More Killing in Rwanda

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KIGALI, Rwanda: Suspected Hutu rebels attacked a Tutsi refugee camp with hand grenades, guns and machetes, killing more than 200 people and wounding 200 more in northwestern Rwanda Thursday. For a region that has undergone sweeping and hopeful changes in the last year, the massacre signals the return of an old scourge.

U.N. officials believe that the killers, rebels against the Rwandan Tutsi government of Paul Kagame, fled west back to bases in Congo -- a disheartening prospect since border-crossing raids brought Rwanda and then-Zaire to the brink of war in 1996. Kagame's solution then was drastic: lending military and financial support to the bush rebellion of Laurent Kabila, which swept westward across Zaire to the capital of Kinshasa and renamed the country Congo with Kabila as its new president.

Yet the rebuilding of Congo has stalled. The Hutu militia that escaped the advance of Kabila's forces have again set up shop in the country's isolated eastern tip. The enemies of Paul Kagame--and of Central Africa's stability--remain.