The long trail of death of Hutu refugees in DRC
“The soldiers chased us across the country. They had guns and bombs. We ran and fell over each other. We crawled. Some refugees suffocated. Many of us could not go any further. People would stop along the road. They would give up and die slowly. A mother would lie down with her baby. Her heart was still beating – I could see her chest rise –but her eyes would close. I had my baby on my back. I couldn’t hold her in my arms. I felt dead. I was starving and sick. I could not move any more. We had almost no clothes on, and nothing on our feet except sores. We were dirty. We smelled. I wanted it to be over. I wanted to die.”
—Elise, a Hutu survivor from Kasese camp
Elise and her baby were Rwandan refugees in Zaire [now DRC]. For more than six months they were human prey, hunted across swamps and hostile jungle. The soldiers chasing them were Tutsi forces from Paul Kagame’s army. His troops, backed by allies in Uganda, invaded in October 1996 and attacked Hutu refugee camps inside Zaire’s border – an act that formidable intelligentsia in the West deemed inevitable and wholly justified. About half the population in the sprawling camps – at least five hundred thousand refugees – went back to Rwanda to face their fate. The other half fled westward, pushed by gunfire and fearing slaughter.
The refugees who fled deeper into Zaire poured onto paths and into forests they did not know; they ran and hid. They ate shrubs and battled snakes. They settled into makeshift camps, contracted cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, dengue fever and malaria. Eventually, Kagame’s soldiers, with their assault rifles and rifle-launched grenades, would find them again and massacre as many as they could. Those who managed to survive and escape were chased again. Elise and her daughter trekked several hundred kilometres from Kashusha camp near Bukavu to Kasese, south of Kisangani. Imagine being stalked from Frankfurt to Paris? Starving, stripped of every shred of dignity and hope a human being can cling to, with a child to carry? How did it come to this? Who committed this massive crime against Elise and hundreds of thousands of others.