To Rwandans Returning From Exile, Possession is Nine-Tenths of the Law : Africa: Tutsis coming back after years away are taking goods, homes of those who fled. Leaders’ pledge of fairness may be hard to fulfill.

To the victors and survivors belong the refrigerators, Toyotas, hillside villas and the Kigali Night Club. At least for the moment and, in many cases, certainly forever.

“Immediately after the war, there was . . . looting everywhere,” Penninah Mbabazi explained. “People started running here and there, to other people’s houses, picking things. The refrigerators were the first to be looted--refrigerators, radios, cookers.”

The 32-year-old woman knows what she’s talking about: Mbabazi is now the “manager” of the Kigali Night Club, a one-story concrete blockhouse with a veranda bar overlooking Rwanda’s capital. On Fridays and Saturdays, it attracts up to 1,000 people to guzzle beer and soft drinks.

And who is the owner?

“We don’t know, really,” said the soft-spoken Mbabazi, with a shy smile. Less than three months ago, she still lived in Uganda with her daughter, 10, and son, 5. “The things we are owning now are not ours.”

As a result of Rwanda’s genocide, civil war and takeover by the Rwandan Patriotic Front-dominated government, a New Deal of sorts is under way in this isolated, strife-weary Central African country.

Among the beneficiaries are members of the Tutsi ethnic minority who, like Mbabazi, lived until this summer in exile, in many cases for decades.

The losers are Rwanda’s hundreds of thousands of dead, and the armies of refugees from the dominant Hutu ethnic group who have fled into Zaire, Tanzania, Burundi and other countries, leaving their homes and most of their belongings behind.

To entice those wretched, often terrified people back, and to prove the claim that theirs is an African revolution with a difference, Rwanda’s new rulers have insisted that the goodies that people such as Mbabazi have “picked” aren’t really theirs.

But in a traumatized and poor land whose capital still lacks even such basic services as street lights, electricity and running water, enforcement of that policy can only be sporadic at best.

“No matter who a person is, he has a right to his house,” President Pasteur Bizimungu told a recent rally in the southern town of Butare. And that, Bizimungu said, includes suspects in last April’s massacres.

But from some Rwandans, who had fled into exile after an earlier anti-Tutsi uprising in 1959 killed an estimated 100,000 people, the new government is clearly expecting too much. A middle-aged man in sunglasses who returned to his homeland after 32 years told Bizimungu that he did not understand why he shouldn’t occupy the once-empty house he now lives in.

“Am I supposed to spend my life leaving places with my mattress?” he asked.

And many more exiles are returning now, keen on finding places to live and occupations to keep them busy. According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, 100,000 Rwandans who had long lived in Uganda to the north have recently crossed the border with 130,000 head of livestock in hasty search of new homes and farms.

“We are now trying to work with the government to find land for them,” said Janvier de Riedmatten, deputy representative of the U.N. agency in Rwanda. “If this problem is not tackled quickly, it could become a major issue.”

The U.N. agency’s efforts have been only partly successful, however. Fifty thousand of the returnees have stayed on the lands offered them, including tracts once reserved for hunting in Kagera National Park, De Riedmatten said.

The rest of the former exiles, he said, are continuing south, eagerly scavenging for empty huts and shacks and abandoned pastures and fields.

And the land grab in Rwanda is clearly due to get bigger: The U.N. refugee office estimates that about 1 million Rwandans had been living in exile in surrounding countries when the old order collapsed this year in mass murder and civil war.

Across Africa, the possession of political power has often been synonymous with the opportunity to get rich. A 1973 coup by the then-minister of defense and future president, Juvenal Habyarimana, opened the way for his clan from Rwanda’s northwest to line its pockets. Habyarimana was killed April 6 when his plane was shot down over Kigali.

When leaders of the defeated hard-line Hutu regime that succeeded Habyarimana fled across the border into Zaire, they took fleets of official and private vehicles, stocks of arms and a large chunk of the national treasury with them. People in the Rwandan Patriotic Front and their sympathizers apparently think: Now it’s our turn.

“This is definitely our mother country, even if it has been bad to us,” Mbabazi said as she sat at an unpainted wooden desk near the bar, puzzling over thick ledgers that also belong, or belonged, to the bar’s vanished owner.

