Niyonshuti, 10 ans : « Ils voulaient tuer aussi les enfants tutsi, surtout les garçons, pour les empêcher plus tard de se venger »

Masure, Bruno

Monier, Éric

Constant, Pierre-Laurent

11 mai 1994

19940511

20:00:00

CEST

Journal de 20 heures [2:27]

Niyonshuti, 10 ans : « Ils voulaient tuer aussi les enfants tutsi, surtout les garçons, pour les empêcher plus tard de se venger »

À l'hôpital de Gahini, les patients sont souvent très jeunes, principalement d'ethnie tutsi, le plus souvent mutilés d'un bras ou d'une jambe ou blessés à la tête.

1994-05-11-20fr2.mp4

8193893 bytes

France 2

INA

Journal télévisé

FR

- Chronicle of a forgotten war: fighting is raging again in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Bombings provoke a new dramatic exodus of the civilian population taking refuge in makeshift camps.
- Our special envoys were able to carry out a macabre reconnaissance in this martyred country, accompanied, or rather "guided" in quotation marks, by a Tutsi officer.
- The smell is pestilential. The decomposing bodies of entire families still line the road between the Tanzanian border and Kigali. Some, surprised in their house; others, coldly executed with their hands tied behind their backs.
- Undoubtedly to prove the extent of the massacre, the rebels of the Rwandan Popular Front, which took over the region from the government army, have still not decided to bury these dead. They walk the journalists around, a kind of horror safari.
- Despite the call of the RPF guaranteeing them safety, more than three weeks after the killing, there are still few Rwandan refugees who dare to return to their villages. Tony Kabanda, RPF press officer: "The war here has never been between the two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi. The war here opposes the democrats to the dictators who committed these massacres that you see".
- Only about thirty kilometers from Kigali where the heavy weapon fighting continues, the Gahini hospital, the last in working order in the region. Doctors of the World brought a surgical team back there as soon as the massacre was over. We also meet the first exploratory missions of the International Committee of the Red Cross trying to assess the situation.
- At Gahini hospital, the patients are often very young, mainly of Tutsi ethnicity, most often mutilated in an arm or a leg or injured in the head by formidable nail boards, the preferred weapon executors. Nshizirungu, 10 years old: "I tried to flee with my family. But the militiamen shot me in the leg. Everyone in my family was killed". Niyonshuti, 10 years old: "They also wanted to kill Tutsi children, especially boys, to prevent them from taking revenge later".
- In Gahini there was a hospital, it is now also an orphanage.

The 20 o'clock news of France 2 of May 11, 1994 is visible in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noBhfp9xqEQ