Descent into Mayhem

Alarming as they were, the first, unconfirmed reports turned out to be understated. "We are lying prone on the floor," Christian Georlette, an aid worker for Oxfam, managed to phone back to the British aid group's headquarters on Thursday. "Every window in the house has been shattered by shrapnel and machine-gun fire, and soldiers are attacking the house next door with grenades. The fighting is really bad." Only later, however, would the full carnage of the latest ethnic violence in Rwanda be confirmed: the streets littered with corpses; the thousands killed in less than three days; the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeepers and groups of Catholic priests. And it would be Saturday before the French air force could land at Rwanda's Kigali airport and most of the country's 255 Americans could be reported as close to joining 330 Marines in the relative safety of neighboring Burundi.

In the two small Central African nations of Rwanda and Burundi, where politics is still dominated by the ancient rivalry between the predominant Hutu and minority Tutsi tribes, pure tribal enmity was behind the bloodshed. Last week's violence exploded after a plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, both Hutus, crashed Wednesday night on the approach to Kigali airport, killing both leaders. Witnesses reported hearing heavy weapons fire moments before the plane went down. "What happened was not an accident but an assassination," said Jean Damascene Bizimana, Rwanda's ambassador to the U.N. The two leaders were returning from a conference in Tanzania. Its topic: the ending of decades of Hutu-Tutsi savagery.

After three years of fighting, Habyarimana's regime in Rwanda, made up largely of fellow Hutus, had reached a peace accord with the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front last August. But Habyarimana failed to form an interim government to last until new elections could be conducted. Burundi's Ntaryamira had been elected President in January by the National Assembly after the assassination of fellow Hutu Melchior Ndadaye in a bloody coup attempt last October. With Burundi's army still under the control of the Tutsis, however, Ntaryamira had been unable to stop the rash of ethnic clashes that have killed tens of thousands and made refugees of hundreds of thousands.

Despite the obvious Tutsi motive for assassinating the two Presidents, the finger of suspicion points at Habyarimana's own battalion-strong palace guard of Hutus, who were incensed that the Tutsis had been given Cabinet posts and that their followers, exiled in Uganda for two generations, were likely to be given land on which to settle in what is Africa's most densely populated country. And indeed, government-appointed Tutsis were an early target of the violence last week. After presidential guards surrounded the house of Prime Minister (and Tutsi) Agathe Uwilingiyimana, 10 Belgian soldiers, part of a 2,400-member U.N. peacekeeping force charged with enforcing the truce between the government and the rebels, spirited her away. But the Hutu guards pursued, disarmed the U.N. troops and shot the Prime Minister dead. Then they took the Belgians back to their barracks, tortured and killed them. Three other Tutsi ministers in the government were reportedly shot.