Abstract
- In Rwanda, Kigali airport fell into rebel hands this morning. Yesterday [May 21] the French Minister of Health, Philippe Douste-Blazy, had asked for the application of a UN resolution providing for the dispatch of 5,500 blue helmets and the creation of security zones. He was returning from Central Africa where he had just visited the refugee camps.
- In the largest refugee camp in the world, people die every day. A banal scene: one more child died today. He had however escaped the massacres, walked for hundreds of kilometers alongside his parents, death caught up with him. Dysentery, cholera, typhoid, no one knows.
- In Ngara, drinking water is 15 kilometers away. But the ponds near the camp represent a real temptation despite pollution by infiltration. With 250,000 refugees, that's 15 tons of excrement a day.
- In Rwanda, we are still awaiting the arrival of 5,500 Blue Helmets with a humanitarian mandate. But what is the use of the AICF organization, which would prefer an intervention to effectively stop the fighting? Carole Dubrulle of the AICF: "2,500 men in Rwanda cost up to 750,000 dollars a day. By doubling the workforce, we will be spending a million and a half dollars a day. We start dreaming of what we could do in humanitarian terms with such a sum available to NGOs".
- In Kigali fighting resumed early this morning. The RPF guerrillas who surround the capital have targeted the airport. The airport was until this morning in the hands of government forces. But according to a UNAMIR official, the Hutu soldiers abandoned this strategic point in the face of the Tutsi rebel offensive.
- Passing through Paris, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Rwanda, appointed the day after the assassination of President Habyarimana on April 6, spoke out against the arms embargo on Rwanda. Jérôme Bicamumpaka: "The embargo is unfair. Why is it unfair? It is unfair because it penalizes the attacked, instead of penalizing the aggressor".
- Embargo or not, the two camps are particularly well armed and each day that passes in Rwanda always adds more dead to the number of victims.