Her husband was a fighter with the Front’s victorious army, but she hasn’t seen him in months. She is not sure if he is alive.

Crisscrossing the country, Toyota pickup trucks can sometimes be seen carting young Front soldiers holding on to sofas or refrigerators. At the French Embassy, aghast security personnel estimate that the ransacking of the chancellery, ambassador’s residence and cultural center after the staff fled last April will cost French taxpayers $20 million.

France had been one of the chief supporters of the old Habyarimana regime, and at the embassy people have no doubt that the pillage and gleeful vandalism were committed by Rwandan Patriotic Front soldiers or their civilian supporters.

“This was their way of saying, ‘Thank you,’ ” a police officer flown in from Toulouse to help get the mission running again said dryly. “They stole the cars. They trashed the computers. They thought they were television sets but couldn’t make them work.”

“Of course, acts of indiscipline have taken place, but the leaders have said again and again they will be punished,” said Canadian Maj. Jean-Guy Plante, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission here, in reference to the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s forces. “Generally speaking, they have good discipline.”

That appears to be changing as the victorious army, many of whose troops are penniless teen-agers or exiles, seek other occupations now that there is no longer an enemy to fight. U.N. officials said that soldiers manning checkpoints in Kigali have been shaking down traders or extorting money before merchants are allowed to even see their goods. In some locales, soldiers have reportedly engaged in cattle-rustling.

In the capital, according to one estimate, wholesale massacres and flight have halved the population to 300,000. That means a lot of empty dwellings and stores, and plenty of temptation. The city’s new mayor, a Tutsi RPF major named Rose Kabue, is trying to juggle the conflicting requirements of the ban on property-grabbing and the pressing need to house returning exiles or Rwandans displaced from their own homes.

“We are allowing them to occupy whatever houses they can get on the understanding that when the owners show up, they will vacate them,” Kabue said in a newspaper interview.

Time will tell what the Front’s army and officials do with the buildings they have taken. The government’s de facto headquarters is in what had been one of Kigali’s swankiest hotels, the Meridien. In Kiyovu, the city’s poshest quarter, young soldiers of the new regime stand guard outside elegant, shaded villas now occupied by their superiors.

The seeds for continued bitter social conflict are obvious, especially if the main winners of the Rwandan New Deal are perceived by Hutus to be the minority Tutsi, who from the 15th Century used feudal land ownership and a lord-peasant system to rule a Hutu community almost six times bigger than theirs.

Like many Tutsis, Mbabazi fled Rwanda decades ago, in 1964, or two years after independence. She was then 2 years old and grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda. She returned to her homeland in a taxi in July for the first time, after the Front’s soldiers had driven troops of the ousted government out of Kigali.

“When we came back, we were all anxious for something to do,” she said. “We roamed about, looking for something, and came upon this empty building.”

Another Tutsi returnee, Janes Mbabazi, who is not a relative, nominated herself as the club’s “director.” The stock had been looted, so the women spent some of the cash they had brought with them to buy cases of beer and Coca-Cola. They opened July 15 and have not gotten around to fixing a gaping slash in the corrugated roof cut by an exploding Katyusha rocket. But they did manage to find a generator to chill the Uganda-brewed Bell Brand lager they serve.

“There were so many generators lying around, so we picked one up,” the Kigali Night Club’s manager said.

Penninah Mbabazi and her children also moved into a three-bedroom house in Kigali that had been abandoned and looted. Unlike some other returnees, she was not able to grab an abandoned car. “I was unfortunate,” she said.

If people who live in the Kimuhurura district are right, the two women who now run the Kigali Night Club do not have to worry about a property dispute anytime soon. The establishment, they say, was owned by the son of Habyarimana, the late president, a person who would hardly be welcomed back by the new people in charge.

“The things we are owning are not ours,” Mbabazi said anyway. “If the owners come, they can take them. If there is any confusion, we can always negotiate.”

On a nearby road, young boys picked over the carcasses of stolen and abandoned cars in search of something of value. Two handsome chestnut horses, a male and a female, ambled aimlessly up the steep hill, poking their noses into the grass at the roadside. Their owner had either been killed or fled. Now they too were there for the picking.