A CONTAGION OF GENOCIDE

By ANDREW PURVIS/MASISI

The Hutu militiamen descended through the steep pastureland to the Trappist monastery early one Sunday in May. Their quarry were Tutsi, 800 of whom had fled their nearby homes in the Masisi highlands of eastern Zaire to take refuge in a brick church on the monastery grounds. As in Rwanda two years ago, the Hutu had a plan, recalls French Brother Victor Bordeau, 60, who had been hearing rumors of an attack for days: "First they would kill the Tutsi brothers, then attack the Tutsi refugees. Then drive the rest out of Zaire."

After the first dozen men converged on the compound, drums echoed from the surrounding hilltops, summoning 300 more combatants from nearby villages. While one group negotiated with Bordeau, another, armed with clubs, machetes and AK-47s, stormed into the church. Tutsi, women and children among them, fled through a rear door and into the surrounding papyrus brush. They were hunted down. Hutu severed a woman's hands and feet. They cut out a man' s heart, leaving a huge gash in his chest. Bordeau was handed a baby, still breathing but drenched in his mother's blood.

Finally, the remaining monks managed to escape in a Land Rover. "They were just waiting for us to leave," recalls Bordeau. In the end, between 100 and 150 Tutsi men, women and children were slaughtered at the Mokoto monastery. "The genocidal mentality of Rwanda is spreading here," Bordeau lamented after reaching the nearby town of Goma. "It is a contagion."

The Mokoto massacre signals an ominous escalation in a civil war that is overwhelming the beautiful province of North Kivu in eastern Zaire. Eclipsed until recently by the scale of the killing in neighboring Rwanda and Burundi, the region is boiling over in a conflict that has left up to 50,000 dead and more than 350,000 homeless, 100,000 in the past two months. Thousands of civilians, mostly Tutsi, continue to stream across the border into Rwanda and Uganda.

Hutu and Tutsi have lived in eastern Zaire for generations, many of them immigrating to the region to till the sparsely populated hillsides in the 1930s, and still more being driven across the border by violence at the time of Rwandan independence in 1959. Since then Hutu of Rwandan ancestry have outnumbered both Tutsi immigrants and indigenous tribes. This imbalance, along with a government decree stripping Rwandan immigrants and their descendants of Zairian citizenship, spawned tension that flared into fighting in 1993. That conflict pitted Hutu against indigenous Hunde tribesmen and was marked by gruesome rituals, with Hunde sometimes eating the hearts of their victims to gain strength and Hutu returning the favor.

Then came the exodus of more than 1 million Rwandans in 1994. Militiamen and members of the defeated Hutu army, furious at losing their war with Tutsi rebels, soon joined with their Zairian Hutu brethren and began killing Zairian Tutsi. Their objective, observers believe, is a "Hutuland" on Zairian soil that would provide a safe haven for refugees and a base for ongoing armed incursions into Rwanda.

Unarmed Tutsi civilians, most of them landholders, are bearing the brunt of the ethnic cleansing. Despite decades of peaceful coexistence with local Hutu, at least 50,000 Tutsi have been forced to flee since 1995, most to squalid refugee camps just across the Rwandan border. In the Masisi highlands, two small groups of Tutsi remain. Desire Gaspira, 40, a veterinary nurse born in the area, is among them. "Before, Tutsi and Hutu worked together," he said last month. "We drank together. We were brothers. Now we are enemies." In nearby Goma a Tutsi aid worker explained the dilemma facing her: "I was born in Zaire. My father was born in Zaire. But staying here means losing my life. I do not want to go to Rwanda, but nor do I want to die."

As the Hutu threat intensifies, indigenous tribes have been fighting back. North of Goma a militia calling itself the Bangalima, after a famous tribe of warriors from the central Zairian rain forest, recently launched a series of attacks on Zairian army posts and local Hutu. Avid fetishists, often fighting naked and using charms that they believe turn enemy bullets into water, the Bangalima fighters have sworn to drive all Hutu from Zaire. A letter received last month by the local representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees threatened a "bloodbath" in the refugee camps if all 750,000 Hutu were not repatriated within 15 days.

The Zairian military recently launched an operation to quell what they are calling a rebel uprising by indigenous militia. Long feared for their corrupt and brutal ways, the unpaid combat troops have scored a few successes against the rebels but in the process have spread terror throughout North Kivu. At the Lake Edward fishing village of Vitshumbi, 62 miles north of Goma, paracommandos stormed in behind a barrage of mortar fire last month, killing 15 Bangalima combatants and, according to local human-rights workers, herding 34 suspected collaborators into local churches and gunning them down. A mother of five reported being raped by soldiers for 10 hours after she was accused of being a rebel because of a horizontal tattoo on her nose.

The chaos in eastern Zaire illustrates the distrust and hatred infecting a region traumatized by Rwanda's and Burundi's civil wars. Neither the Tutsi minority, victims of genocide in 1994, nor the Hutu majority, disfranchised in both their former homelands, has been willing to negotiate. Both feel they have an ancestral right to govern and are intent on pursuing that goal by any means. Ironically, the Hutu quest for a homeland in Zaire conforms to the most radical solution yet proposed to solve the crisis: redrawing the borders so that Hutu and Tutsi can live apart in their own countries. But talks that would precede such a partition, which would involve the uprooting of millions, are not in the offing.

The latest fighting in eastern Zaire has yet to attract attention from the outside world, owing in part to new restrictions on foreign journalists. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali sent a special team to investigate the crisis last month, but rampaging soldiers in Goma forced the group to depart after several hours' consultation with aid workers. "The international community must wake up to this forgotten civil war," said Amnesty International last month. That is certainly true. For without a negotiated settlement, one of the bloodiest conflicts of this century will continue to spread.