Left to Die at ETO and Nyanza
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Witness to Genocide No 13 Left to Die at ETO and Nyanza Witness to Genocide No 13 Left to Die at ETO and Nyanza April 2001 Published by African Rights 2 Witness to Genocide No 13 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acronyms .................................................................................................................................. 5 Preface ....................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 8 Survivors’ Accounts ............................................................................................................... 9 A Question of Justice ........................................................................................................... 10 UNAMIR ................................................................................................................................. 13 Seeking Protection ................................................................................................................. 15 Lacking Compassion .............................................................................................................. 29 Inside ETO: Limited Care .................................................................................................... 30 A Lack of Support ................................................................................................................ 33 Denied Access ...................................................................................................................... 34 Camped Outside ETO: No Help ........................................................................................... 37 Obvious Discrimination ....................................................................................................... 39 The Situation Deteriorates .................................................................................................... 43 A Sense of Foreboding, 10 April ......................................................................................... 43 Preparing to Leave, 11 April ................................................................................................ 47 The Evacuation ..................................................................................................................... 47 The Return of Colonel Rusatira, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: The Prelude to Departure ......... 52 The Unthinkable: The Troops Withdraw, 2:00 p.m. ............................................................ 55 Trapped at Eto ....................................................................................................................... 59 Mayhem and Murder as UNAMIR Pulls Out, 11 April ....................................................... 59 A Massacre Foretold .............................................................................................................. 69 Fear and Humiliation ............................................................................................................ 69 A Cry for Help: Ghanaian Troops Drive By ........................................................................ 70 Colonel Rusatira’s Orders .................................................................................................... 71 The Death March to Nyanza ................................................................................................ 74 Nyanza ..................................................................................................................................... 79 A Massacre to the Finish, Monday 11 April ........................................................................ 79 A True Genocide: Taking Hutus Aside ................................................................................ 80 A Rainfall of Bullets and Grenades ...................................................................................... 83 Hunting Down the Wounded and Looting the Dead, Tuesday 12 April ........................... 99 The Survivors ....................................................................................................................... 110 Waiting for Justice ............................................................................................................. 110 Preliminary Census of the Victims at ETO and Nyanza .................................................. 128 Commune Kicukiro ............................................................................................................ 128 Sector Kagarama ....................................................................................................................... 128 Cellule Rukatsa ......................................................................................................................... 128 Cellule Kanserege ..................................................................................................................... 135 Cellule Kanserege II ................................................................................................................. 141 Cellule Gatare ........................................................................................................................... 143 Left to Die at ETO and Nyanza 3 4 Witness to Genocide No 13 ACRONYMS CDR Committee for the Defence of the Republic CND National Council for Development ETO Ecole Technique Officielle FAR Rwandese Armed Forces ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda MRND National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development OAU Organization of African Unity PSD Social Democratic Party RPA Rwandese Patriotic Army RPF Rwandese Patriotic Front RTLM Télévision Libre des Mille Collines UNAMIR United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda UNDP United Nations Development Programme Left to Die at ETO and Nyanza 5 PREFACE Apportioning blame for the atrocities committed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has been accepted as a necessary part of efforts to prevent recurrence of this kind of tragedy. Genocide perpetrators are being prosecuted. But in lesser degrees, many more people, groups and institutions in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, or with the power to intervene in the killings, have been tainted by the episode. Their “guilt” is not of an order that the courts could establish, but it matters profoundly to survivors and to our understanding of how a crime of such magnitude could have gone uninterrupted. It is generally agreed that more could and should have been done to stop the slaughter of innocents in Rwanda in 1994, and that the response of members of the international community was generally either inadequate or misguided. This recognition has prompted extensive criticism and, in some cases, heartfelt admissions. Greater openness about the mistakes made in April 1994 is to be welcomed, but it provides little comfort to the survivors’ and the victims’ families. Political, financial or bureaucratic decisions taken as far away as New York and Brussels knowingly left men, women and children in Rwanda to face hell on earth alone and little consideration was spared for their plight. Left to Die at ETO and Nyanza is about the human beings whose lives did not matter enough in international terms and whose deaths have become the statistics to prove this fact. It explores one instance of the extreme horror which the United Nations failed to combat because of what has correctly been termed a “lack of sufficient concern for African tragic situations.”1 This report gives a detailed account of an incident which has already been subject of intense criticism—the hasty departure of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) troops stationed at a school in Kigali, the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO). It is a record of the suffering of the displaced people who flocked to ETO in the belief that the UNAMIR forces would offer them protection from the mobs of killers intent upon genocide. At the time they were not aware that the political will was lacking for a mission to defend them. They also did not realize that the evacuation of expatriates was the focus of international concern in these crucial early days of the mass killings. They discovered the reality when, on 11 April 1994, the Belgian UN troops deserted them without warning. Survivors give graphic descriptions of the massacre by the interahamwe militia, which immediately followed. They then describe a second bloodbath at Nyanza later that day where most of the remaining ETO refugees, who numbered over 2,000, were slaughtered. Those who survived generally were saved by the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers who were waging war against the government forces—the Rwandese Armed Forces (FAR)—for the area, which they later won. It is appalling to realise that had the UNAMIR troops left but a day later, many more people would have been saved by the RPF. The question of how the tragedy at ETO could have been allowed to happen is not easy to answer. UNAMIR soldiers left ETO in part because they had a mission to evacuate a group of Belgians elsewhere in the country. Significantly, they left as soon as the small group of expatriates who had been under their protection at the school was evacuated by French troops. Several other reasons lie behind the decision by the Belgian command to pull out. UNAMIR peacekeepers were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster; they lacked understanding of the political