(3 of 6)
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 to local Tutsi were buried alive. The mayor of the southern town of Butare, who is married to a Tutsi, was offered a Sophie's choice by Hutu peasants: he could save his wife and children if he gave up his wife's family -- both her parents and her sister -- to be killed. He made the deal.
The 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." In all, about 1.7 million Rwandans, out of a population of 8.1 million, have fled their homes. Most remain within the country, dodging the army, the gangs or the rebels, streaming along roads carrying clothes in plastic bags, mattresses on their heads. Last week, as the numbers of refugees continued to swell, U.N. officials were desperately trying to sustain the horde.
Early on there was already a winner in the war, whose triumph will be unaffected by whatever the politicians or soldiers decide. It is the victory of disease. Sanitation is impossible; typhoid, dysentery, cholera are all menacing the refugees, especially the children. Malarial mosquitoes swarm above the swamps. As the rainy season continues in the mountains, the dry cough of pneumonia and tuberculosis echoes through the camps. One Red Cross doctor has commandeered a partly built breeze-block structure and roofed it with blue plastic sheeting to make a hospital. More than 70 patients with bullet wounds and 100 others with horrendous machete gashes are presented at surgery each day.
The Red Cross doctor has personal worries as well: he too is a refugee. "I was living with my wife and four children in Kigali but had to leave them behind when I fled a month ago," he says. "For the past two weeks I have ^ telephoned my house, but there is no reply. Already I think of them as dead. Every one of our neighbors had been killed. I have put them out of my heart." He had three sons and a daughter, all under seven years old.