by Ann Williams
Karubamba, 48 km (30 miles) northeast of Kigali, was described as a vision from hell. It was a nauseating scene of human wreckage, with signs of agony on the faces of the dead. Every window, every door, told its own incomprehensible story – a schoolboy lying dead across his desk, a couple covered in blood underneath a picture of Jesus. Every few hundred kilometres along the red-clay road, bodies lay in heaped, decaying piles. The church, which the locals thought would be a safe refuge, was a scene of complete carnage. What was once a fertile valley of terraced hills, was now a carpet of bloodshed in every direction.
THE AFTERMATH
By July the RPF had managed to take control of Kigali, crushing the Rwandan government and eventually bringing a halt to the genocide by July 18. When it became obvious that the RPF was victorious, it is estimated that as many as 2,000,000 Hutus fled to Zaire (the present Democratic Republic of Congo). There were large-scale reprisal killings against Hutus who were alleged to have taken part in the massacre, and the UN returned to Rwanda to help restore order and basic services.
A new multi-ethnic government was formed on July 19, which promised a safe return to all refugees. Pasteur Bizimungu, who was a Hutu, was appointed president with many prominent cabinet posts being taken by members of the RPF.
Although the massacres were over, there was still a concentrated search to find all of those people who were involved. By 2001, 100,000 people were being held in prison and another 500 were sentenced to death for their part in the genocide.
Rwanda, which was already one of the poorest nations in the world, is still suffering today, with little hope of a quick recovery. They are still in desperate need of decent roads, bridges and telephone lines, and education is suffering due to a shortage of schools, teachers and educational material. To make matters worse, food production has been ravaged not only by war, but also by drought, leaving many Rwandans desperate for nourishment and relying on aid from the UN.
It would be nice to think that the atrocities of 1994 are just a distant memory for Rwanda, but today the scars remain and the Tutsis are still convinced that the only way to ensure their survival is to repress the Hutus. The Hutus, themselves, feel they are being treated unfairly under the Tutsi-led government and extremists on both sides still believe that the only solution is the annihilation of the other. As the warring ethnic groups remain prepared for future struggles, we can only hope that this does not lead to another wave of mass killings.
The genocide was a direct result of a small section of the Rwandan government, who believed that an extermination campaign would restore the solidarity of the Hutu under their leadership. Using their power they incited the impoverished population of Rwanda to take up arms and fight for their benefit. One aspect of the genocide, which perhaps has been overlooked, is the fact that it was not only men who were recruited to fight. A substantial number of women, and even young girls, were involved in a number of ways. Not only did they assist in the slaughter, but they also inflicted extraordinary cruelty on fellow women and children. This was another move by the perpetrators to involve the whole of the population – people who were already swayed by past fear and hatred.
A human rights report, which was released in March 1999, stated that the USA, Belgium, France and the United Nations were all given previous warnings of the 1994 genocide, and that it could have been prevented. Over a decade later world leaders have denounced what happened in Rwanda and are shamed by their failure to intervene to halt the slaughter. If another Rwanda happened, has the world learned by its mistakes and would it respond any differently? One thing is for certain: the alarm signals were ignored, and people are still angry at the world’s callous characterization of the Rwanda genocide.
HOTEL RWANDA
The atrocities of 1994 are documented in a 2004 film entitled Hotel Rwanda, directed by Irish filmmaker Terry George. It is based on the true events that took place during the genocidal violence, and the central character is Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle), a Hutu, who managed the four-star Sabena-owned Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali. Through his bravery and management skills he was able to save the lives of 1,200 people, making his hotel a place of refuge against all odds.
Kizlyar Hospital Siege
Chechnya declared independence 11 years ago. Hostage taking, hijacking and bloodshed have been the rule – not the exception – ever since.
Time magazine, October 2002
The siege of the hospital at Kizlyar, a town in Dagestan, Russia, took place in 1996 as part of a series of attacks by Chechen rebels to draw attention to their claims for a separate state, independent from Russian rule. In one of the biggest attacks of its kind, rebel warlord Salman Raduyev held 3,000 hostages captive in the local hospital. After releasing the majority of the hostages, the rebels fled to the Chechen border, where the Russian army opened fire, killing some of the remaining hostages in the process. The situation worsened when, in support of the rebels, gunmen hijacked a passenger ferry on the Black Sea, demanding that the Russians cease their offensive. Thankfully, after four days, the hijackers surrendered and the 255 hostages on the ship were safely returned.
MASS DEPORTATION
The siege was just one episode in a history of conflict between Chechnya and its foreign rulers, which had continued since the reign of the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century. From the 18th century on, Chechen warlords resisted the Russians, who took over the province, and took every opportunity they could to oust their new rulers. Naturally enough, the Chechens were especially rebellious whenever there was internal unrest in Russia itself – for example during the Russian revolution and during the period of enforced Collectivization.
