Thousands of Rwandans Return to War-Torn Land : Africa: Refugees leave fetid camps despite threats of violence in homeland. Cholera epidemic has killed 14,000.

The barefoot old woman hobbled quickly here Monday, her worn bamboo cane pounding the pavement as fast as she could walk. Deep inside her native land, Generose Nyirandoti was headed home from the horrors of a cholera-ridden refugee camp in Zaire.

She balanced a rolled sleeping mat on her grizzled gray head. She guarded her identification papers in a dirty plastic bag hidden inside her tattered wrap. And her gnarled hand held tightly to her most precious possession--a 4-year-old granddaughter in a torn, filthy sweat shirt. She was the only survivor in her family.

“Her father is dead,” Nyirandoti said, as the tiny girl tore ravenously into a roll offered by a reporter. “Her mother is dead. Even her brothers and sisters are dead. We will die too if we stay there.”

A day after Zairian officials agreed to open the sealed border after repeated urgent appeals by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, thousands of Rwandans trudged steadily along the narrow winding road Monday, heading home into an eerily deserted land that was once Africa’s most densely populated country.

A daylong drive about 30 miles into western Rwanda found looted ghost towns and villages perched on beautifully terraced mountains and nestled in lush valleys lined with dense groves of eucalyptus and bamboo. Endless green fields appeared at every turn, bursting with a bounty of corn, beans and bananas.

But except for the odd military truck, the long line of refugees was the only sign of humanity. They walked alone, in pairs, and in groups of 10 and 20, with meager possessions on their heads and infants safely bundled on their backs. Other than the shuffling of feet, the only sound was the cawing of crows and the rustle of the mountain breeze.

Two barefoot men carried another in a stretcher atop their heads, and he shaded himself with a ripped golf umbrella. Another hauled a gaunt woman in a rusty wheelbarrow. About half a dozen people had collapsed, however, and their forlorn corpses lay in the dust.

The residents here were butchered in massacres that began in April, when the Hutu government’s civilian militias and death squads launched a genocidal pogrom of the minority Tutsi population. An estimated 500,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, most hacked to death with machetes.

But when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front army quickly routed the Hutu government, the fleeing 40,000-member military forced virtually the entire Hutu population here to cross the border with them into neighboring Zaire.

An estimated 1.2 million Hutu refugees now live in miserable camps set on a moonscape of sharp volcanic rocks. A still-worsening cholera epidemic has killed up to 14,000 people, doctors say, and dire shortages of food, water and medicine leave tens of thousands more at risk.

Members of the murderous militias now control parts of the disease-ridden camps; many of their leaders are reluctantly used by relief groups to help distribute what little food is available. Hutu leaders have ordered the refugees not to leave, warning that they will be killed if they return. But a growing stream of Rwandans have decided to take the risk.

“In Zaire, they told us they (the victorious rebel soldiers) are killing people, but it is false,” said Ferdinand Niyatusenga, 29, who headed home in lace-less shoes that flapped along the road.

His barefoot friend, Jean Wemeyirongo, 34, agreed: “It’s better to come back, even if they kill me.” Most of the 50 friends and family members who fled the capital, Kigali, with them for Zaire are now dead, he said.

But the refugees said the victorious RPF soldiers had welcomed them back, giving food at check-points and truck rides to a few of the worst-off. “I am asking people along the road if we can go on, and people say we have nothing to fear,” Wemeyirongo added.

Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said about 1,000 refugees crossed the border into Rwanda at Goma, Zaire, on Monday and several thousand others had headed home through nearby forests. “It’s going slowly, but it’s going,” he said.

An official from the agency was posted at the border to monitor the refugees, and about 15 blue-helmeted U.N. troops will be assigned there today.

The refugees were not asked for documents as they crossed into the former lakeside resort of Gisenyi. Once home to Rwanda’s president and several ministers, its elegant villas are empty, and the broad palm-lined streets are filled with burned-out vehicles and other debris of war.

“Refugees don’t have papers,” said Lt. Peter Karake, 39, the RPF commander at the border. He added that like many Tutsis, he had grown up as a refugee in Uganda and Kenya. “Personally, I don’t have papers either.”

The new government has compiled a list of alleged Hutu war criminals, and Karake said they will be tried when they are caught. But he said there was no urgency. “To hunt people involved in genocide is not overnight,” he said. “The Nazis are still hunted after half a century. So we are in no hurry.”

The border at Goma is still lined with stacks of grenades, assault rifles, ammunition belts, machetes and spears--all confiscated from Rwandans when they began crossing into Zaire in an unprecedented exodus about 10 days ago.

Dan Everts, head of the World Food Program operation on the border, said the agency hopes to begin truck convoys across Rwanda within days to bring food faster to the refugees. He said the returning, empty trucks could then be used to carry the old, sick and children home.

Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, head of U.N. forces in Rwanda, told reporters at the border that fighting had ceased inside Rwanda and the situation was “relatively calm.” He urged people to return to help rebuild their shattered land.

Virtually all the refugees headed home said they had lost family members in the maelstrom of confusion and death at the border.

Walking alone, Bridgette Uwera, 16, cried as she recalled losing her father when she went to fetch water at one of the sprawling camps. “When I came back, he wasn’t there,” she said, tears streaming down her face. She doesn’t know if he, or her two brothers, their wives and children, are alive or dead.

“I’m going home because if I go home, maybe I will find them,” she said. She said other refugees had given her potatoes and cassava to eat, her first meal in days.

Down the road, Moise Ngorati sat on the ground with three children, sharing millet and potatoes given to them by RPF soldiers. The girls were 8 and 11; their brother was 10. Dressed in filthy, cast-off clothes, they stared reverently at Ngorati as he spoke.

“I met them in Goma,” he explained. “They were alone and had nothing to eat. I had some sugar and shared it with them. So now we are all together.”

He said he would take them to Ruhengeri, a provincial town nearby, then continue home to Kigali, hoping to find his own family. “I’m not expecting to find them alive,” he added.

Indeed, hope was hard to find among the survivors. Cleopace Mugabo, a barefoot, 38-year-old farmer from Karago, simply shrugged when asked his plans. “If I must die, I prefer to die in my own country,” he said without emotion.

He reached up to readjust the bulky sack on his head, patted the boy on his back and marched on, silently headed home.