Bwindi Massacre : Bwindi is found in the South Western part of Uganda in Kanungu District at the edge of the western arm of the great rift valley. Approximately an 8 hour journey from Kampala. It is famously known for mountain gorillas only found in Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo. A home to over 400 gorillas which is more than half the entire population of these primates on the entire earth making it the perfect destination for gorilla trekking.
An expedition to observe rare mountain gorillas in their natural habitat turned into a march of terror and death in the rain forest as Rwandan rebels slaughtered eight foreign tourists, including two Americans, after they were abducted from a Ugandan national park.
At least six other tourists survived the nightmarish rampage, which began with rebels systematically raiding campgrounds, killing rangers and rounding up foreigners.
The dead also included four Britons and two New Zealanders, diplomats said Tuesday. “The rebels were looking for Americans and British,” said Hussein Kivumbi, manager of one of five tented camps at the Bwindi National Park and a survivor of the attack. “They killed four women and four men with knives, machetes and axes”. Some of the victims were killed because they couldn’t walk fast enough, he said. At least one female victim appeared to have been sexually assaulted. Americans Rob Haubner, 48, and his wife, Susan Miller, 42, who worked for the computer company Intel Corp., were slain, company spokesman Bill Calder confirmed. The Hillsboro, Ore., couple were on their third trip to Africa with another couple from the company.
All the victims were hacked to death Monday in jungle terrain made famous in the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”
Six tourists who survived the ordeal unharmed were flown Tuesday to safety in Kampala, Uganda’s capital.
Events at the camps on the edge of the national park, also known as Bwindi Impenetrable Forests, unfolded rapidly not long after dawn Monday. About 200 Rwandan rebels charged into the camps set along the mountainous border with Congo and separated the tourists in search of Americans and British, Kivumbi said.
A French diplomat was released, Kivumbi said. The rebels, speaking Kinyarwanda and French and dressed in ragtag clothes, then forced hostages into the mountains of neighboring Congo thus Bwindi Massacre.
Three Americans, six Britons, three New Zealanders, an Australian, a Swiss woman and a Canadian were among those kidnapped, Ugandan officials said, adding that three tourists still were missing.
The rebels appeared to treat their captives kindly at first. They allowed one American to slip away after she feigned an asthma attack and another tourist to leave after she complained she had left her eyeglasses behind. But they later showed no mercy.
They wanted them to move fast, but some couldn’t,” Kivumbi said. “So they killed with machetes one man and one woman who couldn’t walk. Then they killed another three.” Uganda’s army said it attempted to pursue them, but the rebels ran too fast. One survivor, Mark Ross, a tour operator and pilot from Arkansas who has lived in Africa for years, was freed. He said he came upon the remains of some captives who had been marched through the rain forest.
We came across the first set of bodies,” he said. “The women that we’d been told would be escorted back had been killed on the spot. It looks like one was raped prior to being killed.” Ross said he saw five bodies, and “the ones that I saw had their heads crushed in and deep slashes.”
His account clashed with that of Ugandan police spokesman Eric Naigambi, who said the tourists were killed in a gun battle between the rebels and Ugandan soldiers during a rescue operation Tuesday morning. Despite the police accounts, U.S. officials said Tuesday that evidence favored numerous witness accounts that the eight were slain by the rebels.
The rebels also gave a message to Anne Peltier–a survivor who is France’s deputy ambassador to Uganda–blaming the Americans and British for not backing the “ethnic Hutu majority.” The rebels attached notes to the corpses: “Americans and British, we don’t want you on our land. You support our enemy.”A University of Chicago doctoral student was perilously nearby when the rebels raided the camps thus Bwindi Massacre.
At 6:45 a.m. Monday, Elizabeth Garland, 30, was asleep in her tent when she was awakened by the sound of gunfire and grenade explosions, according to her father, James, president of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Garland, who spoke with his daughter Tuesday in Kampala by cellular phone, said she had set out this year to study the impact of tourism on native people.
She had been living in the tent in the Buhoma campground on the northern edge of the park, just a short trail away from the main lodging area, which was filled with tourists, he said.
“She dressed but did not leave her tent for fear that the noise of the tent zipper would attract attention,” James Garland said. “The gunfire and explosions continued until about 9 a.m. She could then hear banging noises as rebels kicked in doors on the ranger station and the guest huts for tourists and began looting” thus Bwindi Massacre
An hour after the last grenade explosion, she heard the camp manager call her name, and she left the tent and toured the area with him, her father said.
All vehicles and buildings in the camp had been burned, one person had been burned to death and many tourists kidnapped, she told her father.
The survivors eventually found a two-way radio that hadn’t been damaged and contacted the U.S. Embassy in Kampala. The embassy then sent a plane to a nearby airstrip and evacuated Garland and the others, her father said. She was concerned that the publicity over this event would undo years of effort and would reinforce undesirable stereotypes about Africa and her peoples,” he said.
Uganda said four Ugandans–a game warden and three park rangers–were killed in the initial camp raids. It said its soldiers killed four rebels in a jungle pursuit that continued Tuesday.
The rebels are among the Hutu fighters who fled Rwanda
