Why? the Killing Fields of Rwanda

Hundreds of thousands have died or fled in a month of tribal strife. Are these the wars of the future?

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"There are no devils left in Hell," the missionary said. "They are all in Rwanda." Actually they brought Hell with them; you have only to watch the rivers for proof. Normally in this season, when the rains come to these lush valleys, the rivers swell with a rich red soil. They are more swollen than ever this year.

First come the corpses of men and older boys, slain trying to protect their sisters and mothers. Then come the women and girls, flushed out from their hiding places and cut down. Last are the babies, who may bear no wounds: they are tossed alive into the water, to drown on their way downstream. The bodies, or pieces of them, glide by for half an hour or so, the time it takes to wipe out a community, carry the victims to the banks and dump them in. Then the water runs clear for awhile, until men and older boys drift into view again, then women, then babies, reuniting in the shallows as the river becomes the grave.

Aid workers have guessed that anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 Rwandans have died since the civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsi reignited a month ago. But no one knows how many -- and we may never know. The bodies not rotting by the roads are buried in mass graves or floating down the rivers, far away from the arithmetic of history. With this latest tragedy in its long litany of tribal massacres, Rwanda joins Angola, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Bosnia and Nagorno- Karabakh in defining what barbarism means in the late 20th century, and defying the rest of the world to try to do something about it.

For the past month, anyone watching the two unimaginable dramas playing out in Africa was left wondering which one was prophecy. "We have moved from an era of pessimism, division, limited opportunity and turmoil," declared Nelson Mandela after he took his turn to vote an end to three centuries of racial hatred. "We are starting a new era of hope, of reconciliation, of nation building." All across South Africa the people lined up to cast a ballot to escape from their past. All along Rwanda's borders and into the instant refugee camps, they lined up to escape from the future.

"I see two ends of the spectrum in Africa today," says Professor Crawford Young, Africa specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, "the most depressing in Rwanda and the most hopeful in South Africa." In South Africa optimists find a jubilant example of the victory of democracy that the end of the cold war has ushered in. But out of Rwanda come warnings about how other struggles may unfold in this next dangerous generation.

Unless led by a hated tyrant, a country that loses its head of state by violence often goes a bit mad. In Rwanda the madness was spreading even before the night of April 6, when the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana and his neighboring head of state Cyprien Ntaryamira from Burundi was shot out of the sky over the capital of Kigali, plunging into the gardens of the presidential palace. Habyarimana was a Hutu who had grabbed power in a coup in 1973 and worked hard to hang onto it. He was on his way back from a peace conference in Tanzania that was meant to end years of struggle between the minority Tutsi and the ruling Hutu. Instead, with his death, the fighting turned into massacre after massacre after massacre.

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