Rwanda's refugee crisis is one of the worst in history. It could also be just the beginning
by Eric Ransdell, Inigo Gilmore, Louise Lief, Bruce B. Auster, Linda Fasulo
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Outside a refugee camp near the Zairian border town of Goma, a boy soldier staggers forward from a crowd. Hands outstretched, the young man, a Rwandan, pleads for help, but it is too late. Breathing weakly, he tumbles to the ground. Minutes later, he is dead.
Jarred by scenes of stark tragedy such as this, the world has begun rushing assistance to the hellish border region between Rwanda and Zaire, where an estimated 1.75 million Rwandans are huddled after fleeing rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who captured most of the Central African country earlier this month. Hundreds of corpses litter the countryside around Goma, and relief officials believe that as many as 50,000 people may die within days as cholera rages through the miserable camps.
Saying it could be "the world's worst humanitarian crisis in a generation," President Clinton last week ordered an around-the- clock American airlift of supplies and medicine to the refugees, believed to be dying at the rate of one a minute. The American relief effort will cost more than $250 million and involve as many as 4,000 U.S. military personnel. Clinton also called for United Nations peacekeepers to be sent to Rwanda to safeguard refugees who decide to take their chances by returning home; for now at least, no U.S. military forces will participate in a peacekeeping mission.
Things to come. While governments around the world and aid workers in Zaire struggle to contain the disaster, prospects are increasing for an even wider explosion of violence that could pitch much of Central Africa into anarchy. Bad as it is, Rwanda could be just a preview of worse to come.
Which means the international aid effort may become even more daunting. Thousands of the defeated Hutu government's soldiers and civilian militias are an immediate concern. French forces in Rwanda tried to disarm the retreating Hutus, but many managed to smuggle their weapons into Zaire. Already there are indications that they are beginning to reorganize for a counterattack against the Tutsi- dominated RPF, which last week installed two Hutu moderates as president and prime minister in an attempt to forge a new government of national unity in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.
The sheer number of those in need is the most serious problem, however. When a U.N. World Food Program convoy tried to deliver 20 tons of beans last week to some 10,500 refugees sleeping in the open at the Magunga camp near Goma, Rwandan soldiers turned it back after demanding food in return for safe passage. Officials fear the camps in Zaire could explode, particularly if the French military forces there respondto calls to find and arrest those responsible for the massacres in Rwanda.
Potential for trouble abounds. The displacement of so many refugees has made the situation in neighboring Burundi, another locus of Hutu-Tutsi contention, "extremely tense," in the words of one State Department official. "The same kind of precursors of violence that were present in Rwanda are present in Burundi," warns Alison DesForges of Human Rights Watch/Africa: "The underground militias, the widespread distribution of arms, the hate-filled radio broadcasting." A wave of ethnic bloodletting in Burundi left at least 100,000 dead last October. New tensions in the country of 5.6 million, which has a similar ethnic mix to that of neighboring Rwanda, have been building since April 6, when Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana were killed when their plane was hit by a rocket outside Kigali airport.
Tragically, the powder keg in Burundi is already smoldering. Clashes have been reported in the suburbs around Bujumbura, Burundi's capital. Ethnic fighting has also flared in the countryside, particularly in the northern border area where fleeing members of Rwanda's dreaded interahamwe -- "those who attack as one" -- have been implicated in the killings. Civilians of Burundi's Hutu majority and members of the Tutsi-dominated military are reportedly stocking up arms in anticipation of a renewed outbreak of slaughter. Hutus fear that Tutsis have been emboldened by the rebel victory in Rwanda; Tutsis live in constant terror of a genocidal uprising by the majority Hutus similar to the one that ravaged Rwanda.
Any explosion of ethnic violence in Burundi could send hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into Tanzania and Zaire, which already are struggling to cope with the tide of Rwandan refugees. Tanzania is one of Africa's most stable countries, but Zaire has been tottering on the brink of collapse since rioting and Army-led looting swept the country in 1991. Since then, a rift between President Mobutu Sese Seko and Zaire's democratic opposition has created a power vacuum; government has ceased to exist, and lawlessness reigns throughout most of the nearly 1 million-square- mile country.
Land of opportunity. Sharing borders with nine countries at the heart of Africa, Zaire is the key to Central African stability. Sources say President Mobutu has been using the relief effort as a target of opportunity -- to ingratiate himself once again with the Western governments that have severed ties to his corrupt regime in recent years. Even if he succeeds, however, it will only prolong the life of a shameless dictatorship now rejected by the majority of Zaire's 40 million people; a frustrated opposition may be spurred into using more radical measures against Mobutu. If that happens, the consequences for the region will be dire. "If Zaire goes," says one analyst, "it will make Somalia look like a Sunday picnic."
The influx of refugees into the border town of Goma has increased the Zairian president's chances to exert leverage. Mobutu has sent some 600 members of his elite Presidential Guard -- considered to be the worst human-rights abusers in Zaire's military -- to shore up his forces there. Mobutu has long supported the Hutu government in Rwanda, but his forces have been accused of slaughtering ethnic Rwandans in the past year and could turn against the refugees if tensions rise.
The only hope, for now, is the massive relief effort now getting underway; it will rival the scope of efforts a decade ago in Ethiopia. Yet even relief workers who have served in hardscrabble countries such as Ethiopia and Somalia have been unprepared for the utterly collapsed state of Zaire's infrastructure. When one Boeing 707 bearing relief supplies landed at the town's small, crumbling airstrip last week, it took six hours to unload by hand.
The U.S.-led international effort should change that quickly. U.S. military combat engineers, police, water purification troops and others will operate from Germany and Entebbe, Uganda. Lights will be brought into the airfields near Goma so that flights may arrive around the clock; survey teams will determine whether new runways and parking aprons can be built to accommodate more planes. Radars will be set up so air-traffic controllers can bring the craft in safely. The most difficult task will be sanitizing water; although aid workers estimate that they will have enough rehydration packages to last for weeks, purifying water and distributing it to 1.75 million refugees will be a massive undertaking.
U.S. officials concede they do not know how many people they will be able to feed and say that the only solution is to get the refugees to return to Rwanda. "If you can't get the refugees to move toward home," says a senior Defense Department official, "nature is going to solve your problem."
But so far, efforts to get the refugees to return have been thwarted by Hutu-controlled Radio Milles Collines, the station that in April urged people to "Kill the Tutsis" and has implored Hutus to flee the country in recent weeks, while heaping abuse on the U.N., United States and France.
