Exodus written by Daniel McGrory for iWITNESS, 2004.
The trail of misery stretched for over a hundred kilometres, as an exodus of Rwandan refugees fled across their border to the town of Goma in neighbouring Zaire. The one million refugees driven from their homes by death squads could not have picked a more inhospitable place to seek sanctuary. Unwanted by their neighbours, they were denied food and shelter, and forced to camp on jagged volcanic rock which offered no trees for firewood, no water, and no comfort for the many too weak to walk another step. As international aid agencies struggled to cope, over 50,000 died from disease in the first fortnight in Goma, in what the refugees believed would be their refuge from genocide. The murder of Rwanda's Hutu President on April 6th had signalled the start of the slaughter in this small mountainous central African state. Radio stations began pumping out violent appeals for Hutus to grab what weapons they had to hand, and to kill their Tutsi neighbours or be killed. The United Nations estimate that in 100 days, beginning in April 1994, as many as 800,000 men, women and children of the majority Tutsi tribe were shot, strangled, bludgeoned, burned, or hacked to death, by their Hutu rivals. When the Tutsi Patriotic Front unexpectedly defeated the Hutu government forces, the Hutu population fled to escape certain death from Tutsis thirsting for revenge. They left behind them countryside of corpses.
Frightened refugees poured out of this landlocked country in every direction. In 48 hours a quarter of a million went east to Tanzania. About the same number staggered south to Burundi, but most headed west to Zaire and to Goma, an impoverished town of 200,000 on the banks of Lake Kivu. Observers from the United Nations refugee agency - UNHCR - counted 600 people crossing the border at Goma every minute. One official declared "There has never been a movement of refugees like this in history". In the overcrowded makeshift refugee camps that appeared around Goma, there were no tents or shelter of any kind, and no clean water or sanitation. Disease swiftly became the new killer. When cholera struck, three thousand people died in the first few days. Within a fortnight over 50,000 perished. The first emergency medical teams to reach Goma could do no more than treat the sick where they fell. Parents with barely the strength to stand, held intravenous drips feeding saline into the skeletal arms of children who would not survive the day. There was neither dignity or privacy for the dying. Nor was there any place for their loved ones to bury them. The razor sharp black volcanic rock made it impossible to dig graves, so all families could do were wrap their dead in straw mats that was their only bedding, and leave the bodies by the side of the road. At first light volunteers would come in trucks to scoop up the dead, and take them to a mass grave the size of a football pitch.
As soon as that was full, bulldozers had to cut down Goma's one fertile corner, the town's banana plantation, to excavate a pit for the thousands more corpses. Only an international airlift of food, on the scale last seen in the 1948 operation to save Berlin, kept Goma from starving. In the emergency camps there was no respite from the savagery. Refugees were used as human shields by the Hutu militiamen who had orchestrated the mass murder, and now feared being discovered by their Tutsi rivals, or war crimes investigators. The gunmen grabbed control of relief supplies, and only fed those who obeyed them. The bodies of those that didn't were found floating in Lake Kivu. Ten years on, more than 3.5 million Rwandans have gone home. Slowly, with international help, they are rebuilding their lives, though they do so in the knowledge the killers of their families still live in their midst, as Rwanda doesn't have enough jails to punish the thousands who took part in the slaughter.
Danny, who worked around the world for the Daily Express and the Times and a close friend of Tom’s.
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