Documentary : The Goma Camps: An African Tragedy : A correspondent finds ‘the final horror of the Rwandan refugee nightmare.’

From the road, about 50 yards away, it looked like a busy construction site. A huge, yellow front-end loader belched black diesel smoke and roared about, while a smaller backhoe growled as it dug nearby.

But up close, I found the final horror of the Rwandan refugee nightmare the most grotesque scene in nearly two weeks of witnessing unimaginable pain and death. Especially death.

Only God knows how many of the million or more Rwandan refugees who reached this Zairian border town have died here so far. U.N. officials use a figure of 20,000, but they don’t know. They blame a cholera epidemic for the corpses that appeared by the hundreds, or the thousands, along the roads each day. But again, they don’t know.

Some refugees died of dehydration, their lips parched and faces contorted in pain. Others fell to measles or dysentery. Some simply keeled over, too weak after days without food or water, and too exhausted by days of walking, walking, endless walking.

How many simply died of anguish, alone and afraid in a living hell of volcanic rocks and gut-wrenching misery? Even worse, how many were buried alive, swept up by burial crews while sick or sleeping? On my last day here, I met a boy who was pulled alive from a mass grave.

Each day, trucks drive down the road to collect the corpses and ferry them to mass graves bulldozed beside the main road at the airstrip. Then crews toss the bodies one by one into the foul trenches, corpse upon corpse, tumbling down into a ghastly jumble of flesh and bone and rag, like garbage on a heap.

Last Friday, as usual, French soldiers arrived to bulldoze dirt over the mound of rotting bodies dumped in a grave the night before. Many were wrapped in blood-soaked rush mats, tattered gray blankets or rags soaked with the stench of death.

Then one bundle began moving.

“The soldier thought it was a rat, so it he hit it with a stick,” said Christian Clark, a UNICEF worker. “And it began to cry.”

The boy has spindly legs and his knees are painfully swollen by rickets, so he walks without bending them, stiffly, like a crane. His face is covered with scabs. He looks about six, but weighs about 15 pounds, say the doctors at the French army clinic where the boy is cared for.

As he stands, he wobbles weakly and a filthy diaper sags and then drops onto his feet. He stands mute in his feces until a nun pulls off his shirt, leads him by the hand and gently washes him in a tub. His ribs and spine are tiny bumps and ridges against his emaciated back, and his spider-thin hand clutches the woman’s dress.

He says nothing now except his name--Ntibagirirwa. His eyes seem dim and glazed, his lips thin and tight, his secret hell locked inside. His future, at least, is assured. The French lieutenant who found him has decided to adopt him.

I met Ntibagirirwa while making the morning rounds aboard a white UNICEF truck. Each morning at 8:30, it rumbles up to Munigi, which has become an infamous cholera death camp, where thousands died in days on a moonscape of black volcanic rocks. Then it stops at the French army compound, by a church in town, and elsewhere, searching for orphans and unaccompanied children.

So far, UNICEF and other agencies have collected about 8,000 unattended Rwandan children and put them in 11 orphanages and care centers. They estimate another 20,000 are still living alone in the streets and fields. But again, they’re guessing. No one knows the depths of pain here.

“Some of these kids were at their mother’s breast when we picked them up, but the mother had been dead for two days,” said Clark, the UNICEF aide. A few have died on the truck. Even fewer have been reunited with their families.

On this day, the truck picked up 35 children in less than an hour, including a dozen with a large blue O marked on their foreheads. Camp doctors mark them so others will know: They are orphans. Three are infants, wrapped in blankets on the truck floor.

One of the oldest children was naked. He sat at the back of the truck, his legs pulled up to his chest. His name is Cyprian Bigirimana and he is 12. Once he had eight brothers and sisters. Now, he doesn’t know if they’re alive. He only knows about his parents.

“My parents are dead,” he said in a whisper. “They died in Goma. They died a week ago.”

Covered in filth, his naked body laced with sores and scabs, Cyprian literally had nothing. He clutched a gray blanket in one hand, but it belonged to the little girl behind him. She sat with her huge eyes half closed, hugging the wheel well of the truck. Others sat crying, eyes wide with fear.

Clark, a cheerful 34-year-old Canadian, bustled about the truck as it lurched along, hugging the children and singing. Major relief agencies have been heavily criticized for the planning and pace of their operation here. I have nothing but awe for aid workers like Clark and his colleagues.