With the advent of the World War II, the Chechens threatened to help the Germans against the Soviet Union, so Stalin ordered the deportation of virtually the whole population to Kazakhstan and Siberia, in the process causing thousands of deaths. It is now thought that roughly one-quarter of the Chechen population died in this way. After the war, there was a continuing programme of ‘Russification’ among the Chechens, forcing them to use Russian as the main language, which proved another source of resentment.
ROUGH JUSTICE
It was not surprising, then, that when the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1990, the Chechens were among the first to take advantage of the situation. By now, Chechnya was an economically deprived, backward region presided over by a group of renegade warlords with different motives and ideals: some of them genuinely fought for independence, progress, and modernization, while others sought merely to line their own pockets. Whatever their motivation, most of these men were no strangers to violence and had grown up with a rough and ready idea of justice. When they began to mount a series of terrorist attacks in the republic, to draw attention to the plight of their people, they proved to be formidable enemies.
As the former Soviet Union began to break up, Russia sent forces into the rebel republic to maintain its authority there. The warlords, led by Shamil Basayev, responded by seizing the town of Budyonnovsk, in Southern Russia, on June 14, 1995, and taking control for six days. They captured the local town hall and police station before commandeering a hospital, where they held more than 1,000 people hostage. Basayev issued a statement demanding the withdrawal of troops from Chechnya and an end to the war between the Chechens and the Russians. He also tried to force authorities to hold a press conference in the hospital, and when his demand was refused, he killed five policemen that had been held hostage.
Eventually, the Russians sent in commando troops, and a battle between them and the rebels raged for two days, before a ceasefire was agreed. Some hostages were released as a result, but many lost their lives in the battle. A second Russian raid failed to resolve the situation, and in the end Russia was forced to agree to ending hostilities with the Chechens in return for the hostages. The president of Russia at the time, Boris Yeltsin, met with a great deal of criticism, both at home and abroad, for allowing the Chechen terrorists to go largely unpunished.
The Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev disclaimed responsibility for the action and sought to distance himself from the rebels.
THREE THOUSAND HOSTAGES
However, this was by no means the end of the story. Six months later, in January 1996, Chechen terrorists again mounted a terror attack, this time in the town of Kizlyar, on the Terek River delta in Dagestan, Russia. The leader of the attack was Salman Raduyev, who assembled a force of around 250 militants, apparently with the support of Dudayev. The rebel fighters attacked a military base at Kizlyar, and then took hostages, commandering the local hospital. The attack was similar to the one in Budyonnovsk, only more hostages were taken: 3,000 people were herded into the hospital and held captive there while the rebels issued their demands. Once again, the terrorists demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.
After releasing most of the hostages, the Chechen rebels made their way back to Chechnya, taking with them hundreds of remaining hostages. They managed to get to the border, at the village of Pervomaiskoye, where they were blocked by Russian troops. They entrenched themselves at the village, and were surrounded by Russian special forces, who tried to overcome them. When they failed, Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov announced that the hostages had all been executed by the rebels and ordered the Russian troops to open fire. Despite appeals from the hostages, who were still very much alive, the soldiers began to fire off rockets into the village. After an eight-day battle in which more hostages died, Raduyev and the rebels managed to escape from the village, taking hostages with them.
To make matters worse, a separate action was taken when another group of Chechen terrorists hijacked a passenger ferry on the Black Sea and held the crew at gunpoint. Demanding that the Russians should cease their attack at Kizlyar, they threatened to detonate a bomb on board the ferry, which would have killed more than 200 people on board. However, after a siege that lasted four days, the gunmen were forced to surrender, and the hostages were free to return home, much to the relief of their families.
WILD WEST
The mayhem continued when, at the end of the first war between Russian and Chechen forces, the region became a kind of Wild West. The Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, ceased to have any control over the warlords, who began to kidnap individuals at random, often extorting money as well as demanding political changes. The rebels’ cruelty became legendary, and there were instances of hostages being beheaded. For example, four engineers were taken hostage and later found with their heads cut off. Aid workers and missionaries also became targets for the rebels, though luckily they survived: Herbert Gregg, an American missionary, went through the ordeal of being held hostage for seven months. After his release, it emerged that the rebels had taken a video of one of them cutting Gregg’s finger off. Gregg himself claimed that he had been reasonably well treated, though this was hard to square with the evidence. In another incident Camilla Carr and John James, two British aid workers, were held captive for a year, but they were fortunately released unharmed.
Sadly, in the new millennium, the continuing conflict between Russia and Chechnya has led to further terrorist incidents. In March 2001, Chechen rebels hijacked an Istanbul plane bound for Moscow. When security forces raided the plane, three people were killed. Not long afterwards, a series of relatively small scale, but nonetheless frightening, attacks were mounted by rebel individuals operating independently. In one of them, tourists in a hotel in Istanbul were held captive in protest at the war; in another, 30 people on a bus were imprisoned in the heat as a Chechen rebel demanded the release of Chechen prisoners held for their part in a previous attack. However, the most daring and horrifying of these attacks took place at a Moscow theatre in 2002, when Chechen terrorists stormed a theatre and held the audience captive before being subjected to a commando-style raid by Russian troops, which killed a large percentage of the hostages.
