On the 22nd of April 1995 more than 8,000 Rwandans were massacred and thousands more injured in Kibeho, an Internally Displaced people’s camp as the RPA troops unleashed heavy fire on the camps.
On that day, an MSF team witnessed the Rwandan army’s deliberate massacre of over 8,000 displaced people in the Kibeho camp in southwest Rwanda. MSF spoke out publicly to denounce the killing and produced a report based on the eyewitness accounts of its volunteers.
In Kibeho camp more than 100,000 IDP’s were living. The military chased the displaced out of their shelters while pulling down the plastic sheeting. In the initial panic and chaos, ten people (nine children and one woman) died of trampling and suffocation, and more than 100 people got wounded.
The displaced were forcibly regrouped on the hill in the centre of the camp, around the UNAMIR compounds. Here they have been standing squeezed together from the morning of Tuesday 18th till Saturday afternoon. They stood in the open air, with hardly any access to water and food. Most of them had had no time to take their belongings during the nightly expulsion from their huts.
The UN peacekeeping soldiers were left to watch helplessly from the sidelines as men, women and children were cut to pieces by machetes or gunned down in cold blood. They had dictated that their rules of engagement were to defend UN soldiers only.
At 15.45 hrs, shooting started again, “This time there was permanent machine-gun fire, combined with heavier weapons. The permanent machine-gun firing was right outside the second UNAMIR compound where we found ourselves. One of the UNAMIR soldiers coming back into the compound commented: “They are spraying them”. The soldiers were shooting directly into the crowd who fled in panic, inevitably trampling everybody who fell down.