Word: bizimungu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there any task left to be performed by 14,000 heavily armed troops? Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu said he did not believe military intervention was necessary any longer, and he relayed that view to the U.N. Security Council--which voted to authorize the mission anyway. Canada still planned to go. But Clinton reserved judgment. "I don't think we know enough yet," he concluded, "to say that the mission won't be needed." He ordered the Pentagon to continue preparations but delayed giving a deployment order. Relief workers on the scene still insist that an armed force is vital...
Major General Augustin Bizimungu, the commander of the defeated Hutu army, is only slightly more circumspect. "People call me a killer of innocents," he says. "But I represent the Rwandan people. ((Defense Minister and former rebel commander)) Paul Kagame must negotiate with us. If he does not, he may have trouble sleeping at night for fear that I will come to bother...
...Bizimungu knows time is on his side as long as food donations keep pouring in. Though individual agencies may continue to withdraw, aid workers note that short of stopping relief altogether, their hands are tied. Many recall Cambodia in the late 1970s, when foreign food assistance to refugees on the Thai border enabled the defeated Khmer Rouge to live and fight another day. Rwandans who have already suffered a holocaust now face a choice between starvation or the resumption...
That makes international involvement necessary, and thankfully, the Rwandan government is amenable to this. But time is passing. The need for some retribution is building in the country. Pasteur Bizimungu, the Rwandan president, has warned that further delays could spark violence. "We can't release those persons," he said, "If we release them, there is the risk that there may be acts of revenge." Acts of revenge in Rwanda carry with them the threat of catastrophe...
...thousands of people in trials that could begin within a month. Twagiramungu said there are more than 22,000 former bureaucrats suspected of complicity in the slaughtering -- and that does not include thousands of militiamen, soldiers and presidential guards who could also face a firing squad for genocide. President Bizimungu promised that the trials would be fair and open to foreign jurists. But most of Rwanda's magistrates were either massacred or fled, and there is no police force, raising the fear that the pursuit and execution of justice may rest with vengeful soldiers of the R.P.F...