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THIRTY thousand Rwandan refugees began the long trek back home from
Zaire yesterday after assurances of their safety from Rwanda's new
government and the United Nations.
Major-General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN forces in Rwanda,
said at the border crossing between Zaire and Rwanda that he had passed
about 30,000 refugees on his three-hour drive through Rwanda from the
capital, Kigali. People are crawling through the forest,
he said. A
UN aid worker counting refugees passing through the main border post
between Goma and Gisenyi said about 560 had crossed between 9am and
noon.
General Dallaire said he wanted to direct aid into Kigali so it would
be a magnet for refugees. Aid vehicles could go through Rwanda to Goma
bringing aid and go back as taxis,
he said.
The US military halted food airdrops flying from Entebbe in Uganda for
refugees in eastern Zaire when the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
stopped authorising them after complaints from aid agencies that the
drops were being misdirected, a US military spokeswoman said.
Colonel Dallaire's news of the returnees offers the dimmest glimmer of
hope that the refugee crisis in Zaire may end. It came as Peter Hansen,
head of the UN's Department of Humanitarian Affairs, said that the
situation was out of control. It is extremely dangerous. We don't have
the capacity on the ground to deal with this,
he said.
Last night, aid workers said they would begin burning bodies of the
cholera victims, estimated at up to 14,000 six days into an epidemic,
because burial sites were full.
General Dallaire said the refugees were tired and hot and stopping on
the hills because of the heat. He called on the UN and other relief
agencies to start feeding programmes in Kigali which would act as a
magnet to draw refugees home. I don't want them to think that the only
place where they can get food and be safe is in the southwest (where
French forces are policing a safe zone),
he said.
For all his enthusiasm, many Hutu refugees, who have been conditioned
to think that they will be slaughtered by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan
Patriotic Front, must overcome this fear and intimidation from their
own leaders who do not want them to return home.
In the Muganga camp, home to about 200,000 refugees, a group of women
sat quietly tending their children and stirring a saucepan of beans.
When asked whether they would rather stay in Goma and risk dying of
cholera or return home, they were driven away by a portly and officious
man who refused to identify himself. I am a Rwandan citizen, that is
all,
he said. We will not go home until the international community
guarantees our safety there. We know we will be killed as soon as we
cross the border.
At the frontier, RPF troops lounged about and smiled as refugees
gingerly approached them. They are registered and sent on to a former
hotel for further processing and transport not to meet the fate they
all dread. Though the officious man denied he had been a member of the
former ruling party, the Revolutionary Movement for National
Development, others with him, who were organising a meeting of their
commune's elders, admitted that they came from the Karago commune in
Gisenyi. Karago was the birthplace of the founding father of Hutu
extremism, the late President Habyarimana.
The RPF cut out our eyes and will kill us. The refugees who have
crossed the border are just a fake, they are inyenzi (cockroaches, the
RPF's nickname) in disguise,
said a young man wearing a hockey shirt.
The fat man agreed.
While they yelled abuse about the RPF and claimed, against available
evidence, that the former rebels were mass murderers, a group of three
men approached another journalist. He was asked: Have you been to
Ruhengeri (50 miles inside northwest Rwanda)?
They whispered: We
would like to go back there.
They asked whether it would be safe for
them in RPF-dominated Rwanda. They asked anxiously: How many
roadblocks are there on the way?
They said that the men interrupting discussions with ordinary civilians
and telling them that they would be killed in Rwanda were indeed
members of the former government's administration and had been party to
the genocide of Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
Nevertheless, the three men said they would wait until people who had
crossed the border reported back.
Leaders of Rwanda's Hutu former government, which fled into exile in
Zaire with about 20,000 soldiers, attempted to hold a news conference
in Goma yesterday, but a Zairean colonel with an armed escort broke up
the meeting, saying they had no authority to speak there.
By Sam Kiley in Goma and Our Foreign Staff.
