Kibeho, the Final Chapter: UN Sharply Lowers Death Toll, Says Many Were Victims of Hutu Extremists, Not the RPF

In November 1995, UN officials and experts significantly revised downward their estimate of the number of Rwandan refugees killed earlier that year when government troops began shooting at the Kibeho displaced camp in the southwest of the country. They now suggest the death toll was closer to the government's original estimate of several hundred than the figure of several thousand still cited by some foreign officials, aid workers and Rwandan exiles opposed to the new leadership in Kigali. For the record, this revision of the death toll received far less media publicity than the original inflated estimates disputed by Rwandan authorities.

In a recent statement to Kenya's parliament, Foreign Minister Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka took Rwanda's current Tutsi-installed government to task about a slaughter of ethnic Hutu at the Kibeho displaced persons camp last April.

Mr. Musyoka quoted unnamed independent observers as saying more than eight thousand people were massacred at the camp by troops of the mainly Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Army.

Mr. Musyoka is not alone in citing estimates of a high death toll at Kibeho, an incident which provoked an international outcry at the time and which is widely perceived as a major blemish on the record of the new leadership in Kigali.

The international medical relief group Medicins Sans Frontieres or Doctors Without Borders still contends that "thousands" were killed at Kibeho.

Hutu extremists regularly cite Kibeho as an example of what they describe as a massacre by bloodthirsty Tutsi troops.

The United Nations, which had military observers at the camp, last April put the toll at four thousand -- an estimate which was almost immediately cut in half, to two thousand.

But now, after several months of quiet study, senior UN officials and investigators have again significantly lowered their figure of the number of actual fatalities at Kibeho. They say they now believe the death toll from last April's shooting was between 800 and 12 hundred.

That is a figure far closer to the number of several hundred dead issued by Rwandan authorities than the original estimates of several thousand cited by aid workers and UN military sources and still referred to by officials like Kenya's Foreign Minister.

These UN officials and investigators also say many of the mainly Hutu refugees who died at Kibeho were killed not by Rwandan soldiers but by fellow refugees -- either deliberately hacked to death with machetes or crushed to death in what turned into a stampede.

Shaharyar Khan is the UN’s Special Representative to Rwanda. In a recent interview in his Kigali office he made clear his support for a revised, lower death toll.

“I talked to people who had been there -- you know, the Zambians, Australians and others. There was a lot of emotion that night when the counting took place. There's also feeling that people might have felt that they had seen bodies when in fact bodies were not there. And there were bodies who pretended to be dead.”

Investigators now agree many of the alleged corpses initially counted by UN troops and aid workers were in fact burlap bundles abandoned by refugees in the mad scramble that took place that fateful day last April.

In other cases, alleged corpses did indeed stand up and walk away after being counted among the dead. An American reporter who was there recalls watching as UN soldiers grabbed the arms and legs of what appeared to be a dead man. The man suddenly jumped up as if shocked out of a deep sleep and ran off, leaving behind several equally shocked soldiers and onlookers.

Rwandan authorities do not deny that their men shot refugees at Kibeho and acknowledge soldiers may have used excessive force in dealing with the situation. But they continue to maintain the troops were provoked by extremists within the camp and acted in self-defense.

The incident occurred after Rwandan authorities cordoned off the camp and announced it would be closed. They called Kibeho a haven for Hutu militia responsible for the 1994 slaughter of a half million or more ethnic Tutsi. They claim relief agencies had turned a blind eye to the activities of extremists in the camp.

Whatever the cause, senior Rwandan officials acknowledge the killings at Kibeho severely damaged the new government's image and interests. But they adamantly reject suggestions that what happened there was what critics have charged is a deliberate policy of ethnic revenge-taking by the country's new Tutsi-installed leadership.