The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 15

The Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, May 21, 1994 B3 OBSERVER RWANDA BURUNDI 'lUocCty (ones' tapped! odd Diving DneDD Seeds oiVss Family finds safe haven in Row II, Tent 17 FLEEING THE SLAUGHTER: Emmanuel Niarimana and his two sons escaped the massacre in their Rwanda bordertown and walked for eight days to reach a UN refugee transit camp. Now, they and 9,000 others share a 10-hectare field in Mubuga. and bare feet. He is a Tutsi. He saya he is 45 years old.

He is very proud of his two teenage sons, Justice and Edouard. 0 3" r.v 's, ---'4 I flippy- WM 1 I IK tlllf I III I III Y.A." 1 Horror blurs line between life and death KIGALI, Rwanda A jagged hole in the roof and bloodstains in the bleachers of a football stadium full of refugees are mute witnesses to the global indifference to the Mike Trickey world's deadliest war. Fifteen people most of them children were killed by the blast a couple of weeks ago. More than 100 others were injured. "It's the same kind of thing they fired into that market in Sarajevo," said Canadian Maj.

Jean-Guv Plante. "After that, everybody cared about Bosnia and what could we do to stop it. This thing? It was just as bad, just as many people killed, but I don't remember reading anvthing about it." Tucked into a dark corner of the world, the almost indescribable horror of Rw anda goes on. The numbers are so vast as to be incomprehensible. Most officials are accepting 500,000 dead more than twice as many killed in two years' of fighting in Bosnia as a reasonably accurate figure.

There are more than a million refugees some of whom have been on the run from ethnic killing between Tutsis and Hutus for more than three years. Tens of thousands have crossed into neighboring Burundi hoping for sanctuary in the relative peace of a country that saw 50.000 killed in similar fighting earlier this year. Another 300.000 are in Tanzania, which cannot afford to support them. Countless others are cowering in football stadiums, churches and hospitals, waiting to be discovered and possibly killed. The International Red Cross has expanded its Kigali operation into neighboring houses so it doesn't have to release wounded people into the streets.

At either end of the road leading to the makeshift facility, dull-eyed gunmen have set up roadblocks. They are Hutu extremists looking for Tutsis. If one comes out, he or she will be killed. Inside, the lone surgeon performs 10 to 20 operations a day some minor, some requiring patching together skulls cleaved open by machetes or treating the stumps of hacked-off limbs. In one tent, a girl probably no more than a year old sits without crying as a volunteer nurse gently treats her left foot, torn apart by shrapnel.

Nobody knows who the girl is. She was found and brought in. She, like a generation of other young Rwandans, is likely now an orphan. But, in the twisted lottery that is Rwanda, she's lucky. At least the Red Cross is getting basic medical supplies and has a doctor.

At King Faisal Hospital, more than 3,000 refugees, more than half of them children, live in stinking, fetid conditions just metres from a Rwandan Patriotic Front trench. The courtyards at the modern hospital are under 10 centimetres of green water, human excrement and garbage. The smell is, if you're lucky, breath-taking. All the staff have fled and medical supplies have long since disappeared. A little boy lies crying on the i Reuter photos GENERATION OF ORPHANS: A Hutu girl, top, carries her younger brother en route to a refugee camp.

Below, a Tutsi boy sits outside a hospital in the Rwandan town of Gahini ww ft ZAIRE UGANDA Demilitarized zona i IMUD1I I Gitarama Cyangugu BURUNDI "0 Bujumbura a Major roads LaKB TAUTAUIA 40 mile 40 km Seeds of the ethnic violence that has caused up to 500,000 deaths in Rwanda since April 6 were planted centuries ago. Rwanda was born as a kingdom in the 13th century and ruled by the Tutsis, a political minority. They clung tightly to the reins of power, but existed fairly peacefully with the majority Hutus. German and Belgian colonial rulers in the early 1900s upheld the Tutsis' dominance, even through a period of unification with Burundi. The Hutus rebelled in 1959; stripped of power, thousands of Tutsis fled the country.

