Word: tutsis
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Thirty minutes before dawn last Wednesday, Hutu members of the presidential guard kicked in the door of a church just east of Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. Instantly, they opened fire with semiautomatic weapons and tossed in grenades. Then, according to Belgian news reports, they set upon the Tutsi parishioners who were still alive with knives, bats and spears. Almost 1,200 civilians were massacred, more than half of them children...
...numbing stacks of corpses were the grisly hallmark of a horrifyingly intimate style of slaughter, literal hand-to-hand combat. The predominantly Tutsi forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Hutu-dominated army and presidential guard battled each other with mortars, machine guns and hand grenades. But what kept people shuddering in the darkest corners of their homes were the machete-armed gangs of Hutu men on a wild killing spree, often drunk and dressed in startling fashions looted from abandoned stores and houses of the dead. Swaggering Hutu men and boys paraded through the city, loaded with weapons...
...Western troops could barely manage to protect their own countrymen. A 2,400-member U.N. peacekeeping force, in Kigali to monitor a peace accord signed last year, lost 10 of its Belgian members when they tried to save the life of the Tutsi Prime Minister. Some 12,000 people were under U.N. protection at the national stadium and at the city's main hospital. But U.N. officials were worried that the lightly armed peacekeepers would not have the resources to cope. Chastened by the experience of Somalia, the U.N. Security Council is unwilling to intervene with force...
Despite the obvious Tutsi motive for assassinating the two Presidents, the finger of suspicion points at Habyarimana's own battalion-strong palace guard of Hutus, who were incensed that the Tutsis had been given Cabinet posts and that their followers, exiled in Uganda for two generations, were likely to be given land on which to settle in what is Africa's most densely populated country. And indeed, government-appointed Tutsis were an early target of the violence last week. After presidential guards surrounded the house of Prime Minister (and Tutsi) Agathe Uwilingiyimana, 10 Belgian soldiers, part...
Representatives of the church and aid organizations promoting human rights and the peace process in Rwanda also suffered. Five priests and 12 young women gathered for a retreat in a Jesuit center near the airport were massacred. All were Rwandan; most were Tutsi. The guards and regular troops of the mainly Hutu Rwandan army reportedly killed Rwandan staff members of several aid organizations while expatriates were forced to look on at gunpoint...