Word: hutu
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Beneath the killing frenzy, something more systematic and sinister was happening. Moderate members of the Hutu government, those who had favored making some accommodation with the Tutsi, were among the first to be hunted down. Acting Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and other Hutu ministers died within the first hours of fighting. "At first the killing wasn't purely ethnic. It was also political," says Desire Habiyambire, a Hutu moderate who fled Rwanda with his three children after his name was circulated on a hit list. "I am caught in the middle," he adds. "Extremism is my enemy. If I meet...
Like many refugees, Habiyambire thinks hard-line Hutu are trying to consolidate power by enlisting Hutu civilians in the fight not just against the rebel front but against all Tutsi. "They are trying to confuse people for their political ends, and they have succeeded." Augustin Nigaba, who is in charge of a major checkpoint on the border with Burundi, agrees. "First it was politics," he says. "Then it was genocide...
...hate campaign did its job; relief workers and refugees agree that much of the most vicious killing was done not by the army but by Hutu death squads, called the interahamwe ("those who attack together"). These are young men in street clothes, armed with anything from a screwdriver to an Uzi to a machete, a dull gleam in their eyes and a whistle around their neck. If one spotted a Tutsi family emerging from hiding and trying to flee, he blew his whistle, and his comrades sealed off any escape. "If you look in their eyes," says Daniel Bellamy...
Thousands of Tutsi who took refuge in the Kigali sports stadium were bombarded by grenades and mortar fire. U.N. refugee officials said that each night, armed Hutu with lists of professionals and intellectuals would arrive at the stadium, haul out dozens of Tutsi and execute them in a kind of intellectual ethnic cleansing. Last week 21 orphans and 13 Red Cross workers trying to guard them were murdered: in a scene reminiscent of Nazi Germany, the children were picked out of a group of 500 simply because they looked like Tutsi. There were reports that several priests giving refuge...
...population grew so desperate that in a single 24-hour period, a quarter of a million people streamed across the border into Tanzania, creating an instant city, the second largest in the country. Some were Tutsi, but many were Hutu who feared that the rebels, now controlling much of eastern Rwanda and threatening to capture Kigali, would exact revenge for the massacres. One U.N. peacekeeping official, however, observed last week that "the Tutsi have shown remarkable restraint -- there's been no ethnic cleansing in the Tutsi areas. They are not doing the kind of killing that the government is doing...