Massacre
"With Brent that day were Marek Pazik and Stefan Stec,
both polish officers who had briefly been billeted in the Gikondo Parish
Church, known as the Polish Mission because it was run by priests from Poland.
Pazik and Stec did not last long under the austere regime
at the mission, but two of their fellow Polish MILOBs had stayed on.
That morning, a faint call had come from the men at the
mission begging for help.
The batteries on the radio were dying and all Brent could
make out was that there had been killings at the church.
Not knowing what to expect, Brent, Pazik and Stec armed
themselves and, hatches down, set off to Gikondo in the APC with a Bangladeshi
officer and three men.
Along the route, they passed through fighting between the
RGF and the RPF, through Genarmerie roadblocks and through ever-increasing and
chaotic militia roadblocks.
They saw the bodies of men, women and children near these
roadblocks.
So many civilians were on the move, it looked like the
entire population was abandoning Kigali.
At the church, they came to a halt and dismounted.
Pazik and a Bangladeshi soldier went to the rectory to
find the Polish MILOBs, while Brent and Stec confronted the first evidence of
wholesale massacre.
Across the street from the mission, an entire alleyway
was littered with the bodies of women and children near a hastily abandoned
school.
As Brent and Stec were standing there trying to take the
number of bodies, a truck full of armed men roared by
Brent and Stec decided to head for the church
Stec went inside while Brent stood by the door to cover
him and to keep the APC in sight
They confronted a scene of unbelievable horror – the
first such scene UNAMIR witnessed – evidence of genocide, though we didn’t yet
know to call it that
In the ailsles and on the pews were the bodies of
hundreds of men, women and children
At least fifteen of them were still alive but in a
terrible state
The priests were applying first aid to the survivors
A baby cried as it tried to feed on the breast of its
dead mother, a sight Brent has never forgotten
Pazik found the two Polish MILOBs, who were in a state of
grief and shock, hardly able to relate what had happened
The night before, they said, the RGF had cordoned off the
area, and then the Gendarmerie had gone door to door checking identity cards
All Tutsi men, women and children were rounded up and
moved to the church
Their screams alerted the priests and the MILOBs, who had
come running
The priests and officers were seized at the church doors
and slammed up against the wall with rifle barrels at their throats
They were forced to watch at gunpoint as the gendarmes
collected the adults’ identity cards and burned them
Then the gendarmes welcomed in a large number of civilian
militiamen with machetes and handed over the victims to their killers
Methodically and with much bravado and laughter, the
militia moved from bench to bench, hacking with machetes
Some people died immediately, while others with terrible
wounds begged for their lives or the lives of their children
No one was spared
A pregnant woman was disemboweled and her fetus severed
Women suffered horrible mutilation
Men were struck on the head and died immediately or
lingered in agony
Children begged for their lives and received the same
treatment as their parents
Genitalia were a favorite target, the victims left to
bleed to death
There was no mercy, no hesitation and no compassion
The priests and MILOBs, guns at their throats, tears in
their eyes, and the scream of the dying in their ears, pleased with the
gendarmes for the victims
The gendarmes reply was to use the rifle barrels to lift
the priests’ and MILOBs’ heads so that they could better witness the horror
Killing with machetes is hard work, and sometime in the
night the murderers became fatigued with their gruesome task and left the
church, probably headed for some sleep before they moved on to the next
location
The priests and MILOBs did what they could for the few
survivors, who moaned or crawled from underneath the corpses that had sheltered
them
Both of the MILOBs were overwhelmed by emotion as they
recounted the night’s events
One fell completely silent while the other admitted that
though he had served in places, such as Iraq and Cambodia, this was it, he was
going home
The men needed to get out of there, to get back to the
security of headquarters and regain their equilibrium, and they urged the
priests to join them
But the fathers refused, saying they had to stay with the
wounded, who were too many to carry in the APC
Brent and the others gave the priests a radio and a
charged battery, what water they had and a small first aid kit, and promised to
report the incident and mount a rescue mission
They warned the priests that since it was already mid
afternoon, it was unlikely that a large armed escort with ambulances or heavy
transport could be mounted and then negotiate the dozens of roadblocks before
nightfall, but the priests were confident they could hide overnight, as the
militia and gendarmes had surely finished with them
Feeling like deserters, the UNAMIR group returned to
Force HQ, and the Polish MILOBs were put to bed.
Kigali sector was directed to conduct a rescue mission,
but as Brent had suspected, it couldn’t comply until the next day – dozens of
missions were already underway.
Early the next morning, the priests called on the radio
and reported that the militia had returned during the night.
Our APC had been spotted at the church, and the killers
had returned to destroy the evidence of the massacre.
They had killed the wounded and removed and burned the
bodies.
The decision to leave the priests and the victims had
disastrous consequences, but such are the decisions that soldiers make in war.
Some days you make decisions and people live, other days
people die.
Those innocent men, women and children were simply Tutsi.
That was their crime."
(482)
