Word: kigali
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have jammed into camps within Rwanda, seeking safety in numbers. Most are in government-held territory in the western and southwestern parts of the country, out of reach of aid agencies and at severe risk for epidemics and starvation. United Nations peacekeepers, deployed in the once picturesque capital of Kigali now being shelled into a sprawling ruin, concede they are powerless to intervene: last week the diminutive force was twice compelled to suspend humanitarian operations after its vehicles came under heavy fire...
...exiles saw their homeland as a mythical country of verdant hillsides and crystal lakes, whose people and terrain they could glimpse only in textbooks. "I didn't know much about Rwanda," recalls rebel leader Paul Kagame, 37, in a rare quiet moment on the outskirts of Kigali last week. "But I knew it was my country...
...after nearly four years of marking their victories in inches -- in 1990 a single government soldier killed was cause for celebration -- Kagame's forces have taken well over half the country in just two months. Last week they pressed their offensive into Kigali and the southwest, relentlessly shelling Rwandan army positions and closing in on the seat of the interim government in Gitarama, 25 miles southwest of Kigali. Army troops, their morale plummeting, have yet to launch a single counterattack. Despite ongoing cease-fire talks in the capital, the rebels are unlikely to call a halt to the fighting before...
...forces." Europe feels the same way. Belgium, Rwanda's former colonial ruler, lost 10 of its U.N. peacekeepers when the fighting broke out in early April. Said a government spokesman last week: "At the moment, we have no willingness to have contact with the so- called government in Kigali, which consists of a gang of murderers." Neither French troops nor French-equipped African troops are acceptable to the mainly Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front: France helped arm and train their opponents, the Hutu forces of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana...
That is not likely any time soon. The rebels control nearly 60% of the country and are advancing into the capital of Kigali. Government soldiers reportedly are abandoning the city. Although another round of cease-fire talks is scheduled this week, a rebel statement issued in Washington said any attempts to stop them now "would be like intervening in Berlin in April 1945 to prevent the Allies from defeating Hitler...