Tutsis Archives - MICHAEL O. ALLEN

RETURNING TO RUINS: Rwandan Refugees Find War’s Debris

By michael o. allenHomepage, New York Daily News, Special Report on RwandaNo Comments

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by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Monday, August 1, 1994

KIGALI. Rwanda – Thousands of Rwandan refugees returning home yesterday from camps in Zaire found their towns torn up by civil war.

About 700 refugees riding into the capital in an United Nations truck convoy yesterday faced a city battered by three months of tribal warfare. Buildings were damaged. Streets were littered with wrecked cars. Water and
electricity were scarce. Gas stations were destroyed. And a rebel government that has no administration or civil servants was struggling to get the ravaged nation back on its feet.

As the convoy threads its way through Rwanda’s towns and villages, the refugees see that nearly every place where people once lived and farmed appears deserted. Shops are bombed out. If you get up close to some houses the smell of rotting invades your senses.

Though disease has killed thousands of refugees packed into filthy camps, most Rwandans too frightened to return home. Many are convinced the new Tutsi-led government in Kigali will kill returning Hutus to avenge the massacres of Tutsis by Hutu extremist forces.

To make matter worse, the refugees in camps in Zaire may soon face a second wave of epidemics more deadly than the cholera that kills hundreds of people daily, said Serge Male, the UN specialist in contagious diseases.

He said an inevitable dysentery outbreak could claim 20,000 to 40,000 lives among the more than 1 million refugees near Goma. Measles, malaria and meningitis also loom.

June 6, 2008

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Rwanda: Critical, Stabilizing

By michael o. allenHomepage, New York Daily News, Special Report on RwandaNo Comments

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by MICHAEL 0. ALLEN in Rwanda and GENE MUSTAIN in New York, Daily News Staff Writers

KIGALI, Rwanda–The heartbeat of this nearly terminal country thumped a little louder yesterday.

The war ravaged capital city, as most of the country has little portable water, few working phones or toilets and hardly any electricity–but people were beginning to try to go about their business.

For the first time since rebel army took over, an open-air market was live with the noise of a back-to-basics economy–hawkeers pitching okra and plantains and buyers haggling over the price.

Nearby, the few people with money to spare sipped warm beer in Kigali Night, the hottest nightclub and bordello in town.

Beyond the market and the club, however, the evidence of Rwanda’s difficult road to recovery was everywhere. Neighborhoods were deserted. Buildings lay in ruins, or looted of their contents. Refugees trickling back to their homes lugged the bodies of the sick or dead relatives on makeshift stretchers.

Rwanda Patriotic Front soldiers questioned civilians at gunpoint and searched vehicles at roadblocks built with plastic crates.

The new government’s Tutsi-dominated leaders, overwhelmed by the demands of resuscitating the country, announced that they will step aside and a let a United Nations panel investigate and prosecute officials in the former Hutu-dominated government suspected of waging genocide against the Tutsi.

“We recognize the importance of a fair and independent judicial system to stability and democratic reform and we intend to develop such a system expeditiously, said Alphonse Nkubito, the justice minister.

June 3, 2008

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Rwanda’s story

By michael o. allenHomepageNo Comments

I have been reading stories in newspapers and magazines lately about the anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

I was in South Africa in early spring covering the first all-race elections in that theretofore benighted nation when I got news of the atrocities in Rwanda. Nelson Mandela had been released from decades of imprisonment and he had, by sheer force of will almost, led South Africa to the brink of renewal as a nation.

It was a great development in the history of mankind: a tyranny, essentially, relinquished power to the people it once oppressed.

To be sure, there were elements in the country that resisted the new dawn that was about to eclipse their world. The AWB, a militant Afrikaner group, for instance, mounted a bombing campaign that failed to halt the votes. Also, while the demise of apartheid meant the end of the despicable ideology of white supremacy on that continent, it did very little for women of all races who still had few rights in the new South Africa and were subject to incredible violence.

But those were days of hope and that was how I and the platoon of journalists from all over the world that descended on South Africa covered the story.

Then dark tidings reached us of violence convulsing another part of the continent, genocide in the East African nation of Rwanda.

On April 6, 1994, a mysterious plane crash killed Juvenal Habyarimana, president of Rwanda. The Interahamwe, militias made up of Hutus, the majority tribe, commenced a reign of bloodletting that did not stop until an estimated 1 million of their fellow Rwandans had been killed. The dead consisted of mostly Tutsis, the minority tribe, but Hutus considered opponents of the government were also slaughtered.

April 19, 2008

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Cold comfort

By michael o. allenHomepageNo Comments

Transcript:
“It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep.
But there’ s a phone in the White House and it is ringing.
something is happening in the world
your vote will decide who answers that call.
whether it is someone who already knows the world’s leaders,
knows the military
someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.
its 3am and your children are safe and asleep.
Who do you want answering that phone?”

This is inadvertent but former Pres. Bill Clinton just showed why his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, (D-NY), is not only not the person you want answering the phone, she might not even answer it if she gets the opportunity.
Mrs. Clinton has mentioned often in this campaign her “35 years of experience,” which she says has put her “across the threshold” to be commander-in-chief. Well, the phone rang in 1994 regarding Rwanda. It rang. And rang. And rang. And rang. No one answered.
Bill Clinton spared no effort trying to stop genocide in the former Yugoslavia republics. This was admirable. But close to a million people were killed in the genocide when Hutus decided to kill Tutsis in that African nation.
Bill Clinton said his wife had urged him to take military action to stop that genocide. History will record that, even if it is true that Mrs. Clinton did offer that advice, and there is no record whatsoever to prove she did, she was in ineffectual. Mrs. Clinton was just as ineffectual trying to ram a health care overhaul through the U.S. Congress.
That was when she became a full-time touring first lady. She visited many countries. This is part of the experience that she says qualifies her to be president and commander-in-chief. It is the lifetime of experiences that she says qualifies her and Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), to be president but not Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL).
If we know anything at all about Bill Clinton, besides the fact that he’s a political animal, it is that he is an inveterate and pathological liar. This advice that he remembers Mrs. Clinton giving him is clearly a political memory that he’s fantasizing now to help his wife’s candidacy.
Sen. Clinton, in her many statements lately, is also showing herself to be power-hungry.Not only did Sen. Clinton cross a threshold that qualifies her to be president, whatever that means, but she broke a golden rule of politics when she gave Republicans ammunition to use against Sen. Obama, should he be the party’s nominee.

March 8, 2008

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