groups."

But evidence of continued violence abounds. Some examples are clearly driven by Hutu militias' war of extermination against Tutsis, fanned by pro-government extremists.

Others defy simple explanation.

Students reportedly slain

At the Marie Merci Catholic girls school in Gikongoro, about 30 miles north of the Rwandan-Burundi border, 88 Tutsi students were reportedly killed by pro-government militiamen in a massacre last week.

A Rwandan relief worker, a Hutu, returned to his home village near Gitarama from Burundi two weeks ago to learn that his parents, both 92, had been killed.

Neighbors who buried them reported that they had been slain by rebel forces. The relief worker sought anonymity because he is ++ still searching for a child separated from his family in the early days of the war.

In Kabgayi, a large Catholic compound south of the provincial town of Gitarama, church officials report that the director of a nursing school, Dorothee Mukandanga, was killed Wednesday night, apparently either by soldiers or pro-government militiamen.

Her death seemed all the more mysterious because she was a Hutu and had treated wounded government soldiers at the hospital.

At the same compound on Saturday, a motionless, apparently dead young man lay in a pool of blood beside a dirt road between a refugee camp and the church hospital, his upraised )) fists slightly clenched.

Soldiers in a nearby pickup truck bark at a reporter to move away.

A few hundred yards away, about 8,000 Tutsis, the largest concentration in southern Rwanda, are trapped in a month-old refugee camp outside a Catholic seminary, fearful of being killed if they venture onto the open road.

Although government policemen patrol the premises, the Tutsis' only real protection is the moral authority of the diocese, which has tried to feed and shelter them despite pressure from the Hutu-controlled local prefecture.

Moved by fear

But if the killing has become less widespread, the fear has not.

A four-day trip through government-controlled areas, including Kigali, showed a new spasm of migration on top of the flight by hundreds of thousands into neighboring Tanzania and Burundi.

Waves of thousands more are trudging north or south within the country itself, balancing possessions in sacks or suitcases on their heads.

Prodded by the government, Hutus who had fled south from the Rwandan Patriotic Front advance in the north are moving further westward, crowding the hillside around the village of Kamonyi with huts erected from leafy eucalyptus branches and thin plastic sheeting.

The RPF, while composed of both Hutus and Tutsis, is widely associated by peasants and the government with the Tutsi minority.

All that remains of the displaced Hutus' previous encampment at Runda, just outside Kigali, are the frames of abandoned huts and a fetid stench.

Further south, another wave of Hutus was moving northward during the weekend, toward the government-controlled region of Gitarama, where Rwanda's civilian authorities make their headquarters.

Still others moved in the opposite direction, apparently seeking protection among friends in ancestral villages.

Under pressure from rebel forces pushing from the north, Rwandan government radio urges people to rise up in the country's defense.

Local militiamen seemed to take the injunction seriously, throwing felled trees across the highway in a series of unofficial roadblocks along the 36 miles between Butare and Gitarama.

At each checkpoint, a peasant in ragged clothing appears in the headlights of the lead vehicle, driven by Vjeko Curic, a Croatian Franciscan priest based in Gitarama.

Behind the peasant, emerging slowly from the bushes into the light of a campfire, several young men appear to stand beside him, clutching machetes, clubs and spears.

Between checkpoints, numerous groups of men camped by the roadside maintain a fire-lighted vigil.

More ominously, lines of young men and a few women, armed with machetes, spears and clubs, march purposefully by the side of the road, in Rwanda's abiding hunt for the enemy.