U.S. Airdrops Aid to Rwandans : Africa: First direct American assistance consists of eight pallets of food that crash-land in a hamlet. Border area is reopened and more than 1,000 refugees return home.

U.S. Air Force planes dropped about seven tons of emergency food for Rwandan refugees here Sunday, but the first direct American aid was barely a drop in the ocean of desperate humanity that has engulfed the region.

The airdrop was also a near-disaster. Only eight of the 24 promised pallets parachuted down from cloudy gray skies, and they crash-landed in a hamlet up to a mile from the designated drop zone--a grassy runway on a coffee plantation outside one of the largest refugee encampments.

Instead, one of the car-sized pallets smashed into a stone wall about 20 feet from a cluster of six thatch huts and narrowly missed a U.N. helicopter parked behind the village school. Another pallet almost hit the other side of the empty school, while the rest tore into a cornfield and coffee plants.

“We thought they were bombing us,” Theonest Nyandwi, a 43-year-old Zairian farmer, said as he stood with his terrified family moments after the huge crates nearly landed on their heads. “We were very, very scared.”

The U.S. military, however, said the planes dropped the food precisely where the United Nations asked it to drop it.

Cmdr. Ron Morse, spokesman for the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, told the Associated Press that nearly 17 tons of aid was recovered. “We don’t want people saying we missed the target when we don’t think we did,” Morse said, adding that the helicopter that was almost hit was in the area to observe the airdrop.

But the good news Sunday was that Zairian officials finally reopened the border at Goma, the town that is at the center of the refugee crisis, allowing more than 1,000 Rwandans to return home. A spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has encouraged the voluntary repatriation, said no problems were reported.

Hundreds of refugees had massed at the Rwandan border, hoping to return home after days in the fetid camps. But Zairian troops stopped them for two days, apparently until the border area could be cleared of abandoned weapons.

At the airdrop site about 35 miles northeast of Goma, John Wallis, a truck driver from a British relief group, was furious as he cut away the tangle of parachute cords and cardboard wrapping with a knife. “It’s criminal,” he fumed. “I’m speechless. . . . They should bring those pilots up here and see what they’ve done.”

The local leader, Jean Musoka, tried to be upbeat as villagers rushed to the scene and stared in astonishment at broken boxes and smashed cans of chocolate, Gruyere cheese, flour, vegetable oil, salt, corned beef, biscuits and secondhand clothes. A few looted the pallets in the confusion.

“It’s good that they sent us food,” Musoka said. “It’s better if they take care of it better. . . . All we can say is, thank you.”

But the Belgian manager of the 4,000-acre coffee plantation stood open-mouthed. “If it’s like this every day, I’m finding another job,” he finally said.

U.S. Army Maj. Guy Shields, spokesman for the American operation here, said later that he could not explain why the three C-130 aircraft ignored flares on the runway.

The planes flew from Entebbe Airport at Kampala, about an hour away by air in neighboring Uganda. Working from Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, Germany, an Air Force Special Operations wing is using Entebbe as a staging ground for what President Clinton promised Friday would be a massive and immediate relief operation for the estimated 1.2 million refugees struggling to survive in squalid camps without enough water, food or medicine.

But the only other U.S. aid to arrive Sunday was a single forklift, capable of lifting 10 tons, for use at the overburdened runway at Goma. About 17 other relief flights landed Sunday at Goma, however, the largest one-day delivery so far.

Shields said a large water-purification unit would be flown to Goma today but said he was unaware if any other aid is en route or if further airdrops are planned. About 25 Americans are now in Goma to direct the operation, he said.

Although overwhelmed relief officials said any help is welcome, many were clearly skeptical at the embarrassing opening salvo of America’s aid effort. A raging cholera epidemic is killing up to 1,500 refugees a day, according to the United Nations, and hundreds of rotting, abandoned corpses still line the roads and camps each morning.

Officials from Oxfam International angrily complained Sunday that they were unable to deliver a much-needed water-purification unit to Katale, where up to 350,000 refugees have camped on jagged volcanic rocks, because six empty trucks were sent to pick up the American goods.

Until the unit is installed, the refugees at Katale must walk nine miles each way to fetch water from a jungle stream. Thousands trudged along the road Sunday with yellow cans on their heads. But a few stopped to scoop water from a muddy brown pond.

Alison Campbell, a spokeswoman for CARE, also questioned the amount of food dropped--and the practicality of sending items like cheese and chocolate. “It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever,” she said after examining the broken pallets.

“It’s primarily a publicity stunt,” a senior U.N. official said. Dan Everts, head of the World Food Program operation, was more circumspect. “The trucking option is, to us, the real solution,” he said.

Airdrops are most often used as a last resort in relief operations, when food can’t otherwise be delivered. The United States has parachuted emergency food and supplies into war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, and to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. The World Food Program has used them in southern Sudan and Somalia.

The dramatic arrival of the first direct U.S. assistance is dwarfed by the needs of the chaos and misery on the Zairian border. But it’s also dwarfed by the supplies that have finally begun to pour into the camps. Indeed, Katale already has far more food than any other camp.

A World Food Program truck convoy, arriving Saturday from Kampala, brought 280 tons of food. Another truck convoy with 240 tons is due here today.

CARE distributed 40 tons of corn, beans and blankets at Katale earlier Sunday, the first formal distribution in the camp, and the International Committee of the Red Cross gave out 90 tons farther south at Kabumba.

Most of the supplies were handed out in 220-pound sacks to workers assigned by Rwandan prefecture leaders, who arrange for county and village chiefs to distribute it to their people. Emergency medical tents are mushrooming in the disease-ridden camps, and some relief workers expressed limited optimism for the first time since the crisis began.

“There’s definitely some semblance of order here,” Sarah Lee, a worker with Britain’s Action Aid agency, said as she surveyed a sea of plastic tents and grass huts at Katale. “I think people have got a chance now.”

A Swiss delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross was also upbeat as the daylong distribution began at Kabumba. “It’s very orderly,” he said. “Compared to what happened in Rwanda a few weeks ago, we expected much worse. It’s astonishing.”

The mostly Hutu refugees swarmed across the border in an unprecedented mass exodus early last week in fear of the victorious Tutsi-led rebel army, which took control of Rwanda after a civil war led to a gruesome 3 1/2-month tribal bloodletting that left hundreds of thousands dead.

But the refugees landed in one of Africa’s most inhospitable zones. Three active volcanoes, one of which is now erupting, have left a bleak moonscape of rocky ridges and pitted ravines of blue-gray rock. Thick volcanic dust, combined with the smoke of cooking fires, chokes the air.