Refugees Face Disease, Death in Zaire Camps

A weeklong exodus of biblical proportions of Rwandan refugees into neighboring Zaire appeared to slow Wednesday, relief workers said, but deadly disease and hunger are growing among the estimated 2 million people who have already fled the tiny war-torn nation.

Scores of rotting corpses--victims of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and infection--lay under rags and thin-reed mats on the streets of Goma, the dusty Zairian border town where 1 million desperate refugees have encamped on a volcanic plain amid squalor and despair.

The bodies of more than 200 men, women and children were taken by truck and dumped in a narrow trench dug at the edge of a banana plantation near Goma’s airport. Survivors clambered over the gruesome pile of corpses searching for loved ones. Two crude crosses, cut from a tree branch, were placed on the mass grave.

Aid officials said a massive humanitarian effort had begun, but the sheer scope and logistical challenge of the crisis is limiting swift, effective relief. Digging wells and latrines, for example, has proved nearly impossible in the hard, rocky soil.

An official of the International Committee of the Red Cross said tens of thousands of bedraggled refugees were waiting patiently when trucks rumbled into the sprawling Kibumba camp north of Goma and two other smaller camps. But aid officials estimate that 600 tons of food are needed each day to feed the growing multitude.

With little sanitation and endless lines for clean water, aid officials said dehydration, severe dysentery and suspected cases of cholera already have begun to take a deadly toll in the teeming camps. Vicious strains of malaria are endemic in the region.

“A lot of these people are going to die,” Dr. Jacques de Milliano, president of Doctors Without Borders, told reporters in Goma. “It is one of the biggest catastrophes I have ever faced.”

An estimated 300,000 refugees have also moved this week into miserable makeshift camps in Bukavu, about 50 miles further south along Lake Kivu, and Uvira on Lake Tanganyika in Zaire. Other refugees have fled in massive waves to neighboring Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi.

The staggering, weeklong migration, experts say, may be the largest sudden movement of refugees in modern times and has created nightmares for beleaguered relief agencies.

“The conditions are appalling,” said Panos Moumtzis, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “The humanitarian organizations were unprepared to deal with a crisis of these proportions.”

Steve Redding, an official from CARE International, observed: “We’re talking about a situation that’s beyond the capacity of anybody out there. The interventions we can make are effective, but they’re limited. The sheer numbers tend to boggle all of us.”

He said the influx of refugees had slowed considerably Wednesday, after the border crossing near Goma was closed.

Penelope Lewis, Nairobi spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program, said the agency now estimates that 3.3 million Rwandans--of a prewar population of about 8 million--have either fled or were forced from their homes within the rugged country, which is about the size of the state of Maryland.

Lewis said aid officials hoped to persuade the refugees to return home as quickly as possible, especially since the country’s maize and sorghum harvest has begun. “What we’re trying to do is create a system so people stop panicking and start moving back,” she said.

For now, aid workers said, attempts to distribute critically needed blankets, plastic sheeting, medicine, bulk food and water have been hampered by a logistical nightmare.

Roads in the area are so clogged with refugees that truck convoys carrying relief goods can only crawl through. The tiny airport at Goma has no equipment to offload aircraft; each giant Hercules cargo plane and other relief flights must be offloaded by hand, a laborious process that can take up to six hours.

Because of the congestion, only 14 humanitarian aid flights were able to land at Goma’s airstrip Wednesday. Despite stockpiles in the region, Lewis said the World Food Program was able to send only two planes with food, “which was fairly useless.” She said the agency would now focus on using trucks to bring supplies in more swiftly.

Fred Lasore, a U.S. Embassy spokesman here, said U.S. Air Force planes were en route to Uganda and Kenya on Wednesday night with donated Swedish trucks for use in relief convoys.

Virtually all of the refugees are Hutus, members of Rwanda’s ethnic majority. They have fled Rwanda fearing retribution from a Tutsi-led rebel army that toppled the Hutu government after a brutal three-month war. The new regime has urged the refugees to return home, saying no reprisals are planned.

Government-sponsored Hutu death squads have been blamed for the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi civilians since fighting broke out in April in what was once one of Africa’s most densely populated countries.