Rwanda: have my friends survived?: Safe in Oxford, Anne Mackintosh is haunted by fears of the violence that has engulfed the African country from which she escaped. She talked to Celia Dodd

When Anne Mackintosh, Oxfam's regional representative based in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, packed her bags for a routine three-day meeting two weeks ago, she left her address book behind. It's an omission she regrets.

The meeting, held in a lakeside mission in the north of the country, coincided with the explosion of violence in Rwanda. It was cut short when mobs rampaged through the mission house, murdering several people staying there. After being stranded overnight, Anne escaped, and finally reached Britain some days later.

For the time being at least, the loss of the address book is academic, since telephone contact with Rwanda has been severed. Anne has no way of knowing what has happened to her friends. She checks herself when she talks about them in the present tense, and fears the worst. She is critical of the UN's failure to help even its own Rwandan staff, let alone employees of other international agencies such as Oxfam, who are in desperate danger. The last she heard of her best friend, her Rwandan deputy, was that she had gone into hiding.

Anne, an Oxford graduate, worked on Oxfam's programme in Central Africa from the agency's home base for six years. She went to live in Kigali three years ago as the regional representative for Rwanda, Burundi and part of eastern Zaire. Her house was in a pleasant quarter of the capital, and she had Rwandan and ex-patriot friends. We met at the house of English friends, where she has been staying since she got back to Oxford a week ago.

'It's terrible not knowing what's happened,' she says. 'It's awful here because you get so little news. I'm in limbo, because I don't know who's dead or alive. I don't know if the office has been looted, or if all our records are still there. I don't know how horrific it will turn out to have been.'

Anne's experiences during her last days in Rwanda were horrific enough. The first sign of trouble came when two government soldiers, both Hutus, came to the mission and tried to take Prosper, one of her Oxfam colleagues. He is also a Hutu, but because he is tall and thin could be taken for a Tutsi. Anne did her best to reason with them, although they spoke little French and she spoke little Kinyarwanda (the national language).

''They were very menacing, aggressive and ruffianly. They kept trying to push me away, saying 'Retour, retour', meaning go back into the house, but I kept up with them. I don't know what I would have done if they had started to attack Prosper. They did cock their rifles, but I think that was just bravura.' Eventually they left, but it was obvious they would be back.

Anne and her colleagues continued with their meeting, simply to occupy their time and keep the level of anxiety down. When they broke for tea at four o'clock, Prosper went to rest, which meant that he was out of the way when a mob of 100 youths rampaged through the mission building carrying spears, machetes and clubs and massacred a Tutsi family who were hiding. Many of the youths were wearing the insignia of the CDR (Coalition for the Defence of the Republic), an extremist Hutu party.

Anne and the other Europeans, who included four young Belgian children, heard the screams. They later found a badly wounded girl, three people on the point of death, the body of a three-year-old boy whose skull had been split open by a machete, and a pregnant woman whose belly had been split. They witnessed the mission cook's death rattle, his torso covered in blood.

For Anne, there are many 'What ifs?' about those terrifying 24 hours. She wonders whether, had she intervened earlier, and had she been able to speak Kinyarwanda, more lives could have been saved. As it was, she ignored her colleagues' entreaties and went out with a Polish missionary to try reasoning with the murderers. She says she didn't feel she was putting herself at risk. Fortunately two of them spoke French, unlike most of the mob, and were open to reason. They left an hour-and-a-half later.

Anne and the missionary had hidden two young Rwandan girls whose family had been killed. This created enormous tension with a Belgian family whose mother argued that by hiding the girls they were putting her children in danger. Later, when a second mob arrived, they hammered on the locked loo door, where the girls were hiding, and demanded the key. Anne told them the staff who had left had taken it. Mercifully, the children kept quiet and the mob gave up.

Anne relives another 'What if?' about that evening, when the second mob had dragged out a wounded, semi-conscious Rwandan girl and were threatening her with a machete. The men put their faces up close to the Belgian children, menacing them and enjoying it. The children were beside themselves with fear. Then the phone rang and Anne answered it. 'I wonder if I should have asked,' she says. But had permission been refused, Anne might not have escaped.

