Relief Starts Making a Difference for Refugees : Africa: Rwandans in Zaire receive critical supplies of food and medicine. Some aid even comes from Somalia.

One camp is in a sports center, the other in a rocky field. Each is swamped with sick and dying Rwandans. And both received desperately needed medical help from the outside world Wednesday.

There the similarities end.

The Goma Cercle Sportif houses 2,400 ill and wounded soldiers, officers and political agents of the former Rwandan army, a force accused of widespread atrocities as it fought and lost a civil war to prop up a murderous regime.

Down the road, the S.O.S. Orphanage houses nearly 4,000 Rwandan children whose parents were killed or have disappeared. From 6 months to 10 years old, the lonely children are among the saddest victims of the war.

Indeed, it is a measure of the chaos and misery here that the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) rushed an 11-member anti-cholera team and four tons of supplies to the orphanage from a country better known for receiving emergency aid than for sending it: Somalia.

Thanks to round-the-clock relief flights and to a growing lifeline of truck convoys, critical supplies of food, medicine and other emergency goods are finally pouring into Goma, hub of the global effort to aid an estimated 1.2 million Rwandans who flooded across the border almost two weeks ago.

As a result, more specialized aid is going to groups largely overshadowed or forgotten until now.

The Israeli military, for example, arrived Monday to erect a 250-bed field hospital on the shores of Lake Kivu. But the 50 Israeli doctors, nurses and technicians will treat few refugees and focus instead on helping residents of this once-obscure border town.

Thousands of Zairians, even prisoners in the city jail, have been stricken by the still-raging cholera epidemic that is now killing an estimated 1,800 refugees a day. Goma is considered the center of the epidemic.

Other humanitarian aid goes to a little-known walled camp specifically set up for thousands of ethnic Tutsis who fled Rwanda before the current crisis. They are kept separate from the other refugees for understandable reasons.

Up to half a million civilians, mostly Tutsis, were butchered by the majority Hutu army and civilian militias after the country’s Hutu president died April 6 in a still unexplained plane crash. But when the Hutu army was routed by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Hutu population and their leaders fled in fear.

Now members of the exiled government and militias are regrouping in the refugee camps. They are largely responsible for distributing the hundreds of tons of food brought in each day by relief groups.

Some of the aid finally reached the Rwandan soldiers at the sports center Wednesday. But more than 1,000 of the wounded already had died. A rutted tennis court was turned into an open-air morgue, and gaunt bodies in tattered uniforms were dumped in rows awaiting burial.

Inside a small building were piles of crates from Norway’s Red Cross. Dr. Halvor Fossum Lauritzsen supervised as the dark, dank rooms were mopped so they could house a mobile surgical hospital, complete with two operating theaters.

Lauritzsen said surgical teams expect to operate on about 40 soldiers daily. “We’ll deal mostly with gunshot wounds,” he said. “They are badly infected with gangrene. There’s going to be a lot of amputations.”

Nina Winqvist, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross here, said her organization’s mandate is to treat all those wounded or affected by war, not just civilians.

“It is a very dangerous path to start moralizing in war, to say who is good, who is bad, who should live and who should die,” she said. “That is not for the Red Cross to say.”

Down the road, new aid also appeared at the orphanage, which is set on a rocky field pitted by ravines and straggly patches of cassava. The 11-member UNICEF team bustled about in white T-shirts, but Awilhagil Ali, a Somali public health officer, stopped to shake his head.

“The conditions here are worse than in Somalia, and the population is much larger,” he said, referring to last year’s international operation to feed Somalia’s starving population.

Said Ahmad, a Somali hydrologist, agreed as he worked nearby. “In Somalia, at least we had coordination. Here there is no coordination.”

Steffan de Mistura--the UNICEF representative in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, and head of the anti-cholera team--said far more refugees are crowded together here without proper housing or sanitation than during the Somalia crisis. And many are already sick and exhausted by the long trek from Rwanda and the horrible conditions in the camps.

“The good news is here we are not being shot at,” he said with a grin. He said the members of his medical team wear bulletproof vests in Mogadishu for protection from the country’s fratricidal clan wars.

Still, four young Hutu men had approached the camp earlier and demanded entry, De Mistura said. “One man said he had a grenade. We said they can’t come in, or over our dead bodies. They got very agitated and said they’ll be back. But we’ve been too busy to worry about it.”

De Mistura said about 20% of the children at the camp have cholera and that 58 had died so far. “The situation is appalling,” he said. “But I believe it will change in the next three days.”

He said the team will dig six latrines and that UNICEF trucks will bring clean drinking water twice a day. Since chlorine kills the cholera bacteria, shallow wells of chlorinated water will be dug outside for the children and camp workers to step in.

UNICEF’s four doctors joined three already here, giving the children far more medical attention than other refugees.

About 20 newly arrived children were immunized Wednesday for measles and polio, and screened by a doctor. A dozen others lined up to be washed, while a crowd of half-naked children waited with plastic cups at a feeding center for steaming dollops of high-protein gruel.

Dozens sat on the ground in a tent, clapping their hands as an animated man sang to them through a bullhorn. Others wandered about in freshly washed donated clothes.

Scores of new white canvas tents stood in the sun, a carpenter sawed away noisily and boys laughed as they played in the water that gushed from a ripped hose.

Even Dr. Lalani Nimet, the ever-harried camp doctor who has seemed to work in perpetual motion during the past week, slowed from a run to a fast walk as she talked. For the first time, she even smiled.

“It’s OK now,” she said with a grin. “We’ve got doctors, nurses, food and water. I’m feeling on holiday today.”