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So great an exodus could only have been born of an epic betrayal. Western governments and relief officials lob charges back and forth; if a few hundred paratroopers had dropped into Rwanda's civil war last April, says a high- ranking U.N. official, all of this could have been avoided. Now the fighting has stopped, and the needy are outside the war zone, but where is the food, the medicine, the will to save? Analysts decried the seeming indifference of the international community, exhausted by "compassion fatigue" from missions in Somalia and Ethiopia and Bosnia.
But the greater betrayal lay closer to home. During the last weeks of fighting, the Tutsi rebels chased the Hutu army west, pushing more than a million refugees ahead of them. The Hutu leaders hid in the safe haven set up more than a month ago by French forces sent to provide humanitarian relief. Once protected, the defeated despots kept broadcasting messages of hate and revenge over Radio Milles Collines, warning their countrymen to flee or be killed.
Theirs was a brutal strategy of sacrifice; the idea was to cede the land but take the people with them. "The only power remaining in their hands was the population," said one veteran aid worker. "This was why they created the panic." A mass of refugees would pressure the world community to intervene, and show that while the R.P.F. may have won, it had no country left to govern. "It is the former ((Hutu)) government that killed half a million Tutsi," says Nigel Fisher, the UNICEF representative for Rwanda, "and then instilled fear in its own people: 'You better escape because the Tutsi will kill you in revenge, and if you don't escape, then you're a traitor and we'll kill you.' "
The deadly message did its work. Up and down the rows of refugees in Goma, they tell the same stories, share the same fears. The moderate Hutu members of the new government are traitors and terrorists. Tutsi promises of peace are not to be trusted. "They want to govern us from on top, like they did for 400 years," argues Emmanuel Zabandora, 33, a former professor of physical education in Rwanda's capital, Kigali. "The R.P.F. will govern without a people. They want to live alone." Hutu refugees stand at a mass grave, watching their neighbors being buried by French bulldozers near a banana grove. "It was the Tutsi who poisoned our food," one declares. "We bought it by the side of the road, and now we are dying. God will judge this."
At a run-down hotel in the center of Goma, some former Hutu government ministers are holed up, plotting. Jerome Bicamumpaka, a Brussels-trained economist, joined the government after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana. "We are their government," he says. "Of course they will follow their government. I could live in Nairobi or Paris. But I will stay here because this is where my people are." He repeats the warning of R.P.F. reprisals. "If the French leave, there will be no protection," he says. He asserts his right to spread panic and fuel the exodus. "You cannot oblige us not to talk. It is freedom of the press."