Few of those waiting outside seemed to share Mr Nkurayija’s certitude. People are still being admitted with machete and other wounds. In the Mdecins sans Frontires hospital, 90 per cent of the patients being admitted have been shot from behind.”None of those coming back are being killed or mistreated,” insisted Ferdinand Nkurayija, assistant mayor of Nyakizu as the returnees queued up outside his office. Some of the worst excesses of last year’s genocide of more than half a million Tutsis were perpetrated in the south-west.In the University Hospital at Butare, Rwanda’s second city, are some 130 Hutus who have been wounded in recent violence.

Up to a quarter of a million Hutus were living in these camps a week ago; now they are all but empty.The people who have returned have done so against their will. Having fled ahead of the victorious advance of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front last year and fearing reprisals, they chose to live in teeming camps monitored by the UN and by international aid agencies. More than 18,000 Hutus have in recent days returned to Nyakizu from Kibeho and the three other displaced people’s camps in the Gikongoro area of south-western Rwanda. Soldiers from the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) are being blamed for the carnage.The group waited patiently in line yesterday to be registered with the municipal authorities. Some 2,000 Hutu inmates of the camp were shot and trampled to death there on Saturday and hundreds more were injured, according to figures compiled by the United Nations. Ten months after fleeing their community just 15 miles inside Rwanda’s border with Burundi, they had returned home

It was not a joyous homecoming.

All were exhausted and barefoot, some had hastily bandaged head wounds, a few were in very sorry condition.
They had come, said a man with a cut on his scalp, from the displaced people’s camp at Kibeho which lies about 30 miles north-west of Nyakizu. FA ragged group of some 60 men, women and children were assembled outside the mayor’s office in the village of Nyakizu by midday yesterday. “We cannot tell the time or the origin of the next threat,” he said, “but we cannot be caught unready. Nor can we deny indefinitely to others in Europe the protection which we have secured for ourselves.”. That prospect, too, was dismissed by Mr Hurd, who described the OSCE as merely one strand of Europe’s security relationship with Russia.Nato, he said, was “the most successful collective security organisation we have known” and would not be dismantled. Indeed, Mr Kozyrev has said his country would prefer to see the organisation dissolved. He has proposed in its place a new continental security order, perhaps founded on the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Russia’s views would be sought and listened to, he claimed.This formulation is unlikely to still the chorus of indignation from Moscow, where the accession of Poland to Nato is widely regarded as an alteration to Russian security interests of historic proportions.Russia is also, though to a lesser extent, concerned about the aspirations of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to join Nato. “It means the extension of specific and binding guarantees which amount to a more dramatic pooling of sovereignty than anything envisaged in the European Union,” he said.”If a member of Nato is attacked in the morning, Britain is at war in the afternoon.”Mr Hurd said forethought and planning was needed, not least to reassure Russia that an enlarged Nato would not amount to the creation of a new hostile bloc.”The Nato allies could not possibly be heirs to Napoleon and Hitler, pointing a dagger at the heart of Russia,” he said. Who can blame her?”Mr Hurd warned that the expansion of Nato committed its member states to dramatic military and political responsibilities. “Poland longs for collective security,” the Foreign Secretary said, “because her history of invasion and partition leaves her anxious, even impatient. The Western alliance now seems destined for confrontation with Moscow over the possible inclusion of Poland in Nato, a proposal that has drawn bitter and consistent criticism from the Russian Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev.
Mr Hurd acknowledged that Russia was “entitled to an assurance that the process will not surprise her”, and agreed with Mr Kozyrev on the need to avoid “a nightmare of renewed confrontation”.But Mr Hurd’s remarks, in a speech prepared for delivery at last night’s Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, made no practical concessions to Russian concern. The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, gave little comfort to Russia last night when he said Nato was certain to expand to the east and predicted progress on the issue by the end of this year.