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The Hutu instantly blamed the Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front for the death of their President. Within minutes after the crash, soldiers of the presidential guard, who most resisted any sharing of power, took to the streets along with mobs of drunken young men and began hunting down Tutsi civilians, killing them where they stood. Western nations quickly whisked their nationals to safety, leaving terrified Rwandans to fend for themselves. As the tales of murder began to filter out, it became clear that there were no sanctuaries: blood flowed down the aisles of churches where many sought refuge; five priests and 12 women hiding out in a Jesuit center were slaughtered. A Red Cross ambulance was stopped at a checkpoint, the six wounded patients dragged out and bayoneted to death. Toddlers lay sliced in half, and mothers with babies strapped to their backs sprawled dead on the streets of Kigali. The fighting was hand to hand, intimate and unspeakable, a kind of bloodlust that left those who managed to escape it hollow eyed and mute.
Beneath the killing frenzy, something more systematic and sinister was happening. Moderate members of the Hutu government, those who had favored making some accommodation with the Tutsi, were among the first to be hunted down. Acting Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and other Hutu ministers died within the first hours of fighting. "At first the killing wasn't purely ethnic. It was also political," says Desire Habiyambire, a Hutu moderate who fled Rwanda with his three children after his name was circulated on a hit list. "I am caught in the middle," he adds. "Extremism is my enemy. If I meet a Hutu extremist, he will kill me. If I meet a Tutsi extremist, he too will kill me."
Like many refugees, Habiyambire thinks hard-line Hutu are trying to consolidate power by enlisting Hutu civilians in the fight not just against the rebel front but against all Tutsi. "They are trying to confuse people for their political ends, and they have succeeded." Augustin Nigaba, who is in charge of a major checkpoint on the border with Burundi, agrees. "First it was politics," he says. "Then it was genocide."
The hate campaign did its job; relief workers and refugees agree that much of the most vicious killing was done not by the army but by Hutu death squads, called the interahamwe ("those who attack together"). These are young men in street clothes, armed with anything from a screwdriver to an Uzi to a machete, a dull gleam in their eyes and a whistle around their neck. If one spotted a Tutsi family emerging from hiding and trying to flee, he blew his whistle, and his comrades sealed off any escape. "If you look in their eyes," says Daniel Bellamy of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, who has encountered these killers at numerous roadblocks in the capital, "there is something there that is not in the eyes of normal people."
Relief workers tried desperately to help where they could, but the fervor of butchery grew too powerful, and people were dying too fast. Prison inmates were ordered to collect the corpses piling up in every corner of the capital. They came with Caterpiller tractors and shoveled the bodies into mass graves, sometimes thousands at a time. Without water or electricity and afraid to venture out for food, civilians huddled in their homes listening to the screams as soldiers moved from house to house, slaying whomever they found.