Zaire Archives - MICHAEL O. ALLEN

SPECIAL REPORT ON RWANDA: 1 Dies Every Minute

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

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Tuesday, July 26, 1994

GOMA, Zaire – The skies here were darkened by aircraft yesterday bearing desperately needed food and medical supplies to Rwandan refugees dying at a rate of one per minute in the squalid camps below.

But the water purifiers needed to combat the raging cholera epidemic did not arrive until nightfall.

So with no way to cleanse the filthy water of disease, 1,400 refugees died yesterday on day six of an epidemic that has cut through the crowded camps like a scythe.

By nightfall the death tally from the epidemic had risen to 14,000, and relief workers had started burning bodies because there was nowhere to bury them.

A mass grave the size of a football field dug into the soft earth on the outskirts of Goma was full. French troops farther down the road were using explosives to blow holes in volcanic rock while hundreds of rotting corpses piled up nearby.

United Nations officials, fearing the death toll could reach 80,000, yesterday asked the United States to launch a military-type operation to distribute aid.

“It is out of control,” said Peter Hansen, a top UN relief official. “We don’t have the capacity to deal With thiS.”

Last night, on the muddy road that leads from the Goma airport to the refugee camp at Katali, the dead were wrapped in mats and stacked like logs.

Bodies are so dense by the roadside that some bear tire marks. Dogs and people could be seen scavenging among the corpses.

“We are all dying,” said one refugee who gathered up his children yesterday and started to walk home. “It is better to be killed in Rwanda.”

June 11, 2008

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RWANDAN CRISIS-HORROR OF THE CHILDREN: Thousands Are Dying, More Are Orphaned

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 | Wednesday, July 27, 1994

GOMA. ZAIRE – Her tiny torso was wrapped in dirty rags. No one knew her name, where she came from or what became of her parents. She could not have been more than 6 months old.

Last week French soldiers at Goma airport handed the baby to Florence Nirere, a 15-year old Rwandan refugee whose parents were killed fleeing tribal warfare in their homeland.

Nirere had no food, but she struggled to keep the child alive by giving her water.

Yesterday, Nirere frantically shook the tot limb-by-limb as I rode with them in a truck to a refugee orphanage at Camp Carea. She checked her mouth and eyes, looking for any sign of life.

“The baby is dead,” Nirere finally announced, as she dropped the infant’s lifeless arm.

I stared at Nirere’s skirt, which was caked with dirt from a three-month trek.

The dirt was mixing with a sickening yellow fluid that oozed from the baby as its short life expired.

Nirere and the dead baby were among 24 orphans crammed into the truck yesterday as it bounced along the dirt road.

Clad in filthy rags and weakened from hunger, heartbreak and illness, the children stared listlessly. Most seemed oblivious to the shroud of death around them.

Thousands of Rwanda’s children will die anonymous deaths, nameless victims of illness and civil war.

June 10, 2008

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Refugees Are Dying Too Fast to be Buried

By michael o. allenHomepage, New York Daily News, Special Report on Rwanda2 Comments

by GENE MUSTAIN in New York and MICHAEL O. ALLEN in Goma, Zaire, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday July 27, 1994

Aid workers battling death, famine and pestilence of the Rwanda refugee crisis faced a new problem yesterday–a shortage of graves.

The raging cholera epidemic in the squalid camps near the border backwater town of Goma, Zaire, continued to claim lives faster than mass graves could be dynamited out of the volcanic rock blanketing the area.

As planeloads of international relief supplies began arriving, burial teams — including a Zairian boy scout troop — collected 2,000 bodies. And aid workers feared that 20,000 may have died since 1.2 million Rwandans fled to Zaire a week ago.

But gravesites were full, and hundreds of rotting bodies were left in foul-smelling piles along the roads. Aid workers held back on announced plans to burn corpes because cremation runs counter to African traditions.

“The burning issue, as it were, is a last resort,” said Ray Wilkinson, a United Nations spokesman. “One problem, as you may guess, is that it’s hard to find anyone willing to undertake the grisly task.”

About 75 American soldiers and a number of civilian experts began operating water purification equipment yesterday, but relief workers fear that thousands more refugees will die before enough equipment is on hand.

“Our top priority is clean water, because without it more people are going to die in droves,” Brig. Gen. Jack Nix said after landing at Goma’s airport.

June 10, 2008

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A Hell Without Fire

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

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Thursday, July 28, 1994

GOMA, Zaire – The heart of darkness lies beneath a smoky volcano.

It starts at the edge of a shimmering lake and stretches across a few miles of flowering bushes and dark rocky plain, proof of Mount Nyiragongo’s periodic tantrums.

It would be a beautiful reminder of nature’s capacity to uplift, if it were not the epicenter of the Rwandan refugee crisis – a man-made calamity of monumental misery.

Now it is hell without the fire – a place where children die without pity and men cry without shame.

“It is just so horrible, I can’t explain it,” a relief worker, Noel McDonough, said as he gave a Daily News reporter a lift into the teeming refugee encampments outside outside this border outpost earlier this week.

It was early in the morning, still dark, but light enough to see bodies piled beside the road, dead from hunger or untreated wounds or the cholera epidemic sweeping through Goma with the fury of a Colorado brushfire.

“These people are being wiped out,” he said, “wiped out.”

June 9, 2008

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AFRICAN EPILOGUE: Dreams of Death

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

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Amidst lesser mountains, Kilimanjaro sat mysteriously in the distance, its brooding, mammoth expanse shrouded by clouds that streaked the rising sun. It was barely dawn at this wildlife reserve, and the elephants were headed out to the swamps.

I must confess that the burden I had carried in my heart to Amboselli National Park, in Kenya, lifted at the sight of that first baby elephant. It loped along goofily, trying to keep pace with its mother.

Twelve more gray pairs followed, then a herd of wildebeest and a span of gazelles, warthogs, and buffalo. Cattle egrets paced with hippopotamus, munching grasshoppers while scampering from underfoot.

This visit last month to the wildlife preserve was my attempt at a vacation. Yet I held little hope that it would banish the nightmares that had been creeping into my sleep or erase memories of the horrors I had witnessed as reporter covering the tragedy in Goma, Zaire, and Rwanda.

A dozen zebras heading to a pond for a drink looked warily at three Maasai warriors approaching in the distance. A pack of hyenas, accompanied by two jackals, ate a baby wildebeest under the gaze of a council of vultures peering from the trees.

Here on the plains under the shadow of Kilimanjaro, the laws of nature were apparent. Animals engage in their own Darwinism. But how to explain the unnatural carnage of the prior month—the gruesome slaughter of 500,000 Tutsis by the majority Hutus, and the mass deaths of refugee Hutus from politics and disease?

Humans, when we deign to acknowledge our place in the animal kingdom, think we are better, more evolved beings than the beasts cavorting on the plains. The scriptures assures us, after all, that we are created in the image of God.

When, with the world’s complicity, a Rwanda happens, it gives us pause. It gave me nightmares—nightmares that started at one site of the carnage, and which have plagued me until I arrived home, in New York, this week.

Inexplicably, the nightmares began shortly after I arrived with other reporters to stay at the CentreCQ Cristus, a Jesuit retreat in Kigali, Rwanda, a few weeks ago. I say “inexplicably” not to diminish the horror of what happened at Centre Cristus, but it’s not clear to me why the story of what happened there affected me more than the horrors I actually witnessed.

June 1, 2008

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