Kigali

Writer-director Terry George, in Washington this past November to promote Hotel Rwanda, confessed that when he read co-writer Keir Pearson's initial script, he felt that the politics threatened to overwhelm the personal story. And how could they not? On April 6, 1994, the downing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane on its approach to Kigali Airport triggered a genocide of unprecedented swiftness. Habyarimana was a Hutu, and the ruling, majority Hutu tribe blamed the Tutsis - even though the president had just agreed to share power with them.

KABGAYI, Rwanda -- The land is disarmingly lush at first. Before reaching the eerie emptiness that grips the killing fields, the aid convoy passes through hills thickly cultivated with coffee, bananas, beans and sorghum -- the places to hide.There aren't stacks of bodies here, but death lingers. It greets the aid workers, and a reporter traveling with them, as they make one of their first expeditions into southern and central Rwanda since it became too deadly to stay in the country.On an open field beneath a hill between the Burundi border and Butare, a university town in southern Rwanda, the convoy stops where two bodies lie on their backs, bloated in the sun and about 100 yards apart.

Relief workers called him Moses. Yet instead of being pulled from reeds and bulrushes, this 2 1/2 -year-old Rwandan was found alive beneath the corpses of other refugees felled by mortar shrapnel and a trampling mob last week in Goma, along the Zaire-Rwanda border.Nearby were piles of assault weapons and grenades seized from Rwandan government soldiers as they fled by the thousands into Zaire, fearing retribution in Rwanda's latest turn of gruesome events.Moses' fragile luck may hold. A Baptist mission hopes to find him a home with a Zairian family, according to David R. Syme, regional director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency.

PHILADELPHIA -- The Save Darfur coalition will hold a rally in Washington on Sunday to focus public outrage on the genocide in Darfur. Over the past three years, Sudanese militias, aided by the government, have caused the deaths of up to 400,000 African Muslims in the Darfur region in western Sudan. They sent another 2.5 million fleeing to refugee camps. The rally's organizers, a broad umbrella of religious and human rights groups, hope a huge turnout will galvanize the White House to work harder to stop the slaughter.

KADUHA, Rwanda -- Hutu refugees who have accepted assurances from the new government in Kigali that it is safe to go home have come back to the wretched camps of this harsh region of Rwanda. They claim that Tutsi villagers and soldiers of the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front, the Tutsi-dominated organization that is now the government, are killing Hutus returning to their village."I saw so many dead bodies," said Charles Murera, 43, who told how he had escaped from a mud-brick house where he was being detained by Patriotic Front soldiers with 10 other Hutu men.Mr.

2 dead, 9 injured in allied attack on southern Iraq targets BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Allied planes struck civil and military targets in southern Iraq yesterday, killing two people and wounding nine others, the Iraqi military reported. The U.S. Central Command confirmed that American planes had attacked Iraqi missile batteries 100 miles south of Baghdad, but gave no word of casualties. The attacks were in retaliation for anti-aircraft fire and a surface-to-air missile attack on "coalition aircraft," the Central Command said in a statement from its headquarters in Florida.

THROUGHOUT his presidency, Bill Clinton took heat for too much intervention in the problems of the world, throwing caution to the wind without an exit strategy. The foreign policy promise of the Bush 2000 campaign was to end this. The national interest narrowly defined will govern policy. But the judgment of history is likely to be that the Clinton administration's worst foreign policy sin was not doing too much but doing nothing in Rwanda and ensuring that nothing was done. Rwanda's Hutu military government organized the murder of some 800,000 Tutsis in a few weeks of 1994.

Until a few weeks ago, a select group had been allowed to visit a family of fellow primates rarely encountered by mere humans -- the mountain gorillas of East Africa. It is perhaps the most sublime experience one can have with wildlife in Africa, maybe in the world. But it is no longer available. The gorillas of the mist have become the gorillas of the war zone. Since eight tourists were killed in an attack in Uganda on March 1, the last of the routes to visit these gorillas has closed.

It's been almost 10 years since 800,000 Tutsis were shot and hacked to death in a barbarous slaughter organized by the rival Hutu tribe in Rwanda. The French and Belgians -- who do considerable business there -- did little to stop it, the United Nations did less, and the United States all but ignored it. Fearing that the blood bath will soon be forgotten completely, Gil Courtemanche has written a harrowing novel describing the long nightmare of violence that...

When it comes to consumer complaints, blame flies fast and furious. Companies blame faulty technology or confused workers. Workers blame bad company policies and, occasionally, unreasonable consumers with unrealistic expectations. And consumers blame everyone involved - from an employee on up to corporate management and the governmental body that regulates the company. Seldom does anyone blame himself. Joelle Miller, a graduate student, wrote in recently about a colossally bad experience she had while flying from Washington to Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 3. Here's her story: "The U.S. State Department issued me a passport with a typo."