In 1962, Rwanda regained independence, and ethnic strife has simmered ever since, exploding in periodic coup attempts and massacres. Leaders had established a fragile truce before the Hutu president was killed in a suspicious plane crash April 6. RWANDA: UHiJ Size: 26,338 square kilometres Population: 7.5 million; 90 per cent Hutu; 9 per cent Tutsi; 1 per cent pygmy Economy: About 93 per cent is based on agriculture, primarily coffee, sweet potatoes, bananas and beans. BURUNDI: Size: 27,866 square kilometres Population: 5.5 million; 84 per cent Hutu; 1 5 per cent Tutsi Economy: About 93 per cent is based on agriculture, primarily coffee, beans, cassava, corn, peanuts; also nickel. APWm.

J. Castello, Eileen Glanton The thugs take a particular delight In stopping and taunting the UN, forcing operators of armored personnel carriers to let them carry out inspections. Once night falls, being outside is an invitation to death. The UN-marked vehicles are targets of gunfire as peacekeepers dash from their compound to their sleeping quarters in a once posh hotel. There's no running water or lights in the halls.

Lights work in the rooms, however, and the satellite television operates so residents can watch CNN and channels from South Africa and France. The RPF is stationed outside and fighting has blown out most of the hotel's front windows. In the back, a children's playground sits deserted. Plante, a 30-year veteran of peacekeeping missions, swerves to avoid a body that lies rotting in the street and stares into the faces of the young killers who seem to enjoy their work the same harvesting of humans that has been going on for generations in Rwanda. "I believe in God," he says.

"But you know, sometimes I believe his logistics people really (messed) up." Southam News repair a public toilet. Third, people were paid next to nothing. Consequently, they didn't work very hard. After my trip to Bucharest, I must admit my analysis was wrong. The explanation was good, but not good enough.

Communism has gone, but the filth remains. The main question goes unanswered: How can we stand the disorder? How can we pee in such places without feeling offended at the way we live? Toilet seats might be too expensive, but do we have to settle for a piece of rusty wire or a rope to flush the toilet? Why the smell? Why no toilet paper? Why, despite the end of communism, do we witness the continuation of this phenomenon? Here's a partial answer. If you take a stroll in downtown Bucharest in the middle of winter, all you see are fur hats. It's not because there are no alternatives or because fur is less expensive than wool. No, the fur hat is part of the national peasant costume, and Romania, like most ex-Communist countries, remains a country of peasants.

(It was 80-per-cent peasant before the Second World War.) After the "glorious victory of communism," the masses migrated to the cities. The fact that they flocked to urban areas, however, does not By George Somerwlll SouthamStar Network BUJUMBURA, Burundi Fear is everywhere these days in this small corner of Africa, Whether talking to Burundi-ans, Rwandan refugees, aid workers or priests, you can smell the fear. It sticks to the body like a clammy film of plastic. The ultimate natural defence of minds and bodies that have seen and heard too much. It is a powerful repellent to outsiders, yet imparts a ghastly aura of attraction its victims.

The cause of the fear in this country and its northern neighbor, Rwanda, is now familiar to us all. The incredible savagery that has engulfed Rwanda could very easily sweep across Burundi. From the mountains of eastern Zaire, across the northern border of the mountainous frontier region, refugees come on foot, by dugout canoe or packed into old trucks that have seen better times. At some points it's possible to walk up to the border between Rwanda and Burundi. The two neighbors are frequently separated by a deep river.

It's the rainy season and the rich red-brown mud clings heavily to your boots. In this season, the banana groves and the rainforest are a rich luminous green giving an impression of bursting fertility. It contrasts strongly with the orgy of killing and destruction on the other side, inside Rwanda. Across the river, nothing moves except a thick, continuous pall of smoke. Its presence confirms reports of escaping refugees, aid workers and priests that armed gangs of militias, loosely controlled by the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda, are sweeping across the countryside, destroying settlements and killing everything in their path.

With the rainy season, the river is full, fast-flowing and thick with mud. In nine minutes, I counted more than 30 corpses being swept along. A CARE colleague reported that, the previous day, the flow of bodies in the river was continuous. Emmanuel Niarimana is a tall, fine-looking man with an innate dignity despite his patched jacket Whether talking to Burundians, Rwandan refugees, aid workers or priests, you can smell the fear. It sticks to the body like a clammy film of plastic.

mean they changed their ways. Anyone who has ever visited a village in the Balkans or in the former Soviet Union knows peasants have a different idea of hygiene than city-dwellers. They go here and there, in nature while working in the field or in a wooden cabin in their yard. And their idea of what is regarded as "clean" is certainly different from that of urban folk. There is a difference between having a hole dug in the ground, fenced with four planks, and having a water closet in your apartment or at least there should be a difference.

