Refugees in Zaire Get 1st Shipments of Food and Water : Africa: U.S. military team arrives as cholera death toll climbs among Rwandans. U.N. official cites grave digging as the only success in crisis of apocalyptic scope.

Desperately needed food and water finally arrived at this nightmarish camp for 150,000 sick and weakened Rwandan refugees Saturday, but the living literally had to walk over and around the dead to reach it.

Corpses of cholera victims, many of them uncovered and rotting in the hot African sun, piled up on this desolate volcanic wasteland. Perhaps 200 other bloated bodies surrounded three crowded medical tents, where overworked doctors frantically tried to stem the epidemic that experts now say is the worst in recent world history.

“Nobody’s coming to bury them,” said Claire Boulanger, a relief worker from the Paris-based Medecins du Monde, appearing near tears. “They’ve been lying here for three days. What can I do? The ground is all rock here.”

It was an indication of the apocalyptic scope of the crisis here that Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, later announced that the digging of mass graves was the only success that relief groups could cite more than a week after an estimated 1.2 million refugees poured across the Zairian border near here.

“The only thing working efficiently right now is the burial of bodies,” he said. “Nothing else is working.”

Despite Saturday’s deliveries, food, water and medicine were still in critically short supply, he said.

The only good news was evidence that far more aid is starting to pour down the international pipeline.

At midday, a 25-member U.S. military team flew into Zaire from Stuttgart, Germany, after President Clinton’s promise Friday of immediate, massive assistance.

Members of the team, including experts in logistics, transport, water purification, sanitation and medicine, were the first of an estimated 4,000 U.S. troops to be deployed to the region in an around-the-clock relief mission expected to last months. Food drops over the most desperate areas were scheduled to begin as early as today.

But as preparations for the mission were getting under way, the death toll kept climbing.

Georges Dallemagne of Doctors Without Borders said his group estimates that 7,000 refugees have died since the disease appeared.

“We’re only on the fourth day of the epidemic,” he said. “Usually an epidemic lasts three weeks. Nobody knows how many more will die.

“The epidemic is worsening. It’s far from being under control.”

That grim assessment was echoed from trucks with loud-speakers that rumbled down the refugee-clogged road all day, urging people to “bring out the dead” to the roadside, as town criers did during the great bubonic plague that swept medieval Europe.

But the body-retrieval trucks have only begun to operate south of Goma, the impoverished Zairian border town that is the center of the disaster.

Mgunga, 10 miles south, had other problems. Although chlorinated water was delivered to the camp’s emergency clinic, the tap to open the bulging blue plastic sack was apparently lost.

“It’s dreadful,” Boulanger said. “They’re finally bringing water, but no one can open it. We’ll have a riot in five minutes. People are dying because they have no water.”

The tap was found by late afternoon, however, and trucks pulled up soon after to haul away the bodies. Sixty tons of corn-soy mix and high protein biscuits, enough to feed about 120,000 people, as well as four truckloads of blankets and plastic sheeting, was successfully distributed. French troops also arrived to fill two large water tanks.

Conditions were also heart-rending down the road at the two-shack Ndosho Orphanage, which was home to 50 children last Monday. More than 2,500 Rwandan infants and children have since been delivered there, including 191 who arrived in three trucks in less than an hour Saturday morning.

“The cholera is spreading like wildfire,” said Nimet Lalani, the center’s harried doctor, as she tended to the worst-off in a dark room rank with vomit and excrement. “But there is no water. Since this morning, we have no water. If we don’t have water today, half these children are going to die.”

A French army lieutenant who brought some of the children, many of them too sick or weak to stand, said he had left a dozen children dying on the roadside. “There was no sense bringing them,” he said with a shrug.

The camp has food, and the children sleep in United Nations Children’s Fund tents. But the only other U.N. aid to arrive at the orphanage all morning was a package of soccer balls. “For the children to play,” one aid worker explained. “So they won’t cry.”

Fatalism and exhaustion now permeate a relief operation that faces near-insurmountable problems. The one-runway airport is overtaxed, there are far too few relief workers, and extortion and corruption is slowing what little help there is.

The million-plus refugees move constantly in desperate search of food and water. One new camp, Kitunayni, literally grew from 15,000 to 100,000 people overnight, officials said. And each day, the refugees grow weaker, more hungry and more susceptible to disease.

“Things are still going to get worse before they get better,” Wilkinson said. “We haven’t reached the bottom of this crisis yet. We’re still going down on every conceivable front.”

The international aid effort should get into full swing soon, however.

About 15 water tankers are expected within days; only four are now available. Germany is sending 17 giant water-purification units. And the first World Food Program convoy from Uganda reached several hundred thousand refugees at Kitali camp, north of Goma, dropping off 240 tons of maize, corn-soy mix, peanuts, salt and other supplies.

“Now we’re getting there,” a WFP official said. But the 300 tons delivered at Kitali and Mgunga are only half the estimated daily needs of the total refugee population.

In Brussels, Defense Secretary William J. Perry and Army Gen. George Joulwan, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, said the United States hopes to begin parachuting food to thousands of Rwandan refugees in Zaire today.

Flying five sorties a day, three C-130 planes from airlift headquarters in Entebbe, Uganda, will be able to drop a total of 100 tons of food a day, Joulwan said. The planes will be joined within several days by larger C-5s, which will be carrying large transportation equipment, but not involved in airdrops.

U.S. officials also said Saturday that the Americans already appear to be ahead of schedule in achieving one of its first goals--establishing an airstrip near Goma that is capable of operating 24 hours a day.

The Pentagon said Friday that its forces would need several days to prepare the airstrip. But by Saturday, it appeared the airstrip will be ready much sooner.

Local Zairian officials, meanwhile, closed the border at Goma for the second straight day. Only those refugees able to pay about $10, a fortune here, were allowed to cross back into Rwanda.

More than 2,000 Rwandans who didn’t know about the exorbitant fee, or couldn’t pay, stood waiting in the sun all day, hoping to be allowed to go home.

U.N. refugee spokesman Wilkinson said Zaire’s vice prime minister would visit the area today, and official appeals would again be made to reopen the border. The U.N. agency promised Friday it would assist all Rwandan refugees who want to go back to their villages.

But few of the refugees knew of the U.N. offer.

“We ran away because of the fighting,” said Valens Ruvavangara, a grizzled and barefoot 49-year-old farmer who stood in the crowd with his eight children and wife. Two other children and his brother died here, and he wants to go home now. “We are starving here. It is useless to stay.”

He dismissed the widespread rumors here, fueled by the defeated Rwandan regime, that the victorious Tutsi rebels intended to massacre Hutu refugees who returned in revenge for atrocities committed by Hutu militia.

“I don’t care,” he said grimly. “If we stay here, we will die.”

Times staff writer James Risen in Washington contributed to this report.