The call was from the husband of Anne's Dutch deputy, who was in Kigali and alerted the Belgian embassy to organise help, which eventually came the following morning.

As it was, Anne faced her most dangerous moment when she was challenged by one of the mob: 'He said, 'How dare you try to contact anyone?', swept the phone to the floor and cut the cable with his machete. Then he wiggled the machete in my face. I thought Whoops, this could be it. But I really wasn't frightened. At the time it reminded me of an incident when I nearly drowned as a child, and it flashed through my head that this would be a stupid way to die. But I felt very matter-of-fact.'

It's hard to believe anyone who says she is not scared when faced with a machete, but I can believe Anne. She says her worst times came when she was trying to get Prosper out: 'What was much more anxious-making was holding your breath in the motor convoy, praying we would get through the military block. I sat by the car window, with Prosper in the middle, so he couldn't be pulled out easily.

'Had I been chopped down at the telephone there was nothing clever I could have done to get out of it. Whereas with Prosper I thought, we could make a false move here. It was a case of keeping our nerve and keeping up a facade. What was also difficult for me was elbowing my way to the front of the queue for a phone to persuade the authorities to allow Prosper to leave Rwanda. I'm rather timorous like that.'

Not all the Europeans proved as willing to help Prosper as Anne. The Belgian soldiers who took the Europeans away from the mission by boat on the morning after the massacre were concerned that his presence would make everyone else a target, too. They finally agreed to take him when, as the final boatload was about to leave, they saw the mob returning.

Having escaped from the mission on the boat across the lake to Gisenyi and got through the first military road block, Prosper was at first refused permission by Rwandan border officials to cross into Zaire and safety, although he managed to negotiate his way out the following day. Anne later found out that the Belgian soldiers were refused permission to leave. She also heard that the mob had attacked the mission again, killing everyone who was left. It might be true - equally horrible things have happened.

For most people in Britain, the violence in Rwanda hit the headlines like a bolt from the blue. Was it so unexpected for people living there? Anne says that tension had been growing for months, in spite of the peace agreement signed by leaders of the Tutsi-dominated rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front and the late President Habyarimana, a Hutu, last August. What shocked everyone was that the mayhem and terror took hold so quickly.

When Anne went to live in Kigali, it was clear that the situation was very volatile. 'But day to day it still didn't feel like that. The increase in violent crime hadn't really started then. Since the civil war started in 1990, weapons had become easily available - you could buy grenades in the market. So petty criminals would use them and blow people's legs off or blow them up when they were burgling houses. Every night you would hear a grenade somewhere. You used to ask about what happened in the office the next day. But it got to be a daily occurrence and you stopped asking.

'At the same time, at delicate points in the protracted peace negotiations, a rash of killings would be sparked off in different parts of the country. So people were getting inured to violence.' Anne believes such episodes were sparked off by agitators; what she finds so distressing is that they put the spark to something inflammable.

Oxfam's Rwandan staff were a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis, who generally got on well and respected each other. Even so, reports of episodes of violence often put a strain on relations between them.

But Anne insists that the fighting is not tribal. She points out that there are splits between the Hutus from the north and the south, and between extremist Hutus and more moderate factions. 'It is not nearly as simple or as mindless as tribal fighting. It is not neighbour turning on neighbour for no reason. It is elements of the presidential guard and the Rwandan army and hardline politicians - the people who stood to lose from the peace agreement - hanging on for grim death. And that's what they've unleashed.

'They stirred up hardline Hutu party youth and any petty criminals willing to be swept up in the violence and the looting. The violence is mostly perpetrated by young men who are unemployed, disaffected, and poorly educated. None of the mob who attacked us was over 25, probably none of them had children . . . they were football hooligans really, no-hopers with a kind of bottled-up hatred of the have-nots for the haves.'

Back in Britain, Anne is safe but her future is uncertain: 'I can't plan in the present situation. As soon as the situation is stable enough, I will go back. But who knows when that's going to be?'

Oxfam Rwanda Appeal: money donations to any Oxfam shop or by post to Oxfam, 274 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7DZ; credit card donations 0865 313131.

(Photographs omitted)