Exiled Tutsis Return To Unfamiliar Home

KIGALI -- David Kalinda, 20, sits smiling in his family's small shop in the capital of Rwanda, a country he had never seen until three weeks ago, and says he is home at last.


His lips, he says, are breaking out in spots as he is not used to the heat, he does not speak Rwanda's second language, French, he drives on the right instead of the left and misses the electricity and water he accepted as normal in Uganda.


But David, as a member of Rwanda's Tutsi minority whose parents fled into exile in 1959 when the feudal land-owning Tutsi monarchy was overthrown by the Hutu majority, is alone no longer.


Tens of thousands of Tutsis in exile in Uganda, Zaire and neighboring Burundi for three decades have returned to Kigali since the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front seized it a month ago.


"What we fought for is finished. There is no need for anyone to feel revenge. There is only a need for reconciliation and unity," says David in the grocery shop his family found empty when they drove for the first time to Kigali from Uganda.


His is the tone of the victor, who nevertheless knows the Tutsis are a minority of less than 14 percent after massacres of more than half a million, while most of the majority Hutus are in defeat.


But the Tutsis and small Hutu opposition parties now in power in the new government want the 2 million Hutus who fled the country back, which is bound to bring them up against the long-term Tutsi exiles who returned during their short absence.


"The Hutus must come back. If they understand the new situation they will. They are welcome here," said David, who has three sisters and seven brothers including a fighter with the RPF.


The lush, hilly capital is still fairly quiet more than a month after the end of the fighting.


The UN high commissioner for refugees estimates there are at most 100,000 people now in Kigali, which had 400,000 before war erupted in April.


Only a trickle of 5,000 Hutus each day are returning to Rwanda from disease-ridden refugee camps in eastern Zaire.


They have to trek into a capital where for every car with Rwandan registration plates on the shell-holed highways there are almost equal numbers with foreign plates belonging to the 1959 Tutsi exiles.


In the evenings, smartly dressed couples and teenagers stroll around their new neighborhoods, making new friends and discovering the city -- much of which was looted in the war and has grown beyond recognition for most who last saw it in 1959.


The Tutsis and their families on their return found empty houses, shops and offices abandoned by their Hutu owners and moved straight in although the new government insists they are not their property.


"They belong to the people who occupied them before but they can stay there temporarily," President Pasteur Bizimungu told reporters Thursday, adding that the new government was drawing up a plan to settle permanently the 1959 refugees.


He urged the refugees in Zaire and elsewhere to return as they had homes and farms and would help settle the problem.


The government has ordered that if an owner returns and finds squatters he has to give them a grace period to move out, or if it is a large property, that he can negotiate with them to share it.


If someone arrives with witnesses who confirm that furniture or a car is his property it must be surrendered.


"The Hutus were deceived. The old government told them the RPF were animals with tails who eat people. But when they see us here they will realize we are human beings," says David.