Streets of Slaughter

Thirty minutes before dawn last Wednesday, Hutu members of the presidential guard kicked in the door of a church just east of Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. Instantly, they opened fire with semiautomatic weapons and tossed in grenades. Then, according to Belgian news reports, they set upon the Tutsi parishioners who were still alive with knives, bats and spears. Almost 1,200 civilians were massacred, more than half of them children.

As the tribal carnage entered a second week in the tiny central African country, the streets of Kigali were the domain of marauding bands of men hacking down women and children on sight. Severed heads and limbs piled up on street corners, the smell of decay fouling the air. No matter how many bodies Red Cross workers collected, more appeared. Boys carrying hand grenades threatened passing cars, while drunken soldiers at makeshift barricades terrorized civilians scurrying by. In a city without electricity or water, the foolish few who ventured out into the streets to forage for food were too traumatized to eat after passing rows of mutilated bodies lying in pools of blood. "Hundreds of thousands are cut off from anything decent or human," said U.N. spokesman Moctar Gueye. "People are starving to death in their own houses. Hospitals are not functioning."

Rwandans packed into Kigali's hotels, huddling in the dark hallways without food or beds, hoping the few foreigners there would protect them. Their terror only increased as the foreigners slipped away. At a hilltop compound for the insane, a group of Belgian nuns and lay brothers abandoned 200 of their patients in a desperate rush to escape. For days the clinic had been surrounded by bands of machete-armed Hutu men. The foreigners had little doubt about the future of their patients or the 500 Tutsis who had come for refuge $ from the fighting outside. "They're finished," said hospital administrator Gerard Van Selst as he boarded an armored Belgian convoy. "A huge number will be killed." One American sheltered a fugitive opposition politician and helped him to safety. But there were too many others he could not help. "I saw scenes that will haunt me for the rest of my life," he said. "Bodies. Piles of bodies, women and children. Just piles of them."

The numbing stacks of corpses were the grisly hallmark of a horrifyingly intimate style of slaughter, literal hand-to-hand combat. The predominantly Tutsi forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Hutu-dominated army and presidential guard battled each other with mortars, machine guns and hand grenades. But what kept people shuddering in the darkest corners of their homes were the machete-armed gangs of Hutu men on a wild killing spree, often drunk and dressed in startling fashions looted from abandoned stores and houses of the dead. Swaggering Hutu men and boys paraded through the city, loaded with weapons and cheap liquor. Many of the 20,000 victims died simply because they were Tutsis. "More and more of the civilian population armed with machetes are ruling the streets," said Philippe Gaillard, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kigali. "The army can't control them."