Kibeho Massacre
The Kibeho Massacre occurred in a camp for internally displaced persons near Kibeho, in southwest Rwanda on April 22, 1995. Australian soldiers serving as part of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda estimated at least 4,000 people in the camp were killed by soldiers of the military wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army. The Rwandan Government estimated the death toll to be 338.
The reason for the massacre was an attempt to root out possible fugitive génocidaires hiding in the camp due to the fact that the camp contained mostly Hutus. It is one of the earliest examples of collective punishment of Hutus by the RPF after Paul Kagame took command of the country.
Background edit
Following the Rwandan Genocide and the victory by the army of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), many ethnic Hutus, including an unknown number of those who had committed genocide, (known commonly as génocidaires) fled from the RPF controlled areas to zones controlled by the French as part of Opération Turquoise and into the neighbouring states of Burundi, Zaire, and Tanzania. When the French withdrew in August 1994, the administration of a number of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps was taken over by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and a number of aid organizations. The new Rwandan government, dominated by the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), wished to identify those individuals and Interahamwe militia members in the camps who had committed genocide.
In late 1994, the large camps in the former so-called Safe Humanitarian Zones housed about 350,000 people. The UN set up an Integrated Operations Centre (IOC) to handle the caseload and managed to repatriate about 80,000 IDPs between October 1994 and January 1995. However, this period fortuitously coincided with the period when the new RPF government had reduced the activities of its kill squads after their activities were documented in the officially-denied Gersony Report. In January 1995, after RPF fears of Western sanctions had abated and the sanctioned killings had resumed, the IDPs refused to return to their home villages, where they would be vulnerable to the kill squads.
By the third week of February, the OIC had basically stopped working and the camps were filling back up with villagers fleeing the violence in the hills. The UN field workers were caught in a Catch-22. "The government's hostility to the camps was profound, visceral...A large proportion of those who had taken shelter within Zone Turquoise were seen by the government as perpetrators of the genocide", in the words of the former director of the United Nations Rwanda Emergency Office (UNREO), and the RPF was contemptuous of the inadequate programs proposed by the UN bureaucracy. In contrast, scholar Gerard Prunier asserts that "the camps sheltered thousands of women and children as well as men who might or might not have been genocidaires."
Meanwhile, UN headquarters in New York City insisted on proper procedures and close cooperation with the RPF government. The former UNREO director would later write, "The government was on board but never fully committed, allowing the humanitarian community to assume responsibility for an 'integrated' approach that in reality never existed." The IOC situation reports reflected its conflicting responsibilities, blaming a "deliberate campaign of disinformation" for IDPs refusing to leave the camps, while nearly simultaneously reporting "people return to the camps, fearing for their personal safety. There have been reports that some people are fleeing the communes and entering the camps for the first time."
By early 1995, the Kibeho IDP camp was the largest in Rwanda, sprawling for 9 square kilometers and containing between 80,000 and 100,000 people. UNAMIR presence at the camp was maintained by a Zambian infantry company, with medical services provided by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The RPA maintained a tight cordon around the camp. Refugees wishing to leave the camp to return home had to pass through a checkpoint, where genocide survivors would point out individuals who had taken part in the 1994 killings.
On 17 April 1995, the préfet of Butare announced that all camps in the prefecture would be closed immediately. The declared aim of this was to forcibly separate known génocidaires from those who would be sent home via a staging camp in nearby Butare. Taken by surprise, UNAMIR hastily dispatched 32 Australian soldiers and medical officers to support its presence in Kibeho, on 18 April.
The massacre edit
On April 22, 1995, not long after 10 am, in heavy rain, RPA forces began firing into the crowd in the hospital compound, causing a stampede of refugees against razor wire and barricades. RPA forces continued to fire at fleeing refugees for the next two hours. While initially firing into the massed crowd with rifles, the RPA later began using 60mm mortars. Corporal Paul Jordan wrote "we watched (and could do little more) as these people were hunted down and shot." The RPA slowed for a while after lunch before resuming fire until about 6 pm.
The MSF and Australian medical teams struggled to cope with the large numbers of wounded, many of whom were later evacuated to Kigali hospital. Despite this, the medical teams continued their work while the infantry sections brought in wounded to the clearing station and hospital, during breaks in the firing.
During the morning the hospital was also moved, under fire, into the Zambian compound. Firing continued intermittently throughout the day. Jordan recalls seeing people being "killed all over the camp." The RPA also directed automatic rounds, rocket propelled grenades and .50 calibre machine gun fire at another wave of IDP who tried to break out after 5.00 pm.