DEATH OF A WARLORD
In 2002, the leader of the Kizlyar raid, Salman Raduyev, died in jail in Russia. The year before, he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorist acts. The circumstances of his death were somewhat mysterious, the cause of death being given as ‘internal bleeding’. Many suspect that what actually happened is that he was beaten to death, although the Russian authorities vehemently denied this at the time. Amnesty International, aware of the many instances of torture and ill-treatment within the Russian penal system, has called for a full, impartial investigation into his death.
Today, Raduyev remains a controversial figure in Chechen history. For many, he was simply a thug, refusing to abide by the wishes of the Chechen rulers and continuing to carry out terrorist attacks independently. For some, he was a hero: after almost losing his life in a car bomb assassination attempt in 1998, he earned the nickname ‘Titanic’, because of the steel plates planted in his head to reconstruct his skull. Others, such as the incoming Chechen president in 1997, believed that he was mentally ill. He was probably a combination of all three: violent, brave and perhaps somewhat deranged; and, perhaps, it was only the injustices inflicted on him and the Chechen people by the Russian state that gave him any credibility as a freedom fighter.
Docklands Devastation
I looked out of my window towards Canary Wharf to see a huge pall of smoke.
Office worker, Paul Bargery
On February 9, 1996, a large area of London’s Docklands was ripped apart by a massive explosion. The blast was centred on an area known as the South Quay and it was caused by a lorry that was loaded with explosives.
The London Docklands was formerly part of the Port of London, which at one time was the largest port in the world. The demise of the docks came about between 1960 and 1970, when the port was unable to cope with the much larger vessels needed for the newly adopted container system of cargo. The shipping industry gradually moved to deep-water ports such as Tilbury and Felixstowe, and one by one the docks closed. The redevelopment of the area, which was principally for commercial and residential use, took almost 17 years to complete. The 22 sq km (8H sq mile) area, which stretches across the East End boroughs of Southward, Tower Hamlets and Newham, has been transformed and has attracted much worldwide attention.
BOMB ENDS CEASEFIRE
The South Quay in the London Docklands is a railway station for the Docklands Light Railway on the Isle of Dogs, which opened in 1987. On February 9, at about 7.01 p.m., a 500 kg (1,000 lb) bomb, left in a small lorry about 73 m (80 yds) from the station exploded, causing approximately £85 million worth of damage. The lorry was parked underneath Marsh Wall, a bridge at a point where the tracks crossed. The station itself was extensively damaged, along with three nearby buildings – the Midland Bank and South Quay Plaza I and II.
Dublin and Belfast media had received a coded telephone warning regarding the bomb, and consequently the buildings and road nearby were evacuated. Unfortunately, two men working in a newsagent shop directly opposite Marsh Wall, Inam Bashir and John Jeffries, were not warned, and they both died in the explosion. A further 39 people required hospital treatment due to blast injuries and falling glass.
Local residents said they heard an almighty bang and then their windows seemed to bow under the pressure. Another resident reported that even though she lived several kilometres from the explosion, glasses in her china cabinet shook when the bomb actually went off.
Windows in the nearby housing estate imploded and gas mains were ruptured, triggering off a second, smaller blast. Customers who were having a quiet drink in the nearby Trade Winds wine bar, dove to the floor as radiators literally popped off the walls and ceiling tiles started to fall down.
Firemen worked through the night to clear up the devastation, searching carefully through the rubble in case there were more bodies. The secondary gas explosion hampered their rescue efforts, and it wasn’t until the following morning that the police found the bodies of the two men.
The bomb at London Docklands marked the end of a 17-month ceasefire by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the return of viole
nce took most people by surprise. During the ceasefire British, Irish and American leaders worked at trying to come up with a political solution to end the troubles in orthern Ireland. The problem was the Unionists never wanted a negotiated settlement at all. The deposed Unionist leader, Jim Molyneaux, complained at the time of the IRA cessation that ‘the cease-fire had destabilised the situation’. Conversely, Gerry Adams, the leader of the political wing of the IRA known as the Sinn Fein, spoke out about the need to continue the peace process.
Although the IRA claimed responsibility for the bomb at the Docklands, they made a statement that the ‘regrettable injuries’ could have been avoided if the police had responded promptly to their warnings, which, according to the IRA, were both clear and specific.
The IRA have been waging a war against British authorities and the Protestant majority for more than 25 years, with the ultimate goal of getting the British rulers out of Northern Ireland and reuniting it with the Republic of Ireland to the south. However, the Protestant paramilitary organizations, who were determined to keep Northern Ireland British, joined in the battle with their own terror attacks. In the subsequent violence, more than 3,000 people have been killed.
Police investigations into the Docklands bombing led to the arrest of James McArdle, a 29-year-old bricklayer from County Armagh. He was tried and found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions in June 1998 and was jailed for 25 years. Murder charges for the deaths of the two men killed in the explosion, had to be dropped when the judge dismissed the jury over concerns of unfair press coverage.