“The first couple of days you sort of cry and cry,” said the Canadian, who rushed here from another horror show in Somalia. “Then you roll up your sleeves and get to work. And now I look forward to it. These kids actually give me strength. They’ve persevered through so much.”

He brushed aside a question about how he endured the work each day. “People feel sorry for the aid workers because we’ve witnessed genocide. But these kids have lived through it. The least we can do now is do all we can do.”

One child starts crying, and soon a dozen are wailing. Clark picks two up, and hugs them. I grimace. I’ve tried not to touch any of the refugees, made wary by doctors’ warnings about contracting cholera or any of the other deadly diseases that have cut through the camps like a scythe.

The two children hush, their legs wrapped around Clark’s chest. A little girl, her clothes soiled with fecal stains, rests her head on his shoulder and instantly falls asleep. “That’s all it takes,” he says softly, cooing in her ear. “They want to be picked up. They need love.”

Actually, they need much more. This was the worst humanitarian disaster in a generation, the standard by which all tragedies must now be judged. Like something out of the Bible, more than 1 million people fled Rwanda’s brutal civil war almost overnight, on foot, into one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Pestilence awaited them.

What’s it like to see death on a scale not seen except at the Nazi death camps of World War II? The first day was shocking; the next day I was numb. I saw but did not see, looked but did not feel. How could one do otherwise?

I only broke down once. I couldn’t talk to the withered old woman who came up and offered me her orphaned infant granddaughter, pleading for me to take it to America, to safety, to a life away from this. I directed her to the nearby medical tents and walked away, blinded by tears.

Sometimes I got angry. Early on, I met a refugee wearing surprisingly clean jeans, black loafers and a T-shirt from Louisiana State University. His name was Alphonse Rubagumya, he said, and he had graduated LSU with a Ph.D. in sociology last January. Then he’d gone home to Kigali, capital of Rwanda.

Rwanda is not much bigger than Vermont and about as rugged. The Hutus, Rwanda’s poor majority, held the power. The Tutsis, the rich minority, wanted it. Nevertheless, they have lived side by side, often in the same family, for generations. It is an old story in Africa.

Then something snapped. In April, the Hutu president was killed in a suspicious plane crash. Suddenly, in nearly every village and town, Hutus began butchering Tutsis with machetes and grenades. Rwanda became a charnel house. Some say 300,000 died, others 500,000 or more. Does it matter?

So I asked the American-trained Hutu sociologist how he could explain the madness, the genocide, the horror? What does it say about the human condition when killers proudly pose for photos before bodies stacked in tidy heaps?

He shrugged. “This has been going on for centuries,” he said. “It is our history, that’s all.” I asked if he was helping the desperately understaffed relief agencies.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he said with a smile. “I am only a refugee.”

Which gets back to the construction site. First some geology. Still-active volcanoes have left a thick cover of black igneous rock in eastern Zaire. Older lava flows have a thin layer of soil and brush, but the most recent eruptions deposited sharp-edged boulders and rocks. It’s difficult to walk on, and impossible to dig.

So when mass graves in Goma began to fill up, crisis turned to catastrophe. Hundreds of bodies piled up in Kibumba camp alone, stuck behind cooking fires, stacked around the tent hospital, and, in greatest number, abandoned along the road.

Caught in traffic at Kibumba several days ago, I counted 180 bodies piled next to my van. Many were uncovered, and some had been run over by passing vehicles.

Finally, most were moved to an open field to be buried. They were heaped high and hideously in two long rows, bloated and stiff, and the stench flooded the busy roadside vegetable market and open-air cattle butchery.

For two days, a French army bulldozer clanked and rumbled, trying to dig a grave. It only got a few inches down in the rock. Then it broke down.

Something had to be done. On Sunday French soldiers appeared again. They put on surgical masks and gloves and began their grisly task.

I only stayed a minute, but the details are etched in my mind.

As a soldier guided him with hand signals, the driver of the big yellow loader dropped the huge shovel to the ground and lurched forward into the mountain of death. Seven sharp teeth on the edge of the shovel caught under and in the corpses as the driver scooped his grim load.

As the shovel flipped up, one bloated body teetered on the edge, an arm and a leg hanging over. The driver shook the shovel. Then again. Finally the body tumbled back out.

The driver shifted gears, and with a snort of black smoke, the machine backed up, turned and rumbled over to the face of a small hill. He emptied his shovel, and the latest load tumbled onto a growing embankment. Then came the backhoe, dropping grass and dirt.

The only requiem was the roar of the machines, the only eulogy the whistle of the wind. Death is rarely pretty. Here it is obscene.