Rwandans Seek Refuge in Huge Tanzania Camp

In hardly more than a month, this empty valley on the Rwandan border has been transformed into the world’s largest refugee camp, a sprawling metropolis of tents and huts that testifies to unspeakable horrors and mindless violence.

More than 300,000 Rwandans, many in rags, some bearing machete and gunshot wounds, have fled across the Kagera River to seek safety in this green, nameless valley, to stand for hours in U.N. food lines and, in the process, to consider themselves privileged to have the right to live another day.

“Yes, I suppose I am lucky,” said Patrice Mukakarisa, who wore a Christian cross and held her infant son to her breast. “But this is my only child who lives. The other five, my husband, I saw them die when the rebels came to my village to kill us all.”

“Ah,” said Prucaririe Kayumbu, the woman next to her, “you are lucky. You have your baby. Mine is dead, thrown in the river. My village is dead too. They killed everyone. I played dead until the rebels left, and then I started walking for here.”

The Benaco camp, named for a tiny village nearby, is but one of half a dozen that have sprung up in Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi since ethnic fighting between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsi erupted in Rwanda after President Juvenal Habyarimana and his counterpart from Burundi, Cyprian Ntayamira--both Hutus--died in a mysterious plane crash April 6.

The fighting has turned one in four of Rwanda’s 8 million people into refugees and claimed the lives of at least 200,000 people.

As immense as the tragedy is, it could have been even greater had not the international community reacted so quickly.

Within a few days of the first refugees’ arrival here, relief supplies from around the world were being trucked over the rugged dirt roads to Benaco, a camp that U.N. officials initially believed would attract no more than 50,000 Rwandans.

“Considering the number of people involved and the suddenness with which they came, the relief effort is well-advanced,” said John Howard, a water engineer with the British charity Oxfam. “At this point it’s been a tremendous effort, very much a success, I think.”

On an average day, more than 100,000 Rwandans stand in orderly lines for their thrice-a-week rations of maize and flour. Water pumped out of a nearby river-fed pond is filtered and chlorinated--and cleaner than the tap water in many African capitals.

Thousands of tents have been distributed, health clinics and an operating theater set up, crude latrines dug. A cemetery has been paced off, and at last count 215 Rwandans had been buried there in several long rows.

In addition to a tent, each family receives blankets, a cooking set and a plastic jug to haul water.

“If the hygiene doesn’t break down, I think we’re going to be OK,” said Dieter Jacobi, a German Red Cross surgeon who has worked in Africa for eight years. “People come in here hungry, but they are not starving. We have plenty of food. The malnutrition rate is really rather low for a crisis of this magnitude.

“We’ve treated malaria, of course, but we haven’t seen any cholera or typhoid--knock on wood. The one that’s really quite surprising is the attitude of the people themselves. They almost seem passive, as though they’re taking all of this in stride.”

Indeed, the general cheerfulness of the camp seems almost eerie.

Groups of women will occasionally break into Christian songs as they trek up into the hills, water jugs on their heads. Children cavort among the endless lines of tents. Old men stand quietly for hours on end, waiting to fill their burlap bags with a few pounds of maize.

Relief agency workers say they know of no crimes, even thievery, being committed in the camp. Nor have there been any disturbances of note, even though some of the inhabitants are presumed to have been involved in the killing in Rwanda.

“We know how to suffer quietly,” said John Mubonyuzuku, a former druggist. “This is not a new thing. There has been killing for years. But the problems are with the extremists, not with the ordinary people. Here we get along whether we are Hutu or Tutsi.”

Their blue and white tents reach up the hills and are packed so closely together that from a distance the hills appear as a wave-crested ocean.

Women hunker down along the roadway below the tents, selling sweet potatoes and hunks of recently slaughtered goats. Barbers exchange haircuts for a scoop of maize, and teachers gather children on little chunks of unclaimed turf to recite the day’s lessons, although without the help of books.

Across the camp fly the flags of the United Nations, the Red Cross, Concern, Oxfam and other relief agencies. They remind those such as Mubonyuzuku that he is now an international ward. Like the others here, he dares not guess when he will be able to return home.

* REBELS STORM KIGALI: Government troops relinquish capital’s airport, army base. A8