Tutsis Tribe

To the victors and survivors belong the refrigerators, Toyotas, hillside villas and the Kigali Night Club. At least for the moment and, in many cases, certainly forever. "Immediately after the war, there was . . . looting everywhere," Penninah Mbabazi explained. "People started running here and there, to other people's houses, picking things. The refrigerators were the first to be looted--refrigerators, radios, cookers."

A Rwandan court acquitted a former official charged in the 1994 genocide of more than 800,000 people, state-run Radio Rwanda reported. The criminal court in Kibuye, west of Kigali, the capital, cleared former Deputy Gov. Ignace Banyaga of charges that he helped kill thousands of minority Tutsis seeking shelter at a local church and a stadium in April 1994.

Facing possibly the most serious threat to Congolese President Laurent Kabila's 15-month regime, loyalist troops fought Tuesday to crush a rebellion of renegade soldiers in key cities in their country's east, while in the west the capital braced for gun battles and a nighttime curfew. Military officers primarily belonging to eastern Congo's Banyamulenge Tutsi ethnic group have vowed to oust Kabila in an uprising similar to the one that brought the onetime rebel leader to power in May 1997.

Hollow-log drums throb. Dancers in togas churn up red-powdered dust. It is Sunday and 5,000 villagers press close as their young and inexperienced president steps forward to try to give them hope against the genocidal bloodshed spreading across this troubled nation once again. Burundi is Rwanda's blood brother, born from the same German-cum-Belgian coffee colony and living with the same Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic struggle.

Victorious Tutsi-led rebels installed a "national unity" government Tuesday and urged a halt to the desperate flight of millions of terrorized Rwandan refugees. Nearly half of this Central African nation's population has either fled or is on the move toward the border with Zaire. Maj. Gen.

The nation's Tutsi president handed power to a leader from the Hutu tribe in a power-sharing arrangement designed to end bloodshed. President Pierre Buyoya stepped down for Vice President Domitien Ndayizeye. Although Tutsis make up 15% of the population and Hutus 85%, Tutsis traditionally have dominated the government and army, stoking resentment.

Shelling rocked a city in eastern Zaire on Friday as Tutsi rebels battled Zairian troops, and a European envoy warned that a new genocide in Central Africa could be near. Western aid workers in Geneva said that Banyamulenge rebels--ethnic Tutsis who have lived in Zaire for generations--had seized the airport in Uvira and cut off all satellite and radio communications. Many people were fleeing the city on Lake Tanganyika, they said.

An exodus of 300,000 Hutu refugees from camps in eastern Zaire grew more chaotic Thursday as rumors spread that Tutsi rebels were planning to attack the provincial capital. U.N. aid workers in that city, Bukavu, where 80,000 refugees were reported to have arrived Thursday, said Zairian troops were setting up roadblocks and warning people of an impending assault.

Survivors of a massacre at a U.N.-run refugee camp buried 163 Congolese Tutsis in a dusty cotton field Monday, some fainting in the hot sun as the simple wooden coffins were lowered into a mass grave. Some of them wept as others told of narrow escapes as Hutu marauders rampaged through the Gatumba camp, screaming that they would kill any Tutsi they found.

The signs are ominous: Rwanda seems to be tumbling toward a resumption of civil war. On Monday, the international organization Human Rights Watch issued a report substantiating fears of Rwanda's young government and concerns of independent officials in the region: The defeated and exiled army of the former regime is rearming and preparing to try to retake the country by force. Moreover, Human Rights Watch said the campaign by these armed ethnic Hutus threatens to destabilize the entire region.