Damien Timms - Kibeho

Running time
3 min 40 sec
Copyright
Department of Veterans' Affairs

Transcript

Kibeho, so my role again was provide security to the medical team. So we had a medical team go down there and it was all on the intelligence information that the RPA may have some vengeful acts for the Interahamwe, who had committed all this genocide. And they were going down there and they were saying that they were training camps for the Interahamwe to rise up again. Historically Rwanda has had one demographic being the Tutsis, and the Hutu.

They will rise up and they will train over the border. And they'll come over and fight them and so on and so on. It's just been like that for centuries so to speak. But this time obviously with the war they'd killed two million people in around two weeks or so, so they'd really had gone full on. I digressed from your question, but from an intel and needing to understand the history of things, it seemed like it was going to be another tit for tat sort of thing.

So they went down there. We were close to the area because we were doing sort of other outer patrols, because we were vehicle mounted. And then we basically got called up to go support them because a massacre had started there, basically vengeance acts against the people. When we initially got there, the Australians had started a triage station and were also there with the Zambians who actually had an outpost there. All the people were fleeing from the shooting. A lot of them had been killed so they moved, tried to get into where the UN soldiers were to protect them. A lot of them obviously didn't make it and the RPA would not ... It was like they had their blinkers on for the UN troops. Yeah they're there, but they're basically observers. They're not going to do anything. This is our country, let's get our vengeance so to speak.

Was this page helpful?
We can't respond to comments or queries via this form. Please contact us with your query instead.
CAPTCHA