In the streets of Bucharest, the link between fur hats and hygienic habits suddenly became obvious to me. The Communist crash course in turning these peasant newcomers into urbanites did not help them to change. They were forced to jump from a village into a city, from feudalism into communism, without an opportunity to develop a civil society with all its values and habits, from private property to human rights, from democracy to toilet paper. So as much as toilets in Romania reveal the nature of the Communist system, they also reveal the future of democracy. People need time to but his wife is dead, he says sadly.

She died two years ago. He and his sons had a small' patch of land near the southern' Rwanda border town of Butare. The plot was big enough to feed them and to sell what was left over. He also owned three cows. Although lonely since the death of his wife, Niarimana was happy, with his life.

All that came to a sudden and brutal end April 17. His small village was attacked by 20 heavily armed Hutu men who called themselves a militia. The killing began at one end of his village, says Niarimana, and while some of his neighbors and their cattle were being killed, he and his sons fled into the bush. Thev hpaded south for di. Its l.iO kilometres from Butare to Ngozi in northern Burundi.

It took Niarimana and his sons eignt clays to walk it. By day they hid in the bush ing wild fruit and by night they trav-, elled, always keeping a wary eye open for militias or remnants of the Rwandan army. At the border, they met several thousand other refugees. About 40 of them had beeh: severely injured, mostly during vicious attacks by militia gangs with machetes, knives and "Many of the people I travelled with were too injured to walk." Niarimana said. "One man had lost half of his hand and he was trying to stop the' bleeding with an old cloth.

Another woman had a bad cut across the side of her face. I could see the Thov frncton tho nnrrloi of a lit tie-known checkpoint near a town." called Kabarere. The Rwandan officials had fled, the spot clays before and Burundi's officials and army, predominantly" staffed by officers and men of Tutsi origin, welcomed the refugees. rri I A i lie military pruviueu iwo trucks, which took the seriousiy; injured to local health posts or hospital in the provincial capital of Kayanza. The Niarimana family remained at a UN refugee transit camp near Kabarere for three days and were eventually shipped to a CARE-run camp at Mubuga in northern Burundi.

When I met them, they were receiving the familiar standard issue one blanket per person, a large blue plastic sheet combined with a set of sticks, makes a small tent, a set of saucepans, plates, spoons and knife. In another part of the maize rations were being distribat- ed. The smell of cooking fires was' heavy. Emmuanuel Niarimana and his sons, Justice and Edouard, are living at Mubuga camp in Row II, Tent 17. They share a field of 10 hectares with 9,000 other men, women and children.

George Somerwill works for CARE Canada and has spent the past month in Burundi and Zaire working with Rwandan refugees. story change their ways and to understand new ideas and values, and one of the most difficult lessons is that of individual responsibility. If we are to undergo yet another crash course, this time in democracy, the result will be more or less the same as it was with communism: demcc-racy will never become more than an ideology manipulated by cur new leaders for their own purposes. Anyway, what meaning could democracy possibly have for a's today? It is still a mere phantasm, a new Utopian concept, a panacea. Most people in the former Communist world have a deformed notion.

of democracy; it's a kind of natural occurrence that descended on us, not something we had to develop and work for. The values of a civil society are values created by citizens, and one or two generations of peasants living in the cities under a totalitarian regime had no chance of becoming citizens, politically and culturally. Liberal values take time, particu larly in countries in which clean bathrooms with hot running water, toilet paper and soap used to belong only to dictators. Slavenka Drakulic is a Croatian writer. floor, bloody from shrapnel wounds, but there is no pain-killer for him.

"He hurts now, he's going to hurt tonight and he's going to hurt tomorrow," says the woman trying to comfort him. In the room reserved for the badly wounded, where aid workers sometimes come to change pus-soaked dressings, Hutus and Tutsis suffer together and without recrimination. One man, a Tutsi, rolled up his nightshirt to show dreadful burns he says came from a Rwandan government rocket. Next to him, a Hutu shows off his disfigured arm and rotting bandage. "We went out looking for some food one day and some soldiers from the RPF forced us into a house.

