Tutsis Tribe

After days of heavy fighting, ethnic Tutsi rebels claimed Monday to have driven government troops from the politically important city of Gitarama southwest of the capital. A new round of cease-fire talks opened in Kigali, but no breakthroughs appeared imminent. A brief truce in the city, however, allowed U.N. peacekeepers to escort refugees to safe areas for the first time this month.

Making dangerous flights in darkness, French commandos rescued 74 ragged Tutsis from Rwanda late Thursday after they spent days in hiding from marauding Hutu militiamen. The refugees had bullet and machete wounds, some many days old. They were flown by six helicopters to Goma, the Zairian border town that is the base for the U.N.-authorized French humanitarian mission in western Rwanda.

Millions of Rwandans fled toward uncertain safety in neighboring nations Monday as Tutsi rebels declared an immediate cease-fire, an end to Rwanda's civil war and the installation of a new government. But the rebels' promise of a unilateral cease-fire did little to reassure millions of Hutu refugees--by one estimate nearly half the prewar population.

President Laurent Kabila's government has accused Uganda of joining fellow neighbor Rwanda in sending troops into Congo to fight in a week-old Tutsi-led revolt. Information Minister Didier Mumengi said at a news conference Sunday that two Ugandan army columns with tanks, armored cars and trucks had crossed the border near Lake Albert in the northeast of Congo, formerly called Zaire. "These Ugandan soldiers are heading for Bunia," he said referring to the northeastern town.

The peasant women stood in a semicircle, smashing clumps of dried earth with hoes. Some were shrunken and shriveled; others had babies strapped to their backs; all were barefoot and wearing head scarves. In a country mired in ethnic strife for decades, it didn't matter that some of these women were ethnic Hutus and others Tutsis. Their tools crunched in harmony as they prepared the soil to plant Irish potatoes that would provide both food and a profitable commodity.

Some of them are only boys, 14 or 15 years old, wearing sheepish grins and raggedy uniforms that make them appear no more threatening than toy soldiers. They smile easily, but the smile does not reach their eyes. Already these boys are wartime veterans, warriors who have no rank, collect no pay and travel on foot, lugging an odd assortment of French, Belgian and Soviet weapons. They sleep on the ground, stuff bullets in their pockets and have not yet learned to salute or field-strip a rifle.

In an ominous development threatening more than 100,000 exhausted Rwandan refugees facing starvation and disease in eastern Zaire, rebels blocked the United Nations on Friday from starting a massive airlift to carry them home. The Hutu refugees have been on the run since 1994 and are on their last legs, dying at a rate of about 60 a day, although that rate is half that reported earlier this month. Officials of the Office of the U.N.

A bitter civil war is spreading here in the shadow of Rwanda, where a similar boil of ethnic hatred and extremist politics led to the genocidal slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people two years ago. The question is: Will Burundi, where up to 100,000 people already have been killed, go the way of tortured Rwanda?

Rwandan authorities have arrested at least 500 Hutu refugees accused of genocide among the 340,000 who have returned from Tanzania this month, U.N. officials said. Anne Willem Bijleveld, an official with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the refugees were arrested in northeastern Rwanda in connection with the 1994 genocide of about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. A Hutu refugee lobby group said the returnees were being arrested on the basis of false testimony.

Defeated and bitter Rwandan army soldiers have begun killing some of their own people to stop them from returning home. And if that were not misery enough for the 900,000 refugees here, an outbreak of yet another killer disease has begun--a mysterious fever that is suspected to be typhus. U.N. relief officials said Tuesday they have confirmed that a refugee was beaten to death at a nearby camp after urging his countrymen to return home to Rwanda.