Rwanda Rebels Urge Refugees to Halt Flight

Victorious Tutsi-led rebels installed a “national unity” government Tuesday and urged a halt to the desperate flight of millions of terrorized Rwandan refugees.

Nearly half of this Central African nation’s population has either fled or is on the move toward the border with Zaire.

Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, the rebel leader who became Rwanda’s vice president and defense minister Tuesday, has sought to reassure the majority Hutus that they have no reason to flee in the wake of carnage that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead, mostly minority Tutsis.

But the leaders of the ousted hard-line Hutu government have mounted what appears to be an organized campaign, mostly through radio broadcasts, predicting Tutsi retribution, to persuade their supporters to follow them into Zaire.

The rebels, who blazed from exile to victory in the 14-week civil war, routed the Hutu government. Fearing that the rebels will retaliate, 1.7 million Hutus have poured across the border into Zaire in the past week, and refugee officials say 1.5 million more are on their way in an exodus of epic proportions.

Relief officials predict widespread famine unless massive aid arrives.

Little evidence has emerged of reprisals by Tutsi rebels against Hutu civilians.

“Today is a day of joy and sorrow,” Kagame said as he took the oath of office in the capital, Kigali. Two moderate ethnic Hutus, Faustin Twagirimungu and Pasteur Bizimungu, were sworn in as prime minister and president.

“The (rebel) army has removed a system of oppression and dictatorship, but only at the cost of many lives,” Kagame said.

The makeup of the new government generally follows a power-sharing plan worked out in a peace agreement signed in August to end a three-year civil war.

The agreement was never implemented and the war restarted after President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed in a suspicious plane crash April 6. His allies began a systematic slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The two new deputy prime ministers are officials of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. Twenty other Cabinet members also were sworn in, five of them rebel leaders.

About 3,000 people watched the inauguration from the lawn of the Parliament building, shattered by shells in fighting for the capital.

But in the far southwestern corner of the tiny Central African country, the refugee flight continued. If all those moving through the southwest cross into Zaire, it would bring the number of Rwandans living in refugee camps in neighboring countries to about 3.5 million. Rwanda’s prewar population was about 8 million.

Rebel official Alexis Kanyarengwe asked the refugees to come home.

“There is peace,” he said. “No Rwandan should ever be a refugee again. There has been a lot of suffering in this country, and now the RPF has decided to work democratically to end Rwanda’s pain.”

Since Sunday, an estimated 400,000 refugees have crossed into Kamannyola, Zaire, from the southwest border. About 300,000 more crossed the border farther north. Nearly 1 million Hutu civilians and soldiers fled into the Zairian border town of Goma from northwest Rwanda last week.

And 1.5 million more Hutus were streaming toward the southwestern Rwandan border town of Cyangugu and believed to be headed for Bukavu, Zaire.

The first exodus sent 350,000 people across the eastern border into Tanzania in late April.

“It’s really an exodus of a nation. The whole country is coming out of its borders. We can’t cope,” Panos Moumtzis, a spokesman for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, told reporters in Goma.

”. . . What we really need right now is an enormous reaction, an enormous response” from international donors, Moumtzis said.

The biggest needs are food and water. “Clearly, if we don’t have our act together in the next two or three days, we will witness an incredibly disastrous situation of famine on an unprecedented scale,” said Daan Everets of the World Food Program.

The Pentagon is stepping up aid flights to the refugees and is considering sending civil affairs officials to help with relief efforts, a Pentagon spokeswoman said Tuesday in Washington.

Air Force transport planes and privately contracted aircraft will fly 78 missions, carrying medical supplies and food into Goma.