There were 45 of us and only I lived. That was because I fell when I was hit and I got covered up by dead people. The doctor who came here said I'll lose my arm." Outside, Plante, a grandfather from Montreal whose gruff soldier mask doesn't fool anyone, is being mobbed by children as he hands out packages of his own food. He looks first for mothers with infants and scolds a teenager who grabs a biscuit from the reach of a small child. Then you come into a white marble hall with an elegant staircase that leads upstairs to the living quarters of two of the three Ceaus-escu children; son Valentin and daughter Zoe.

Zoe's former apartment consists of a salon, a bedroom and a bathroom. The salon and the bedroom are done up in silk wallpaper and heavy silk curtains. At first glance, the pink bathroom is less impressive than the ornate rooms that surround it. With its heavily designed, gold-plated fixtures and its two shades of pink tile the room is an ordinary, if spacious, bathroom of the sort found in middle-class homes throughout the West. But during the reign of her parents, Nicolae and Elena, Zoe Ceausescu's bathroom was a sign of ultimate luxury for one very simple reason; it worked, with hot water, toilet paper, soap and all that.

By contrast, Bucharest's toilets public and private make you feel as if you have entered an underground world, a place where civi-, lized life has ceased to exist In the little apartment of a friend, a doctor living on the eighth floor of a skyscraper, there is such a luxury as a bathtub, but it serves only as a container for the water for his toilet And judging from the calcium Some people brought their cattle and goats with them. But with food running short, at least one animal must be slaughtered each day and there aren't many left. To add a touch of the surreal, four pretty, clean, made-up prostitutes work the crowd. And groups of men sit huddled in the dirt, playing card games for money. Back at the stadium, bands of children fall in line behind Canadian soldiers on patrol, beating rhythmically on their flak jackets and chanting "Ca-na-da." They pay no attention to the overpowering smell or the piles of human and animal feces dotting the running track as they traipse barefoot through the muck.

Again, by the strange logic of Rwanda, these are the lucky ones: Most have escaped unhurt, the stadium is protected by the UN and there are lots of other children to play with. In the places where there is no suffering, there is menace. Teenage or younger boys build roadblocks and order the few vehicles to stop while they search for their enemies or loot the contents. Grenades could be bought on the streets of Kigali for 25 cents apiece before the war broke out in April and it seems almost every adolescent male has one. deposits, it has been so forever, because of the fact that water, as well as electricity, often goes off.

It gets worse. Take, for example, the famous restaurant Carul Cu Bere, situated in the centre of town in a beautiful 19th-century building. It's a classic Bierstube, with good food and plenty of dark, carved wood. The atmosphere changes, however, when you venture to the restroom. No sooner has the restaurant door closed behind you then you are hit by the sharp, choking stench of urine.

There's not a dry spot on the floor. Nor is there a toilet seat. To flush, you pull a dirty rope. Soap and toilet paper are nonexistent. This is not an exception.

What explains the absence of normal hygienic standards? And why is it important? Coming from a former Communist country myself, I long offered a three-part explanation for the East Bloc's stinking, decrepit toilets. First the cause was to be found in the dysfunctional Communist system, with its failure to recognize and fulfill people's basic needs, from milk to toilet paper. Second, since everything was collectively owned, no one was accountable. Someone up there had to decide to To pee or not to pee: A post-communist lav GOING TO POT: Communism is gone, but the filth remains. There's no such thing as hygienic standards.

Entering a washroom is like descending into a place where civilized life no longer exists. By Slavenka Drakulic The New Republic BUCHAREST, Romania I peed in her pink toilet. I washed my hands in her pink sink and corrected my make-up in a mirror above it. For a moment, I even considered taking a bath in her pink tub. Perhaps that was what every Romanian woman wanted to do; enjoy the privilege of Zoe Ceausescu's bathroom on the first floor of her former residence on Spring Street in Bucharest I knew she would not have approved of what I had done, but with her parents dead and her family stripped of its possessions, Zoe no longer had a say in this or other matters.

When you enter the villa, separated from the street by a high wall, you pass through an entrance hall ith mosaics in marble and gold on the floor and on the walls..